We all know the story of Hearth's Warming Eve, but the simplified legend all ponies remember belies how close we came to losing it all. Now, the discovery of the lost diaries of the survivors transports us back to that harrowing time when the world balanced on the edge of a frozen knife, and the heroism of eight adventurers pulled us back from the brink, laying the foundations of the diarchy we know today.
(Compatible with Canon and inspired by Nyx's Family)
Now available in audio format.
Chapters (16)
Take the italics code out of your short description, IT DOESNT WORK AND IT MAKES YOU LOOK STUPID.
(Sorry for the brutal honesty, but it's true.)
4779726 Hey look! An opinion!
4780354 yes, and guess what? The mods have stated it's stupid before, as well.
You know there are trees above the arctic circle, right?
4780760 Sure, but we've all seen the Crystal Empire in the show; wide open spaces with hills in the background, yet there are no forests to be seen... Exactly as you said, the climate dictates anything not under plow should be forested, but it isn't. Something happened here, and this is the story of what and how, as told by those who lived through it.
Hope you enjoy it!
4779726
I have taken your advice. Maybe sometimes with description, less is more.
Cool story, heh.
I'm finding this absolutely fascinating, and eagerly await more. If I hadn't already been following you I would be now.
Pity this doesn't get more attention. Really curious to see where it goes
Oooooh, boy... Cliffhanger time!
Something truly alien like this, I wonder if it would even understand that the indigenous life does not want to "live" like that and is willing and capable of taking action against it to prevent that...
What was this?
Did I delete it or did you?
Very interesting end to this story. I like how it ties in with Nightmare Moon!
And thanks for the link to the Silly Filly Studios video, I hadn't seen that one (they've done such amazing work, although some of the words were too hard to hear).
Why are the other tribes so rude to Earth Ponies?
Really? They're the ones who can grow food, an army can't march on an empty stomach and you want to talk down to them?
5249335 That's a very rational, dispassionate, twenty first century way of thinking.
If you look back throughout history, farmers are almost always on the lower rungs of society, below the military: growing food is back-breakingly hard, dirty work and food is the only outcome.
As soon as society invents a warrior with weapons who can take food, well, what do they need farmers for anymore? 
For a very long time, wars were waged by staying in houses of the occupied territory and eating their food. That's why the soviet 'scorched earth' plan of burning their own country to the ground as they retreated worked so well. The conquerors of the time had never considered what their soldiers would live on if they couldn't loot the occupied territories, and without modern supply lines of food, well, lets just say it didn't go well. 
It's a mean, hard truth of how people work and think, but its true. The attitudes pictured are all too realistic, and that's why it stings a bit to read it, but stay with us, you know the story ends well, with equality for all. See Nyx's Family for some of the source inspiration.
All right Verdant Green, you're my favorite so far.
Though, I'm no scientist, what levels of sun rays does it take for the sun to sustain life on our planet?
Eyes freezing. Geez, now I'm going to have nightmares about that.
Well, this sounds like Armageddon.
Now, are our adventures her at the center point of the end of the world? All of this seismic shifts in the world, how is the rest of Equestria dealing with all of this?
5312180
This story takes place during the events of Hearths Warming Eve, and the events we know are taking place just as the story says far to the south. The Unicorn Kingdom is cold, yes, but Pie's equipment shows its not experiencing the cryogenic cold our heroes are.
It may be obscure, but check screen shots from any episode with the Crystal Empire: It's warm enough for trees to grow, but as far as the eye can see, the only trees are those purpose planted by the ponies. Ever wonder what happened to the anchent forests that should be growing there? Well, now you know where they went.
Because this is a canon compatible story, we already know the broad tale of how it ends, but we've already seen there's more going on than the legend records, and we still have to find out what's causing this cold in the first place! The old line that it was the windigos has been shown for the false asumption it is. The windigos never had anything to do with this, they were just mindless animals driven south by the freezing temperatures just as everypony else was.
The show takes place. We know what comes next. The real question we should be asking is why the stories of our adventurers are only now coming to light...
Thought, the sun is artificial and all that but it still acts like the one in the sky, correct?
With the atmosphere outside and the shift in the elements and all that, wouldn't there be consequences of introducing a giant flaming ball of gas? I'm no scientist but I'd think that there would be some kind of reaction when the artificial is introduced to unlivable conditions.
I found the time to read this. ¿Should I finish reading Nix’s Family? I made it as far as the point where Reality Check injected his crazy into the story.
¡11 PetaJoules! ¡That will destroy what is left of the UnicornCity and everything to the horizon! ¡That is almost 3 MegaTons! This raises a question:
Although the artificial Sun is a failure as a Sun (it might have inspired the CrystalHeart), it is powerful weapon. ¿Why have we not we heard about it in the show? Granted, the show presents, to date, no opportunity to use such a weapon (the ponies could not have used such a weapon without blowing themselves up (1 explanation about how Queen Chrysalis overpowered a Goddess is that Princess Celestia had to hold back so as not to kill the Wedding Guests while Queen Chrysalis did not care about SplashDamage)), but we should have heard about this great weapon in the Equestrian Arsenal capable of destroying whole cities and burning, leveling, and killing everything to the horizon while blinding and burning those at the horizon.
¡Do not cross the beams!
