Frosty Fates

by Storm Vector

Chapter 8

The heavy forest canopy that had been blocking the dimming evening light finally gave way, revealing a large clearing and the raw face of a towering mountainside. Winter glanced up to look for the summit of the mountain high up. It was a mistake though, since her eyes gravitated to the thickening clouds her snowstorm was creating. It covered a large part of the sky by now, the storm had to be huge, one giant target for any flier to tell something was very wrong around this mountain. It wouldn't be long before somepony came to check what was happening...or even worse, Midnight flew over the forest straight for her.

Winter snapped her eyes shut, clenching them for a second as the headache she'd been nursing for the last two hours, before she focused back down on the mountain. It was towering now, not as big as Canterlot's peak but far bigger than Winter was used to seeing, especially this close. The mountain had looked far smaller from town when she'd vaguely decided that was where she wanted to hide... "How am I going to get up there?" she muttered, as she watched the snow starting to land and coat the rocks. "Why did I even come out here."

As she watched the light vanish from the mountainside, Winter had to convince herself that it wasn't merely the storm growing worse, but the light of Celestia's sun finally giving way to Luna's moon. How had it gotten so late? "Was I seriously walking for that long?" she murmured, putting a hoof to her stomach. She could still feel it was light, seemingly almost empty, yet her body was still working just fine and she was only just getting hungry. Surely she'd been walking for at best an hour or two...but it wasn't that late when she'd left Ponyville and it was nightfall now...

Winter sighed and dropped her bag on a rock near the base of the mountain, sitting in the growing pile of snow nearby. She hung her head as she tried to banish the thoughts of Ponyville that rushed to meet her. The town had felt like home almost since she’d left Canterlot, and every day she seemed to find a new reason to love it there. The walks down the sunny street towards town hall or Sugarcube Corner, the sight of her home after a long hot day, the way the snow piled on the hills in her namesake season, the twin pools of pale moonlight that always welcomed her with the slightest glance...

"No, no." Winter sighed, wiping a tear away as it froze on her hoof. "That life is done. I can't go back, not anymore." As the tear fell and put a hole in the blanket of snow to her right, Winter sighed and fell flat on the ground, trying to keep more and more tears from joining their one chilled companion.

"Climb."

The deep, rumbling voice prompted Winter to leap to her hooves, heart pounding in her ears as she turned around. Her ears were spinning all around, looking for where the terrifying voice had come from. "Who...who's there?" Winter stammered, half expecting some great and terrible creature to wander out of the forest. But there was nothing, no response for nearly a minute, save her headache worsening with every turn of her head.

"Climb."

Winter spun straight behind her, right where she'd heard the voice, only to see the spire of the mountain and the steadily growing white coat it was growing to match hers. There was nothing there, no source for the voice anywhere she could see. "Who are you? What...what are you? Where?"

"The peak," the voice answered, sending shivers of terror up Winter's back. She shivered so rarely thanks to her body, so the sensation was already worrying for her. But the voice that seemed to echo all around her had a tinge of something...off, something wrong. She felt ill hearing that voice, like she was hearing a howling from an empty graveyard, only a hundred times more discomforting. "Climb."

Winter almost nodded in agreement, feeling a subconscious urge to obey the voice blindly. But there was something else in her mind that yelled against it, either too proud or too afraid to listen to the voice in the mountain, no matter how dominating it sounded. "No. No, not now."

"Climb," the voice demanded, that piece of Winter buried deep within twisting in anger. A deep raw pain flared inside her heart, along with her headache and the magic pressure crushing down around her, trying to force her into complying. But she couldn't, not now.

"No! I'm tired and hungry...I can’t, I won’t!" Winter cried out at the mountain peak. The energy pressed tightly down on her, squeezing her head around her horn and making her buckle with pain, but after a moment everything stopped. Winter clutched her head and sighed as she stood back up. She was dizzy from the pressure she felt only a second ago, and almost nauseous as she looked in her bag for food, but she needed something to eat at least.

It didn't take long for Winter to eat her meager meal, but as she tried to reorient herself after her meal, she just couldn't rest. She tried to make a fire to see by but she just couldn't get the wood to catch. By the time she threw the stick aside in frustration, the storm around her had started to grow very dense. As she stared, her headache flared and the voice growled at her again. “Climb,” it commanded.

“No!” Winter snapped at it. “Not now, I need to sleep. I haven’t slept all day because of all this…mess, I need some chance to sleep!” She glared defiantly up at the clouds above, having no better place to focus her anger at this immaterial voice dragging her through so much torment.

When there was no response from the voice for several minutes, Winter felt it appropriate to look at her surroundings again, watching as the snow continued piling up. She needed some kind of shelter to spend the night, or she’d get buried alive. Thankfully, Winter was in her element and had plenty of raw materials to work with. She grabbed a nearby mound of snow and pressed it into blocks, forming an igloo with a simple twist of her horn. Her normal magic was at work again, something she'd been afraid would never feel familiar, even as the storm raged outside filled with a raging energy that felt ready to tear her apart.

Winter's igloo didn't need a heat trap at the entrance, though as she crawled inside to make herself comfortable she wished she'd made one anyways. The straight tunnel offered a fine view of the storm outside, coating the trees and freezing a nearby brook. In a moment of panic Winter grabbed a new chunk of snow and rammed it into the entire tunnel, blasting it with an icy beam to freeze it shut.

Winter shook her head before laying it back down, curling into a tight little ball as she begged herself to calm down just a little. “You’re still here Whispy, you’re still here…” she tried to convince herself, but it wasn’t nearly effective. She kept thinking of what she’d done this afternoon, how Ponyville had nearly become a glacier, and if she were really that powerful and mad, she kept worrying that it wasn’t going to stop at one little town. By the time she fell asleep, her dreams were polluted by her fears, transforming them into unhinged nightmares of a frozen Equestria, with only herself to walk amongst the ruins. She would be alone again, all because of her ice.