It came as little surprise to Twilight that, when she sucked in as much cold air as she could handle without coughing and pushed it as hard as she could back into space, she still could not breathe fire.

She put the pitiful cloud of condensation behind her as she increased her pace down the street. It followed her like an old friend goading for conversation, reaching into her mouth with bonelike grey fingers, pulling something out then stuffing it back in again without giving it a chance to smooth out properly. The truth was jagged. When you sanded it down it ceased to be real. Just phallic and silly. It made her throat burn. Aah, winter!

The time of great solidarity. Maybe that was so because nopony--but her--was stupid enough to go outside at this hour in this weather on this day. This day! What excuse could she have not to be out? This was the winter solstice! Hearth’s Warming Eve! Everypony in the town, probably the whole country, was either asleep or winding down the final subdued conversations of the evening before bidding good night and passing out in the snow.

Ponyville was a tough town. After all these years it retained a largely earth pony population. Eventually, they would clear this snow away by hoof. The heat from their bodies would melt whatever was left behind. Most of the big cities, the Manehattens and the Fillydelphias and the Chicoltgos, had switched to using magical radial-heaters a few decades ago, following Canterlot’s stunning exhibition to celebrate the 1500 year anniversary of Hearth’s Warming Night not being widely considered as the evening Nightmare Moon swept down from the moon in a carriage of ice pulled by windigoes and shot bolts of ice into the hearts of anypony dumb enough to wander outdoors. It kinda defeated the point of staying in with friends and loved ones to avoid the wrath of a homicidal boogy-monster, but a pony could only get so sentimental during the winter before they started getting clinically depressed. Twilight spent too much time in bed already. Her friends would get nervous around this time of year--they felt they had to keep her up and moving or else she’d freeze in place and never move again.

So when she told them she was going to take a walk and politely excused herself from the festivities, they let her go. Her chances of escaping Nightmare Moon were better than getting away from what really ate at her, especially since the Princess Formerly Known as Nightmare Moon was currently lounging lasciviously on her favorite softest castle sofa, regaling an audience of just over a dozen with drunken war stories. If the worst came true, at least she could fight nightmare Moon.

Living with earth ponies for so long, especially the Apples, made you tough.

The earth ponies, most of them, still celebrated toughness. The Apple family still bucked trees, albeit more of them than Applejack would have been able to handle on her own. Distinctive uneven shovel marks lined the streets and walkways. Only a few odd mansions on the outskirts of town, the ones whose occupants had their groceries delivered to them and didn’t go to summer block parties or Hearth’s Warming tree-lightings, bore the clean-shaven look of mechanically-snowscaped walks. Ponyville was still a town endowed with physicality.

Good for them. Toughness helped with the cold.

A few generations back, one odd Apple wound up with a cutie mark for dancing. They all thought he would wind up a wimp--even worried openly about it in family gatherings (of which Twilight was always an honored guest)--until one day the unfortunate colt beat the teeth out of another colt’s skull for calling his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother Applejack a whore.

Tough ponies, the bunch of them. Even ballet couldn’t buck the Apple out of his system. Not even a hundred generations.

Twilight wished she could be an Apple, sometimes. Always so tough when they needed to be. All she had was weakness and cold and a runny nose and no tissues.

If you were to ask Princess Twilight Sparkle if she would rather be somepony else, she would smile and say something to the extent of, “I am happy the way I was made. Everypony should be. I accept myself for my weaknesses as much as my strengths. My flaws make me who I am,” or something else inspiring and dumb.

If you were to ask Twilight if she would rather be somepony else, she would look up to the heavens as if asking Nightmare Moon to swoop down with her terrifying ice carriage and hand her a parchment and pen, and proceed to list about a hundred names, starting with Her Majesty Princess Celestia and ending with Spike the Dragon. If you asked why, she would give you a list with twice as many points, starting with “complete serenity in the face of political and social lunacy” and ending with “the comforting fact of knowing I will die before my best friend.”

There were a lot of reasons--too many to keep in one mind. That’s why she wanted a list. She could keep it in her winter hat, or her saddlebags, or wherever, and whenever something didn’t go her way she could whip out the list and find a name and a reason or two. She could emulate her idols and survive.

How many more things could she remember before she ran out of room?

