Sensation returned to Vermilion in two ways. Slowly, then all at once.
He was aware, vaguely, of the killing cold. It wrapped around his bones like iron bands. It flowed through his veins, reaching deeper and deeper until finally its many disparate tendrils reached his heart. And if he were not the personal vassal of Luna, Princess of the Night and sovereign of – among many other things – Winter, he may have died there just as Lord Graymoor had. But she had marked him with her touch; mere cold could never destroy her tools. A sword might sooner seek to defeat an anvil than darkness or cold or night defeat him.
Next, he became aware of a beautiful blue light. It seeped in between his closed eyelids like the dawn creeping over the horizon. It soothed his mind as the cold soothed his sore body, and he let it wash over him and carry his cares away.
Then he woke.
Memory returned in a flood. His eyes shot open, and his muscles spasmed so hard his body jerked into the air, breaking free of the ice that had coated his limbs and bound him to the broken stones of the balcony. His legs scrambled for purchase on the slick surface, and he stood, gasping frantically for air. The freezing air hurt his teeth.
“Rose!” He spun in a circle. His iron shoes cracked through the thin glaze of ice and sent little chips of it sliding across the balcony. “Rose! Cloudy!”
“Cherry!” The shout came from above, and he looked up to see Cloud Fire’s head peering out from the ruined facade of Graymoor’s manor. “Don’t move buddy, we’re coming!”
Coming? Vermilion realized that he was no longer on the balcony. Or, more correctly, the balcony was no longer a balcony, having fallen three stories to crash onto the cobblestone road below. He’d fallen with it, and now he was just a few steps from the crushed remains of the front door. Hopefully the ponies guarding it had gotten away.
He took a step and banged his shin on something hard. Pain flashed up his leg, chased away a moment later by shock. He’d just kicked Graymoor’s frozen corpse. It was solid as stone. Beside him, crumpled and half-crushed by stones, was Stratolathe. He leaned down and tried to tug the old stallion free, but as soon as his hooves touched Stratolathe’s body he knew it was too late. It was already growing cold. He stumbled away and tripped on the shattered stones.
A feathered shoulder caught him before he fell. Wings wrapped around him in an embrace. Cloudy’s scent, of ozone and feathers and shockingly clear in the freezing air, assaulted his nose. He stuck his face in his best friend’s mane and let Cloudy’s warmth thaw the frost that had collected on his muzzle.
“Are you okay?” Cloudy asked. He stared into Vermilion’s eyes, then quickly scanned the rest of his body. He looked past him at Graymoor and Stratolathe, grimaced, and focused again on Vermilion’s face. “That was a long fall.”
“I’m fine.” It was mostly true. Parts of his body were starting to ache, and he suspected the skin beneath his coat would be a patchwork of bruises by tomorrow. But nothing was broken. “Where’s Rose? Everypony?”
“Zephyr’s got them.” Cloudy pointed with a wingtip, and Vermilion followed to see Zephyr with Quicklime held in her forelegs, standing at the edge of the broken balcony three stories up. Quickline squeaked something and buried her face in Zephyr’s chest, and then the pegasus jumped. Her wings snapped out to catch the air and beat twice as she landed gently.
“Whew. There we go.” Zephyr carefully pried Quicklime’s hooves off of her. “C’mon, leggo. We’re safe.”
That seemed like an overstatement. Vermilion found his saddlebags on the stones, half-covered in snow, and slung them over his withers. His saber was a few steps further away, the leather scabbard crushed and torn, but the blade itself seemed undamaged. He jammed it beneath his saddlebag straps.
There, armed. At least he could die with a sword on. Something caught in his throat, and he coughed up a mouthful of blood. It stained the snow black.
Zephyr landed beside them again. Rose clung to her shoulders, and she tumbled onto her rump with a whoosh of breath. She stood before Vermilion could help her up.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” It was a bald lie, and he could tell she saw through it. But they didn’t have time to tend to bruises right now. The wind was picking up around them, and the temperature falling further with each passing second. The hairs around his muzzle began to gather little beads of ice, frozen from out of his breath. “Where… where did that thing go?”
“The windigo?” Quicklime said. She shook herself, tossing off a dusting of snow. “South, somewhere. She’s not far, though.”
“How do you know?” Zephyr asked. She and Cloudy didn’t seem bothered by the cold, but then, pegasi never did. They both scanned the sky, their heads turning in time with each other, as though guided by the same mind.
