The lonely figure drifted amid the lifeless rooms.

Ze stumbled occasionally. Ze was asymmetric at the moment and finding balancing quite tricky.

Ze righted hirself and lumbered on. Walking helped hir think, and ze had been thinking a long time. Ze and hir thoughts, alone together in the castle.

Ze passed by abandoned dining halls where even the termites hadn’t come to eat in almost a century, past dusty lecture halls where the broken-down remnants of chalkboard erasings had settled into the narrow pores of everything, through corridors with dented walls and paintings that hung crooked or had fallen, and up and down crumbling staircases, trailing dirt and soil behind.

Ze drifted onward…

...bumping against the walls now and then….

There were never going to be any new books.

---

All of the Universe runs on Law. There are many theories why this is so, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. For example, many people credit a higher Creator as the Lawmaker, but this raises the question of whether He is also the Judge and what grounds there are for Appeal. One also has to wonder whether His laws produce unintended consequences—perhaps black markets in negentropy, well-hidden beyond some event horizon.

Most of the Universe runs on Physical Law. These laws are simple and natural, and so they are studied by people with complicated minds and a robust fear of going outside. They involve ohms, inverse squares, and fiddly little diagrams sketched neatly onto sheets of paper made of lots of little gridlines. Physical laws are precise, specific, and rigid, and leave little to the imagination. This is probably a good thing. If the Laws were less reliable, the greater uncertainty would raise interest rates, thereby reducing economic growth. Thus it may be supposed that the Creator is sensitive to the value of His Stock Options.

Whether the Creation has any Shareholders is unknown, although most religions promise Dividends to those who attend the regular meetings. Questions are encouraged, but, like actual shareholder meetings, answers are always long and boring and rarely reveal much about how the Company is really run.

There is one planet in one solar system in one galaxy that does not run on Physical Law. It runs on Economic Law, the key distinction being that Economic Law is more a set of guidelines.

This planet used to run on Physical Law. It used to, but it does not anymore. This phase shift, for lack of a better term, may have had something to do with the greater volatility induced by rapid technological growth on this planet, where chemicals became cells, cells became animals, and animals became little gods. The result of the rapid growth was a big Boom, an extraordinary reorganization of energy springing up on this wet planet seemingly out of nowhere, like mushrooms after a rain.

The Bust afterward was quite long, and deep, but at least there were no shareholder complaints, being that there were no more shareholders, and since the corporation responsible for the incident had said at its last meeting that its next project would resolve all shareholder complaints, this can be regarded as a success.

This planet is a lonely one. It is the only planet in its solar system. And it does not orbit its Sun but instead carries it along behind it. The Sun arcs every 24 hours like a yo-yo over the Earth, and it involves essentially the same mechanics. The holder of the Sun’s tether, an Alicorn called Princess Celestia, does her duty faithfully, although deep down she really wants to see what would happen if she tried a few tricks. She saw a yo-yo contest winner do a Reverse Slack Moebicide to take the grand prize and has been dying to try it ever since. The sad knowledge that every other pony would be dying if she did try it holds her back from doing anything more than a simple Around the World.

Her sister, Princess Luna, had been able to get away with more daring maneuvers, seeing as how the Moon was less imminently necessary for life. It had been fun sharing the sky with her sister. It had been good. It had worked. But there had been a falling out, there had been a fight, and Princess Celestia, perhaps to her misfortune, had won.

The princess’s power did not come from the Sun. And when her sister, cloaked in the anger and madness of Nightmare Moon, returned from the night sky with vengeance in her sharp terrible horn and fury smoldering in shadows around her dark hoofs, it was not the Sun she seized from her. And when Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia’s best and most faithful student, gathered the Elements of Harmony and defeated her, restoring Princess Celestia to the throne, it was not any celestial body that the throne represented. It was the One Bank. Or just the Bank, as it was often called, for the same reason that Princess Celestia was redundant. No pony ever felt the need to say “the hot fire” or “the unpopular debt collector.” Similarly, the Bank was just the Bank. There were other banks, in the sense of deposits and loans and so on. But every pony could hear the capital letter of the Bank. There was something almost magical about it.

