Fanfic / Winter Storm

She's an immortal princess of love. He's a near-immortal living crystal. Together, they fight Time.

A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fanfic by Snake Staff, of Friendship Is Grievous fame. Centuries in the future, the immortal and benevolent Princess Mi Amore Cadenza rules over the Crystal Empire. At her side, her true love and very mortal Prince Shining Armor, who has been cheating death in an imperfect crystal body to remain with his wife. The price of immortality takes the toll on both of the rulers, and amidst the Crystal Empire’s hosting of the Equestrian Peace Conference, Cadance seeks a permanent solution to their mortal dilemma. With dark machinations in motion, will Cadance be able to ensure that her beloved Shining never leaves her?

Well, yeah. Just barely. The sequel story, Winter Storm, continues twenty years after the first. Cadance still struggles to complete her quest to restore Shining to life, but she no longer has all the time in the world to complete her designs. When Celestia is called away to mediate another country’s territorial dispute, Cadance makes one last effort to save her husband from his unseen guillotine, but finds losing him may be the least of her worries in the coming days.

The continuity also features a prequel, a short book centered around Celestia and exploring what made her into the Princess we see in the story.

The first, the prequel, and the second stories are complete, with the final chapter in the trilogy coming further down the line. They can be found here, here, and here, respectively.

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Together Forever

Together Forever List:

• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Despite being several generations removed, Cadance and Shining make sure to playfully tease their most recent descendant of her childhood as she brings her husband and child for a visit.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: After Cadance’s Roaring Rampage of Revenge is stopped and Celestia knows she’ll never let Shining’s attempted assassination slide, she offers this as an alternative to killing her niece. The deal forces Cadance to never reveal what happened this night nor seek revenge, to allow Celestia to euthanize Shining should Cadance fail to revive him, and most disturbingly, surrender any children she would have with Shining so Celestia could raise them.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: At least half of the Equestrian Royal Family has significant mental issues. Twilight manages to stay the sanest and most upbeat, while Luna seems to have sorted through her own quite some time ago.
• Dark Fic: Notable because while the meat of the story is as upbeat as the series it’s based on, a few moments explore into the dark implications of past events, and the destructive fight scenes don’t shy away from the details.
• Emperor Scientist / Mad Scientist: King Sombra was both in his reign centuries ago, both ruling over the Crystal Empire with an iron hoof and conducting twisted experiments in dark magic below his castle. Cadance uncovers his work when she liberates the country, and is rightfully disgusted, but it turns out that his research was the key to ensuring that her Shining Armor would never perish.
• Eternal Love: Cadance’s ultimate goal is to preserve her relationship with her mortal husband.
• Evil-Detecting Baby: Shining Armor is anything but evil, despite the nature of the ritual that gave him his long life. However, when seeing his great-great-grandpa in the flesh (or in the gemstone), his infant nephew starts crying in fear at seeing the walking statue approach his stroller. Extra painful for Shining, who’s constantly aware he’s “an abomination.”
• Geas: Twice.
  • First with Lady Rose Quartz, cast by Celestia to prevent her from revealing the true culprit behind Shining's near-death. She eventually breaks hers under duress, the backlash of which leads her in a vegetative state.
  • How Celestia forces Cadance to agree to her Offer she can't refuse. She caused Rose Quartz to break her own and witnessed the consequences, so Cadance knows what's at stake.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Granted, there’s light gray and dark gray, but both sides have a point and admit to using morally questionable tactics. Cadance dwells in necromancy (though she hates that term) and eventually steals medical corpses to experiment on, while Celestia goes further and attempts assassination to try to ensure the Crystal Empire’s safetly. Notably, Celestia has no objections to Cadance’s using dark magic to revive Shining, as long as it furthers another of her plans.
• Happily Married: Cadance and Shining Armor’s love is so strong it’s continued over centuries, and despite the hardships and argument they have, they never once doubt their true devotion to each other.
• Heel–Face Turn: Sombra claims to have gone this way after centuries of wandering as a spirit, though Cadance suspects he’s lying. At any rate, she accepts his advice, which turned out to be completely accurate.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Cadance uses this reasoning to justify using the unethical work Sombra has recorded, plus stealing corpses (that were already donated to science) for her own experiments.
  • Celestia uses this justification as well, regarding her plans to have Shining Armor killed.
• Immortality: Both the central theme and the central conflict of the story. All alicorns are ageless, near unkillable, and natural leaders, which is quite a problem when the alicorn Cadance falls in love with the mortal Shining Armor. Rather than be forced to lose Shining Armor to the inevitable, she forces immortality on Shining Armor, who would accept it if it means he could stay with his beloved. The rest of the story involves her search to replace his imperfect immortality with a perfected solution.
• Immortality Hurts: Not physically, mind you, but as an imperfect Living Statue, his sense perception is a shadow of what it used to be. This means whenever he sees a pair of lovers embrace or watches a subject eat a delicious snack, he’s constantly reminded of the sensations he’s unable to feel any more.
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: Surprisingly for a Cadance story, nothing to do with changelings. One of the clauses of the “deal” Celestia strikes with Cadance is that she is to forfeit any children she has with Shining Armor. Since they’re guaranteed to be alicorns, Celestia plans to raise them to be enlightened rulers that would eventually come to lead all mortal nations, similar to how Twilight was nurtured by herself.
• Irony: A potentially nation-shattering confrontation suddenly occurs during a peace conference.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Shining Armor is less than pleased at his immortality accommodations, but he simply loves Cadance enough that he’ll willingly shoulder any burden so she’ll keep her true love alive.
