I've overshot. By a fair bit, if I don't miss my estimate.
Normally this would not be a problem. Long-distance teleportation often has bugs like this in it; it's the price of using Chaos, a lack of precision. I can be even more precise than your average unicorn at short distances, but over long ones, I don't mind saying I don't always end up exactly where I want to go. So this isn't any great surprise... but it's freezing cold up here! And my magic is heavily constrained, so I can't easily just teleport out.
Ugh. I hate the Far North.
I can smell that stupid dead harmonic tree from here. Yggdrasil was dead before I was born, but like the realtors say, it's all about location, location, location, and Yggdrasil is rooted in the North Pole, where all the magic in the world goes underground to be fed into the core and come back up on the equator. So its corpse is still there, sustained just enough by the magic flow that I can feel it. Or, oh, right, maybe that's the reindeer I'm feeling. Magic here becomes so tightly controlled and harmonic, even ponies have a hard time using it; if there were such a thing as "order magic" this is where it would live. Kind of funny that Matrisse wasn't located here, actually. Matrisse was between Bovinia and Long-kuo, aka Chineigh, aka The Dragon Kingdom (not to be confused with the Dragon Empire, which doesn't exist anymore, or the dragon nations, which are way way south; Long-kuo is populated primarily by ponies and Neighsian dragons, the kind I descend from.)
I'm rambling. I'm cold. I'm really, really cold. I've snapped myself up a furry hat and coat, and some boots, but oh dear chaos it is cold up here. And here I am, walking on the very very cold icy ground, because I can't teleport and exposing my tender and delicate wings to the temperature up here is right out. I don't actually need my wings to fly – I can levitate – but I like to use them to steer, and I am not taking them out of this coat to flap them until I get to somewhere warmer than this.
You say to me, "But Discord, can't you use your powers to warm up?" Oh, if only. Like I said, the ley lines converge up here. There's a lot of magic, but it's almost inaccessible – very little in the air, so a pegasus probably couldn't work the weather, but fortunately weather is actually almost nonexistent here. Not much in the ambient for a unicorn to draw. And no chaos. All the magic's going underground, so an earth pony might be able to get at it, if they could actually stand on the earth and not on a thick sheet of ice. But I can't get it, and when I open up my own magic to use it, the damn ley lines start pulling magic out of me, the way this cold air is pulling all the moisture out of my beautiful face and is undoubtedly going to leave me wrinkled before my time. Or at least badly chapped. I have a lot of magic, so I could survive the bleed – I did conjure up all this snow gear, after all, though I'm pretty sure I need a lot more – but it's really uncomfortable. And warming myself would require a constant low-level application of magic, exactly the kind that will leave me open and suck me dry. Not literally, I suppose; it would probably take months before it actually sucked all the magic out of me. But did I mention it's really uncomfortable? Possibly moreso than the cold. I'm not sure, I'm actually debating which is worse.
Also I'm bored. Really bored. I mean, really, really, really, really, really bored. I can add some more reallys to that if the idea isn't getting through. There's nothing around here but ice! And occasionally rocks. Covered in ice. Oh, and for a change of pace, big rocks covered in ice! I'll give it this, the ice formations are really intriguing – I'm getting some inspiration from them, honestly. There are walls of ice that curl, bending over, their tops turning into fringes of dangling, glittering spikes; cliffs of compacted snow; arches and portals made of snow and ice that don't seem to have been made by any sapient being, just the course of nature... I'd love to replicate some of this in translucent obsidian. (Which doesn't exist, except when I say it does. Obsidian is normally opaque, but when you rearrange its internal molecules magically to make it behave something like glass, it's stunning. Especially when you let flecks of silver and gold get into the center so the light that passes through can reflect off them.) It actually reminds me of my cave, except that caves have this kind of architecture naturally; under normal circumstances you'd never find it out in the daylight.