“She’s hunting,” Vermilion said. He had to raise his voice now – the winds whipping through the town had started to drown him out. They whistled over the broken stones and icy crags growing where before there had been only piles of snow. “That was his… Graymoor’s plan. Summon the windigo to fight the Nightmare.”
“Was this part of his plan, too?” Rose stared at Graymoor’s corpse, sneered, and looked away. For a moment her gaze fell upon Stratolathe’s half-buried form, and her expression softened, but in an instant that was gone too, frozen into ice. “It’ll destroy the town! Do you know how many ponies there are here?”
“Uh.” He tried to think back to the teeming camps outside the gates. “Thousands?”
“Tens of thousands!” Rose’s horn sparked to life, flickered in the cold, then began to burn with a green glow. A wash of heat flowed out from around her, and the deathly chill faded. “What’s going to happen to them?”
“We, uh…” Vermilion took a few steps forward, stopped, and turned aimlessly. Where was he supposed to go? He looked around at the town, and for the first time since waking, he saw what it had become.
Shadows had swallowed Hazelnight. The only light came from the brilliance of the full moon, shining down at them through the crystal-clear air. It painted everything it touched silver. Little icy motes like diamonds sparkled in the sky, as numerous as the stars. Around them, the buildings had already begun to vanish as blowing snow collected like a blanket, rounding out their corners and smoothing the hard stone edges. He watched a thick granite waterspout carved in the shape of a gargoyle break from its cornice and fall three stories, landing with a soundless crash in the muffled street below. He felt its impact in the stones through his hooves more than he heard it.
“What do we do?” Quicklime asked. She shivered and pressed up against Rose’s side, looking more like a foal than ever. Somewhere along the line she’d picked up a deep cut along her shoulder, and it wept blood halfway down her leg. She didn’t seem to have noticed it yet.
Do? What could they do? Vermilion stared at her stupidly as the others turned to him. They were all silent. Waiting, he realized. Waiting for his orders to fix this.
He started to shake. It wasn’t from the cold. He swallowed over and over. Slowly, the magnitude of his failure emerged, like a boil erupting from beneath his skin. He’d well and truly fucked up this time and they were stuck in a town growing colder and colder with every passing minute and soon the snow that was drifting about their fetlocks would grow higher and higher, and it would never stop, and eventually they would drown in it, all of them, and their last words would be to curse him for his naive stupidity. They would blame him and they would be right to do so and—
Stop. Stop. Stop it. He took a shaking breath and focused on the pain the cold air ignited in his lungs. It broke through the loop of failed thoughts in his mind, and let him focus anew on the problem.
They were in a town that was freezing.
Tens of thousands of ponies were with them.
The windigo was killing them. They had to stop the windigo—Arnapkaphaaluk, it whispered again in his mind. Her voice echoed through the falling snow like distant windchimes—before she destroyed them all.
“Can we hurt her?” he asked. “The windigo. Can she be killed?”
“They’re not immortal,” Quicklime said. She trudged closer to him to be heard over the rising wind. “Probably, I mean! I think. There are myths from Dream Valley of ancient heroes driving them off with spears and magic.”
“We have to hurry,” Rose said. “Whatever we do, it has to be fast. The town won’t last through the night like this. We’ll all be frozen by morning.”
“Alright. We’re moving.” Vermilion jumped from the shattered remains of the balcony into the street. He sank up to his knees in snow, and more drifted in to fill the spaces left by his passage. “Cloudy, Zephyr, can you fly in this?”
Zephyr hopped into the air, hovered for a few seconds, then landed with a soft poomph in the snow. “Yeah, unless the winds get a lot higher.”
“Okay.” Vermilion tilted his head up to the southern sky. The moon filled it like an enormous eye, but just above the dark shapes of the buildings he could see faint flashes of an unworldly blue light. The windigo, hunting. “Stay above us. Steer us toward the windigo, but don’t fight her yourselves! It needs to be all of us!”
“Got it!” Cloudy jumped, and a moment later Zephyr followed him up. Within seconds Vermilion had lost them, and only a moving absence, an occlusion of the stars as they passed, hinted at their presence.
He heard a muffled grunt, and turned to see Quicklime in the snow behind him. She’d landed in a particularly deep drift, and only the yellow ember at the tip of her horn stuck above the snow. She struggled out, but even so the snow still came up to her chest.
