Ice - 1
It could be worse, Twilight reflected. They could have ended up in space, or an active volcano, or in the middle of the ocean.
“This is really cold,” Spike said, his teeth chattering. “Where are we?”
“I… don’t really know.”
They were standing on an ice plain, in darkness. The sky was full of stars and a moon with very different markings than the one at home had ever had. She wondered who might be trapped in that moon. The moonlight glittered on the ice. There were mountains in the distance, none as tall as the Canterhorn. Nothing living was visible.
When Twilight had packed her saddlebags, she’d used magic to hyper-compact a blanket large enough to cover herself and Spike. She’d thought they might end up camping on this side of the portal. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. The cold was bitter, and she knew it would affect Spike more than her – pony fur and alicorn feathers would do a better job of holding the heat in than his scales. He was hotter than her to begin with, but he also needed to be hot. She tried to pull the blanket out of her saddlebag with her magic… and got it, eventually, after a full minute of struggling with it, a task that should have taken seconds. Her magic was sluggish and barely responsive.
“There’s no magic here. That’s a serious problem. Let’s go back and recalibrate.” She put the blanket around Spike, since she had it out anyway, and turned back to the portal. Its magic felt wrong. “Come on, you go first.” She didn’t want to risk the portal closing as she went through it and stranding Spike.
But right after Spike stepped through the shimmering anomaly, she heard his voice. “That didn’t do anything.”
“That – what?”
He came back. This time he was visibly not coming through the portal so much as stepping through the space it occupied. “When I went through, the portal wasn’t even visible. I could see you just fine, but you weren’t looking at me, so I thought maybe the portal was still visible on this side and you couldn’t see me through it.”
“That’s… really strange. Get on my back, I’m going to try it. Since I created it, it might behave differently for me.”
She tried to use magic to levitate him onto her back, but the lack of easily accessible magic had already weakened her to the point where she couldn’t lift him. Sighing, she crouched down. “Gotta do this the hard way. My magic isn’t working right.”
“Right.” Spike climbed on her back. “Do you really think it’ll work differently for you than me?”
“It’s possible.” She trotted through the portal – and came out on a dark ice plain, with the exact same moon and the exact same mountains visible. And when she turned around, she couldn’t even see the portal. It looked as if she’d just trotted through open air.
“Uh. Oh, I wish I had my books! I know I read about something like this happening – something about portals breaking in two? So there’s an entry point and an exit point and they’re not physically congruent anymore? But I don’t know how I’d go about finding the other half…”
At this point, Discord came flying out of the portal and landed hard on the icy ground, face first. Twilight had been too startled by his sudden appearance to be sure, but it looked like he had… fallen.
“Oh, for – ice? Really? Really?” He got to his feet, unsteadily.
“Discord? What are you doing here?”
“There’s no time! You need to go through the portal and go home right now, before it separates even further!”
“I… think it already did that,” Twilight said. “When you say ‘separate’, do you mean that the entrance and the exit separate so you can’t get back through the portal you just came out of?”
“Oh, no,” Discord said. He facepalmed. “Do you know where the other side of it is?”
“Uh… no. We just figured out now that it’s separated. What are you doing here?”
“Really, Twilight. You tear a hole in reality and you think that’s not going to attract my attention?” He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. “Ice. Why did it have to be ice?”
“Can you snap us out of here?” Spike asked.
Discord shook his head. “I would have been able to, easily enough, except that you somehow managed to end up in a frozen place on a low-magic world. There’s no chaos here for me to draw power from, and I’ve already lost so much power I can’t safely teleport.” He glared at Twilight. “This is all your fault, you know. Why did you think it was a good idea to try to create a portal without notifying anyone who knows what they’re doing, who could help you or at least make sure you didn’t create a broken one and then get sucked into it?”
“Uh… because I don’t know anyone who knows what they’re doing.” A large red, blinking arrow appeared over Discord, pointing at him. “I know you can do it, but I was trying to do it with harmonic magic, and anyway, if you’re low on magic shouldn’t you be holding off on using it for jokes?”