  • Eventually, used against him. Part of the charm spell that almost ensures his suicide involved convincing him that the only way Cadance can truly be happy is to let him go and find a new love, which she’ll never do when he’s alive.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Shining Armor might be a centuries-old, clinically depressed, living statue, and Twilight a similarly-aged respectable and wise alicorn princess, but that doesn’t stop the two from engaging in the silly play and pillow fights they’ve had in their youth.
• Knight Templar: Celestia. She’ll gladly sacrifice lives now as long as it ensues the loss of more lives later down the line, even if those potential lives saved may not have been in mortal danger.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Shining Armor has become this for Cadance, since neither of them are sure if Cadance would emotionally survive Shining’s death. This means Shining’s alive well past the time he should be dead, and Cadance hostile to any insinuation that she needs to let go and recognizes her irrationality. Other characters point out how unhealthy her devotion is, and eventually take it upon themselves to remove that crutch.
• Living Statue: How Shining Armor artificially extends his life. He’s inhabiting a perfect replica of his young body made of crystal, and then his soul is bound into and animates the statue. It keeps him alive, but he greatly longs for the joys of living, like being able to feel his wife’s mane or enjoy a delicious meal.
• Love Hurts: Another huge theme the story explores. Cadance and Shining Armor’s century long love is taking it’s toll, but they power through in the hope that their situation will improve.
• The Men First: For all her flaws, Celestia tells the truth when she says her life goal is to keep as many people alive as possible. So when she knows Cadance seeks revenge, she chooses her isolated summer home to make her stand and evacuates all the staff and guards.
• Mercy Kill: Shining Armor is miserable being forced to live far past his natural lifespan, so Celestia sees her plan to eliminate him this way. Lady Rose Quartz seemingly has this idea as well, but since in her introduction she introduces her son as a perfect bachelor, it’s likely she had ulterior motives for seeing Cadance widowed..
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Thanks to their natural toughness, Healing Factor, and incredible power, alicorns outright shrug off most damage and recover quickly from what breaks through. However, they can be killed, especially by a similarly-powerful entity.
• The Pollyanna: Twilight, in both stories, still remains relatively innocent and idealistic despite the passage of centuries. Cadance and Celestia are both glad for her good cheer, so seek to limit her exposure to the nastiness of politics as much as possible.
• Poor Communication Kills: Turns out, Celestia doesn’t mind, and even encourages Cadance to continue her efforts to create Shining Armor a new body. If only she knew that before she tried to euthanize Shining Armor, and irreparably damaged her relationship with Cadance.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Shining Armor is a unique example in that he’s using forsaking his own soul, for the sake of his wife, in order to artificially extend his lifespan, by inhabiting a Living Statue enabled by dark magic.
• Roaring Rampageof Revenge: When Cadance finds out Celestia was behind Rose Quartz’s attempted assassination of Shining Armor, she doesn’t not take it well. Her first act when she finds Celestia is to half-demolish her summer home, and it only gets more intense from there.
• The Scapegoat: Played With. Lady Rose Quartz very much wanted Shining Armor retired so that her son could marry into the throne, and actually did attempt to ensure that came to pass. So nobody doubts her guilt and her punishment of immediate execution. However, it was Celestia who gave her the means to do so, and the extra push.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Pick an alicorn princess. Any alicorn princess. This trope describes them. However, when Cadance confronts Celestia, she drops the silk before Celestia does.
• Time Skip: The story is set over four hundred years after the main series, which everyone but the immortal cast having passed away.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Cadance and Shining. Shining’s still his original size, which matched Cadance’s, but her alicorn status meant she eventually grew to almost Celestia’s size. Some humor arises from the odd positions they need to enter in order to cuddle how they like to.
• Universally Beloved Leader: All the alicorn princesses are still adored by their subjects, and Cadance even expresses concern that she could get away with too much because the public is unwilling to challenge their leaders. The problem is that love doesn’t always extend to Shining Armor in his current state.
• Unstoppable Rage: A defining trait of alicorns when they’re pushed over the edge emotionally. The story emphasizes how the level of destruction they can wreak can render whole areas uninhabitable. Eventually, Cadance unleashes hers upon Celestia.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Cadance truly loves Shining Armor, and woe betide to anyone who tries to make her let him go. That includes Celestia.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Celestia.

