Frosty Fates

by Storm Vector

Chapter 3

Being back in her frosty home had already helped Winter immensely, her weakness and lethargy already starting to wane. She decided to have another small glass of iced tea before she hauled herself back up to her room, shutting the blinds and the door behind her. She flopped down on bed, landing on her side and glancing at her bedside table.

The clock that had nearly been a casualty of her frustration this morning ticked back at her, hastily replaced and still partially frosted where she'd blasted it as it dared to wake her up. It hadn't lost a beat either, showing Winter that it was only one thirty. She’d expected that exhibit to take longer, at least four or five in the afternoon.

"At least I have some time to nap," she muttered, still letting go of the frustration from the failed meeting with her parents. She closed her eyes and nudged her pillow back, until her horn just barely draped off the side like she found comfortable. Winter started to will herself “off”, relaxing her body and letting the feelings of sleep take hold. Even with a little light seeping through the blinds, the sensations of oncoming sleep relaxed her, helped her put her worries at ease as she drifted off into Luna’s embrace…or so she’d hoped.

Soon after she fell asleep the dreams began, though these weren’t the dreams she usually had, envisioning a snowy paradise for her to play around in. As she became more and more aware of her surroundings, Winter realized that the white blankets she saw all around her were better described as a frozen wasteland. There were signs of civilization here and there, but all was buried under meters of snow and iced over, the landscape was torn to pieces. The clouds were so thick she could only guess that it was day because there was at least enough light to see the smothering snowfall above, as more and more of what used to be a wonderful sign for her threatened to destroy her. Winter used her magic to force the falling snow aside, giving her a tiny little bubble to pass safely as she searched the landscape, calling out in what she could already tell was a vain attempt to find somepony else still alive in these conditions. She felt colder than she’d ever been before; it still wasn’t “too cold” for her body, but enough that she felt ill at ease, like something was very wrong. Of course, she didn’t need her sense of touch to sense that, especially as she stumbled upon several massive shards of ice embedded in the ground before her. Winter hesitated to approach, fearing what she might find, but something compelled her to keep going, glancing at the ice crystals that towered above her, seeming to tear the clouds open to drop yet more snow on the land. For no reason she could pick up, she stopped to examine one crystal closer, something she regretted immediately. Staring back at her were three ponies, suspended in the ice with expressions of fear and pain frozen on their lifeless faces. The image itself was horrifying enough, especially when she recognized every spire was filled with shadows just like these three, but it only took her a moment to realize she knew these ponies: it was Vlyka, Crystal, and Midnight, her three closest friends, staring back at her from their crystalline tomb.

Winter’s eyes snapped open, a sharp gasp filling her lungs in an instant as the horrifying image faded from her view. The real world began to come back into focus, but the expressions she’d seen on her dream-friends’ faces still burned in her mind’s eye, and she began to hyperventilate from the nightmare terrifying her so. She was paralyzed by fear of her dream for only a moment though, before she realized that the ice hadn’t vanished completely from her vision. Turning her head and sitting upright in her bed, she came to the startling realization that there was ice underneath her; her bed had somehow frozen over. There was the sense of her power still encircling her horn, suggesting to her that she’d somehow been responsible for this magical leak icing her bedsheets. That had never happened to her before, not even when she’d first been learning to control her magic, so now all of a sudden her powers were running amok?

“Calm down, calm down…” she muttered, trying to catch her breathing and steady her heart rate. “Alright just…don’t panic.” Winter slid out of bed, an unusual motion that involved her natural grace on the ice more than she’d ever expected trying to get up from a nap, but as she stepped away from her bed she realized that it wasn’t the only thing frozen. The wall behind her and her bedside table had also succumbed to the frost, engulfing that poor alarm clock for the second time in only a few hours. Winter might’ve laughed at the poor clock's fate, but she was too occupied with freaking out at what this power outburst meant for her. She’d felt out of control exactly once before, when she’d been pushed into a state of raw fury and her power had slipped away from her. She’d frozen a town over in her anger, barely avoiding killing anypony in her rampage and barely making it out of town after the villagers had retaliated. Windigo or not, being drowned in “holy water” would have killed her…sure Ponyville would probably be more accepting if she were to lose it again, but when she was still trying to write off the psychological scars of that encounter a year and a half later, Winter was in no hurry to test that theory. Plus, she had no idea if she could pull herself back from another freakout like that, or what would happen if she couldn’t.