“Oh, I suppose,” Discord said grumpily. “And just because you were trying to do it with harmonic magic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have told me! Didn’t you think I’d want to see it? Harmonic magic being used to create something as disharmonic as an interdimensional portal?”
“Well, I’d have shown it off to you and the rest of our friends once I had it working, and I still might, if I can get it working correctly, but I sort of need to get home first.”
“I told you you should have waited for Starlight,” Spike groused.
“Never mind that now. Discord, you can detect magic, right? Can you tell where the other end of our portal went?”
Discord closed his eyes, and shuddered. Twilight said, excitedly, “You found it?”
“No, I’m simply freezing to death. Brr.” He tried sitting on the ice, apparently found that intolerably cold, and stood up again, looking miserable.
“Discord, you ought to stay on all fours if you can.”
He opened his eyes and glared at Twilight. “Do these paws look like they’re rated for winter sports?” he asked, shaking his lion paw and eagle talon at her.
“No, but even with all that fur on your chest, exposing that much of your body to the wind here is probably a bad idea.”
“There’s wind?” Discord’s eyes went comically huge.
“Hey.” Spike nudged him. “Ixnay with the agicmay, ok?”
“What?” Twilight stared at Spike.
“It’s Pig Latin. It’s a code, but a really dumb one. We use it to talk about Ogres and Oubliettes in front of ponies like Rarity or Applejack who don’t play it, because otherwise Big Mac gets embarrassed.”
“Oh, okay.” She turned to Discord. “And there might be wind. We don’t know where we are. Just because the wind’s not blowing right now, doesn’t mean it can’t.”
Discord looked up at the moon. “Oh. Actually, I do know where we are.”
“Really? Where?”
He sighed. “The name won’t help you. They call it Earth.”
“Like… land? They named their planet Land?” Twilight asked, disbelievingly.
“What’s our planet’s name?”
“Terra… oh. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”
“If I was pretending to be you, I would point out, pedantically, that Terra is actually Romish for Earth, and that those of us who travel dimensions know our world as Terra Fabula… Magical Earth, basically. This world is more precisely known as Terra Mundi, which literally means ‘earth world’, but in this context, it means it doesn’t have magic.”
Spike said, “That’s a pretty good job of pretending to be Twilight.”
“It’s a terrible job, I should at least have turned myself purple.”
“It’s so dark, Twilight looks gray, and anyway, you have to save your magic. You got the tone right, though.”
“Discord, can you find the other half of the portal or not?”
Discord closed his eyes again, still shivering. He made a coil of his tail and sat on it. After a moment, he pointed. “Thataway.”
“Okay! That’s great, we’re getting somewhere! Let’s go!”
The three of them set off across the ice. It was not even thirty seconds later when Spike fell noticeably behind, because Twilight and Discord could both go to four legs and move faster that way, but Spike still had the bipedal build of a baby dragon and couldn’t do that.
Twilight stopped to let him catch up. He was out of breath. “It’s so cold,” he said. “Even with this blanket.”
“How about you ride on me? I don’t like your paws being in contact with the ice, anyway.”
“Oh, but you were fine with my paws being in contact with the ice,” Discord said.
“Yes, because you are not a dragon and your life doesn’t depend on an internal magical fire, also because one of them is a talon so that’s very little ground contact there, one of them is furred, and one of them is a hoof. Only one of your paws is a dragon paw.” She sighed as Spike climbed onto her back. “Not that I’m not grateful for the help, but why did you come after us?”
“Well, to begin with, if you’d gone anywhere else at all — an ice plain on a magical world, or a not ice plain on a non-magical world — I’d have had the magic to snap you home immediately. But mostly, I was intensely curious. I’ve never seen harmonic magic open a portal without a framework.”
“A framework?”
“Starswirl eventually figured out how to enchant mirrors into portals in general, after he took my portal to a linked dimension and embedded it in a mirror.”
“Well, that’s more than I knew before, but I know the alternate me from the mirror dimension — the one you say you created — opened a lot of portals once she was brimming with magic, and since she’s an alternate me, she must have been using harmonic magic!”
Discord started laughing. “Harmonic?” He fell over on to the ice, which stopped his laughter immediately. “Ow. Brr, that’s cold.”