Winter Storm (Warning: Spoilers for the First Story)

Winter Storm Trope List:

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Once again, Sombra manages to take over the Crystal Empire, forcing Celestia and Luna to take the fight north to depose him.
• Artificial Human: 'Pony' in this case. Cadance's hopeful solution to replace Shining Armor's imperfect immortal body is to make him a new, living alicorn body, but she's been having no success after centuries of research. She finally succeeds in creating the body thanks to a healthy dose of The Power of Love.
• Baby Factory: Cadance accuses of Celestia's contract of "turning your own niece into a baby factory." Celestia can muster no real counter argument.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Well, one of them, anyway. Celesta still survives both Sombra and Cadance on the verge of killing her, with her Geas on her niece intact, and having manipulated Shining Armor into being open to the idea of surrendering their child to her at birth. Her victory is somewhat Pyrrhic, as Princess Celestia is only a fraction of her strength before. With Cadance's emotional damage worsening, she needs to tread carefully to avoid making her adversarial niece feel like she has nothing left to lose, because Cadance could easily destroy Celestia's reputation and take her elder with her as she dies.
• Bait-and-Switch: The story seemed to revolve around Cadance’s attempts to escape the vice Celestia has her placed in and and create a permanent solution to keeping Shining alive, but Shining Armor gets his body halfway through and Celestia isn’t even the main villain.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Celestia may use certain extreme methods and has developed quite the ego, but she’s very sincere in her desire to protect as many lives as possible and her ultimate plan uses very benign methods. She’s practically as morally upstanding as her canon incarnation compared to what Sombra is planning for the world.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Why Cadance is spared by Sombra and the Changeling Queen. They detect her very-early pregnancy, and can’t resist the idea of raising their own alicorn Tyke-Bomb to rule the world. They cheerfully point out they’ll kill her after she delivers her baby, though.
• Did You Just Have Sex?: Everyone they encounter could tell what the first activity the Royal Couple performed once Shining received his new alicorn body.
• Distressed Dude: Shining Armor can’t catch a break, even centuries later. Not only is Celestia threatening to euthanize him should Cadance fail to craft him a new body, but even once he fully returns to life, he gets possessed by Sombra.
• Demonic Possession: There’s a reason why Sombra helped ensure Shining Armor was restored in a shiny new alicorn vessel. After all, he only has a few weeks to start to learn what it’s like to live again, and it wouldn’t take much to take control...
• Dramatic Irony: Anytime a character besides Cadance points out Celestia’s moral perfection and kindness rings hollow when considering the previous story.
• Evil All Along: Sombra. What a surprise.
• The Extremist Was Right: Celestia was actually right about Shining Armor being a weak point in the Crystal Empire’s defenses, as his dark-magically conjured body did end up attracting evil creatures. Specifically, Sombra.
• Golem: Shining Armor technically counts, but straighter examples find use by multiple characters, typically to act as disposable guards or minions.
• Happily Married:
  • Still the case with Shining Armor and Cadance, but this time they finally get to fully experience the “happily” portion.
    • Played a bit more tragically, yet heartwarmingly at the conclusion. Despite being furious with his wife for unwittingly allowing Sombra to return and start a brief reign of terror and murder, Shining Armor chooses to isolate himself to calm down. In the end, he still loves his wife, and dismisses the thought of divorce almost as soon as it crosses his mind.
  • We also see that this was the case with other alicorns. Twilight had married, lived a full life, and had kids with Flash Sentry centuries ago, Celestia and Luna had also done the same. Most importantly, they all mourned their loves and and moved on. In contrast, Cadance refused.
• Harmless Freezing: Luna ends up incapacitated during her fight with Sombra this way, courtesy of his windigo allies. However, that’s not even treated as more than a method of capture, even with her alicorn resilience.
• Hobbes Was Right: Celestia truly believes in this philosophy, which is why she hopes to create a world in which all heads of governments are alicorns, since they have the longevity and power to rise above simple “mortal” concerns. She’s had a very long life witnessing mortal leaders killing each other over foolish concerns, yet under her rulership Equestria has enjoyed nearly-permanent peace, so it’s hardly unfounded.
• Hope Spot: After centuries of hardship, denial, and depression, Cadance finally realizes her dream of restoring her beloved Shining Armor to life, and they can finally enjoy life together for a few wonderful months. However, she knows that won’t last, because her pregnancy announcement comes with the reminder of her bargain with Celestia, and even that is postponed by the current overthrow she unwittingly helped Sombra perform.
