Windigos



The Windigoes are minor antagonists of the series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Nature
According to Clover the Clever (the character Twilight Sparkle plays in the Hearth's Warming Eve play), Windigoes are malevolent "winter spirits that feed off fighting and hatred; the more hate the spirit feels, the colder things become". The feud between unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies gives windigoes power, which they use to turn the lands into an unlivable wintery wasteland. If ponies' hatred gets violent enough, windigoes can even freeze them in ice blocks.

The Windigoes look like ghostly and slightly translucent horses with glowing eyes. Only three of them are shown in the play, though this may not reflect their real numbers.

Role in the episode
The windigoes feature three times throughout the episode: at the conclusion of the grand summit, after the pony leaders' snowball fight, and at the cave that the ponies took as shelter.

In their first appearance, the three windigoes only look down onto the grand summit from a passage in the clouds with glowing blue eyes, but in their second and third appearances they wail and fly through the sky, generating a circle of clouds. They are eventually defeated by "the fire of friendship", a pink flame that takes the shape of a heart which was created in the play when Clover, Smart Cookie, and Pansy become friends.

Although they appear to burn to death, it is implied that they, or other members of their race, are still around in modern Equestria when one of their distinctive howls is heard through an open window when Rainbow Dash and Applejack start arguing about who has the responsibility of closing it. Interestingly enough, they have never threatened to return during any other arguments in the series (such as Applejack and Rarity in the episode Look Before You Sleep), so the howl may have been simply someone playing the sound effect used to simulate them in the play, as a way of breaking up Rainbow and Applejack's argument.

They also reappeared in Hearth Warming Eve Tail when Twilight read a story on the holiday to Starlight Glimmer to make her the importance of the holiday, she tell the story of a pony named Snowfall Frost at first they are just like the beginning of the episode they are just mentioned. But then during the last spirit song they appeared to sucessfully covered Equestria with snow, because Snowfall decided to erased that holiday, but after Snowfall realised the mistake she was going to make when she apologized she seen it was just a vision of what will happen if she erase the holiday, that make also Starlight realized how important it was and they will not come back.

Trivia

 * The name "Windigoes" are an allusion to the Wendigo, a malevolent cannibalistic Algonquian spirit strongly associated with the winter, the North, and coldness, as well as with famine and starvation.