“What’s funny about her using harmonic magic? They have harmonic magic in that dimension, that’s how they take on pony traits and use magic.”
By now Discord was back on four legs. “Stop stopping, Twilight, we’ve got to get to that exit portal. We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. Most of this was called behind him as he trotted forward rapidly, his neck craned backwards.
“I was stopping for you!” Twilight said indignantly, and tried to trot fast to catch up, but as soon as she came close to a canter, her legs went out from under her and she skidded. Discord caught her and Spike before she could pitch over onto the ice or Spike could fall off.
“Also, hooves aren’t ideal for this environment,” Discord said, setting Twilight back on four hooves and then Spike onto her back.
“No kidding,” Spike said. “Wish we had ice skates!”
Discord lifted a paw, started to snap… and stopped, and sighed. “No. Not even going to try. I know it’s not there, and if I did it and then they popped like soap bubbles, that would do us no good at all.”
“Why are you losing your magic so quickly?” Twilight asked, trotting forward, painfully aware now that she couldn’t move faster than a trot without losing her footing.
“I’m the Spirit of Chaos,” Discord said, pacing her.
“I know, but what does that have to do with—“
“Did you ever wonder why Equestria needs a Spirit of Chaos?”
“I didn’t actually know Equestria needed you,” Twilight said, and then at the expression on Discord’s face, hastily added, “I mean, any more than Equestria needs me.”
“Didn’t Starlight Glimmer destroy the world seven times to prove how much Equestria needs you?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I really don’t.”
“I think she destroyed the world seven times because she was trying to prove the opposite of that,” Spike said.
“Yes, and she failed, because the world needs Twilight. Well, the world needs me too, because chaos creates magic.”
Twilight blinked. “Really? I thought magic just welled up from underground!”
“Did you think it was a perpetual motion machine? That magic was uniquely not subject to entropy, of all forces? That magic just appears?”
“I can’t say I’ve ever really studied where exactly magic comes from.” Twilight turned her head. “Spike, you have anything you can take notes with?”
“Yes, but my hands are too cold to hold a quill.” He held them out from his body, under the blanket. Twilight could turn her head just enough to see them shivering violently.
“Oh, for the love of everything, Twilight, I’ll tell you all this over again once we get home if you insist. You don’t have to take notes. There won’t be a quiz.”
“Fine,” Twilight said. “I’ll hold you to that. It’s not like you go around telling me things about how magic works every day.”
“Because it’s more fun to watch you figure it out.”
“You were telling me about chaos and magic?”
“More precisely, change creates magic. Constant change. The stronger the change, the better. Chaotic upheavals of everything create more magic than they consume.”
“That sounds like a perpetual motion machine.”
“It’s not, though. The magic I’d use to make the sky a skating rink is less than the amount of magic that doing something that ridiculous would generate… but most of that magic seeps away into the ground, traveling the ley lines to the poles, where it goes underneath the bedrock. The magma layer and the constant shift of tectonic plates keep the magic moving and keep adding to it, until it comes up out of the ground via geysers or volcanoes, enters the atmosphere, and is used by almost every living thing on Terra Fabula. And a significant amount of that magic flows through me. I keep magic from being used to ossify the world and make it perfectly orderly, because doing that would destroy magic. I keep the magic moving, because when it pools, it can take on… hmm… unpleasant characteristics. Like the Mirror Pool.”
“I see. But then why didn’t magic disappear while you were in stone?”
“Magic was still flowing through me, Twilight. Flowers and grass planted too close to my statue would mutate. Oh, that drove the groundskeepers absolutely batty. Birds that landed on me too often would transform, or their chicks would. I just didn’t have any control over it.”
“Oh, wait.” Twilight stopped for a moment. “So… your magic isn’t yours? You just have all of the magic in Equestria flowing through you?”
“Don’t be silly, of course my magic is mine, and stop stopping! We need to reach that other portal in time!”
“In time for what?” Spike said. Did he sound sleepy?
“Spike, are you falling asleep?”
“It’s… kinda tiring me out, being so cold…”
“Don’t go to sleep! Ponies who go to sleep in the snow never wake up!”
