Equestria, the beacon of civilization and the symbol of harmony, a land where all ponies, unicorns, Earth Pony, and pegasi, live amongst each other in balance. The subcontinent that is now known as the land of the ponies has a rich history, and certain branches of it are expected to be lost from sight, with only the smallest of fallen leaves ever to be noticed, for far from the civilized cities of Canterlot, Ponyville, Cloudsdale, and, Appaloosa, lay the barren icy mountain range of the Frozen North. Within the Crystal Mountains, holds a collection of a certain species of ponies, not documented by civilization, was thought to never exist. However, one faithful winter’s night, something happened, that would change two ponies’ different outlook, on life as they know it.

Our tale takes place in the midst of night, during a typical night storm common to the Frozen North. As the winds, frost, and hail bashed the faces of the mountains, a lone glow can be seen from an alcove in the solid ice of a mountain. A small pony, dressed in a large black cloak, far too big for its body, wanders out of the light and pokes its head into the weather. Chills tickle the tip of the pony’s nose, causing it to softly sneeze in reaction. The wind flutters through the cape and over the hidden fur; the sounds of flapping cloth pierce the silence of the night. The small pony continues to stand before the pitch black of the storm for what felt like hours, feeling the artic freeze dance on the pony’s fur and skin.

The pony’s meditation was then broken by a low howl echoing from the golden glow behind it. The lone pony turns back and approaches the heat pulsing from the bowels of the cave. Deep within the icy cavern now, the crackling of a distant fireplace pops in its ears as it is approached by another, slightly larger pony in a black cloak. The larger pony takes off the hood of her clothing with her hooves, revealing a young mare’s face, with deep blue fur and a silvery mane. The mare gives a stern look at the smaller pony, tapping her left hoof impatiently on the opaque blue ice floor. The pony immediately recognizes the larger pony as its older sister, presumably crossed because the smaller pony wandered to the entrance of the cave again.

The small pony then remembers what the parents of the cave told their young. They said that the outside world is dangerous, full of monsters, deadly weather, strange ponies unlike anything they have seen ever, and the unknown in general. The cave was their home, and for generation upon generation, their tribe would expand the cave system for the next. Everything they needed was not out there in the unknown world, but their safe haven. Parents would tell their offspring what they have been told by theirs, and the small pony was expected to do the same in the future.

The older sister then proceeds to bite on the small pony’s hood and leads her deeper into the cave, stopping in front of a small wooden fireplace perched in the center of a circular chamber of the cave. Upon releasing the sibling’s hood, the black piece of cloth flies back, revealing another younger mare. She had light turquoise fur and a shining mane of pure white, flowing loosely in front of her white glazed eyes. The warmth of the flames lightly rubs against the younger sister’s face, causing saturated color to flow into her face.  The older sister then begins to speak, yet to the little one’s ears, all the younger sisters hears are random grunts and sounds as she looks back to the open mouth a cave, thinking. Her family has always been annoyed, even sometimes aggressive, at the young, curious spirit inside the younger pony. The youngling never figured out why though. Was it because they feared the unknown as much as the others of the tribe? Was it because they cared so much for the small pony, it causes them to be aggressive towards her at times? Was it even, dare the young pony thought, because of something, malicious, that has always been within her relatives? The thought unsettles her and she attempts to get her head out of the clouds and regained her attention to her sister who was still castigating her for going even close to the cave exit.

Loud clopping interrupts the older sister’s lecture as the two turn to see a stallion on the other side of the fire, holding a small woven pouch in his mouth. The stallion was barely taller than the older sister, with cyan fur and a mane of grey. The sisters recognize him as their brother, the eldest of the three. The older sister goes around the fire and meets her older brother as the younger sister sits in place and listens to her sister telling her brother about the younger mare’s small adventure. The brother cuts her short by dropping the brown bag in between them, causing a lone green apple to roll out onto the reflective floor. The sister pokes the bag with her hoof and finds it to be completely flat. The older sister knew what this meant; their tribe was running low on food. Although it was a common occurrence for the tribe, especially during the winter, this time however, this shortage was significant. Due to the spike of births increase during the previous months and an extremely early winter, the gathering of food grew limited and the demand for more rose exponentially. The two siblings crept down on all fours and quietly whisper to each other while the younger sister daydream while listening to the fire.

