Frozen Forever
History has many great tales to tell, some known and renowned for the glories they tell, some hidden behind a blanket of death and time. Before the ponies grew to prominence, conquering or befriending all the other races of the world, came the gryphons. Before the gryphons usurped the throne of dominance, came the dragons. The dragons took control from the wilds, taming them with writing and knowledge and magic. But History knows no limits, not even those of knowledge. And so history remembers the dawn of life, and the first beings to stride across its surface. And history remembers, too, their fall, both from grace and from dominance. History remembers the end of beings now known only as "The Forebears". But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Lets go back a bit.
In a land yet unconquered by ponies and gryphons, untouched even by the ancient dragons, there was a civilization. Before a hearth was first warmed, chaos was first spread, or fire was first breathed, the peoples of this civilization created mighty works. They built mountain-top fortresses whose ruins, untold thousands, or tens of thousands, of years later, would serve as the base of gryphon civilization. They crafted relics that Pony civilization would find and center themselves upon, forces of good such as the Elements of Harmony and the Crystal Heart, as well as ancient evils such as the Alicorn Amulet, so named only because of the level of power it granted.
They created, too, many feats of magical wonder. They made cities that soared high in the skies, huge sections of earth ripped from their wombs to host them. They created elixirs to cure any ailment, amulets that would cause lost limbs to regrow, and even mastered spells that could infinitely prolong life. Even their children toys would seem miraculous to modern races, plants with a sense of humor, ordinary animals on a scale so small they could be carried around, and telescopes that could create illusions identical to the object being viewed.
Their legacy was so great, their achievements so self-evident, that they would be venerated by races not to live for untold ages, and seen as gods. Ponies and gryphons alike would imagine them both merciful and wise, and hold them up as a standard to which all races should strive. Even when knowledge of them grew, fact rooting out fiction, they remained a mystery. Even their appearance was unknown, because despite countless ruins and cities and marvels, not a single fossil, or skeleton, or image was found to mark their existence. And so worship continued, because their virtues remained the most public and obvious aspect of their legacy.
Despite this veneration, however, they were no more than a powerful civilization. And, like any powerful civilization, they had enemies and they had flaws. Their enemies were themselves, different kingdoms of the same peoples, unpressed by outside forces and thus hostile to themselves. They sought a victory to end all wars, a weapon to bring peace, an unsolvable paradox. And yet, in time, it seemed they had succeeded. In weapons that could destroy whole nations, they found themselves with a war not unconscionable, but impractical. By the time a spell was cast or a weapon launched, the other nations would have noticed and responded in kind, and all would be destroyed.
Of course, instead of letting time run its course and show the foalishness of even conceiving of such weapons, they sought to improve them. They worked to make make the weapons faster, or to build walls against them, so that they could survive their use. Both succeeded, to ends, but the result of research into such things was that a faster activation was countered by faster detection of an activation, stronger shields meant stronger, or more directed, or more piercing attacks. In time, however, a true success, at least by their definition, arrived. One nation, unbeknownst to the others, created a spell whose creeping, deadly effect could go unnoticed by their opponents until it was far to late. a spell whose progenitor would be difficult to discover, and whose activation was impossible to stop, and whose effect could not be prevented with mere shields.
It is unknown if it was intentional that the spell, which created, rather than summoned, powerful ice spirits, focused upon those with hatred in their hearts and anger on their lips. It is further unknown if it was intended, by the maker if no one else, that the only possible defenses to the beasts were ancient tools of peace. It is possible, of course, that these things were no more than coincidences. It isn't hard, after all, for even the smartest of beings to fall for their own propaganda, to see their enemies as seething pits of hatred and anger, and thus assume that your creation, which focuses itself upon such things, will ignore you in favour of them. Avarice, or perhaps simply self-obsession, would then have condemned this mighty civilization to the dust.
For the creatures they created, and then loosed upon the world, froze their surroundings, feeding on the warmth and life around them, and were drawn to those whose hearts were filled with hatred, and whose lips allowed pure anger to pass. Kindness and Laughter would have been as poison to them, and perhaps some few of their progenitors realized that, perhaps a city avoided the walls of snow that covered so many others. But with an endless winter, the cold never needed to touch them for death to find its way among them. The cold destroyed crops and farms and cities with equal ease, and so any who survived the freezing and who fended of the spirits found themselves with an enemy not so easily defeated: hunger.
Thus the greatest, and perhaps most foolish, civilization to walk this world passed from history, leaving behind a legacy that would wait a hundred thousand years or more to continue its work. With no sentience left upon the world, nothing remained that was capable of hatred, at least not in the capacity that the spirits' creators had forced them to prey upon. Without a source of food, they went into a sort of hibernation, allowing life to bloom once more, and, in time, new prey to appear. Like so many other aspects of this story, it is unknown what reawakened them, or how they came to prey upon ponies when gryphons made war and dragons fought each other constantly. Perhaps the other races fought without anger and hatred, but with honour and joy. But they fed on the anger and life of ponies, and so they came to resemble them, although larger and stronger. It was then that they received their name, Windigos. And it was then, though separated by a wall of decades, that they found their destruction. When the ponies found their protection from the windigos, they also found a weapon against them, and, as warmth spread throughout the land once more, the windigos found themselves poisoned, the destroyers of gods brought low by a species barely beyond infancy. Sometimes, history is poetic. Other times, it simply is.