“He’s riding on a mammal,” Discord snorted. “You are not snow, Twilight. He can fall asleep on you.”
“Well, what if he falls off?”
“I’ve slept on your back before,” Spike mumbled.
“Yes, and you’ve fallen off! And I’ve caught you with my magic!” She turned her head toward Discord. “So if your magic is yours, why are you losing it so fast?”
“Because I have a very, very large pool, but I’m designed for magical flow. Not conservation. I’m trying to dam the flow, but there’s so little magic on this world, and the Spirit of Chaos exists to keep magic moving. If it moves out of me, it dissipates completely and I can’t get any of it back, not on this ice plain where nothing ever changes. And I’m… having a great deal of difficulty keeping it inside me.”
“That’s not good.”
“A brilliant observation, Twilight, I can see why you were Celestia’s star student.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“I am the Spirit of Disharmony, after all.”
“I’m still wondering—“ Spike yawned broadly —“why it’s so important to move fast. I mean… yeah, this cold is awful, I hate it, everybody hates it, but is there a reason besides ‘we want to get home as fast as we can’?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Discord was sounding just a tiny bit breathless.
“I guess so…” Spike yawned again.
“How far ahead is this portal?”
“Do I look like someone who knows numbers and distances?” Discord said irritably. “You’re an alicorn, Twilight. You’re not as attuned to magic as I am, but in this forsaken magicless place, even you should be able to feel the portal ahead.”
“Oh. Really?” She reached out with her magical senses. “I don’t feel it.”
“You might have to stop for a moment to fixate on it,” Discord suggested. “It took me a moment.”
“All right.” Twilight stopped. Spike shifted on her back as if he hadn’t been paying attention, and slid a little from inertia.
Focus. She knew what the portal felt like, she’d created it. She’d been sucked through it. She should be able to feel it. It was hard to stop when it was so cold, hard to open herself up to anything. She wanted to roll into a ball like a pillbug to keep the cold out. But she had to do this. Discord was right, he was terrible with numbers and distances. Someone with an analytical mind needed to know where the portal was as well.
She closed her eyes, and breathed deeply — which made her cough, as the ice cold air hit her vulnerable lungs. Ok. Not doing that again. Shallow breaths, through her nostrils so the air would be warmed by the distance through her snout before it hit her lungs. Unfortunately her nose was already feeling frozen, and this didn’t help. So many distractions from the cold. How could she focus?
Maybe she was looking at this wrong.
Twilight let her mind drift. Let herself experience the cold, and the deep unpleasantness of it. Her cold body, the drip from her nose. The feel of Spike’s warm body on her back, the only source of warmth in the entire world.
Another pinpoint of warmth, behind her. That had to be where the entrance from Equestria was. Where was there something like that, up ahead?
There. There it was. Far ahead. She didn’t have any more idea than Discord how far away.
“Spike,” she said, “can you open my saddlebag and hand me my compass?”
Discord hadn’t actually stopped. He was up ahead. Twilight felt frustrated; why had he told her to stop and take a moment if he wasn’t going to wait for her?
Spike was sluggish, but still faster than Twilight’s nearly numb hooves, as he pulled the compass loose and showed it to her. Twilight took a deep breath. “North,” she said. “We need to go north. That’s where the portal is.”
“How much farther?” Spike asked sleepily.
“Not too much,” Twilight lied. “Can you tie the compass around my right foreleg?”
“Okay.” Spike did so, strapping it into place. Now she’d be able to check it just by lifting her foreleg and looking.
He got back on her back, lying down and wrapping himself in the blanket, conserving both his warmth and hers.
Twilight looked up. Discord was coming back, his thin body a shadow in the moonlight. “You realized you were leaving us behind?” she called to him, and coughed. Shouting in this cold was not a good idea.
“Oh princess of little faith. I never intended to leave you behind,” he said, drawing even with her. “I just need to keep moving. It’s far too cold to stand still here.”
“I managed it.”
“You have fur all over your body.”
Twilight poked his furry chest. “You seem pretty furry to me.”
He poked her back with his scaled tail. “Only half of me.” And then started walking forward again. “Did you feel it?”