The younger mare continues to daydream as she tunes out the voices of her sister and brother, thinking nothing of the food crisis. She has experienced them a couple of times as well, yet never really took mind to the lack of food some days. On those days, all she would think about was a random idea she would come up with. It was a common thing for her tribe to see, ponies thinking of random ideas when they didn’t have anything to do. Ideas of ways to improve their daily lives, stories, philosophies, even abstract thoughts that come from nowhere. For generations, the tribe of ponies saw this thinking as not just some way to pass the time of their boring lives, but rather important to their purpose in this seeming bleak world. Throughout their time, thinking has brought many offerings upon the tribe. Through the use of thought and engineering, technologies have been created that enhanced the tribe’s way of living, from axes that can shatter the crystal ice of the mountain, to small farms able to produced food in the larger chambers of their cave system. This time however, the younger pony did not think about something involving the cave or her fellow ponies, but rather the outside world. What was out there in the unknown? A scary thought to most, but the young mare felt otherwise. She felt like there was something more, friendly, out past the snowstorms, other ponies that could be living outside the mountains.

Once again, her thinking session ended as the brother slowly crept behind the younger sister and pulls off her cloak entirely, from rump to head. Small ripping is heard from the insides of the jacket as the brother aggressively tears it off and flings it into the fire. The room brightly flickers as the cloth disintegrates into ashes and seems into the charred logs of the fireplace. The younger sister thinks nothing of it at first, but as her brother slowly backs away, a suspicious feeling rumbles through her spine. Hooves loudly clopping against the ice is not only heard coming from ahead by her brother, but also behind by somepony else. Nervous, the younger sister opens her mouth, but before she can ask what’s going on, she is pushed by a heavy force against her side. Grinding against the slippery ice, the small pony tries to identify who is pushing her away from the fire, but the rush is too overwhelming for her to think straight. After a minute of struggling, the younger sister goes airborne as the full blast of the artic storm hits her. Her skin immediately grows cold and dry and her fur and mane grow stiff and tangled. She screams as pitch blackness envelopes her entire body, with no sense of gravity and the feeling hopelessness heavily bloating inside of her. All of a sudden, smack, a heap of solid snow smashes the pony’s face, chest, and knees from below as hard snow and hail bash at the back from above. The frail body is launched into the air as the scared pony continues to plummet down the mountain slope. Time grows to a standstill for the frozen foal, feeling as if her life was going to end at any second now. Her screams grow raspy and more distant from the cave, her sanctuary, her home, the one place she only truly knows anything about. With a soft splat, the pony blacks out upon hitting the snowy floor of the open north.

Slowly, after an hour of being buried in the snow, the filly comes to her senses as she digs her way out and back into the blasting winds. Shivering cold, scared, aching from all sides, and absolutely lost, she musters up all of her depleted strength all screams at the top of her frozen lungs, calling out to her sister, her brother, her mother, her father, or at least anypony to hear her pleas of help. This did not last long as her lungs gave out and whatever she screamed seemed to be erased by the howling gushes of wind. The mare takes a moment to regain her breathe, trying to think of what to do next. Panicked and confused from the cold, the filly decides to get out of the storm to a cave or shelter where she can warm up for the night. Slowly, one hoof after the other, she trudges across the deep snow, aimless wandering through the artic night, tripping and running out of stamina for every couple of tens of meters.

Thoughts randomly surge through her head, randomly popping in and out with the winds smashing her stiff face against her frozen bones. However, one thought seems to cling into her head, the feeling of being lost with no way of seeing her way back. She was a blind pony, lost within an uncharted area with no sense of direction. From birth, the young pony has always been blind; using the eyes of others and her other senses to find her way back. The elder ponies never found a problem with this though, valuing her life like every other pony of the tribe. She was able to, for the first and only months of her life; traverse the complex cave system with minimal assistance. The young mare’s father was impressed with his daughter’s memory and maneuvering skills. Her mother and siblings however, saw this as weakness to the tribe, but still treated her like one of the family, albeit with less respect. But now, in the mind-numbing ice and cold of the Frozen North, the bling filly has no idea where she is going, for she has never, not once in her early life, left the cave.

After what felt like days of endless walking, fainting, and taking continual breaks, the mare slips onto what feels like a large slab of ice. Cackling is soon heard from all sides of her as faint movements pulse through the ice slab. The pony panics, planting her body to the hard ice and covering her face with her hooves, awaiting the jaws of death to sink her. A loud snap echoes through the wind as the slab of ice rocks back and forth, sliding the pony from corner to corner. The rocking comes to a stop as the vibrations enter a soothing motion, following the wind. The fearful mare slowly gets up and inches towards the edge of the ice. She gently sticks her hoof over the edge and is shocked by a cold surge of water flowing around her hoof. Immediately the pony yanks the hoof and out the water and warms it against her body. She soon figures that she is on a large ice raft, floating on a river, away from her home.