For this world does not run on Physical Law, and mere mass and light and ongoing thermonuclear fusion reactions have less power than silver and gold, if ponies believe it so. And they do believe it, because the value of their bits has wavered only rarely and briefly over the millennia of Princess Celestia’s reign. She manages their expectations with all the panache and sleight-of-hoof of a circus ringmaster and all the care and diligence of Head of Safety at a nuclear power plant.^[1]

^[1] And in keeping with the latter, she has an unhealthy penchant for donuts.

But it was Twilight Sparkle, a mortal pony, who had saved the world. And it was Twilight Sparkle who would have to do it again.

But Twilight Sparkle did not understand the source and nature of her power. She had read many books, and reread them, and taken very detailed notes—copies of her notes fetched a high premium among the graduate students in economics at the great university in Canterlot for decades after she left—but her books taught her nothing that was not obvious. For what ran the least on Law was the minds of her fellow ponies. Indeed they seemed to positively revel in ignoring and defying it. Mathematical certainty meant nothing to a mare doing her weekly scratchcard. The undeniable fact of scarcity melted in the heat of the scorn of a stallion who liked his long showers but did not like his utility rates, not one bit.

In fact, “not one bit” was his expressed willingness to pay to the head of the local water supply authority, who suggested in turn that he take it up with Princess Celestia herself, who had final, if typically delegated approval over rate changes. This worked to end the matter, because while sheer logic might be defied without consequence, Princess Celestia would not be. And she had the most peculiar habit of smiling, and listening with grave concern, and making such simple logical sense in expressing her own point of view that the complainant would usually stumble out of her office with a vague sense of unease, having come away with the impression of talking to a brick wall who was also their mother. Hoofwritten notes for tyranny-defying speeches inevitably ended up in a conveniently located wastebasket that got emptied after every meeting.

Princess Celestia was very good at her job.

Twilight Sparkle was not. Because when she met with the complainant first, she ended up ranting to him about the price system until he asked to speak to her manager. Which is why the story is about her and not the all-powerful princess. It’s much more interesting this way.

Oh, Twilight Sparkle was good at her job. Rather worryingly good, actually. She was good at it in the way that a woodpecker is good at drilling holes into a tree. When exhaustion forced her to sleep, she slept fitfully, like a vampire on gas at the dentist: unable to resist her body’s chemistry, but quite certain she was doing something wrong.

Twilight Sparkle drove herself in part because she suspected that Princess Celestia might have been looking for a successor. Yet Twilight Sparkle as princess would have been, quite literally, a catastrophe of astronomical proportions.

Fortunately, Princess Celestia, being immortal, had time to wait. Time for Twilight Sparkle to grow.

This story takes place in the dead of the coldest winter Ponyville had seen in a thousand years. It was not a time for anything to grow. It was a time for hard tests and painful consequences, which is why it might be surprising to learn that Princess Celestia had nothing to do with it and was quite unaware of the whole thing.

---

But this story does not begin with Twilight Sparkle. It begins, instead, with another of Princess Celestia’s loyal and most faithful students, hundreds of years ago. When Ponyville wasn’t even the seed of an idea in the mind of Frankie Knight, and the Everfree Forest hadn’t got its name and was instead called the Equestria National Park…..

…The story starts when Princess Luna returns to the park for the first time in over a thousand years and sees something entirely unexpected.

But the first chapter deals with something else. It deals with a certain cliff, and the caves under the cliff that overlook a cold and silent ocean.

It deals with the end of the time of the windigos who fled east, and what their last daughters chose to do about it.

---

A long mass of thin white clouds drifted toward the northeastern edge of Equestria, pushed along by a group of Pegasi at the back. As they went, the clouds began to fall apart.

Snow fell like a giant’s dandruff on the landscape. It came undone and drifted loosely through the air to add to the growing piles below, the clouds themselves flaking apart to coat the ground with snow. Snow fell like the price of an asset that somepony was desperately trying to get rid of.

