Her teeth chattered as she felt again a howling of cold wind slide down from the north. "Oh Maker," she muttered, "why is it always so cold here these days?"
Her sentiment was understandable. Living in the far south as she did, it was odd in itself that it would get this cold. It was even stranger that the cold would remain for so long. She shivered and dug her hooves into the ground as her powder-blue mane was buffeted about by another blast of wind and she grimaced. "Everything was fine until last month," she groused, gathering up the last of her tools and stepping away from the tree with a meager pile of hard fruit in her hooves, "and now I can hardly find any good fruit anymore. Either it's all dead or other ponies have gotten to it first."
In the small southern community she lived in, life was based around crescent trees, large silver-barked trees with slender, flexible trunks and heavy tops that naturally drooped into an arc. They made their houses of the wood, they ate the fruit and nuts, they wove clothes of the fibers. Without crescent trees they had little else to live on; very little grew in the small peninsula they made their home upon.
Sighing, she lit up her horn to carry back the fruit in her telekinetic grip—wait, no. She was an earth pony. That wasn't right. Her sister was the unicorn. She shook her head. What was that all about? For a moment, she could swear that she felt a horn on her head. Shaking her head again to dispel the odd feeling, she continued to her small hut, doing her best to ignore the spasmodic shivers that wracked her body.
"Maker damn this cold," she grumbled.
As she nudged aside the curtain of woven crescentfiber that served as the hut's doorway, her sister stumbled to the door, her face lined with worry.
"I think I'm sick, sister," she mumbled. The earth pony's eyes jolted open in shock. Nobody had gotten sick on this side of the Echo for decades. She hadn't even been alive the last time it had happened, and fourteen ponies had died. Now it was happening again, and it was beginning with her sister.
"Are you sure, Cella?" she asked, scraping anxiously at the ground. Cella nodded.
"All of the signs are right. First the crescent trees are dying, now I'm dying too." she barked out a raw, mirthless laugh. "Whatever's causing that wind from the north, I guess it's getting its way. We're all going to die, Lu."
With that, she slowly turned, head hanging low, and dragged herself back to her bed. Lu stood completely still, unable to fully understand what had just happened. Everything that had been going through her mind earlier was erased, replaced with one enormous, overpowering thought: Cella is dying. She had depended on her older sister for as long as she could remember. Without her, she'd be lost. Her eyes narrowed and flicked to the mantle, where there hung an ancient, rusted sword and its sheath, and then back at the crescentweave door. "I won't let you die, Cella," she said, her eyes never leaving the woven curtain. Cella didn't respond.
"Sorry, Father," muttered Lu as she snatched the sword and sheath from the wall, quickly strapping the swordbelt to her body. Looking behind her, she saw Cella lying dormant, seemingly asleep. "I'll be back before you know it, Cella," she whispered, then flung the curtain aside and stepped outside, staring into the assiduous cold wind that flowed from the north.
The wild jungle around her hissed with the breeze, murmuring prophecies of darkness into her ear, as she began walking towards the wind. "You think you can take my sister from me?" she muttered, angrily digging her hooves into the ground as she walked, "You think you can take away my way of life? Kill the crescent trees? Whatever you are, I'm coming for you."
She stopped briefly, howling into the wind, "You hear me? No matter how far I have to travel, I'll find you and stop this damn wind!" She tore the sword from the sheath, grasping it in her mouth as she held it up to the cloud-encased sky for a brief moment before once again sheathing it.
Her threat to the skies delivered, she plodded forwards, entering the shadow that dwelt beneath the enormous jungle trees around her. To her left, the sun sank, the last of it sliding down over the horizon as the pale moon rose to the east. A faint, indistinguishable shape flickered on her blank rump and she stopped short for a moment. "...I don't have a horn, damnit," she muttered irritably before vanishing into the darkness beyond her, pushing her way through the stubborn trees towards the port city of Caer Thadras that lay at the border of the great sea that surrounded the Echo.
The wind blew, and she shivered once more.