That wouldn’t work. He trudged over and, ignoring her complaints, hoisted her onto his back. “Hold on!”
“I’m not a foal!” Still, she didn’t try to jump off, and her hooves wrapped around his neck for support.
Rose trudged up beside him. She didn’t have his strength to power through the snow, but she was taller, and the snow wasn’t deep enough yet to reach above her legs. “Do you really have a plan?”
No. “Yes. But, uh, I’m open to ideas. If you have any.”
“I’ll let you know if I get one.” She started walking, head down, horn pointed forward to shine like a searchlight through the blowing snow.
He jumped to catch up, and together they raced south to find the heart of winter.
* * *
The town was in a panic.
Understandable, Vermilion thought. He was pretty close to panicking, and he was supposed to be an elite knight in Luna’s service. Not that he’d ever done much to earn the title beyond being as stubborn and tough as any run-of-the-mill earth pony could be. He wondered, for a moment, if Luna would object to naming Cloudy or Zephyr the head of their little band. Somepony with real leadership experience.
His frozen musings were interrupted when his hoof struck something hard beneath the snow. He stumbled to his knees and nearly choked on the dry, powdery snow that suddenly swallowed him up to his ears. Quicklime yelped and gripped his neck harder to hang on. The little notch just below his windpipe was apparently the perfect spot for her hooves because she ground them into it with more strength than he realized the little unicorn possessed. He gurgled.
Rose turned. “You okay?”
“No!” Quicklime shouted.
“We’re fine,” he rasped out. “Just a rock. Keep going.”
Around them, he heard ponies in the darkened buildings. Their shouts echoed out from the hollow windows. Shutters banged shut, and they heard heavy objects being pushed against the doors to block out the cold. The ponies of Hazelnight were well-accustomed to harsh winters, but until an hour ago it had been spring, and they were not prepared for this. Smoke began to billow out from the high chimneys.
He pushed up through the snow beside Rose. “Will they be okay?”
She glanced at the buildings lining the roads. “Probably? If we stop this before the snow buries the town, yes. I’m more worried about the refugees.”
Right. The ones outside the gates, who had no buildings to hide in. Who had only tents and blankets, if they were lucky. Their campfires would hold off the snow for a few minutes at most before being smothered and buried, and then they would be buried as well.
He grunted and picked up his steps, pushing the snow aside. Rose made a little sound of surprise and tried to keep up, but after just a few paces she started to fall behind. Only by staying in the path he broke was she able to stay with them.
After just a block he was exhausted. The cold couldn’t hurt him, but it could sap his strength. His breath came in rapid, shaking gulps. His sweat melted the snow on his coat and then froze solid. Icicles formed on the sides of his barrel and beneath his chin.
As they pushed south toward the gates, a new sound intruded. It broke weakly through the wail of the wind and the constant crash of icy sleet against his ears; a melange of panic and anger and pain. Fearful shouts and screams bounced along the stone houses toward them, growing louder with each step toward the valley below the town.
Zephyr landed beside him on the snow. She didn’t sink through it – whatever pegasus magic let them walk on clouds apparently worked on snow as well.
“It’s a mess up ahead,” she said. “Everypony outside the gate is trying to get in. The guards have it barred, but that won’t last another minute.”
He tried to speak, but his vocal chords were too raw and frozen. He swallowed, gasped, and tried again. “The windigo?”
“Outside, over the valley.” Zephyr pointed south with her spear. “Just floating out there.”
Rose pushed up between them. “When we get out there, what exactly are we supposed to do? That thing killed Graymoor in an instant. If it so much as looks at us we could die!”
He shook his head. “You have to trust Luna, Rose! S-she gave us her blessing! The cold is a part of her, just like the night is, and the night can never hurt us as long as we serve her!”
“That’s not a tested hypothesis!” Quicklime objected. “You’re just saying that because the cold hasn’t killed us yet!”
Well, yeah. Maybe. He chose to ignore that. “We have your magic, we have the two best pegasus warriors in Equestria. Now, come on!”
He pushed forward, not waiting for any more rebuttals. They would figure it out when they found the windigo. They always had – whether through Rose and Quicklime’s magic or Zephyr and Cloudy’s skill at arms or his own stupid, stubborn unwillingness to quit, they hadn’t failed yet. They would find the windigo, drive her away from the town, and destroy her.
Arnapkaphaaluk. Her voice caressed his mind like a freezing balm. For a moment all his pains vanished, lost in a numb unfeeling that crept over him like a blanket. She was calling him.
