The lead-up to Hearth’s Warming was one of the busiest times of the year for the weather patrol. Snow was built up in great piles in the days before the middle of the Twelvetide, representing the snow and cold that plagues the unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi before the three tribes came together as one. Then at midnight when Hearth’s Warming Eve switched over to Hearth’s Warming itself, all the snow would be melted, representing the banishment of the Windigos and the coming together of the tribes. Well, all the snow in the town proper, anyway – there weren’t enough pegasi in even all of Cloudsdale to melt all the snow in the whole of Ponyville, farmland included, in just a few hours.
The snow was on-schedule, but the ponies working on it were dog-tired. Even Raindrops’ boss, Rainbow Dash, was flying slower than normal as she worked the cloud cover over Ponyville. The polychromatic pegasus hadn’t looked this tired since the beginning of summer, when certain events had led to the town’s cloud silo losing almost all of its water vapor and so the pegasi in town had needed to work overtime to replace it.
This wasn’t as hard, but it came close (though it was at least not nearly as stressful). Raindrops piled the nimbostrati – the preferred cloud for sustained snow storms – high on top of one another; there was a solid four hundred fifty feet of cloud between her and Ponyville below, which left a good fifty feet still to go. They had the supply, but wrangling the clouds into place and molding them together into one great storm took time and energy and the use of a pegasus’ hooves and wings both.
The pegasus frowned, though, when she entered the vast cloud container that held the nimbostrati clouds (the container itself was made of cumulonimbi; the idea of clouds containing other clouds would have been bizarre to a land-bound pony, but was fairly ordinary to the pegasus tribe) and set her hooves against the next nimbostratus she had to place, feeling it out. “Hey, I think we have a problem,” she called after a few minutes of checking to be sure. She poked her head out of the top of the cloud container, then called over to Rainbow Dash, who was about a hundred feet up and five hundred feet away. “There’s too many ice crystals in one of these!”
---
“Why didn’t you bring this up when we were fighting a Windigo not one month ago?” Cheerilee demanded with perhaps a bit more heat than she’d intended.
“Because Snowy Night isn’t a Windigo!” Trixie countered.
She, Cheerilee, Ditzy, and Lyra were in Trixie’s living room – Carrot Top was out on her farm and it would have taken too long to grab, while Raindrops was busy with weather patrol duties. There was a warm fire burning in Trixie’s fireplace that Cheerilee had made even warmer by putting on an additional log as she’d been informed about Rimewind. Trixie supposed she couldn’t really blame Cheerilee’s reaction to the situation – the Windigo that they’d fought a month or so back had, after all, frozen both her and Vicereine Puissance solid. Trixie imagined that would have an effect on a pony once they were freed from the ice.
“The stories say she is,” Lyra said. She’d grabbed her copy of Flutter Ponies and Other Foal’s Tales on being told about the situation, and had opened it up to the relevant story contained within. “Though my dads always said that afterwards Rimewind was defeated by all the farms coming together in the Hearth’s Warming spirit.”
“My mother used to say that Little Rock was unfrozen, too,” Cheerilee noted, backing down from her angry glare at Trixie. “Guess those would be later additions. Okay, so Rimewind isn’t a Windigo? What is she, then?”
Trixie rubbed one front hoof against the opposite leg. “A pegasus pony,” she said, “named Snowy Night.”
“She seems very alive for somepony who’s three hundred years old,” Ditzy noted.
“More like three-twenty or so,” Trixie said. “And…okay okay okay. Just bear with me, I’m not as good at telling stories as Lyra is.” Lyra beamed a little at the compliment as Trixie considered. “Okay,” she repeated. “Okay. I’m not Luna’s first apprentice, right? She’s taken on others over the years, different reasons for each one. Bright Shimmer, Simple Words, Copper Coin…I think there’s been nine before me. Anyway, Snowy Night was Luna’s apprentice three hundred years ago. She was a pegasus but her family were all earth ponies, living on the edge of the Everfree Forest at the time in one of the homesteads scattered around here before Ponyville was founded.
“Snowy was really good at weather-manipulation, that’s what caught Luna’s eye. But her family were dirt-poor farmers. Luna offered to take them to Canterlot with Snowy, but they refused, her mom and dad were just too prideful to accept help. They wouldn’t even accept it when Luna offered to have Snowy indentured to her.”
