Typhoon alighted on the forest floor a few minutes later, grimacing and wincing as she did so. Though she’d proven she could fly, she could only do so for a short time, and it hurt all the while. Instead of continuing her search for her sword from the air, she decided it’d be easier to conduct from the ground. Though there was always the risk of running into cockatrices or manticores or other unpleasant monsters when wandering the forest on hoof, Typhoon wasn’t too concerned about any of that. Her fight with Firestorm likely scared any living thing away, and if she did have to defend herself, she still had working wingblades. And besides, there was only a small area the sword could have gone, and Typhoon knew she’d see the signs of the sword long before she saw the weapon itself.
After a night to sleep off the terror of a dragon soaring overhead, the forest had tentatively returned to its usual music, adding a calming background melody as Typhoon’s three naked hooves and single prosthetic padded over the mossy ground, leaving icy hoofprints in its wake. Birds chirped out songs of avian love between the trees, and a gentle breeze toyed with the notion of bringing more rain to the forest after the artificial storm Typhoon had constructed the night before. A woodpecker hammered away at a rotting tree somewhere in the distance, adding a sharp staccato to the air, while a pair of far-off ursine growls managed to tease ever so faintly at the mare’s ears. It made her pause for a moment, but she merely gave her head a shake and carried onwards. So long as the bears didn’t bother her, she wouldn’t bother them.
Wandering for a few minutes more, Typhoon came to a small stream winding its way through the rocks, only deep enough to get up to her knees should she wade through it, yet teeming with minnows, water striders, and mayflies. She would have crossed it without a second thought, but something white and almost see-through floating on the surface caught her attention. When she scooped it up with her wing and brought it closer to her face, she realized it was ice, and looking upstream she saw more of it floating along with the river currents. Frowning, she tossed the ice back in the river and began to trot upstream, following the many twists and turns in the stream along its rocky shores.
Eventually, she found the source of the ice. About half a mile upstream, a tree that had fallen across the river wore a sheet of ice like a translucent dress, its mossy branches hidden behind a veil of white. Icicles hung down from its trunk and reached into the stream’s waters, where they would slowly freeze the water in a trail leading from the tip before it grew too large and heavy and broke away, only for the process to begin anew. And rising from the middle of the tree trunk like a steel branch was a curved sword, the blue sheen on the blade seemingly bluer and brighter by the ice coating it halfway up to the hilt.
“There you are,” Typhoon murmured to herself, and she made her way closer to the tree, careful to avoid stepping on any of the icy rocks along the shore closest to the fallen timber. She was surprised that the magical sword hadn’t cut its way entirely through the tree, but she was thankful for it nonetheless. Prying it out of frozen wood would certainly be easier than trying to chip it out of a frozen river. She guessed she still had some luck on her side after all. The last few years, and for what felt like most of her life, had all but convinced her otherwise.
She hopped onto the tree from the base of its roots, holding her wings out at her sides to keep her balance as she began to step across the slippery, frozen wood. Far from the sword, the wood was only covered in frost, but the closer she drew, the more solid and treacherous the ice grew. In the end, she used the tip of her metal hoof to chip out craggy hoofholds in the ice to make sure she wouldn’t slip, and though it was slow and laborious work, she finally made it close enough to the sword that it was within her reach.
Before she wrenched it out of its icy plinth like some kind of sword in the stone with a wintry twist, Typhoon stood at a distance and took her time to admire it. That sword was so close to her side for so long that she had taken it for granted; almost losing it while fighting Firestorm made her realize not only how much she needed it, but how much of her was inside that weapon. The curving, steel blue blade released clouds of frost from its metal, forged from legendary pegasus skysteel. This weapon had started its life as like many other pegasus swords, nothing more than a cloud, a wispy blanket of cirrostratus high in the sky, almost too high for pegasi to fly up to. But it had become something more when the ghostly remains of a windigo had been added to the forge. The icy nature of the cirrus cloud and the magical, freezing hatred of the windigo had melted together in the forge, shaped by the magic of the pegasus who forged it, shaping skysteel nopony had ever seen the likes of before, and likely never would again. And there was no pony in the world who could wield it to its full potential besides its master, Typhoon.
She leaned forward and wrapped her teeth around the handle, shivering at the touch and at the painful memories inside the metal that poured into her being. Memories of cold flagstones on her belly and the smell of alcohol and sweat made her shiver and her skin crawl. Tears slipped out of squeezed-shut eyes and froze down the length of her muzzle, while frost formed on her feathers and glittered in the morning light. Soul-crushing pain and misery made its way out of the sword, that hateful sword, and into the mare grasping it, but after a moment, they failed to hold any more sway over her. That pain and misery was a part of her, a piece of her soul she had put into the sword at the skyforge, and reunited with its master, the pain fit neatly into the hole she had cut from her heart.
Pain and misery. That was what made Typhoon who she was. That was what made her sword what it was. The runes etched along the base of the blade had been written in old Cirran, a language few alive today could still read, but Typhoon knew what they wrote out: Hiems Osculum, Winter’s Kiss. In the cold heart of the darkest winter ponykind had ever known, a single forced kiss had changed who Typhoon was as a mare, and had made her the strongest ice empath in the world.
So many ponies had come and gone, along with their memories, many painful, many pleasant. But those memories, the memories of that winter, Typhoon knew she would carry with her the rest of her life, just as she carried the sword forged from them. They made her who she was. They made her strong, but they cut deep to the bone, deeper than the icy knifing winds of the harshest blizzard she had ever lived through an entire lifetime ago.
Typhoon locked her teeth tightly around the grip and wrenched the sword free, shattering the ice fusing it to the log and sending shards of ice and splinters of wood flying into the air with one harsh motion. The sword returned to the embrace of its master, and after taking a deep breath, Typhoon slid it back into its scabbard, feeling the comforting weight of her burden and her power once more nestled under her left wing. The growth of the icicles hanging from the log stopped, and with a quiet snap, the last globule of ice broke free from the tip and began to float downstream.
Typhoon watched it meander along the current for a long time, until it rounded a bend in the stream and slipped out of sight. Then, nostrils flaring, the old soldier took a deep breath and looked to the skies.
A flap of feathers and a ruffle of wind, and she was gone.