“I did. We have to conserve as much magic as possible; I don’t know if the portal is just hanging open, or if we have to activate it, but if we have to activate it, we’re going to be in trouble if neither of us has magic.”
“A fair point. How far ahead is it?”
“Not too far,” she lied again. Keep up their spirits. Don’t let anyone give in to despair. It didn’t matter how far away it was, they had to get there, or… or they’d die here. It really sank in, then, for the first time, that this incident might kill them all. And she hadn’t left behind a note to explain where she’d gone, so unless Starlight could reconstruct her lab notes to re-open the portal, no one would know what had happened to them. They’d die over here, their bodies preserved forever on the ice, and no one from home would ever find them.
No. She wouldn’t allow it. She wouldn’t. This was her mistake. She’d screwed up the spell somehow, so the portal had separated, and so that it sucked people in instead of letting them just choose to enter or not. She was not going to let Spike die here because she’d messed up. Or Discord. Or herself.
Spike’s breathing changed. “Discord! Can you help me keep Spike awake?”
“No,” Discord said. “But I can do this.” He closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut as if in intense concentration, and produced a thin, strong rope. “I’m going to tie him to your back. He’s a dragon; he’s going into torpor. If you force him to stay awake, he’ll burn through his reserves and that will kill him. He’s falling asleep so he can conserve his inner flame and stay alive.”
“Oh.”
“Baby dragons are typically born here. Well, not here here, but back home, they’re usually hatched either in volcanoes or near the poles because of the intensity of magic needed to hatch a dragon egg. But baby dragons have a lot of fat reserves they can live off until they find their way to a source of food. A vein of gems, or things they can prey on. Because of magic, there’s abundant life all over Equestria.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know, Twilight.”
“If baby dragons are born here, then why…”
“Why is this happening to Spike?” Discord finished tying him onto her back. “Because he’s not a baby anymore. Most of his fat reserves are gone. He may still look babyish, but inside, he’s preparing to become a teenage dragon. A lot of what looks like fat is muscle. Teenage dragons do not do well in the cold, that’s part of the reason for the dragon migration.”
“But he’ll be all right if he sleeps?”
“He should be.” Discord looked at Twilight hard. “Assuming that you’re not lying about how far away the portal is, and actually, it’s so distant from here that we’ll never be able to make it on foot before we succumb to the cold.”
Twilight laughed nervously. “Of course not! We’re going to make it. No question.”
“Good, because my next Tuesday Tea with Fluttershy is in only three days, and she’ll be very disappointed if I don’t show up.” Discord started foward again, in the direction of the portal. “Onward march, I suppose.”
“Onward,” Twilight agreed, and they continued.
***
The moon set, but the sun did not rise.
Twilight was exhausted and so, so cold, but she couldn’t sit down and rest. Every time she stopped, the cold started creeping into her very bones. She felt like they’d been walking forever.
“Is this, like… some kind of alternate reality where Nightmare Moon won?”
Discord lifted his head wearily and looked at her. “What?”
“It feels like we’ve been walking forever, but the sun hasn’t risen. The moon set a while ago.”
“You have no idea where we are, do you?”
“Uh, yes, correct, that is exactly right. I have no idea where we are, but you said you did.”
He sighed. “This is a polar continent. South pole, if I’m correct about the planet we’re on. During the winter, the sun never rises, and during the summer, it never sets.”
“Oh.” That was surprising. “Is that magic?”
“No. It has to do with the position of the planet versus the sun. The same thing happens back home, but there, it’s Celestia’s fault. Well, Celestia and the position of the sun vs. the planet.” He was definitely trudging slower than he had before. “It’s so cold. I feel like my tail is going to freeze solid and break off.”
“It is cold,” Twilight agreed. “But we have to keep going. The portal can’t be too much further ahead.” She checked her compass. It was hard to read in the dark, but the lodestone had been magicked to glow in the dark slightly, so she could make out that they were still going north.
“I certainly hope so, because I don’t know how much longer I can make it. My whole body is turning to ice.”
“I know how you feel—“
“You have fur, so I doubt it.”