“Wait, what?” Ditzy asked. Having Snowy Night become an indentured servant would have meant that Luna would have owned Snowy Night for a set period as determined by the contract worked out between Luna and Snowy’s parents; and at the end of the contract Snowy Night would have been entitled to a rather substantial cash payment known as freedom dues. Despite that, while it wasn’t quite slavery, it wasn’t far from it, either.
“It wasn’t illegal back then,” Cheerilee noted. “And it’s not like Luna made a habit out of indenturing ponies.”
“Snowy was leaving the farm of her own free will, anyway,” Trixie added. “Indenturing her would have just been a way to help her parents out without it seeming like charity. But her parents did refuse it. Anyway, Snowy had brothers and sisters. Her youngest brother was a foal named Little Rock.”
Ditzy’s wings fluttered a few times at the mention of the foal from the tale. “Oh, I don’t think I like where this is going,” she noted.
Trixie help up a hoof. “It’s…I mean, it’s sad, but it’s not Snowy’s fault,” she said. “See, a few years later, while Snowy was Luna’s apprentice, Little Rock got sick. Her parents didn’t tell her, though, until he was really, really sick – they’d barely written to each other since, again, her parents didn’t like that she’d left the farm.
“Luna and Snowy both went to the farm, but medicine wasn’t very advanced back then – even Luna honestly believed that diseases were caused by ‘noxious miasma’ and the best way to fight them was ‘clean air’ and being surrounded by a family’s well-wishing – and Little Rock had been sick too long for Luna’s magic to help him, if it even could have at all. The most that Snowy and Luna could do was make him comfortable. But even then, according to Snowy and Luna, there was a chance that he could get better, even looked like he was getting better…”
“…but he didn’t,” Lyra surmised, glancing down at the foal’s tales book she had open in front of her. “Let me guess: the weather got colder.”
Trixie nodded. “The Everfree Forest produced a really bad winter that year,” she said, “and there wasn’t any weather patrol in this area back then. The cold was just too much for Little Rock, and he died. Snowy…kind of went nuts after that. She didn’t blame Luna and still loved her parents too much in spite of everything to blame them. So she blamed the Everfree Forest. She became obsessed with trying to figure out why the Everfree’s weather can’t be controlled by pegasus magic. Eventually she realized that, according to legend, there was one creature that could – Windigos.
“Snowy left Luna’s apprenticeship and went north, looking for Windigos. She searched for weeks before finally finding them, but all that time alone caused her to forget about most of her reasons. All she cared about was her own hate and pain. So she sort of made a deal with the Windigos.” Trixie held up her hooves before her friends could ask any questions, Cheerilee in particular. “I’m saying sort of because there wasn’t any talking or bargaining. According to Snowy the Windigos just knew what she wanted – power over ice and snow – and gave it to her, then left, with her just knowing what they wanted her to do.
“Anyway. Long story short after that, she returned to the Everfree about a year after Little Rock died and created another harsh winter. She wanted to bury all of Equestria under snow and ice so that everypony would know the same kind of pain that she was going through. But Princess Luna stopped her – the Windigos could make her strong, but not that strong. Snowy was then sealed in Tartartos, since that was the only place that could hold her and she didn’t regret any of what she’d done.”
---
“Put it aside and grab the next, then,” Rainbow Dash responded to Raindrops’ call, waving a hoof. “We can soften it up later.”
Raindrops had already started to do so, but the next nimbostratus was no better, and nor was the next one – or the one after that. Too many ice crystals was a bad thing – the snow would turn to sleet or hail, either of which could be dangerous not just to ponies, but to buildings, the railroad tracks, and the brand-new telegraph cables that had gone up.
Raindrops again poked her head out of the cloud container. “They’ve all got too many ice crystals,” she called.
Rainbow Dash let out a long-suffering sigh, gliding over to the cloud container and slipping inside through one of the walls, Raindrops following her. She ran a hoof along the nimbostrati. “Hey, you’re right,” she said after a moment of checking. “Oh, come on, Cloudsdale! You’ve got a fancy weather factory, can’t you make all the clouds right?”
“Must have been a bad batch,” Raindrops reasoned, as the two left the construct through its proper open exit. Other pegasi in the patrol were beginning to crowd around as they finished off with their own nimbostrati and made to get new ones.
“Okay, we have a problem,” Rainbow Dash declared to her team. “The next batch is no good, unless we want to bean somepony in the head with hail. Which I’m not saying any of you don’t,” she added quickly, “but maybe it’s not exactly in the Hearth’s Warming spirit.”
