The Dark Origins of the Windigo

by Schattendrache

Prologue (re-worked)

I was sitting in my office, finishing up my final reports for the day when my door exploded inward. A panting crystal pony was standing there with a desperate look in his eyes. He told me that while an exploratory team was climbing the Frozen Spires, the mountain range at the western edge of the Crystal Empire, they discovered a large cave along the Eastern face of Mountain Seven.

I informed the frantic pony, who I later learned was named Icy Horizons, that such a report was interesting, but not something I was qualified to make a comment on as my specialty is equipology, not geology. He shook his head and informed me it wasn’t the cave which had brought him, but what was inside of it. The team had found a single body encased in ice, as well as burned and destroyed supplies from what can only be assumed to be their equipment.

This immediately caught my interest. It had long been thought that the Frozen Spires were an insurmountable challenge to face. Until around fifty years ago, every expedition on the spires had been a failure. This was due to the magical influence the mountains had on their weather. The mountains sat on top of a leyline of mana, but due to their strange composition and shape, the mana did not flow properly. This resulted in erratic, and often unpredictable, weather patterns that just as often resulted in decade long blizzards stronger than anywhere else on Equis as they did clear skies. Dozens of stories existed of ponies returning without the remainder of their party, gibbering and broken, unable to properly function in society after that. But more often, the stories of the ponies that decided to take on the challenge of the mountain ended with the ponies involved never coming back.

I asked Icy Horizons if there were plans to retrieve the body and the equipment from the cave and bring them back for examination. He informed me that a party had been organized by Princess Cadence herself to retrieve the body and anything else in the cave so they might be identified so any living descendants could give them a proper funeral. Cadence had sent him here to request my assistance in the identification of the individual and determine when the expedition that had claimed the ponies life had taken place.

I could not have agreed faster.

---

It has been four days since I received the report of the frozen body from the mountains. The body, as well as everything that could be retrieved of their supplies, was brought down today. I was waiting at the castle with everypony else who had been requested to assist in identifying the frozen individual for the group of ponies to arrive with everything that had been recovered from the cave. When the group arrived, several of them were pulling a large cart with a tarp covering a large object, while other ponies were carrying rucksacks absolutely overflowing with items from their own expedition and the frozen pony’s.

Everything was taken to a large room that had been cleared out for us to examine what had been brought back. When the tarp was removed from the frozen body, I finally had my first look at the frozen pony. Well, not actually a look. A thick coating of frost and ice was obscuring everything inside the ice, the only indication that there was even a pony inside was the fact that the vague, colorful shape in the middle of the ice was of a pony-like shape.

I reached out with a forehoof to try to clear away what I could so that I could take a better look, when out of nowhere, a hoof smacked mine down. I turned and saw that it was one of the ponies that had been sent to retrieve everything from the cave that had slapped me. Before I had a chance to ask why he had done this, he answered by telling me that the ice is unnaturally cold, anything that touches it for too long becomes stuck. To emphasize his point, he pointed towards a section of the ice that looked to have been chipped away and then towards a second member of the recovery team with their right forehoof wrapped.

---

After three days of examination, the body was found to have been frozen by a windigo. The ice had been subject to three days of continual, low humidity heat, but after 13:30 on the second day, no additional ice was melted. Before being subjected to the heat, we estimated that the body was encased in approximately forty-five centimeters of ice. We were left with an estimated ten centimeters after the three days of heating. After a magical examination of the ice, it was discovered that dark magic was making it so that no amount of heat would allow for further removal of the ice. When the temperature of the ice was taken, we received a reading of -50 C. We expect that the extreme cold of the magical ice caused a build-up of water vapor on its surface, and after centuries of freezing and thawing of snow and ice on the mountain, the pony slowly become progressively more encased. It was determined that the only possible method to dispel the ice would be the use of the Crystal Heart and the combined love effort of the Crystal Empire. But now that the ice surrounding what we now know to be a stallion has mostly melted, and had become as clear as glass, we could get a good look at him. He was a pale blue-green stallion with a white mane containing streaks of a pale, almost white, blue. He was completely wrapped in a blanket with the exception of his head. His face was heavily damaged, one of his eyes was highly bruised and had swollen shut. Looking closer, that part of his face seemed to be caved in, in all likelihood, the eye was beyond repair. I could also see that his nose had been broken and the bleeding from it had caked his muzzle, as well as one of his ears was missing, more accurately though, it looked to have been ripped off. Finally, the cheeks and eyes had sunken in, giving him a gaunt appearance. But something seemed off about the body. His face wasn't contorted in a look of hatred or anger, but of sorrow and emptiness. It looked as if the pony inside hadn’t been frozen by a windigo, but simply by giving up on life.