⸘Who ever heard of a boulder named Tom‽
Iron 56 has the lowest mass per baryon of any element. For this it would make more sense to use Iron 56 as the Standard Atomic Mass When one takes into account that Neutrons are more massive than Protons, Nickel 62 has the greatest binding energy per nucleon. For this reason, the Nickel/Iron-Core of Tellus (which is very similar to Equus) take up about 8th of the volume of Tellus and a 3rd the mass of Tellus (this is easy to remember because both 3 and 8 are FibonacciNumbers).
Fusion of Krypton would absorb energy, thus quenching the artificial star. It is a good thing that Krypton is super abundant, and cheap and easy to refine.
⸘What do you mean when you say that I am wrong to blame the drop in piracy for global warming‽
Variable stars vary rapidly enough so that the ponies should have observed many periods of warming and cooling in their history. The trouble is that we cannot extrapolate our universe to theirs:
Q created the Planetarium-Like Universe with Equus in its center for his amusement, and then incarnated into it as Discord. Their universe does not work like our Universe.
Enough volcanic ærosols for dimming the Sun should have turned the NoonDaySky grey and the sky at dusk and dawn orange with a red Sun. Unfortunately, ponies are dichromates... Most diurnal avian dinosaurs are tetrachromates, with some, such as pigeons, being pentachromates. If this would be “My Little Pigeon”, the pigeons would have noticed the change in the color of the sky and astronomical bodies immediately.
Zonies are sterile.
I take it that τ (Tau (τ=c/r)) is called Pie in this Universe. Given how advance the Physics of the ponies is and that they have advanced opticslike cameras, they could not already know this. This raises the question about which base the ponies use:
1 way for making the ponies more alien is to have them use a different base. The best base is Balanced Ternary:
The number of characters required to represent a number times the number of numerals is the RadixEconomy. The Radix Economy is best at e. The IntegerBase with the best RadixEconomy is 3. The best Base3 in Balanced Ternary. In Balanced Ternary, one uses -1, 0, and +1. It is traditional to asign the numerals thus:
-1:
T
0:
0
+1:
1
TTT:
-13
TT0:
-12
TT1:
-11
T0T:
-10
T00:
-09
T01:
-08
T1T:
-07
T10:
-06
T11:
-05
0TT:
-04
0T0:
-03
0T1:
-02
00T:
-01
000:
00
001:
+01
01T:
+02
010:
+03
011:
+04
1TT:
+05
1T0:
+06
1T1:
+07
10T:
+08
100:
+09
101:
+10
11T
+11
110:
+12
111:
+13
τ +c/r ≈ 1T0. 10T,T0T,110 , 0T1,10T,T0T , 1TT,000,001
τ
≈
9
+
-3
+
0
+
+⅓
+
0/9
+
-1/27
As great as Balanced Ternary is, the ponies need pretty advanced Mathematics for inventing Balanced Ternary. By the time they invent Balanced Ternary, they would be stuck with some other base, they way we are stuck with Base10, although, they probably use Balanced Ternary in their calculating machines. I recommend that the ponies use Sexagesimal (Base60).
If it is so cold that Oxygen starts liquifying at the poles, most of life on Equus must ready be dead. Equus probably already experienced a mass-extinction greater than the 1 at the end of the Permian.
Liquid oxygen is highly paramagnetic. current running in the superconductor generate a magnetic field, which repels the liquid oxygen.
When the star dies, it should have become a white dwarf. Brown dwarfs never ignite.
It is amazing that such a story which is ProScience and ProSkepticism owns its existence to RealityCheck who is notoriously AntScience and AntiSkepticism.
So much exposition of the history of Equestria. Unicorns proclaiming their superiority and the pegasus being their thugs, yuck. Though it seems karma has come, sooner than they would expect.
Wow, I feel bad for Sombra now. Poor kid was born a puppet and used to overthrow a corrupted government. Those crystal ponies need to secede from Equestria, they got screwed over too many times by boneheads and birdbrains. Well, it was a fun ride to read all of this, so much science in this.
The Darkness is a good example that something can be dangerous without malice:
It killed Ungulus without any malice. It was barely aware that life exists on Equus. When it ended up in the body of a pony, it learned hate because ponies know hate.
We now know what happened to the original artificial sun, but Equestria should have these in its arsenal. These are literal nuclear weapons.
Great work, there were several times when I had to snuggle deeper into my blankets because the cold you described was almost palpable. I was a little thrown off by the romantic antics about half way through, but in the end it was worth the cheese. All in all, a satisfying and interesting take on the Hearth's Warming tale.
10080411
I wanted to do a story that ripped the rug out from under the reader's assumption that the windigos were the root cause and the big bad. That sort of thing happens all the time in real world problem solving, but you almost never see it in a story.
Glad you liked it, it's still the story I'm most proud of even years later.
10080842
You have every right to be proud. And I definitely agree that there was more going on than the Hearth's Warming pageant gave us.
That being said there were a few typos scattered throughout your story, and I still feel that the chapter about midway through where we get a lot of backstory with copious amounts of cheesey romance and shipping kind of came out of left field so to speak. If I had one suggestion, it would be to add more chapters to help slow the pacing of the romantic antics, and the best romance fictions are slow gradual things. Then again, near death experiences and the apparent ending of the world would be a rather powerful motivator, so perhaps looking at it that way does make it easier to swallow, perhaps add a paragraph or so where the burgeoning couples wonder or even fight over whether the love is genuine or just a matter of convenience or panic.