“Can’t we just soften them up?” One pegasus asked, glancing inside the cloud container, though he reached the answer himself after looking at the sheer volume of clouds remaining. “No, too many, we’d never get done in time…”
“Could just settle on what we have,” another pegasus put forth. She was one of the volunteers that helped the weather patrol out during big events, but wasn’t a regular member; she only had cursory weather training. “Is there really that much of a difference between four-fifty feet and five hundred?”
“I could go on about cloud density, chain reactions, and pegasus magic,” Raindrops answered for her boss, “but the short answer is that it’ll take three times as long for the snow to melt if we don’t build it up to a certain point first. That certain point is a five hundred foot cloud layer.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
Rainbow Dash let out another long, aggravated sigh. “Get to softening these,” she said, stretching her wings and turning back around. “As fast as possible…”
She trailed off, and the other pegasi turned to look. Sitting on top of the cloud container, looking in, was another pegasus, albeit one that none of them recognized. Her coat was blue, while her tail was white with the faintest of blue highlights – her mane was probably similarly colored, but she currently had her head stuck through the cloud container, looking at the contents. Her cutie mark was a snowflake being blown along by few stray breezes.
“Hey!” Rainbow Dash called. “Who the heck are you?”
The pegasus lifted her head from the container, revealing teal eyes. Something about the eyes seemed…off, but Raindrops couldn’t place it. Her expression, too, was…just off somehow. The pegasus’ eyes narrowed a little as she regarded Rainbow Dash, then Raindrops, then the rest of the weather team – then looked past them, at the cloud cover, and the sky above, glancing them over with a critical eye.
“Uh, hello?” Rainbow Dash asked, wings beating and taking her atop the cloud construct, where she hovered in front of the newcomer. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!”
The pegasus blinked a few times, then looked to Rainbow Dash again, eyes narrowed. The other members of the weather patrol flew up to their boss then, an instinctive desire to face the new – and strange, and slightly creepy – arrival as a single flock.
But then the new pegasus’ face split into a happy grin, her wings snapped open – and the coldest breeze that most of them had ever felt suddenly blasted the weather patrol away from the new arrival, who took to the air, trailing snowflakes in her wake. She ascended a hundred feet into the air, not particularly fast, but with the weather patrol needing to spend a few seconds to right themselves nopony could stop her as she then pointed herself down at the cloud construct and dove, snow still trailing in her wake, calling something that sounded like “gardyloo!” as she fell, though Raindrops was certain she misheard.
Raindrops had more important things to worry about, anyway. When the new arrival hit the construct, a ripple spread throughout it, then it burst apart, freeing the nimbostrati within and scattering them across the sky.
---
“Okay, so she ended up in Tartaros,” Cheerilee said. “It sounds like she deserved it. But that doesn’t explain a few things. Like, how is she still alive? Does time not pass in Tartaros or something?”
Trixie shook her head. “No. Tartaros isn’t exactly our world, but it is nestled inside of it and follows mostly the same rules. Time passes normally there. But whatever the Windigos did to Snowy changed her.”
“Made her immortal?” Lyra asked.
Trixie shook her head, looking more than a little maudlin as she continued. “No. She’s still aging, just…not as fast as you or me. Princess Luna’s best guess is that Snowy’s going to live thousands and thousands of years.” She fixed each of her friends with a hard stare. “But she is still aging. It’s just taking her longer.”
The other three ponies glanced between each other. They caught the subtext of what Trixie was saying. Right now, Snowy was the equivalent of an adult pony in her twenties, and she’d stay that way for a long time. And then she’d hit middle age – and stay there for a long time. And old age, too. She would still grow feeble and venerable with time; it would just take a long time to get there – but once Snowy did, she would stay there for a long time, too. Senescence was going to take centuries, at least.
Trixie waved her hooves. “But that’s a long ways off,” Trixie said. “The point is that Luna never gave up on Snowy. She kept visiting Snowy in Tartaros, trying to reach her, to make her realize that what she’d done was wrong. It took a couple centuries, but…it worked.”
---
“Hey!” Raindrops called, flying forward with hooves outstretched towards the pegasus. The new arrival noticed and avoided though – little surprise there, given that Raindrops was not a fast flier. But Rainbow Dash was, and Raindrops’ charge had given the latter a chance to zoom up unnoticed and grab the mare about the barrel from behind. Raindrops tensed herself, expecting a fight, but instead the other pegasus only gasped in surprise, eyes widening and body freezing in shock.