At least it's summertime. Did you know that the sun and the moon rotate around the equator of the planet, not around Equestria, despite the fact that that's where the Sun-Bearer and Moon-Bearer live? Did you know that Celestia actually moves the sun closer to Equestria in the summertime and closer to Drakonia in the winter (which is Drakonia's summer)? Did you know that because of this, during the middle of the summer, the sun is always visible in the sky in Arctica? I'm sure you thought the pegasi were solely responsible for the coming of winter, but no, without Celestia's active role in cooling the entire northern hemisphere by shifting the sun so it's closer to the southern hemisphere, none of the ice the pegasi make could actually avoid melting. That's why I used to let her control the sun most of the time; if I feel like having a winter, I can just do it with my magic, but I don't want the world to go without winter just because I've been too busy to arrange for one. Celestia could be counted on to make the summers and winters happen on their boring, predictable schedule, and when I felt like doing something different, I could make it any season I wanted, any time I wanted, regardless of where the sun was.
Luna, by the way, has nothing to do with the seasons, despite the fact that the cycle of shapes the moon takes on in the sky is a month in length. You might want to point out to her sometime that while the moon does govern the tides, almost all of Equestria is landlocked and never experiences tides, whereas summer and winter are a thing every pony is familiar with. Well, actually you wouldn't want to point this out, but I would.
Sweet chaos I am so cold. And so bored. But mostly cold. How far away is caribou territory? It can't be too far away.
That's a little better. These boots are made for walking! That's just what they'll do! One of these days these boots are gonna walk right over Anon!... I wonder if the tooth still picks it up when I'm singing. 99 spikes of ice on the wall, 99 spikes of ice, if one of those spikes should happen to fall, I certainly hope it doesn't fall on my head!... right. I've made a second pair of boots so I can go four-legged, because I can generally go faster four-legged over rough terrain, also because the wind was cutting right through my coat. Both of them, the one I'm wearing and the one that's attached to my skin. You might not recognize them as boots, though; they're more like socks, if socks were waterproof, had hatch marks and short spikes for traction all over their bottoms, and were lined with fur for warmth. But they're still flexible and if I absolutely had to, I could still use my forefeet as hands with them on.
I wish I was going to go deal with reindeer instead. Oh, reindeer are so annoyingly soppy and harmonic and gosh gee willikers we love everyone, let's be BFFs, they'd drive me sane within days... but reindeer would find me, because they send out patrol parties to rescue potentially lost creatures, and since I'm not a caribou, they'd give me hot chocolate and wrap me in warm towels and take me back to one of their cities on a sleigh. (They're not as sweet and harmonious as they like to pretend. If what they found while patrolling was a male caribou, he'd be feeding the polar bears within minutes, and by that I don't mean he'd be trotting around passing out fish and berries.) Whereas caribou have patrol parties too, but I have to hide from those because caribou consider any creature that's not a caribou a threat, at least if they find one strolling around in their back yard. It's not that I couldn't fight off any number of caribou, but I'm here to negotiate with them, which means turning them into bouncy balls, aside from using up a lot of the magic I'm trying to conserve here, would probably make it more difficult for me to get my Element of Cruelty back from them. Bouncy balls might still come into the picture, you understand, just not as an opening gambit.
But unless you're Luna or Celestia you have no idea what I'm talking about. You know about the reindeer, because Sinterklauss and the fact that Albion and Prance and Roam all participate in the annual Yule festival to join a quarter of the planet in harmony and eugh. You probably don't know about the reindeer's evil twins, the caribou, because quite frankly you are entirely too sheltered to begin to comprehend that a society like theirs could exist. Well, unless you're from the Crystal Empire, but even then, caribou practice a form of brutality so senseless and insane-seeming, at least from the outside, that Sombra found them morally disgusting, and yaks will stomp a caribou to death without asking questions if they ever encounter one. Or they'll try, anyway. Caribou carry weapons when they patrol.