Zephyr jerked, her ears flicking wildly back and forth. Rose stopped, the light from her horn sputtering out before re-igniting.
“What—” She jerked her head around. “Did you…”
“It’s the windigo, isn’t it?” Zephyr said. She licked her lips. “You heard it too?”
“Ignore it,” Vermilion said. “Come on. The gate’s just a few blocks ahead.”
He pushed forward. After a few steps he heard Rose fall in behind him. Zephyr, as always, made no sound as she floated over the snow.
* * *
The gates broke just as they reached them.
The guards had already fled, seeking shelter and warmth. The only thing holding the massive oak doors closed was the bars they had left behind, and those shattered under the blows of the refugees outside. The doors opened slowly, jammed by the feet of snow on either side, but enough fearful earth ponies with enough motivation could do incredible things, and soon the gate was wide open.
Ponies began to trickle through. The trickle became a rush, then a flood. It threatened to sweep them back into the town. Vermilion lowered his shoulder against the crowd and pushed. The noise was insane, all shouts and screams and pounding of hooves. He shoved through the bottleneck at the gate, held steady against the flow while Rose caught up, then angled off to the side.
The crowd wasn’t very deep. Ever several thousand ponies, when crammed tight enough together, couldn’t fill an area more than a regimental parade ground, and the mass was already thinning as more and more streamed into the town, breaking into whatever homes and shelters they could find. The noises from inside the town began to sound more and more like fighting.
Vermilion ignored it. The town was behind them. What mattered was before them.
The valley opened up beneath Hazelnight. Low mountain ridges swept out to his left and right, quickly widening into a floodplain miles across. Through it snaked the river and the road south. Miles to the east, a break in the mountains led to the cliffs and the bay. He wondered if the winter had reached that far yet.
Rose stepped up beside him. She helped Quicklime off his back, and they all looked up to the sight in the heavens.
His mouth slackened. He stared up, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be afraid.
The windigo hung in the air, motionless except for her ever-flowing mane and tail, an unnatural stillness that brought to mind his first memories of Luna. She was white as snow, brilliant as a star against the endless black sky. The sterile blue light shining from her soul filled the valley with shadows like noon.
A palpable cold flowed from her, falling like a waterfall. The air below her shimmered, and where it struck the ground enormous crystals began to grow in dazzling patterns. Tendrils and spires of ice grew up, taller than a pony, taller than a house, reaching as high as trees. Slowly, slowly, a forest of ice began to grow in the valley, flowing with fog between its countless branches. And all of it sparkled with her light; the gentle pulse of it filled the crystals with dancing shadows. It breathed, keeping time with her song.
His eyes watered. His lips grew numb, and he realized they’d frozen together. He grunted and grimaced and finally peeled them apart. Something hot and wet flowed down his chin.
“How…” Zephyr’s spear dipped, until its tip sank into the snow. “How do we fight that?”
“We—” A cough interrupted him. His mouth tasted like copper. “It’s like Hollow Shades. We, we faced worse there. Blightweaver was like a god! This is just a spirit—”
Arnapkaphaaluk. She sang again in his mind. The howling winds seemed to shift in pitch, rising higher and higher. They exalted in her glory.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The voice in his mind dimmed. “She’s just a spirit. We’ve killed spirits before!”
“It’s not even looking at us,” Cloudy said. His wings fluttered, stirring little eddies in the bone-dry snow. “It’s just floating there.”
Quicklime squeezed up beside him. She’d gotten her scarf out at some point, the yellow yarn one she wore on that first day of their expedition to Hollow Shades. “Her. Graymoor didn’t summon her to fight us. It was to fight that thing we saw in the mirror. Maybe she’s—”
She’s waiting for it, Quicklime was about to say. Probably. Vermilion had already begun to track back through his mind, retracing the images in the blood-coated mirror in Graymoor’s study to their night in Cirrane. A half-remembered dream of Luna’s shrine began to seep into the edges of his thoughts, and in time, doubtlessly, he would have come to the same conclusion Quicklime had already reached. That the Queen of the Windigoes – for surely this was the being who hovered over the valley, calling winter to her like Celestia called the dawn – was there for a reason. That Graymoor’s final words had predicted this moment.
“Some monsters cannot be fought by ponies.” He heard the dead lord’s voice again. “They can only be fought by other monsters.”
The moon blinked.