The weight of everything on her mind crashed down on Winter like an avalanche, sending nervous tingles through her entire body that wouldn’t go away. She tried to just walk around her home to ward them off, but the movement of her legs didn’t banish the impulses, nor the thoughts from her mind. In fact, she kept finding herself absently strolling too close to a wall, only barely turning to avoid an impact. She was trapped, looking around like the space between the walls and her was shrinking steadily. Winter had experienced cabin fever before, practically every summer because it was usually too hot to leave her house, but this was on a whole different level of anxiety.

“Outside…” she turned to the door, without thinking how hot it was out there. She’d had a little trouble on a walk in the morning, now it was likely going to be even hotter than before, and NOW she wanted to go for a walk? She stopped herself just before she pulled the door open with her magic, looking around at her house once more. The air was getting colder, and she’d started leaving a trail of frost anywhere she’d been pacing.

That sealed it for Winter, hoping that she could at least keep herself from freezing things if she were surrounded by “normal pony” temperatures…She was so distracted by her thoughts and compounding fears that she completely forgot to grab her sunhat, walking out into the heat with no protection. She didn’t even notice it, consumed by her fears and every part of her mind still in her control trying to work out how it wasn’t that bad. That is, until she began to hear something…else.

Winter stopped dead in her tracks, ears perking straight up as she heard something odd. A familiar noise…the wind from earlier. She was hearing the sound of that wind again, louder and more prominent in her ears, even when she could tell there was no breeze passing through town.

She struggled to breathe normally, failing to push back the panic at her hallucinatory wind and the psychosomatic loss of control of her powers. She felt her stress weighing so heavily on her that it felt like her body itself was getting heavier and heavier. Of course, what she didn’t realize was that her body actually was getting heavier, as a small layer of ice began to form on her hooves as her power bled out in her distraction. But Winter was too busy trying to keep her mind together to even look at herself, feeling the strain so intense she thought she was about to be ripped open and have her brain scatter so far beyond her reach that nopony would be able to tell it was her.

“Okay, okay…” she muttered, closing her eyes as she rounded the next corner in her path. “Just stay calm Whispy, everything’s fine…” She could tell she was lying to herself, everything was falling apart around her, but she was trying so hard to maintain just some sense of normalcy to prevent her from fracturing like a frozen pond thawing in the spring. It really wasn’t working. “I just need to let go of this anxiety, that’s all this is…as long as I don’t…” she began, but upon opening her eyes Winter saw herself falling further and further from safety and normalcy. She realized that she’d wandered right into the middle of Ponyville’s weekly market, a place that crowds were only beat out by holiday gatherings in terms of ponies stuffed into the square. Almost immediately the tension mounted in her head, realizing that if she lost control now she’d be putting half the town at risk in an instant.

“I’ve gotta get out of here…” she muttered, only to glance back and see that her previous exit had been blocked by a new cart just pulling in. Cursing under her breath, Winter turned to head deeper into the maze of stalls, hoping to find a quick exit somewhere else so she could flee back home, wondering if she shouldn’t have left it at all.

As Winter tried to navigate her way through, with her cognitive abilities weakened enough already due to her stress, she started recognizing voices, or at least words that were being used. They weren’t the voice in the wind, but of ponies she’d met maybe once or twice when she’d been hired to craft ice for them. In an effort to get her mind off her own struggles, Winter tried to focus in on the conversations around her, get out of her own head for a little bit, thinking it might help her calm down.

She was mistaken. “Those chills last month almost cost me my crops,” came one voice, which was responded to with a gentle, friendly laugh of a customer. Winter recoiled in shock, unable to put up a barrier between what the farmer actually meant and what her mind interpreted that statement as: a threat. She felt that he was blaming her, stating that it was her fault he’d almost lost his work. Her mind took it to the next step by filling in the blanks, and she began to think that he was going to ensure he got his vengeance on her for her attempted destruction of his livelihood.

Her next desperate attempt to disconnect from her fear didn’t get her anywhere either. “Awful chilly as of late, huh?” asked a customer at another stall.