So over two and a half thousand years ago, the world was a peaceful and harmonious place due to the activities of Yggdrasil, the World Tree. It was the ancestor of the current Tree of Harmony, but unlike the current Tree of Harmony, which is planted in the middle of a large land mass and surrounded by a chaotic forest and therefore can't spread its influence much beyond Equestria, Yggdrasil covered most of the world. The ley lines of magic run in the air and water and upper earth, going north, until they reach the pole, where they plunge under the crust into the roiling, chaotic magma below, and are carried by the currents until they spout upward through volcanoes, underwater crevasses, and the veins of crystal that run through most mountain ranges. When Yggdrasil was alive, all of the magic of the entire world funneled through it to be purified, and when it spouted back up, it was rich with harmony. Even the dragons lived peacefully, enough that they could build themselves an Empire. It was horrible. Everyone in the world got along with everyone else, though none of them intermingled much. Species kept to species, and they all lived in a hazy dream of contentment where nothing much changed.
I despise my predecessor, Mayhem, for many reasons, but while I'm sure I would never take things as far as he did... I understand why he did it. Desperate times call for desperate actions. He used the Element of Hatred to poison Yggdrasil, so that as magic went through it to be purified, it was instead thoroughly contaminated with hate.
The reindeer and caribou had been one society, at the time, their entire purpose in existence to tend the Tree and use their mastery of rune magic to ensure that Harmony ruled the world. They were the first to fall. They split into two groups, those that continued to struggle to maintain Harmony – who became the reindeer, and settled on the Neighropan and Neighsian side of Arctica – and those that embraced, not chaos, but hierarchy. A rule of dominance, where only the strong survive and the rule of the leader is absolute. A triumph of Order, not Chaos. Mayhem's first mistake was in allowing that. His second was in allowing worldwide hatred and distrust of the Other to become so widespread, the discord and enmity so thorough, that it brought the windigos, and the cold brought by the windigos wiped out our species. Which I still haven't forgiven him for. Yes, I probably wouldn't exist if the windigos hadn't killed off most of the draconequui and I certainly wouldn't exist without Mayhem's other actions, but I still hate him for them.
Harmony magic is powerful, and reindeer can channel group workings through runes. The reindeer had every incentive to try to maintain worldwide harmony, which was why they initiated the Yule ritual where they bring food and presents to all of the foals (and young of other species) in Neighropa. Doing this generates so much goodwill toward them that they can keep the winter wasteland of their home a winter wonderland instead, growing food despite a climate that ought to make it impossible and defending themselves and others with their magic. This was not an option for the caribou, so they turned to dark magic, specifically the magic of sacrifice. Mayhem gave them the Element of Cruelty so they could have the strength to continue to harass the reindeer, and with the Element of Cruelty in hoof, they figured out how to create power.
Sombra raised dark magic through fear. He maintained a society where all of the crystal ponies lived in a state of paranoia and terror, even those who had power within that society. The caribou went in a different direction.
...Ugh, it hurts to talk. It hurts to breathe up here it's so godawfully cold. I was planning on trying to explain the caribou before I actually get to their nearest settlement but my lungs actually hurt.
To Tartarus with this. I am making myself some hot chocolate and spicy soup, and then a warm blanket and a fire, and I am going to sit down and warm myself up a bit before I keep going.
Ahhh. That is so much better. I had to pay for it, of course; even the trivial amount of magic it takes to make myself food and a warm place to sit left me open enough that I'm feeling a little lightheaded from the drain, but I've sealed my magic back up and oh, I may have outdone myself with this chocolate. Hot Mexicaballan spicy chocolate, guaranteed to be searingly hot even when it's ice cold, thick fudge-flavored cream, a ton of sugar, salt, and ginger. Mmmm. I might make some strawberries to soak in it, but on the other hand the magic drain feels quite unpleasant, so maybe not. My five-pepper soup is actually tasting rather bland in comparison. Needed more garlic, I think. And some cyanide. You can't go wrong with bitter almond to pep up your soup.