Rainbow Dash let the pegasus go at her action; she fell a few feet but managed to get her wings under her enough to land atop a freed nimbostratus. “Okay, who the heck are you,” the weather patrol leader demanded, “and why do you hate Hearth’s Warming Eve?”
“We were going to have a hard enough time without the nimbostrati losing vapor!” Raindrops added, soaring closer. The other pegasus shied away in fright, but Raindrops didn’t feel a need to rein in her anger at the moment. “What are we supposed to do without a place to keep them all away from that?” she pointed a hoof at the sun overhead. Corona was one thing; the greatest natural enemies clouds had, however, was sunlight, as even on a cold day the light would cause at least some evaporation – but a lot of the vapor that would evaporate would re-freeze before it could even leave the cloud, albeit harder than before. The nimbostrati were about to become even tougher to deal with.
The new pegasus glanced between Rainbow Dash and Raindrops, eyes wide and ears flopped back. “I – I offer my sincerest apologies,” she said. Her accent was…strange, not exactly foreign but not exactly Equestrian, either. “However, I had a solution to that which vexed you. Your cloud construct, ‘twas hewn from altostrati. ‘Tis belike the nimbostrati could be joined with their softer brethren and, withal, resolve your issue forthwith.”
There was a long moment of silence. “…what?” Raindrops asked.
The pegasus glanced between the two again. “Pray forgive me, my diction be arcane to your ears…ah…” she spread her wings again and took to the air – slowly this time, yet her wings still trailed small snowflakes as she moved – and flew over to one of the pieces of the former cloud construct – which had been made of altostrati, a related species of cloud to the nimbostrati it had contained – and then pushed it over to a larger nimbostratus so that the two clouds were touching. She looked to Raindrops. “Pray, aid me in this conjunction,” she said, nodding to the far end of the nimbostratus.
“…oh, wait, I think I get it!” Rainbow Dash said even as Raindrops complied with the other pegasus, pushing the nimbostratus forward even as the other pushed forward the altostratus. The magic of the two pegasi willing the clouds forward allowed the vapor in both to mix and join together. By the time they were done, the nimbostratus had consumed the smaller altostratus – but the altostratus’ smaller, more diffuse ice crystals had substantially softened the nimbostratus, achieving in just a few minutes what otherwise would have taken an hour, and leaving Raindrops with a larger cloud besides.
“Hey, that’s a great idea!” Rainbow Dash noted.
“Yeah, sure,” Raindrops said, her glare still on the new arrival. “Maybe you should have told us this rather than just busting apart our clouds without permission!”
The new arrival looked down. Her wings were beating to allow her to hover in place, and still were creating snowflakes with every beat – how, Raindrops had no idea. “I…I once again offer my most vociferous apologies,” she said. “I have become unused to…oh, fie on my excuses, there be none.” She looked to the two pegasi. “I had thought to ingratiate myself with an act of magnanimity, but ‘twas foolish of me to act without first seeking approval. I shall leave you be, then.”
The pegasus glided away, disappearing beneath the cloud cover and still trailing snowflakes as she went. “How is she doing that?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“How do you trail rainbows every time you fly fast?” Raindrops countered.
“Because I’m awesome,” Rainbow Dash declared, turning back around and looking over the altostrati and nimbostrati in the sky. They probably had exactly enough of the former to soften up all of the latter. “Okay, well, back to work, I guess. Hey, we might even get done early now!”
---
“It worked?” Cheerilee asked. “But you said that was a couple of centuries…” she picked up Snowy Night’s letter again, reading it over. “Oh – but from the looks of things, she stayed in Tartaros because she wanted to punish herself more.”
Trixie nodded. “But she’s decided to leave…and visit.” She glanced to the side, a worried expression on her face.
“Okay,” Ditzy said, “but this is good news, right? Because she’s your friend?”
Trixie looked back to Ditzy. “I’ve met her once, for only a few hours, years ago, and never came back at her own request. She’d said something like, ‘I don’t want a foal to become corrupted by my example.’ Only it was a lot more archaic. Point is I never really considered her a friend…” She took the letter from Cheerilee, glancing it over. “But apparently the same isn’t true in reverse.”
“Well, yeah,” Lyra noted, as though it should have been obvious. Trixie looked to her, and Lyra shrugged. “She’s spent three hundred years in Tartaros. Everypony she knew, except Luna, is dead. The only visits she got was with Luna, you, and maybe some of your predecessors. You would be the closest thing to a friend she has these days.”