Twilight ignored that. “My hooves feel like they’re going to fall off. We’ve been walking for so long, I’m exhausted. Look, over there. That’s a rock face that’s not covered in ice.”
“I’m not sure what relevance that has.”
“Let’s take a rest for a few minutes. Share body heat. I can sit down, you coil around me and Spike, and we all get a little warmer.”
“Rock is not going to be significantly warmer than ice in this place.”
“Not a lot warmer, but it’ll be a little bit warmer than ice. And there’s no risk of our body heat melting the ice and getting us wet.”
“All right.”
The two of them trudged over to the rocky outcropping. It was not even slightly comfortable; Twilight had a very hard time arranging herself on it in a way that didn’t leave rock digging into her legs or her belly. Eventually Discord sat on the rock in a way where the back of his abdomen, his hips, and the top of his tail were on the rock, most of which had protective fur, and all of which, according to him, had dragon scales, a lot of which had fur on top growing around the scales. The brown fur on his body was extremely thick, and significantly warmer than her own pony coat, and with the dragon scales apparently the rock didn’t hurt him as much as it had been hurting Twilight. She sat on him, lying on his fur, and he coiled his head around her and then his wings around them both and then his dragon tail on top of that, making himself into as much of a ball as he could without his magic. Spike’s still-fiery little body in the center made Twilight feel almost warm enough.
Abruptly she woke, with a jerk of terror, and realized she’d dozed off. Ponies died in the cold if they fell asleep in the snow. “Discord!”
“Hmm?” He didn’t sound startled.
“Did you fall asleep?”
“Me? No, not really. Drifting a bit. Resting my legs. I’m still so cold.”
“We can’t fall asleep. We might never wake up!”
“I wasn’t really worried about that,” Discord said. “As long as I’m awake, you were safe to sleep. But now that you’re awake, we should get moving again.” He yawned. “I’m worried about the other side of that portal.”
“Worried?” Twilight extricated herself from him, carefully. “Why?”
“Because if it split once, it might again.” He yawned again. “I wanted to try to make it there as fast as equinely possible before that happens, but I was too tired and plainly so were you. I hope it’s stayed in one piece.”
“Me too.” She prodded him with her hoof. “Come on, get up. Let’s get moving.” Her stomach growled. “The sooner we get to that portal, the sooner we’ll be back home, in the warmth, and we can get something to eat.”
“Yes, that sounds good.” He got to all fours, stretched, and then thought better of it and contracted again. “Oh dear. That’s very cold.”
“Yeah, it didn’t get any warmer while we were napping.” Spike was still asleep. But still alive. She could feel him breathing, slow and deep. Feel his warmth on her back, all the warmth that was left in the universe. The portal was still up ahead of them. It still felt impossibly far away. “Come on. It can’t be too much further.”
“I think we will find that it can,” Discord grumbled, but followed her as she trotted.
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Pleasant surprise! Love the back and forth about the mechanics behind the situation.
Yahoo! You're back!
Yay! So great to have an update from you, and its this fic! I loved the opening to this story, thanks for continuing it!
Well this is a pleasantly unexpected update.
I love how you write the relationships between the three! Again, glad to see an update, this is a fun fanfic to update too!
Hey, good to see you back. Always found this story pretty interesting. Especially considering that 2 of these are the most powerful magic users in Equestria being stranded in a world without magic.
It's been a while since I've read anything of yours or I have read anything at all from here other than a couple of things. Love the whole promise. Hope to read more
wait what? WHAT! she lives!
Oh, hello! You're back!
Glad to see this updated! I've always liked how you write Discord and Twilight interacting.
Hey, nice to see this
Good chapter, I like the dynamic of Discord and Twilight here and the learning
IT'S ALIVE!!!
no way
this got updated before elements of opposition
seeing discord again is satisfactory ispos
Great to see this back! A desperate situation, but not so desperate as some of your other stories.
Hey, maybe they'll run into Jack O'Neill and Sam Carter, also stuck in the ice! They've got a space-time portal which maybe could be modded into a dimensional portal, and Jack creates enough Chaos to help Discord out.
11720283
Ok, now that's an idea!