I'm sitting in the lee of a big rock covered in ice, letting it take the brunt of the wind while I have my little picnic. It's comfy. I'd like to lie back, but firstly, this big rock I'd be leaning against is covered in ice, and even with my big winter coat on that wouldn't be pleasant, and secondly... I'm actually afraid I might fall asleep up here. It's been such a struggle to keep walking through this cold, and holding in my magic against the pull of the pole, and... I'm tired. Maybe this isn't even a good idea. I won't be at my best dealing with the caribou if I go to face them like this. Maybe I should just teleport home, and come back here later.
Right, because I'm ever going to get any more precise about teleporting in the Frozen North. I mean I suppose I could jump from Yakyakistan... but I suspect the caribou are doing something to specifically boggle teleports. One way or another I'm gonna have to find them on foot.
So what I'm doing now, as I finish sipping my spicy chocolate, is I'm looking around with eagle vision, hoping to find some sign of life. See, here is one of the other wonderful parts of being me. I can shift the traits of any part of my body to match the nature of any other part. For instance, when I'm being stealthy, I can make my hoof, my claw and my talon all match my lion paw – they don't change shape, but they all acquire the trait of being soft and nearly silent. Or because my bat wing is actually a batpony wing, I can make my eyes take on the trait of the catlike night vision batponies have. (If I was an actual bat I'd have sonar. Which is fun, don't get me wrong, but I prefer the night vision.) The only traits I can't share around are basic pony and dragon, possibly because those are the ones I was born with and not the ones I was gifted by Chaos, and to be even more specific, I can make all my paws dig like the dragon claw; I just can't share dragon invulnerability across my entire body, only where I actually do have scales.
My talon is an eagle's talon, specifically. So I can give myself eagle eyesight. It doesn't combine with the night vision, sadly (not without an act of chaos magic, anyway), but right now that's not a problem. I'm looking around myself with long distance eyes and observing... a whole lot of ice. What a surprise.
All right, I'm going to climb this big rock that's covered with ice. Get some height, and also see in the directions that it blocks.
This isn't really so bad. I'm only saying that because I'm stuffed full of warm liquid right now, of course; the wind would be really biting into me here if I weren't wearing a coat. But it's not bothering me so much at the moment. I'm looking around myself for any variation in this endless vista of ice, ice, ice, ice, rock, ice, rock and more ice, but so far I'm not seeing anything. Maybe I'll have to fly after –
--oh, oh now wait, what's that?
That looks like a frost dragon. And frost dragons eat heat. Meaning that he (or she) might very well know where the caribou capital city is. (If you can call it a city. I think it's made of tents.)
Well! I think it's time I made a new friend!
...that's... not a frost dragon.
Or is it? That's either a superbly rendered statue, or...
...it's Loki. Dear chaos it's Loki.
And... he's dead. There's nothing. No magic inside that statue at all, let alone chaos energy.
I can't talk about this anymore.
The sun is gliding around the horizon. This is amazing. I should have come up here years ago; it's one thing when I do silly things with the sun, but when Celestia's normal, boring patterns for rising and setting the sun produce something as ridiculous as this... well. It almost makes up for how bitterly cold it still is. Almost.
I made camp a few hours ago. I'm having to rethink my strategy for dealing with the caribou, which is to say, I'm trying to come up with a strategy for dealing with the caribou. When I headed out I assumed I'd have more access to my magic than it turns out I have... and I didn't know that the Frozen North can kill a chaos avatar. Loki... I am willing to admit that finding his body has shaken me up more than just a bit. I knew he was turned to stone at the end of Ragnarok, but I always assumed he must have gotten out eventually and I just didn't have access to those memories, because a thousand years in stone didn't affect my being the chaos avatar in the slightest, so I'd assumed that if Loki had still been stone he'd still be the chaos avatar and not me, or any of the others that came between us. I didn't know it was possible for us to die in stone.