“Yeah, wonder what those pegasi are doing. What, they want to bring winter in early?”

Winter Whisper slammed her eyes shut, every muscle in her body tensing with anxiety. “Stop it, stop it!” she yelled in her mind, pleading for ponies to leave her be. All around her Ponyville vanished, as memories of the town from a year past demanded time in her head, leaving her trapped in the scorn and fear she’d suffered even before she lost her control. She still heard them talking behind her back...nopony had spoken to her directly, but they weren't nearly as subtle as the comments her parents' high society training had taught her to listen for.

“Can you feel her even here? She’s cold…”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Why is she still here in spring?”

“She should have melted.”

“Shut up…” she whimpered, her legs wobbling. She knelt down to save herself from falling, only to finally feel the ice that had been growing rapidly on her hooves as it spread further up her body. Her eyes remained shut, but she still heard the voices from her past.

“What demons will she bring here?”

“Her chill will kill us all.”

“No, stay back. She’s dangerous.”

“Please…” Tears formed and slid down her cheeks, only to crystallize as they fell. The wind in Winter's head grew into a storm, rumbling and adding to the noise threatening to rip her skull apart.

“Windigo.”

“Windigos.”

“She’ll bring them back.”

“Stop it…” Something in her mind told her to lash out, to strike, but but the rest of her reminded her how bad an idea that was. She knew that nopony would approve, that it would look horrible...that it would be horrendous and dangerous and wrong to hurt somepony else because of her fear. But the more she she resisted, the louder the storm raged and the more her power slipped. The temperature dropped rapidly around her, she could feel it, and she already knew it was her fault.

“Death to us all.”

“She will be the end.”

Suddenly, Winter felt a hoof on her shoulder. She gasped in shock as Ponyville flooded back into view. A quick and fearful look around confirmed that ponies were staring at her, a lot of ponies…so many that the market had come to a standstill. The pony closest to her, a unicorn with green and blue highlights in his mane retracted his hoof, shivering at the contact with her frigid body. It stung to see him shiver like that, but what came next was worse. “Are you okay? Come on, let’s get you something to warm you up.”

Somewhere deep inside Winter, something snapped. In an instant she felt the cold flood every part of her body, bursting at the seams to find a way out. She didn’t fear it getting out now though…she embraced it. “I don’t NEED warming!” she bellowed, concentrating her power on her horn and releasing a wild blast in the offending pony’s general direction. The stallion that had tried to help her was thrown backwards a few meters, but the shot was unfocused and the worst damage he suffered was his black coat becoming lightly frosted. He landed in a heap and stared back at her in shock, terror filling his face as quickly as the look of the cold caught up with him. He began to shiver as he gazed at her in fear, only angering her more.

Winter focused her power again, this time all on a single point, tapping into the reserves of energy that had come to her in the instant of rage. Without thinking, she lowered her head and fired off another burst, directly at the pony she’d just launched. Thankfully he managed to scramble away in time, because as she unleashed the strength that had built up in her, Winter’s blast became stronger and stronger. In a split second the barrel she’d hit instead was entirely encased in a thick layer of ice, quickly spreading to the surrounding items and the ground, spikes jutting out from all angles. The release of energy felt so good to Winter that her anxieties vanished, only to be replaced with seething anger. She’d been betrayed, told off by her parents for sixteen years and now abandoned when she’d tried to extend an olive branch. She’d been persecuted by those ponies in that village because of her power, and threatened because they were scared of her. The ponies around her staring at her with fear…they were right to be afraid. She was terrifying, and now was her time to show it.

Winter reared herself up on her hind legs, focusing enough power into her horn that it glowed like a brilliant blue-white star brought down to earth. Then, she slammed her front hooves down, so hard that the ice that had collected on her forelegs shattered. As the fractured crystals tinkled to the ground, each one of them took root like a seed and began to spread ice across the earth beneath her, the power radiating from her hooves rapidly freezing more and more ground. She straightened her neck and held her head aloft, staring up in the sky as her black irises clouded over, her eyes glowing with a light cyan sheen.

Comments

[emeraldhuskydragon0]

Goodly written.
*you gain a like*