“Did the visit go well?” Ditzy asked.
Trixie thought. Kokytos was technically a river, but it was buried beneath a solid half-mile of ice. Snowy had spent the centuries building up a large palace and tunnel network there. There were uncountable books there as well, which Snowy read to pass the time. When Trixie had gone there with Luna she had spent most of her time being bored out of her mind, if truth be told – she could only barely understand Snowy at the time and the latter had been far more comfortable talking to Luna. Trixie wasn’t even sure why she’d been brought along.
“It didn’t go…poorly,” She said at length. “I was a lot younger when I visited her ice palace. I was on my best behavior!”
Lyra stared at her, mouthing the word ‘ice palace’.
“I didn’t melt that one!” Trixie added, throwing her hooves in the air. “In fact I didn’t melt the majority of ice palaces I’ve been in!”
“Most ponies haven’t melted any,” Lyra pointed out. She also didn't mention that the score in that regard was nevertheless 2-1 and quite possible to change.
Trixie whickered a little in annoyance. “Palace is kind of pushing it, anyway. There wasn’t really any pattern to the rooms, I think she added or removed them as she liked or whenever she got bored…honestly it’s a wonder that she didn’t go insane from isolation – ”
There was a thump from somewhere upstairs. The four ponies all started at it, glancing up as they heard what sounded like a pony walking atop the roof. But who…then there was more noise and a cloud of coal dust and snow from the fireplace quickly flooded Trixie’s living room. The four ponies within retreated backwards, coughing, Ditzy using her wings to blow the dust and snow away and back towards the fireplace. They stopped, though, when they realized that there was a fifth voice coughing and a fifth set of hooves stumbling with them.
“Gar and od!” the voice exclaimed as Trixie and her friends scattered from its owner, a blue pegasus pony caked in soot, wings beating furiously to push the coal dust and snow away. Shen then spun in place, hooves stomping on the ground. Ice crept along her from her hooves and wings, crawling across her and pushing forward, gathering the coal soot off of her. After a moment, and with another stomp, the ice expanded outwards, washing across the entire room and repeating what it had just done to her – scouring soot from it, leaving the entire room pristine, if thoroughly chilled. The soiled ice, meanwhile, collected in a solid block in the fireplace, where of course the fire had been completely extinguished.
The pegasus panted a few times. “Fie on my memory!” she exclaimed, glancing to the other four ponies, who stared at her in confusion. “For nigh unto three centuries have I dwelt in a place needing neither flame nor heat. I had quite forgotten the purpose of a fire-place, and saw the benighted chimney only as a means of ingress!”
“…what?” Ditzy asked.
“She thought the chimney was just a way in,” Cheerilee supplied as she stared warily at the pegasus. Every flutter of her wings seemed to scatter a few small snowflakes, and Cheerilee couldn’t help but notice tiny bits of frost at her hooves, either.
“There was smoke coming out of it!”
“Aye, but I had forgotten the significance of that,” the pegasus answered her fellow, glancing her over. Her eyes stopped on Ditzy’s own, which were both quite discombobulated at the moment. “Egad,” she breathed. “Pray, are you well, good mare?”
Ditzy blinked a few times, then took in a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, one of her eyes coming into focus, while the other wandered a bit still. “And…I’m guessing that you’re Snowy Night, then.”
The pegasus drew herself up; at her full height she wasn’t much taller than Ditzy, and indeed looked like a perfectly ordinary pony in every way – save for the frosty effects of her every moment. “Indeed, good mare. Snowy Night, Student of the Princess Luna, and late of the River Cocytus, at your service.” She bowed low, and came back up with a flourish, looking around. “Pray, this be the location of Luna’s vicereine, be it not?”
Trixie had been about to answer, but paused as her eyes widened. “Vicereine?” she asked. She couldn’t help but, for the briefest moment, wonder if Luna had planned on giving her a particularly hefty Hearth’s Warming present this year.
Snowy turned to look at Trixie. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Neigh, good mare, not in the modern sense. I apologize, my habits…arcane…” she paused, leaning forward a little as she regarded Trixie, then brightened considerably. “Trixie!” she exclaimed, leaping forward. Trixie let out a cry of surprise as she suddenly found herself wrapped in a tight and surprisingly warm hug. After a moment Snowy started to withdraw – but then the pegasus kissed her.
And not on the cheek, either.