Twilight breathed again. Under the dim light worming through the clouds her breath looked like her soul wiggling out of her mouth and evaporating, pulled apart by the dry and frigid air. It really put the soul in Solstace. Each breath took a little bit of her essence and blew it away. Like the image of a ghost from a foal’s horror story; translucent, drifting up and out of sight.

How many souls had depended on her? One, at least. A long time ago, one soul had depended on her. She did the best she could. He claimed, even as he sputtered and died, that it was enough. How do you believe a thing like that? How could anypony expect her to believe it? It was downright unreasonable.

She stared at the smoke with as much intensity as she could. She held herself there until it all dispersed. Upon relaxing she noticed tears in her eyes, not from sadness but from the cold. Water pooled in her eyes, bearing the foggy reflection of smoke trailing in little puffs of clouds behind her. Taken apart at a molecular level, but not destroyed.

She blinked and tried to wipe the tears away only to scratch her eyelids with the fringe of her boot.

Grimacing and staring upwards, blinking away the pressure and heat in a divine act of morse-code (spelled H-A-N-D-K-E-R-C-H-I-E-F-P-L-E-A-S-E), she neglected to notice an intoxicated stallion stumbling towards her. He swerved and tied to lean into a snowbank for support only to break through the thin crust and sink into the drift shoulder-deep.

Twilight first realized he was there when he giggled, tried to stand up, slipped, and sat down in the middle of the sidewalk.

He looked almost childlike, a colt with his arm stuck in a vending machine. He wore a guilty, self-disgusted smile, which intensified as he realized he had an audience.

He smiled. A rotten tooth gleamed in the light.

Twilight made sure to pull her scarf up so he couldn’t recognize her. Of all the things he could say right now, “Princess” would be the most hurtful.

“Are you okay?” Twilight asked, then jumped at the way the snow sucked up her voice.

“Happy Hearth’s Warming, ya pretty bitch,” he replied. Then, in something just above inaudible, he mumbled, “Lemme alone.”

She sighed with relief only to take a step backwards as a cloud of her own breath amassed in her scarf and vented into her eyes. It happened. No big deal. At least she wasn’t wearing glasses--they would have been fogged up. Pity she just had to laugh. Pity she could still see. Pity she couldn’t blame the swimming vision on anything else.

The stallion heaved himself up and collapsed into the snow. The bank opened up for him, embraced him--no, swallowed him up. When Twilight blinked back the cold-tears she couldn’t believe anypony had been there at all.

The immaculate snowbank grew larger as Twilight approached it, probably because it was snowing and that’s what snow did to snow banks. It made them larger.

When she got to it, she leaned in until the outermost layer of snow tickled her nose and exhaled.

Warm air dented the downward sloping snow. The heat opened up a slight imperfection, a divot on a golf course. A zit. Snow would fall again soon and cover it up. Ponyville was a tough town. It didn’t stand imperfections. Twilight knew that. She didn’t question it. Only marveled at the determination with which the townsponies carried out their mantra. Always better. Always stronger. Always together.

Pity she couldn’t breathe fire. If she could breath fire she could melt away the snow right down to the dead grass beneath it. No pony. No life. Bent and crooked blades of puke-green grass--like her mane when she stuffed it into her winter hat. Who would even stop her there? There was life after death--she was sure of it. How else could she have survived this long?

Pity she couldn’t breathe fire. If she could breathe fire she could teleport to Canterlot and dig up Spike and breathe fire into his belly. Dragons didn’t decompose like ponies did. It took time--time she had to spare.

Instead all she could do was sit there in a blanket of snow and freeze to death while hyperventilating trying to defy the laws of nature and breathe fire. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. In out in out inoutinoutinout. Theoretically she had to breathe fire by pure chance if she breathed long enough.

How many years was immortal again?

Forever?

Not possible. Twilight Sparkle couldn’t believe in death because she didn’t understand the vastness of her life, the snowcaps stretching out on either sides of her.

One day she would have to wake up spouting a jet of fire like gibberish holy tongues. Burning her lips black. She would know what to do when the time came.

Until then she just had to wait.

Because Twilight Sparkle could not breathe fire.

It was probably just too cold though. That was the problem--it was just too cold.

Her castle lay ahead of her, draped in snow, exhaling smoke from one of the chimneys. Imitating her.

She would try again next year. Same date. Same time.