So. I decided it would be a bad idea to face the caribou if I'm exhausted. Thus, I exhausted myself a lot further by making a nice thermally sealed tent, magicking up some more hot food and some firewood, and some fuzzy blankets, and getting a fire going. I've always liked fire. When I was very young I thought of it as a pet, and its chaotic nature warms my heart the way its heat warms my toesies. Took a nap – to be honest, I rarely sleep like ponies do, for an entire eight hours at a stretch. I'm too restless. Usually I sleep a few hours, then wake up, then go back to sleep a few hours later. I'll probably be going back to sleep again before too long – the warmth of my tent beckons me – but I woke up twice with nightmares about being in stone, so here I am, up and watching the sun refuse to set.
Maybe it will help to talk to my journal about the whole Loki thing and why it's bothering me so much. Better than trying to think about what I'm facing with the caribou, anyway. I don't do well with trying to plan.
It's not as if I haven't had plenty of reminders of my own mortality, while fighting Anon, and it's not as if I care all that much, personally, about Loki. I have some of his memories, sure, but I think they might actually be the first ones I've got – either he was the first chaos avatar or the memories of the others are simply too old for me to recall. They're not particularly clear, either. Before I spent a thousand years in stone, I couldn't really recall any of them except Mayhem; I knew they'd existed, and that was it. The others didn't become available to me until I did some meditation while I was stuck in stone; meditation doesn't exactly come naturally to me, but I didn't have anything else to do, after all. Even now, my memories of Loki are weaker than any of the others. I never even knew how he died.
Now I do.
Loki was a frost dragon, but either he was part reindeer or he was a runt, or something... I don't remember. In any case, he had shapeshifting abilities, which is rare but not unheard of among dragons. Frost dragons feed on heat; they live in the cold because the temperature of a place like Equestria would be like any pony but Pinkie suddenly having forty cakes shoved in their mouth. (I am fairly certain Pinkie could handle this, but she's probably the only pony who could.) Loki, however, didn't need to eat heat to fuel his magic; he had chaos.
He was adopted by the ruling tribe of the reindeer, the Aesir – which is essentially the term for reindeer alicorns. Yes, some reindeer can fly, how do you think it is that supposedly Sinterklauss and his team of nine assistants travel all over Neighropa? And some reindeer can perform magic directly, though all of them can use rune magic – rather like us draconequui, in fact. Loki was taken in as either the son or the younger brother of the king, Woden (like I said, my memories are really unclear here). Despite this, he was generally treated like garbage by the Aesir, who didn't approve of chaos any more than ponies do. Loki put up with it until one day he didn't.
One of the Aesir, Balder, was generally considered an all around wonderful guy that everydeer loved to pieces. He was a shining star of harmony, a friend to absolutely everyone in the universe apparently, truly Creation's gift to reindeerkind or something like that. I'm pretty sure I'd have hated him too and I wasn't even raised with the guy. Loki decided to play a cruel prank and get Balder, who was supposed to be impervious to all harm, injured by the one thing in the world that could harm him. He miscalculated, and Balder ended up dead. Things spiraled out of control, Loki went to war with the rest of the Aesir, lost, was brutally tortured for I don't know how long, got loose, and decided to destroy the world.
He created the windigos. While frost dragons feed on heat and thus generate cold, windigos generate cold magically, and feed on disharmony. He created ice wolves – rather like timberwolves, but made of ice – in the shape of his murdered son (Loki, being a shapeshifter, got around. One of his kids was fathered on a dire wolf, and ended up born in wolf shape. That was the one the Aesir killed.) Then he set them loose on the bearer of the sun, an Aesir doe named Sola, and they ripped her to pieces, because apparently when you melt ice wolves to water, you get water wolves, and when you vaporize them, you get vapor wolves. Alicorns, and alicorn-level reindeer, aren't immune to being torn apart from the inside by wolves that they've accidentally breathed into their lungs. Who knew? (Well, the victim did. Apparently, Sola, who had the prophecy gift like most sun bearers do, had been seeing this death for years before it happened; she just hadn't known Loki would be involved. Why she melted and vaporized the wolves anyway when she knew how it would end up, I don't know, but I guess when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – she had the power of the sun, so everything she had to fight was something to melt or burn. I'm glad Celestia has more variety in her repertoire than that.)