The sounds of the monstrous winds begin to die down as the soft flowing of the stream chants its hypnotic lullaby to the blind pony. Her mind is soon put at ease from her troubles as this new world displays its sounds and emotion. The calming waves massage the raft, the snow calms from its raging winds to a gentle fall, the swaying of the ice turned into a cradle, and the enchanting voices of angels echo over the river’s edge. Slowly, the young mare’s eyelids grow heavy, soon followed by her head, her next, her body, her knees, and finally her hooves. Before long, she fell asleep on the ice, carrying her deeper into the unknown world.

Deep in her sleep, the younger sister, began to hear distant sounds coming from inside her head. She immediately recognized them as her sister and her brother calling for her. She tries to get up, but finds her body to be completely stiff in this dream world. The emptiness of the black void began to squeeze around her. She panics, despite begin used to seeing nothing, nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear. The mare’s breathe increases rapidly. Trying with all of her non-existent might, she attempts to move as the voices of her family begin to sound distressful and drifting apart. She tries to call out to them, only to find her voice missing and her throat stiff. Tears form around her eyes and crawl down her stone face, her breathing turns into hyperventilation, and the void’s grip grows tighter and tighter. Soon, the dreamer feels as if she’s going to pop at any second. All of a sudden, the calling of her siblings distant in the black of her mind transform into shrills of demonic laughter right behind her head. The pony’s frozen body is then launched forward and down, down, down into the abyss of nothingness in a seemingly eternal fall as the maniacal laughing follows right behind her.

The turquoise pony gasps as she awakens from the nightmare and finds herself in a pile of powdery snow. Sound slowly returns to her ears and the bashing of small waves against a rocky bend along the river bend. Her ice raft most likely hit them too hard and flung her to land in her sleep. The filly got up on all fours, and with a small amount of energy regained from the nap, set out to find shelter. The whistling of the high winds against a set of nearby mountains created an echo through a narrow valley in front of her. She followed the whimsical sounds, familiarizing them with the drafts that would rush through her cavern home.

After countless hours of walking over compact snow and sleet, she is caught off guard by a thin object rubbing against her side. She shrieks and ducks into the snow, regaining the feeling of the painful cold that haunted her. The filly recollects herself and examines the mysterious object floating in the air. A wooden stick, a branch attached to a tree is what gave her a scare. She recognized the texture of the twig from when she carried small sticks to a fireplace while her older siblings would push the heavier logs through the tunnels. Her tribe would grow small trees at the farm inside several rooms of their icy base and she would help by bringing melted ice to the trees and plants and water them. More and more, the foal became more homesick by the second, just wanting to cuddle with her brethren around a warm fireplace in her home.

The ground became harder with each step forward, but still covered in slippery frost as the mare found herself in a forest. The trees on each side of her created a canopy above that would gather the snowfall on top, allowing a clear path during the winter. Her hooves for the first time touched dirt, roots, and other loose articles naturally scattered throughout the mysterious forest. Although bumping into several trees and tripping over fallen logs and rocks, the filly continued on her quest, undeterred now more than ever before.

Absolute silence settled in gently as the pony went deeper and deeper into the sea of trees, to the point where it became too quiet. The young mare became paranoid with white noise now occupying her ears with the feeling of some presence hovering behind her. Her trotting slows down drastically and turns into a tip-hoof. Her lips curl and her skin turns tense, almost turning into a statue of sorts. A ghastly chant echoes from ahead without any warning, blasting a whisper into the frightened pony’s front. She backs up a couple of hooves before returning to her sneaking motion forward. The breathily taunting grows more and more, meter by meter, moment of fear upon moment of fear. Finally, after several minutes of this ghoulish chant, it ceases as quickly as it appeared and the young pony bops her nose against a wall. She sniffs it for a second, realizing its solid iron, commonly used for large tools created by her tribe. She follows along the cold side of the iron wall, hearing what sounds like snoring echoing through the thick wall of metal. After turning a corner along the kilometer long wall, she finds another wall adjacent to it, as if some sort of iron pen. After about another half of a kilometer of traveling, the curious filly discovers a large portcullis gate, weaved of metal bars creating a vertical grate. She believes that a large shelter or a home is past the gates and the wall, and that the owner, who or whatever he was, wouldn’t mind if a single pony spent the night inside his massive house. She inspects the bottom of the door to find the spikes pinning the gate down frozen stiff into the ground. She then attempts to squeeze her tiny body through the small grates. With the help of the sipper frost forming around the metal, the mare is able to squeeze through and makes her way to the center of the mysterious pen, unaware of what awaits for her arrival…