The entry in the journal about the Reindeer thinking he knew what it meant to be cold before coming here came to Rainbow Dash’s mind. Because she thought she had known the same thing too.
She was wrong.
Whatever “cold” she had been through on her journey before this was nothing. This was what it meant to be cold. Ice frosted over the bottom of her eyes, making her certain that if she blinked her eyes would momentarily get stuck shut. Her nose had two icicles dripping down from it, her extremities were completely numb and unresponsive, frost had turned her tail into a frozen, unmoving sheet of hair. The chill from the air went through her entire body and into her very soul, making Rainbow Dash wonder if she’d ever be able to feel warm again.
Her teeth chattered and her body constantly shivered thanks to the cold air around the mountains. Each beat of her wings was agony. Winter days spent back in Ponyville were like summer compared to this. Nothing could prepare Rainbow Dash, or any other creature for that matter, for sheer unrelenting cold like this. It was almost a crime to even compare other cold places or seasons like winter to the cold death of this strange other half of the True North.
While just previously the wind hadn’t been more than a breeze before she made it to the mountains, now the freezing gales surrounded her. Rainbow Dash couldn’t even really tell from which direction it was mainly coming thanks to how numb and unresponsive so much of her body was. Maybe everywhere? Snow was falling all around her too, making visibility practically nil. It was only thanks to her massive amount of experience that she hadn’t crashed into a mountainside already.
The frost was settling on her wings as well despite their constant movement and the warm blood rushing into them. Her feathers were slowly becoming glazed over with ice.
By this point she could feel icicles forming on the hair of her underbelly as well, her ears too became little more than frozen points with icicles hanging off them. Rainbow Dash could do nothing about it. The freezing power of the weather around her was simply too much, even for a pegasus who normally manipulated the weather to do her bidding. Perhaps she could form a cloud shelter at some point to stave off the cold or give her wings some rest but she truly didn’t feel like she had the energy to do that. Not with the cold piercing and enveloping her entire body, mind and spirit. Mercilessly.
Her lips had turned to a far deeper blue than the rest of her coat and the meager amount of moisture from her mouth had long gone dry thanks to the howling winds and cold. Frost too caked around the corners of her mouth, making her uncomfortable and wishing she could lick the frost away. A fool’s errand if there was one.
Not one to give up, however, Rainbow Dash continued on through the mountains and did all she could to keep herself going. She flew up and down in short dips so as to break the monotonous act of flying straight ahead and try to force some more blood through her veins, keep her heart pumping and her body heated as best she could. Mentally she hummed to herself and finally wiped away the icicles hanging from her nose to breathe easier.
Think warm thoughts, think warm thoughts… Rainbow Dash repeated to herself again and again. Taking a hot shower. Taking a dip in the spa back home. Group hug with everyone else. Going to the Dragon Lands. Being stuck in the maintenance area of the Metal Mountain. Sitting around a campfire with my friends…
This might have been a colder place than she had ever been before, but—this place had also never had a pony like Rainbow Dash fly through it. She wasn’t going to lose to weather. Not after everything else and not with everything still ahead of her.
Unfortunately the more she tried to fight against it the colder it seemed to get. Any icicles brushed away just reformed and the wind only increased in fierceness. Rainbow Dash had to squeeze her eyes shut as a hail of snow was blown into her face and once she was able to open her eyes back up she had to instantly suck in a sharp breath and just barely dart out of the way of a white cliff that suddenly appeared in front of her face. This place was treacherous with a capitol “T”.
And now the flaps of her wings were growing slower and weaker. Despite quite possibly being the greatest flier in the whole world, her normally strong appendages so full of life felt heavy on Rainbow’s sides.
For a second she thought of potentially looking for a cave or at least some sort of cleft in one of the nearby mountains where she could rest for a bit and try to see if the cold and winds would let up. But immediately she realized that was a bad idea. Slowing down and stopping anywhere in this kind of weather was a death sentence. She didn’t exactly know how she knew this, but her heart was telling her that things would never get better than they are now. She’d have to keep moving or the cold would claim her just like it did those Reindeer.
Shivers were breaking out through her entire body and her teeth clattered with such frequency that she could’ve bit through a plank of wood. Only her own internal sense of direction was keeping her on the track south, otherwise she’d be lost in this blizzard of white. With her eyes narrowed she could only occasionally make out any shapes in front of her. She guessed she had passed a couple of mountains but it was hard to tell exactly how far she had gone. There was a way for her to tell where mountains were by feeling the air currents around her, but her senses were so shot by the cold that Rainbow Dash was blind by that method as well.
With a grunt, she struggled to make her wings move normally now, she felt a strange hitch in them like her joints were freezing up and the feathers were stuck together. It took a little bit of extra strength to get a complete flap out of them each time.
Rainbow Dash chanced a glance back at her own wings and saw them practically covered with a sheen of ice. She hadn’t even noticed how bad it had gotten until now.
“Darn it...” Rainbow Dash grit her teeth and tried to shake the ice off, trying to break her wings free. She reached a shaking hoof up to her back to try and shatter the ice but all she could do was ineffectually paw at it. There was no strength left in any of her limbs.
And because of that, Rainbow Dash began to fall.
Her body faltered thanks to the uneven flapping of her wings, making her wobble back and forth as she quickly descended to the ground. Far too quickly to call safe. It was probably only snow down there but even that could make for a hard landing depending how it went, and there was the possibility of her hitting solid rock or ice too.
Rainbow Dash futilely attempted to free up her wings for a few moments longer before checking down at the ground again. White. Technically good but she was still approaching at too fast and steep an angle.
So she gave up on flying normally and spread her wings as wide as they could go now in an attempt to glide safely to the ground. Her wings were stiff and they twitched in refusal at first but Rainbow Dash finally forced them open enough to catch the wind beneath them. She jilted in the air and looked towards the ground, trying to pull up a little bit more so as not to just smack right into the packed snow. Finally the wind obscuring her vision gave way nearly completely and Rainbow Dash sharply pulled up just five feet above the surface of the snow.
At high speed she glided for a second longer before her hooves started catching along and digging tiny trenches out of the snow. At last her hooves caught on a thick pile of it and launched Rainbow Dash end over end and smashing a pony shaped hole in the snow twenty feet from where she started to land. Freezing cold and covered in snow, she pulled herself free of the hole and looked around.
The wind wasn’t as bad down here and it looked like she was on a mountain ridge. It sloped up ahead of her and she could just barely make out the crest of the ridge maybe a hundred feet ahead.
Rainbow Dash frowned and looked at her wings—still frozen. She tried flapping them and shaking them free of the ice but it was no good. Her wings and all the feathers on them were frozen together. Even if she could get a few beats and make it into the air she wouldn’t stay up there for long. With a grimace, she squeezed her wings shut (also pushing them down with her hooves) and kept them against her sides for now.
The worst possible situation had arrived. It was time for her to walk.