Many tales have been told in Equestria. Most stories of dark times are passed off as old pony tales and many believe them to be untrue. Merely fictional. One such story, as with most, took place over one thousand years ago. Before the millennium of peace that ponies knew, there were always troubles which plagued ponykind. One pony believed that he could help change this. A brilliant unicorn scientist called Cypherus Clockwork wanted to create guardians to help protect and bring everlasting peace to Equestria.
For years he worked on his guardians, crafting them from the strongest metals that the land had to offer. Each one he made in the basic shape of the average pony and each was greater than the last. More agile, faster reacting and smarter. One particular robot he worked on was to be the pinnacle of his work. The greatest of the Clockwork Stallions. It had a much larger body, impenetrable armour, an artificial mind with unlimited intelligence, the ability to learn and complete freedom of will. He worked alone on his creations, believing that he and he alone would be able to craft the perfect machine. On the day of his greatest robots completion, Cypherus activated it bringing his guardians to life. He had named his perfect Clockwork Stallion, Quantus. Cypherus gave the Clockwork Stallions one order, and only one.
To protect Equestria.
Quantus then calculated the best way to protect the land, to bring peace to Equestria. Cypherus didn’t see it coming. His own creation attacked him. In Quantus’ mind, ponies were imperfect due to their emotions. Emotions lead to disorder, chaos and war. The Clockwork Stallions would protect the land, by destroying all who inhabited it. They went from villages to towns, wiping out all live, cleansing the land of what they considered a plague to Equestria. With each passing town, the Clockworks would not only take resources to build more of their own kind, increasing their numbers, but they would also find ways to improve themselves to be more efficient for “The cleansing”.
Word of this mechanical threat to Equestria soon reached Canterlot and Princess Celestia immediately travelled to where the Clockwork army had recently attacked. Seeing her subjects being hunted down like wild beasts was too much for her to bear and she cast a spell above the burning village. Enraged, Celestia shouted out to the machines that for their crimes against Equestria, they shall never again see the glorious light of day nor the beauty of the night, ever again. The spell above the village opened up into a large white hole in the sky that pulled up each and every Clockwork Stallion into it. Quantus shouted out to Celestia a curse and promised to return one day and finish what they started.
The spell Celestia cast was a portal to a realm known only as “The Void”. The landscape was jagged and uneven, made out of rocks that were harder than their own bodies. There was no light from a warm sun, no moon or stars. Just endless darkness. No life could survive there. For the Clockworks, this wasn’t a problem. Each one was powered by a key hidden where a pony would have their cutie mark. They themselves could easily continue to function without any need of stopping. No resting. No sleeping. Quantus began planning immediately on how to break out and escape from The Void.
Quantus was built with an unlimited intellect and learned quickly. It had seen Celestia cast that spell and knew that it could be replicated into a way for them to escape The Void. The master Clockwork Stallion began taking apart the bodies of the smaller Clockwork Stallions, essentially killing them, and would spend the next few years building a machine that could copy Celestia’s portal generating magic and create a way out. The machine successfully created a portal out of The Void and immediately Quantus leapt through with his remaining army to Equestria. But it wasn’t the same Equestria.
Almost nine hundred years later, the Clockwork Stallions would find a way back into the Equestria that they were banished from, seeking revenge against Celestia. But they would remain in the alternate Equestria until they were prepared and made plans to defeat Princess Celestia. But this isn’t our story. This is the story of one pony that had once before encountered one of the most dangerous of the Clockworks ever created and lived to tell his tale. This is the story, of Lance Angelswift.
Lance Angelswift and his friends had accidently come across a factory that had been building the Clockwork Stallions in Equestria. It had long been abandoned after the facility had been shut down by a rogue Clockwork Stallion named Spark, who believed that killing was wrong. Spark had been left to rust in the factory but it wasn’t the only Clockwork Stallion still down there. Lance and his friends accidently set loose a robot called Titan and it hunted them all down, trying to kill them.
The facility was set to self-destruct after a Gateway portal to the other Equestria had been opened up and began tearing the building apart from the inside. Lance and his friends had escaped the building but not without losses.
This story begins several months later, at a very formal event known as The Grand Galloping Gala.