The weather Pegasi did in fact have an excess of slushy water this year due to a budgetary snarl resulting from the Great Succession.^[2] Saving it for next year was not really an option since the quality of the water would just degrade in storage. In Equestria, water could not be saved for a rainy day.

^[2] Also called the Nightmare Moon incident. For the first time in a thousand years, the One Bank of Equestria failed to prevent a recession. It was brief but terrible, like kindergarteners in the school play.

The plan, developed by the eggheads in Cloudsdale, called for them to distribute the extra snow as equally as possible, geographically speaking, in the hopes that this would dilute the difficulties of melting the snow that would emerge during Winter Wrap-Up.^[3] The focus was speed: get the snow out, hit your precipitation numbers, and be back home in time for the New Year.

^[3] The seasons in Equestria have a tenacity to them. Like an object flung in a particular direction, they would continue on with the same inertia unless nudged by something magical. It was in fact possible for Equestria to have a winter that lasted a thousand years, and they didn’t want to try it again.

Downdraft thought this plan was stupid. Different geographies and ecosystems handled snow differently, and you could not infer from this as to how they handled extra snow. She’d explained this at the open forum with charts and graphs and phrases like “extrapolating beyond the data” and “literally the most basic fallacy, like I’m talking to a bunch of bird-brains, OH SHUT UP THAT’S NOT SPECIESIST THERE AREN’T EVEN ANY BIRDS HERE oh sorry Miss Nuthatch, I didn’t see you—no, you do have a right to be here, I understand how this pertains to you…I’m sure your brain is fantastic, look some of my best friends are birds—WHAT HOW IS THAT MORE SPECIESIST?” until her flight commander dragged her off the stage.

Bloody politics, that’s what it was. Because it would be favoring some ecosystems over others to give them more living water. So they were going to flood the basins and drench the grasslands when there were perfectly good mountains that weren’t doing snapple; the mountain goats would lick that s#%& all day and not say boo.

She’d been so mad that she’d eaten through the entire supply of Sugarcube Corner cupcakes that her friend Rainbow Dash had sent her. Those things were like crack. Seriously, the sugar made her shake. And she kept looking at the snow and thinking it was frosting.

So they’d set off on their stupid mission to ruin Equestria’s water supply and maybe drown a koala. Downdraft flew ahead of her team, occasionally doubling back to give the mass of clouds they were towing an experimental lick.

Then things got even stupider, because of course it wasn’t just the flight teams that were strained to the limit, having to push more water on longer flight paths, but the ponies at the cloud packaging plant must’ve been overworked as well, since one of Downdraft’s team’s clouds burst apart, scattering its contents into the atmosphere. Unable to afford to let precious living water^[4] be lost, they had to stop everything until they’d gathered up every errant snowflake they could find.

^[4] Water can die. Maybe it’s something it learned from us. In any case, the effort to revive completely dead water, like they had tried in Caliponia, was not worth the cost. Instead, Equestria relied on recycled water that hadn’t completely died and only needed to be refreshed thereafter. It was impossible, however, to completely refresh the water, so Downdraft and her team were working with water that was only 80% or so alive, which was lower than ever. The consequences, like more frequent cloud-bursting accidents, were predictable and, in Downdraft’s increasingly agitated opinion, almost not worth the trouble of cleaning up.

They packed up the clouds in a denser formation after that, which slowed them down. And the going after that was even harder than it should have been because the path they had to fly wasn’t making the best use of the wind, and if another cloud burst she’d fly straight back to Cloudsdale and start killing ponies; they’d call her the Cloud Killer, and she’d be voted a national hero.

The December sun grew paler over the days, appearing almost sickly in how white it was, and Downdraft kept an uneasy eye on it as she led her team northeast.

On what should have been the last morning, she was watching the Sun struggle to pull itself above the horizon. Downdraft flew back to her team, spiraling down from above and matching their velocity as they pushed the mass of clouds forward.

“Report,” she coughed.

