Elements of Winter · 4:02am Mar 23rd, 2013
A little background on this story. I originally wrote it in September, 2011, for Equestria Daily's National Pony Writing Month. I had only discovered the most recent pony incarnation a few months before, and had fallen hard. I dove into the process and punched out 62,000 words in 30 days, though I didn't finish the story. I got to revising it, and submitted the first three chapters to EQD in January of 2012, but it got rejected for too much Mary-Sueism. I thought I'd avoided a lot of that while writing, but upon further re-reading, I realized that not only had I not avoided that, but the main character was a horrible Mary Sue.
Originally, the main character Wintermute (changed to Winter Whisper in the revisions) met up with the Mane Six, and turned out to solve the problem. It was textbook Mary Sue. One solution was to remove Winter, and make Rainbow Dash the pegasus responsible, but I liked Winter's character too much to chop her out completely. So, I decided to remove the Mane Six from the story. In addition, so much new canon has been added by the show that my original plot was wrecked. This story is a complete reworking of my original one, set a generation or so after the show.
