Snow fell from the heavens, dotting the sky with spots of white. The clouds had usurped the sun, whose rays failed to pierce the planet below. Even as the light of day was repelled, giving the impression of night, layers of snow and ice were beginning to build up around the peak of the mountaintop. That the mountain was host to an active caldera did little to repel the blistering cold. Only an ethereal green flame kept two creatures on the summit from freezing, one a pony and one a dragon.

“I’m not certain I can keep this up much longer, Twilight,” said Spike the dragon, his wings tucked in to preserve body heat. He had no internal body clock to tell him the passage of time as he had continued to use his fire breath to warm their tight bubble.

Twilight Sparkle, former Princess of Equestria, fretted at those words even as she clenched her jaw to prevent her teeth from chattering. The alicorn had hoped sitting next to a volcano could stave off the cold that was setting in, but the great freeze seemed to be making even the massive mountain go dormant. Shaking off the chill that was cutting to the bone, she attempted to make an optimistic estimate. “T-t-twenty m-more m-min-nutes,” Twilight guessed, looking back down to the sheet of paper she was drawing on, fluid ink long since sacrificed for her graphite pencil.

“If it’s that little, I can hold out for that long,” Spike said. Both understood the unspoken words.

Spike wondered where it had all gone wrong, but he knew the answer all too well. His best friend, the mare who was his big sister, had been friends with five other ponies. They had gone on many adventures across Equestria, sometimes adverting disaster, other times exploring the land for the thrill. Even as Twilight Sparkle became a Princess, they continued their journeys far and wide, with Twilight becoming the activist Princess, helping to bring justice to the smaller villages and towns of Equestria that hadn’t seen a Princess in centuries.

Undoing the toxic mentality of Our Town and eventually reforming the leader of Our Town had been one of Twilight’s proudest achievements. Yet it hadn’t been enough. Equestria had gone many centuries with only a few blips to its history. Yet in the span of a few years, the land had suffered from an Eternal Night that was cut short only after a twenty-four hour ordeal, the mad antics of a returned chaos god, and the magic-stealing destruction of an escaped prisoner of Tartarus.

Taken apart, the three national incidents, spaced together with several small-scale but still major emergencies had been remarkably brief and painless compared to what they could have been. Combined, however, there had been much festering trauma that Princess Luna had alerted the ponies of Equestria to a year ago, but had not been paid attention to in time.

The first sign had come from the North. The newly-returned Crystal Empire had enjoyed a cultural renaissance following its return, playing host to an Alicorn Princess, the Equestria Games, and the birth of the first recorded Alicorn infant in centuries. Yet Sombra’s reign and the loss of a millennia of history had left indelible scars on the psyches of the Crystal ponies. The Crystal Heart protected the Empire from the conditions of the North, so it was only when its power began to buckle that the Empire realised how cold it was truly beginning to get outside the protective dome.

Even then, Equestria could have potentially been saved. However, for every Our Town Twilight Sparkle and her friends had visited, there were a dozen more that they hadn’t, each with their own small problems. Predominantly populated with Earth ponies, the unexpected early winter and the bitter cold had left crops ruined, causing tempers to burst out into the open. When temperatures failed to warm up sufficiently with the scheduled Winter Wrap-Up Festival, the worst fears of everypony was confirmed: the Windigos had returned after years of hibernation.

“A-a-alm-m-most d-d-done,” Twilight said, interrupting Spike out of his thoughts. Even buried under several blankets and with her own natural resiliency to cold, Twilight still looked more blue than purple. Even the heat of Spike’s flame didn’t seem enough to keep her warmed up.

“Soon,” Spike grunted, feeling the first sensations of cold nibbling in at his scales. It would take an even greater cold than this to do him in, but he didn’t expect to see the end of the month. The sun and moon had long since vanished under the cloud cover generated by the Windigos, leaving only a perpetual twilight. He didn’t know what had happened to the Princess he considered his mother. Perhaps his last action would be sending a letter to her.

Minutes passed. Spike winced, holding in tears that threatened to drop lest they turn to ice within seconds. The bubble that Twilight Sparkle had cast around him and her was supposed to let heat in and retain heat, all while recycling respired air for fresh oxygen, but the power of the Windigos had grown so strong even the magic of Alicorns was insufficient. Had Twilight Sparkle lacked a horn, this would have been over already. Her mouth was chattering too much to hold a pencil, and her hooves were beginning to turn black. Magic manipulated by a horn had a finer grasp, and Twilight Sparkle was writing for the dear lives of the every being on the planet.

“Issover,” Twilight mumbled, pencil dropping with the lightest of tapping sounds, and she rolled up the scroll she had written. “J-just n-need to s-s-s-“

Spike brought a claw up to her lips. He didn’t want his last memories of Twilight alive to be of her weak and stuttering. Better to leave her some dignity in death. “Yes,” Spike said. “I’ve got it.”

Grabbing the scroll, Spike concentrated, changing the magical nature of his ethereal fire. Sucking in a deep breath, he let out a green flame. The scroll disappeared, not burned to ash, but off into a different point of space. If Twilight’s creation had worked – no, not it, it had to work – then it would be sent into a different point of time, too. It was the last letter Spike would ever deliver to his mom, and yet also his first.

Time Magic was a finicky thing, and only one pony alive had ever been able to really improve on the works left behind by Star Swirl the Bearded, the last true master of Time Magic. Sadly, that unicorn had died in the early days after passing along some of her knowledge on Chronomancy, but Twilight Sparkle held a belief that she was the key to fixing things. After all, while Twilight had become the Princess of Friendship for the brief time before things such as royal titles became irrelevant, she had come into power in an established system. The other had organised her own town. She hadn’t lacked for egomania at the time, and her concept of friendship had been twisted, but she had truly united a ragtag disparate group of ponies who had held together with common bonds even after she had been exposed for a fraud. Twilight had hoped that in a different timeline, she could heal the wounded psyches of the pony masses where Twilight had failed.

Spike thought it irrational. Then again, before this had all started, he would never have believed in something as cliché as the Elements of Magic, either. It had to work.

“I-it’s a-a-a-all up to you now,” Twilight stuttered, before her voice suddenly gained crystal clarity for the last words she ever spoke, “I hope you do a better job than I did, Starlight Glimmer.” With that, she slumped over into Spikes waiting arms.

It was unfair, Spike thought to himself. Twilight Sparkle had been the most brilliant of minds, and a unifier of ponies and other species alike. Her last words should have been something noble, a testament to a long life of success. Instead, she was dying here, on top of a remote volcano, her last words unrecorded and not even the chance for a burial, the ground already frozen solid. What was more, her very life from the day of the Sonic Rainboom was about to be erased.

“I hope you do it, Starlight,” Spike whispered to himself as he huddled his big sister, now smaller than him in close, attempting to keep her alive just a little bit longer. Guilt ate away at him over his selfishness, wishing to prolong the sound of her heartbeat even if it prolonged her pain. “You probably can’t hear me, but please. Please, do it.” As the protective bubble disappeared, he couldn’t tell if it was snow melting on his face or if tears were dripping down his cheeks.