“We’ve been driving these snowclouds for an hour now,” Scud said, snapping a salute. The moonlight shone off his reflective vest. The phrase “Give it to them soft and fluffy!” was written in ink on his vest, which made her smile, and she decided to misfile the report when she wrote him up for it. “We’re supposed to stop at the northeastern edge and work backwards, spreading the snow away from the coast.”

By northeastern edge, he meant the snow northeastern edge. The snow wasn’t actually allowed to reach all the way to the coast. “Or it could fall into the ocean,” sighed Downdraft. And to think she’d hoped at the start that it might have been possible to be home in time to spend Hearth’s Warming Eve with her husband. They’d missed the last three, a common peril when you were both weather pegasi. They’d been stupid enough to laugh about it together when they were still dating. It had been romantic: the waiting, the uncertainty.

He’d left out milk and cookies for her last year, and she’d loved him for it (and eaten the entire plate), but, like, come on.

“I know we’re behind on time, but—”

“You do realize we’re not getting paid overtime for further delays,” Downdraft said. “It’ll take hours just to allocate the snow the way they want. The accident wasn’t our fault; they rush the cloudmaking with rubbish water and then expect us to spread it like it’s the finest ganache on a wedding cake. Besides, it’s freezing,” she added, shivering.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I was scouting ahead. The whole area’s been hit with at least one storm of clouds already, maybe two. I think some teams misread their flight paths or got off course. The bears around here will be hibernating till July.” Because of course that would get screwed up too. I’m going to start a public awareness campaign: If One Thing Goes Wrong, Then Everything Does. “I’ll send somepony to check out the geographic northeastern edge. I mean, they want us to spread it evenly, right? There’s got to be some rabbits around there who’ve never seen snow.”

“We’re not allowed to dump it on the cliffs. There could be caves, and snow could get trapped in them. And even if there’s a beach, water could still fall into the ocean.”

We’re talking drops of waste in an ocean of stupidity from back home. “I didn’t say we dump on the cliffs. But the structural integrities of the clouds are compromised. There’s nothing we can do if they fall apart again.”

“Got it.”

“Then let’s push.”

They touched their hoofs to the cloud and added their weight to the drift. Flying with or above the clouds, Downdraft didn’t need to worry about getting snowed on. But temperature went down as altitude went up, so she was heavily wrapped in a scarf, coat, and hat. Only her hoofs had to remain naked so as to properly massage the clouds in order to keep the water in them from freezing completely, and the only mercy was how swiftly her hoofs were numbed by the burning cold of the snowcloud.

A scout came twisting through the sky, wearing a white face mask. “Sea-edge spotted! We’ll hit the cliffs in three hours.”

Downdraft shook her head. It was a myth that you could catch disease from the breeze by the dead ocean. But there was no harm in her team wearing face masks, so it was pointless to tell them not to.

More and more Pegasi peeled off the back line to fly through the cloud, breaking it up. The pieces began falling faster, crumbling apart into snow as they tumbled toward earth. As a result, the remaining Pegasi driving the cloud didn't lose speed.

“I’m going up,” Downdraft said. “Hold velocity steady. Don’t do a full drop until my word.” With a pump of her wings she was up and over the cloud, streaking past it until the terrifying sight of the ocean was all that was before her. Lifeless and gray, it was eerily still.

Her wings pounded against the air while she hovered in place, studying the geography to see how the snow would settle. Deciding she needed a better view, she saw the edge of the coast below and dived toward it.

It was weird. All the vegetation just stopped in an uneven semicircle before the cliff. It was like a mouth had risen up from the edge of the dead water and taken a bite out of the forest.

She kept flying, studying the unfamiliar geography with an ill feeling.

“Captain!” Lieutenant Stratum above her screamed. “Captain, pull back!”

Downdraft brought herself to a screeching halt. Sweet Celestia! She had nearly gone over the edge of the coast! No telling what would have happened to her if she had tried to fly over the ocean itself. Sheared in half by a sudden spike of dead water? Snatched by some enormous monster? She didn’t want to think about it.