• Hypocrisy Nod: Cadance acknowledges how unfair it is to demand to know if Shining Armor is going behind her back to investigate his attempted assassination, at the same time hiding her complete knowledge of the event. It’s not like she has a choice, however, since she’s under the threat of a mind wipe should she reveal the truth.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Shining Armor’s new alicorn body is noted to be almost a full head taller than his wife’s, which she certainly intended. Quite a the switch after centuries of Shining being the shorter one in the relationship.
• Intimate Psychotherapy: For once, justified. A lot of Cadance and Shining Armor’s issues come from no longer being able to truly interact on a physical level, so once Shining gets his hot new alicorn vessel... Well, when the lovers emerge several hours later, Shining’s mindset has improved incredibly.
• Mana Drain: Sombra’s method of (eventually) killing Celestia involved siphoning her considerable magic reserves away, keeping her excruciating injuries in healing limbo for an extended period of time before even her natural recovery magic failed. After Sombra’s death, he ended up taking a lot of Celestia’s magic to the grave, so she survives, but nowhere near as strong as she was before.
• Malignant Plot Tumor: One criticism leveled at the work involves how, despite a proper build up, the Darker and Edgier conflict with Sombra and the changelings eclipses the earlier conflict between Cadance and Celestia, which was the initial draw. Part of this may simply be because the story started experienced longer periods between updates, making the final portion seem longer in comparison.
• Manipulative Bastard: Celestia proves her mastery by stringing Cadance along as she’s at her mercy, pretending to show no ill will to confuse the emotionally-unstable younger princess until the rest of the royals arrived.
• Murder by Inaction: Sombra disposes of the new Changeling Queen this way, by simply allowing her to be overpowered by her Beam-O-War with Luna. Since he correctly guessed she’d betray him eventually, Sombra simply acted first, by simply not acting.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Cadance admits that while she felt the pressure to find any solution to bring Shining back, she certainly shouldn’t have let Sombra so easily manipulate her and almost bring Equestria to ruin. She can hardly pick herself out of bed to visit the funerals of those slain in the battles, sensing that enough people know her own blame in the catastrophe. Yes, included her beloved Shining Armor.
• Never Recycle Your Schemes: Averted. The Changelings again kidnap and impersonate a princess in order to compromise a well-defended city, and it goes off without a hitch because the Queen actually bothered to learn Twilight’s special greeting with Cadance.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Twice.
  • Cadance revives Shining Armor... at the cost of borrowing energy from the Crystal heart, which temporarily weakens it just enough to let Sombra slip in.
  • Celestia as well, since her constant threat to finally put down Shining Armor made Cadance desperate enough to turn to Sombra's help, despite her every instinct saying no. Additionally, she recognizes that trying to Mercy Kill Shining was a mistake, since she irreparably destroyed her relationship with Cadance.
• One World Order: Celestia's ultimate goal, though through a hegemony instead of one single government.
• Pet the Dog: Despite easily being able to reveal the truth that Cadance unwittingly allowed Sombra to return and paint her rival as an unfit ruler, Celestia instead keeps that fact under wraps. Cadance muses that it might just be to avoid Cadance deciding she has nothing left to lose and reveal her aunt’s machinations, not just solely out of pity.
• The Power of Love:
  • The secret to finally creating Shining’s new body. Cadance made a plea to the Crystal Heart, and it donated a significant portion of its energy to transform her prepared specimen into an alicorn body fit for Shining. Since there’s so much love to be had in the Empire, even the sizeable amount of magic given regenerates in less than a day. Unfortunately, less than a day was all Sombra needed to slip back inside the empire.
  • Returns later. It’s the key to breaking Sombra’s possession of Shining Armor’s body, in a scene almost identical to how they saved the day during their wedding.
• Pregnant Badass: Cadance has her pregnancy confirmed a few weeks after Shining Armor’s ascension, whilst her badass credentials were firmly established before. It actually ends up saving Cadance’s life when she’s captured by Sombra and the Changeling Queen, because they decide they want an alicorn child of their own to raise as an Evil Overlord Junior.
• Sequel Hook: Get two for the price of one:
  • Celestia talks with Shining Armor while he’s still reeling from the scope of Cadance’s mistakes, and seems to convince him to voluntarily turn over his future alicorn child to her care.
  • Doubling as a Hope Spot, Cadance finally asks Twilight, the world’s leading magical research, for help in removing an unspecified geas.
• Spanner in the Works: But wait, there's more! Get the sequel hook double deal, and the author will throw in two spanners, absolutely free!
  • Sombra’s plans at world domination end up being this towards Celestia’s more benevolent method, since eventually it leaves Celestia critically injured at the mercy of Cadance. Celestia weasels her way out of this situation, but points for trying.