Loki took control of the sun and forced it away from our world, making the whole planet colder and darker. He caged in Yggsdrasil so it couldn't interfere, and brought what is called the First Fimbulwinter, the winter that destroys the world as we know it. At the battle of Ragnarok, he killed Woden, and Thor, master of the weather (reindeer didn't have their flyers handle this job – flying reindeer were actually best known for being medics, coming to the fallen on the battlefield to heal them, though they were also famous for fighting demons and sealing the gate to Tartarus, not that they called it Tartarus. There are actually Tartarus gates all over the world, but they have different names depending on where they are – this was the gate called Hel.) And probably a lot of other Aesir as well. I can't much say I blame him; they tortured him really, really gruesomely, for a very long time. No, I'm not going to give you the details. If I wanted to give you nightmares I'd do it when I'm alive and can point and laugh at you.
Yggdrasil came up with a strategy to save the world; it grew six fruit and gifted them to six young creatures, at least one of which was a reindeer but probably not Aesir, and I think some of them might have been a different species but I'm not sure which ones, as to be honest Loki only saw these guys once and then his memories cut off completely. Now, see, it would have been really really useful for me to know that a Tree of Harmony can grow fruit that represent the Elements of Harmony and hoof (branch?) them over to representative bearers who can then wield the powers of a Harmony Tree, before I was turned to stone. The collective memories of the chaos avatars failed me badly there. Though I admit that maybe if I'd cared more about how any of my predecessors aside from Mayhem came to be not around anymore, possibly I'd have been able to retrieve those memories. The point is, Loki didn't know that those gems were Harmony fruits or that they could turn him to stone any more than I did, so he laughed in their faces, like I did, and ended up a statue.
My status as chaos avatar never changed while I was a statue, so I always assumed that Loki must have gotten out of that statued state, somehow, and died after that, allowing the power to pass on to the next one. In fact, if I recall correctly, there were times when I clung to the belief that surely Loki had gotten out or he'd still be the statued avatar of Chaos and not me, as proof that it was possible to get out, while I was desperately hoping that someday I'd get out. But no. He never did.
When I found him out there on the ice, earlier today, his mouth was in a laughing position but his eyes wide with shock, as if he'd had just enough time to realize what was happening to him to start to feel horror instead of humor before he was frozen in place. I walked around him, running my paws over his ice-cold rock body, stretching my senses. Trying to feel anything, any sign of life. Even though Chaos avatars usually end up trying to fight each other to the death when they encounter each other, I would still have freed him if he was alive; he'd have been too weak to be a threat to me, and if I did have to kill him, better a quick clean death than thousands of years in stone. But he was dead, not a shred of life force or magic remaining. Nothing but a statue.
So I smashed it. Chaos should never be frozen into place for eternity for passersby to gawk at. Admittedly not a lot of passersby in the Frozen North, but that's part of the point. That's what killed him.
There's no chaos up here. I was in a garden, in a place where the sun rises and the moon sets at least once every twenty-four hours or so, most of the time, when Woona's not throwing a tantrum. It's predictable, and annoying because it's predictable, but at least it's change. There's weather in Equestria, rain and sun and snow and wind and sometimes some idiot pegasus lets a tornado get loose. Canterlot's up high enough that they never got any natural weather even before the pegasi got everything completely under their hooves, but as unnatural and pony-made as the weather is, it's still weather. There are ponies, with their own agendas, roaming around, and some of them start arguments. There's some disharmony. There's some chaos. And my magic was trapped safely within me, no force native to the area strong enough to pull it out.