Lieutenant Stratum caught up with her. “Are you okay?” she asked worriedly. “You nearly went over.”

“Dust the cliffs,” Downdraft said, shaking violently. It came out in her voice and made her sound like she was much colder than she was. In fact, her heart was pumping so hard that her ears were burning. “Make low flights, hit those formations there, get it piled up everywhere short of the beach. See those weird switchback-like formations connecting the caves under the cliff there? Get them too, just make low sweeps so water doesn’t get in the caves. It’ll help us spread out the snow. Don’t go over the edge, obviously.”

“Sure, Downie. That was a close call, huh?”

“Then we’ll head west if we have any leftovers and see if the griffons in the area can stand any more snow,” Downdraft said, pointedly ignoring the question a second time.

Celestia and Bank above, the ocean scared her. Experiments had shown that you could bring a container of dead water right up to the doors of the Bank and the water wouldn’t even twitch in the direction of the Numeraire.^[5] And things lived in it! Though lived wasn’t the right word. They were an in-between case, like a virus, if viruses were twenty feet tall and had tentacles and could whip them fast and hard enough to slice a boat in half.

^[5] They hadn’t tried bringing the dead water inside the Bank. They weren’t insane. That was Discord levels of crazy. Even Nightmare Moon might not have done it.

“Is it alright to leave so much snow here?” Stratum asked. She kept glancing nervously at the dead, black ocean under them. It oozed at the edges of the rock beach like some acidic beast slowly eating its way to the cliff.

Downdraft flicked her wings. “Nothing lives down there. The edges of Equestria are empty, and not just because of the dead ocean. The Bank pulls everything toward it. Anything still here is too small to care or doesn’t want to be with the rest of us. Let them enjoy the snow, I say, while the rest of us huddle up in our own homes.”

Downdraft gave Stratum a bracing slap on the shoulder, mostly to calm her own nerves. “Come on, Strat. Let’s get back to the cloud. How’re things going with your boyfriend? What’s his name again? Dirty?”

“It’s Mulch, and he’s an Earth Pony, and he’s super shy and really nervous about coming to Cloudsdale so please don’t be yourself at the New Year party.”

“I solemnly promise to embarrass you as much as possible,” said Downdraft, grinning as they flew away from the dead ocean. Sweet Celestia, it felt good to fly away from the dead ocean. She wanted to fly all the way to the Bank and give it a hug and never leave.

Above the tired cliffs, a tight formation of clouds drifted into place. By the afternoon, rocks dotted a snowy plain like decorations on a white cake.

It was a bad winter, and it was only going to get worse.

---

The cliff is hard to see under all the snow. Come back to yesterday with me, and let’s look at it before Downdraft and her team dusted it so thickly.

Yesterday, in the sunlight, it seems to be an ordinary cliff, rocky and cold and mostly empty, no different from any of the other cliffs you could find along the edge of the northeastern stretch of Equestria.

Under the cliff is a rock beach. There used to be more of it; the dead ocean has crept up and swallowed more and more of the shoreline over the last millennium. The rocks that remain, instead of being rounded by lapping waves and the tide, are broken down from centuries of contact with the dead water. The results are rocks that ooze under pressure, secreting their gooey innards like tubes of toothpaste. A film of mysterious slime has built up on them. It seems to have no source, like maggots on rotting meat, and you might begin to suspect that the rocks are losing their form altogether, falling apart into something less than liquid out of sheer apathy. As they do, they seem to take on many of the qualities of dead water.

Walking along the beach, each step is an effort. Each is a little more exhausting than you expected from the last.

Isn’t it easier to just give up…?

Turn away from the sight of the dead sea.

See where roads have been dug out of the cliffside. Switchbacks zig and zag along the rockface, running from the beach to the cliff, connecting all the caves, traveling left and right via up and down. If this were a painting, you might expect to see someone walking upside-down under one of them only to emerge elsewhere right-side-up.

But nothing walks along the switchbacks. Nothing comes out of the caves.