The use of the Crystal Heart is scheduled for tomorrow at noon to try to melt the ice of the windigo. Hopefully, when he is thawed from his prison, we learn he was only frozen for a short while. I would hate for one of the ponies to tell him the world he knew is long gone and everyone he cared for has left this world. Unfortunately, on my end, it looks likely that the pony in question lived at least nine hundred years ago, based on the style of clothing and the way it looks to have been made. I am holding out hope though that the individual is simply a member of the naturalist movement that has arisen as of late and the clothes were simply hoof made to emulate those of back then. As I might have made apparent, I have not been able to determine when this pony explored the Frozen Spires. Most of his items are burned beyond all recognition and what little has survived shows signs of significant water damage. Based on the degradation of the clothing and rate of decomposition of wool, cotton, and hemp, I have determined that the items in the cave have experienced approximately three months of exposure to factors that would lead to their deterioration. Due to the deep freeze that can occur on the Spires, no accurate estimation can be made of when the expedition happened.

---

The Crystal Heart failed to melt the ice. Even with all the love of the Empire, the ice failed to thaw in the slightest. The hatred that froze this poor soul had to have been absolute and total, that is the only explanation anyone had as to why the heat of love couldn't even warm the ice. According to the experts of the Empire, there isn't a single thing we can do to release him from his prison. How could such an event occur? Even the worst of villains have the smallest light in them that would permit them to escape from a windigo’s freezing influence. What could have caused him to exile all emotion from his heart but hatred and anger?

---

After yesterday’s failure to free the stallion in ice, I redoubled my efforts to find anything about this stallion that I could. In the end, only a single, well-worn journal from the assorted items brought back from the cave was discovered to be of any relevance and in good enough condition to provide us with any information when examined. Hopefully, we can learn just what lead this stallion to have nothing but hatred in his heart. Unfortunately, it is written in old Ponish, so I need to consult with an expert on the topic to have it translated.

I don’t know whether or not to feel sorry for the stallion now. While his condition is of the most regrettable sort, I can’t help but feel his permanent imprisonment to be a mercy. The journal has all but proven that this stallion came from well before the modern times, so I can't help but wonder just how terrible it would be for him to be brought back now. For all we know, this pony could have been frozen well before Sombra took control, meaning that his family, along with everything else he held dear would be long gone. It was hard enough for us crystal ponies to adjust to the culture shock of being gone for over a thousand years, I can't imagine adding the grief of losing everything onto that.

Author's Note:

Thanks to

EverfreePony

for helping fix the problems with the first version of this chapter.

Comments

[EverfreePony]

This is an interesting idea and the first chapter does well on hooking the reader, posing many questions for the rest of the story to shed some light on. Looking forward to your Windigo headcanon!

Though on the downside, I noticed quite a lot of grammar errors and typos, as well as some redundant repetition of the same words in one sentence. Nothing to make me stop reading, but still fairly annoying. It’s nothing that a good editor couldn’t fix in a few minutes though

[Schattendrache]

9403651
Is this you offering your help as an editor? If so, I would be highly grateful.

[EverfreePony]

9403772
Eh, not exactly offering, just stating what the issues are. However, I think I can comb through the story... should we talk the details over a PM?