In the Frozen North, the winter nights last a long, long time, and for months of the year there's nothing but night. In the summer the same thing happens to the sun. Aside from a snowstorm once every year or so, there's no weather because weather requires heat. Water doesn't evaporate when it is perpetually frozen. The territories where the reindeer (and later, caribou) actually live are much nicer than this, because they use their magic for heat and to create weather, but out of those zones, out in the cold empty wilderness of ice... nothing changes. There's no ponies or reindeer or other sapient beings around – even frost dragons prefer to live near settlements with heat, because they've gotta eat. Polar bears live near the water, because there's no fish deep within the continent of Arctica.
But there is the pull of the leylines, sapping magic away from any creature who has it.
I don't want to talk about this. Even to my journal. I'm having flashbacks just thinking about it. If I thought I'd be alive when any pony read this I'd never write it, because this has to be the thing I'm most afraid of, out of all possibilities, even worse than being killed by Anon. Loki died slowly, agonizingly, trapped in stone (a horror for a chaotic creature, as I am well qualified to tell you), surrounded by endless nothing, his magic pulled out of him by the draw from the leylines until eventually there was nothing left of it, or him. I mean, I don't know how fast it was, but I know how much the lines were pulling on my magic and I would imagine that being in stone would have made it harder, not easier, for them to pull his magic from him... but also harder for him to resist it. He'd have had no conscious control, no way to fight back, as the leylines drank him like a particularly sludgy, thick milkshake through a tiny sippy straw.
And then there's the cold. I noticed when I was in stone that while most of the time I couldn't feel anything at all, I could feel cold on particularly bitter winter nights... mind you, the numbness I normally lived with was so terrible that most of the time, I enjoyed the novelty of being able to feel anything, even if cold is hardly my favorite sensation. The cold in the North is so much worse than the worst Equestrian winter, though, I'm sure Loki would have been able to feel the cold the entire time... which wouldn't have bothered him. He was a frost dragon, and he was in his dragon form when they petrified him. But I can't help imagining what if I was in that situation... what if it was so cold that I could feel, and all I could feel was the cold, which, as I might have pointed out, killed most of my entire race...
No. I'm done here. Talking about this has been spectacularly unhelpful. I've recorded what I need to for posterity and to make sure my memories can't be taken from me and now I'm done. No more dwelling on things that didn't happen. I was in Equestria, not the Frozen North. I wouldn't have died in my prison. Loki killed pretty much everyone who would have ever thought of showing him mercy; I went out of my way to never kill anypony. Even Luna wouldn't have done something so horrible to me.
Fairly sure I'm going to have more nightmares, though, when I eventually go back to sleep.
And it hasn't put me in a particularly good mood for dealing with the caribou. Not that I think I'd ever be in a good mood for dealing with the caribou, but I'm in a particularly bad mood right now.
They're a lot more powerful than I was taking into account when I headed up here – in this barren wasteland, almost devoid of magic, I can feel the concentration of dark magic that they represent, somewhere around here, just as I can feel echoes of the reindeer's harmony and possibly the ghost of that stupid tree. And I'm a lot less powerful than I usually am, considering that every act of magic is like opening a vein. And they're never, ever, ever going to give me what I want without a fight, because their entire society depends on it. This is going to be like Winnie all over again, except that it's not just going to be my overconfidence and unwillingness to go all out when I don't have to that's crippling me.
Well. The advantage is, I can do a demonstration of godlike power if I have to, and if they remember me from the old days... I'm still the most powerful male creature on the planet. Not counting Anon, at the moment. (If we're not counting Anon I'm actually the most powerful creature on the planet, never mind my gender, which I could change any time I felt like I'd enjoy being a girl, but the caribou care a lot about that kind of thing.) So if I don't reveal myself to be an enemy who finds them disgusting and is there to steal back their most powerful magical item, they're likely to suck up to me outrageously, same as they did way back when. I can hope, at least.
I'm going back to bed now. Maybe sleeping on it will give me some ideas.