The sun moves over the cliff, light glinting off the white mica and making the quartz glitter, reflecting in brilliant sparks where it touches nuggets of pink garnet—but none of these shine as brilliantly as the tourmaline—and dips down toward the horizon. Now you see what is interesting about this cliff. You see how, at the northeastern edge of Equestria, the sun would never cast its light directly on the caves thanks to the way the cliff hangs over them and covers them always in shadow.

The moon takes its turn in the sky, and the stars come out to keep it company, twinkling like the stones had when the sunlight caught them just right.

It’s night now. You were safer during the day.

A cold wind tickles the back of your neck.

Hold very still. Especially your breath: hold it in. Only move when the air is utterly still. This means that you cannot move and breathe at the same time.

Look at the protective curve of the cliff over the caves. See how it hides in shadow anything that might emerge.

Don’t shiver. They can hear you shivering.

That is how you must run: in bursts, using the stillness to move, but also to breathe. You do not know when the wind will blow again.

If you hold very still, you may be safe.

...This is what the animals in the forest will tell you to do, speaking with their teeth clenched as if afraid to let any air escape—and they will not speak at all if the wind is blowing. And long ago, they would have been right. But nowadays, the ocean creeps up the beach, the sun’s eye burns everlong, the One Bank remains in its dayside awake…

Now there is only one left. And it is evident that she is no huntress.

Hold still, and keep a keen eye on a particular cave, by a particular switchback. She’s too thin for you to see her slip out of the cave, a mere shape against the darkness, but—there! That light where the moon’s glow touches the switchback! Look!—how her pale blue form glitters like ice in the moonlight, how her skin seems almost translucent with shades of white under the waves of blue; see how her skin sticks to her skin, stretches across her ribs so tight that you can count each one, how it clings to her knees, her jaw!

You can see her skeleton through her skin and are amazed she can even make the climb to the top of the cliff. But she knows that she can get skinnier still, because she watched it happen to her mother.

Wind rushes down from somewhere, streaming between the rocks, flicking strands of her blueish white mane. The wind makes a faint sighing noise. The dead sea is undisturbed.

Look! She’s at the top of the cliff, a pale glittering figure with hints of blue and bone showing as the moonlight passes over her. Her legs reach out toward the dead sea…

...beseeching? The dead ocean doesn’t harken to any voice.

What could she possibly be doing?

---

Winnette strained her limbs further until they reached well past the edge of the cliff, like she was trying to stretch them to the horizon. She’d memorized the words of the spell she’d read in her mother’s journal, including the new changes Winnette had made; she recited them now.

“I call to the winds from far away,
To my womb, and to my grave,
To the storm, and the calm within,
To the place where windigos end,
I call for the return of times that were,
When ice and snow and hail ruled all.”

Was that a new breeze that tickled the top of her head? Was the air colder, or was that just her imagination?

“I call not for myself, but for order’s reign,
The sun and the moon to be unchained,
Water to revive, the wind’s howl be heard,
And answered by life’s unspoken word.”

Her ears strained. Yes—that rushing sound had to be wind gathering on the horizon. It would be slow, it would be sluggish, since it was making its way across the dead ocean. And the temperature was certainly dropping. Those white sparks she saw when her eyes squinted from concentration had to be crystals of ice, forming in the air from the sheer power of her words.

Winnette squeezed her eyes shut, straining with every fiber of her being, wavering on the edge of the cliff as she reached forward. “I call on the stars to give me favor! By the sign of my mother that you gave her! Save us, eyes of the galactic swirl, bring us wind! Freeze this world!”

Her legs stretched so far forward that she lost her balance and pitched over the edge of the cliff. She fell, grunting when she landed on the switchback a few feet below, the breath driven out of her lungs. It wasn’t that far of a fall, but there wasn’t any fat to shield her bones. Hip and knee and shoulder all smarted, sending arrhythmical throbs of pain through her body, while she lay on the ground for a while, breathing hard.

The air didn’t feel even a little bit colder.

Next Chapter: 2. Wyna, Welga, and Winnette Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 41 Minutes