Who in their right mind would put a city in the middle of an uninhabitable icy wasteland?

That question ran through Creepy Crawly's mind for the thousandth time that day as she dragged her wagon along. Supposedly, it had been considered a means of making the city safer: after all, any army that wanted to invade would have to deal with the long, bitterly cold trek to the city, but that meant that if anypony succeeded in taking the city from you, it would make it very difficult to take back. If the city had not been self-sustaining, it would have been a logistical nightmare keeping the populace supplied with food.

Regardless of the reason, Creepy had to deal with it. She had set out at dawn, as planned, and nopony had seen her leave the city. While she had hesitated momentarily before leaving, her hoofsteps were now determined, and she was marching along on the route that she and her parents had planned to take a thousand years ago.

By now, she reckoned that it was noon, or a little after, and the city was now far behind her. She had to continuously check her compass to make certain that she was headed in the right direction now, as visibility was starting to suffer slightly. The good news was, she figured that she was making better progress than expected, having passed several landmarks that were referenced on her map. The bad news was, the weather was taking a definite turn for the worst.

It seemed the blizzard of the century was forming around Creepy Crawly as she walked. While the weather around the Crystal Empire could be pretty bad, the snowstorm that was beginning to gather around her was rapidly becoming one of the worst she had ever seen. In fact, she thought to herself, it seemed unnaturally bad... or maybe supernaturally bad.

Almost as if triggered by that thought, she heard a sound from high above her. It sounded... almost like a whinny. She looked up, and saw something that nopony had seen for ages: A Windigo.

While most ponies believed that these creatures had been wiped out by the first Hearth's Fire caused by Clover the Clever, some scholars believed that since the Windigoes were ethereal creatures by nature, they could never truly be destroyed, and instead dwelt in the coldest, most forbidding places, to wait for the day when the fires of friendship went out, and they could once again attempt to bury the world in ice and snow.

Whether that was true or not, there was very definitely a Windigo flying around above Creepy Crawly, and it seemed to be controlling the storm that was gathering around her.

"Seriously?" asked Creepy, to nopony in particular. "You've got to be kidding. Nopony sees a Windigo anywhere for hundreds and hundreds of years, and now one just decides to appear for the sole purpose of ruining my day." She turned her head skyward, then shouted, "Hey, don't you have something better to do today other than snowing on a cute little filly!?!"

The Windigo's response was an amused sounding whinny, almost a laugh, which seemed to imply that it felt that snowing on a cute little filly was the absolute best possible use of its free time. It then whipped the blizzard into an even greater frenzy, to the point that it was now very difficult to see.

"Oh, so you think that's funny, do you?" Creepy asked, starting to feel a little bit hot under the collar, freezing blizzard or not. "Well, let's see how funny you think this is..." With that, she grabbed the first thing she could get a hoof on from her wagon, and threw it up into the air at the Windigo. She didn't realize that what she had thrown was Theodora until it was airborne.

Windigoes, as previously mentioned, are ethereal creatures, and as such, are normally untouched by physical objects. Even most forms of magic have only limited effectiveness against them. But they are creatures that are able to be affected by strong emotions, such as negative feelings like hate, which make them stronger, and positive emotions like love... which can harm them.

So, a hand-stitched teddy bear, specifically made by a loving mother, for her beloved daughter, hugged day and night by said daughter, and filled to bursting with all the love a heart can hold, would be quite solid to a Windigo. In fact, when it hit the Windigo, squarely in the face, it was the equivalent of getting hit with a brick. Worse, on impact, the bear exclaimed, in the previously mentioned mother's voice, "I love you," which made the damage it did to the Windigo ten, no, one hundred times worse. And that was not even the worst part...

Creepy's mother, also as previously mentioned, had a unicorn (and a rather powerful one, at that) put numerous spells upon the bear. Among those spells was what was called a "Binding" spell, a spell that had been intended as protection against those rare, but quite dangerous, ethereal creatures that might try to do harm to a small pony while asleep. One solid whack with the bear, and those creatures would be rendered solid, and much more easy to deal with (they were quite small, and easily stepped on). Such spells were intended for small, weaker creatures... but it seemed they worked pretty well on Windigoes, or at least, on injured ones.

The end result of all this was that, after getting hit in the face with the emotional equivalent of a freight train filled with orphans who were hugging puppies, the Windigo fell to the ground, hard and fast, and by the time it hit, the creature was solid enough for the impact to hurt.