  • After the Near-Villain Victory, Sombra pays the price for letting the surviving changelings scurry away, since they spring her from her confinement in hopes she’ll kill Sombra.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To the The Great Alicorn Hunt. While both stories have a similar premise, Celestia attempts to create more alicorns, they are dramatically different in tone and its presentation of Princess Celestia. Here, Celestia is colder and her chessmaster traits are played to the extreme, whereas Alicorn Hunt presents Celestia as warmer and more down to Earth than canon due having moved away this. In both stories, creating alicorns is presented as being for the greater good, but in this story Celestia does this to take firmer control over mortals. In Alicorn Hunt, she and Luna hope to make everyone an Alicorn so that they can step back and allow ponies to govern themselves. The Great Alicorn Hunt takes place across Equestria in an alternate version of the series' present, Winter Storm and its predecessor primarily take place within the Crystal Empire in the distant future.
• Superior Species: Celestia believes alicorns to be superior to mortals. Unusual in that she still greatly values the lives of every creature, but she simply asserts that alicorns are the only ones who will have the agelessness and wisdom to lead nations properly, and that mortals will inevitably kill each other over “pointless” short-term goals. She’s also forgetting the times alicorns made huge blunders, including her own failures.
• Tautological Templar: Despite her typically-benevolent deeds and reasoning, Celestia still manages to fall into this. She reasons that alicorns are far superior to mortals at ruling, despite the fact that her sister went insane while ruling and she dismisses Cadance as too emotional for her own good. She also fully believes that any child raised by her would become the ideal leader for a hegemonic nation, yet she’s had at least one student (Sunset Shimmer) who fell into evil anyway. Still, she’s as determined as ever to ensure her master plan continues, no matter who suffers in the end.
• Time Skip: Another one from the last fanfic’s Time Skip, with this story set twenty more years after that.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian: Celestia gets very close to this without quite crossing the point of no return. Her ultimate goal is to create essentially a benevolent One World Order, by slowly and bloodlessly ensuring that an alicorn raised to be the perfect leader sits on every throne. The main moral qualm about this plan concerns how she’ll force Cadance to give up her children to become the “perfect rulers.”
• Unknown Rival: Shining remains unaware that Celestia was behind Rose Quartz's attempt on his life or that she might still execute him should Cadance's research fail to bear fruit. Cadance's Geas prevents her from revealing this to him. After the Sombra crisis is resolved he actually seems amenable to Celestia taking a role in upbringing their children given Cadance's current unstable state.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Cadance is the only one who is aware of Celestia’s ultimate desire of hegemonic alicorn domination of the planet, and even then, plus the methods she’s willing to take in the name of “protecting others.” For everyone else, Celestia is just as upstanding and benevolent as always.
• Villain Has a Point: For all her scheming, Celestia is very much correct how Cadance's Living Emotional Crutch relationship with her husband gives her a very exploitable flaw, which greatly detracts from her ability to make rational decisions as a state actor and as a person. Too bad Celestia raises this point specifically to convince Shining Armor that his future child should be turned over to her own care, since Cadance is too emotionally unfit for the responsibility of raising an immortal alicorn.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When Shining Armor knows exactly how Sombra was able to return by manipulating Cadance’s need to return himself to life, he drops a slap and storms off, something he’s ‘’never’’ done in centuries of marriage.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
  • Despite having the valid reason of keeping his enemies alive so that he can drain their magic, King Sombra keeps the ones who he isn’t planning on siphoning alive (or easily revivable) to torment the rest by or to admire his handiwork.
  • Not just limited to villains. When Celestia "forgives" Cadance for being about to kill her before she could be freed from Sombra's death machine, the battered younger alicorn demands she retract her kind demeanor and explains why she's a manipulative monster who deserves to die. In the end, that explanation gave enough time for the other royals to arrive, meaning Cadance now had witnesses to any regicide she might pull.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Celestia, while one of the more benevolent examples, still falls in this category. However, she’s nowhere near as extreme as Sombra, who mixes his claims to “liberate” ponykind from the alicorn’s stagnant rule with his propensity for conquering, murdering, and oppressing his future subjects.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Cadance gets so close to being able to get away with killing Celestia, freeing herself and her child from her Aunt, but she doesn’t follow through in time, and now her own unwitting part in Sombra’s return is exposed.

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"True love never dies."