Fractured Land

Our world as it is now, could be described as itself being a pony. It began as an innocent thing, of purity and future that no other such thing can hold. What happens to it is shifted every moment, for it’s destiny has yet to be decided upon. As it grows through it’s life though, it becomes more and more knowing and ultimate, having learned and learned and is no longer innocent. It lost it’s innocence long ago, when it learned of mortality.

When it learned everything has a time and place, comes and goes, and is completely finite. The one thing that is infinite, so existence. So when the ideals of mortality are learned by anything, they begin to take advantage of such a thing.

For our world, the ponies that moved across the crust of our planet took it upon themselves to perform as much advancing as they could in their lifetime, then left the rest for the next generation to pick back up. Within the timeline of a hundred years we had created transportation, literature, and a language system. By 200 we had come to understand basic science and mathematics, and began our journey into architecture. By the 500th anniversary of our conception, we had become a thriving society, living based off both trading of goods and a money system of the simplest kind.

We had rulers living up high above the rest of society in a brilliant and gleaming castle, it’s magnificence shining down upon the rest of the world through the gleam of the sun above it. It was an icon to us of the perfection we could achieve if we tried hard, if we put work into our lives. It was an icon that worked and inspired, and continued us spiraling up through the ladder of process.

But then we became halted in our journey through knowledge, when we came to the realization that we could simply not continue further. We had reached the brink of our aspiration. If we wished to continue further in this venture, we would have to enter a world of things that we did not know yet and would have to learn. A whole world of things for us to be taught, but unlike our ancestors before us, we thoroughly lacked the interest to adapt to this.

So we simply stopped, stayed put, and halted. We did not continue in inventions or architecture, we did not update our science or magic beliefs, instead we focused on society. We put our efforts into breaking society down into smaller, more digestible pieces.

We only did such a thing to make ourselves more comfortable with how large our world had become around us, because for a Unicorn, the greatest fear of all is the unknown.

Earth ponies became those of no significant difference, no wings or horn, and they became the lowest class in our new world. They were the laborers and workers, performing the work which no other pony had such a desire to fulfill.

The next class was Pegasi, who took it upon themselves to envelope most of the celebrity and athlete lives into their kind, becoming idols to the citizens of the world. They lived higher than the Earth ponies, but the Unicorns lived higher.

The highest class of all, the unicorns, lived in only two lands. That of Canterlot and the Crystal Empire. However, after the fall of the Crystal Empire, a large group of the remaining citizens were escorted to Manehatten where they live to this day.

The cracks in society gave way to anger and frustration between groups of ponies. Earth ponies watched Unicorns with poisonous envy for their relaxed lifes. Unicorns observed the Pegasi and all of their glory, dreaming of the days when they too could achieve such high levels of fame. And the Earth Ponies...frankly, no one wanted to be one of them.

The Princess’ in the castle above sat in silence, allowing such racism to be allowed in their land. Rarely a word was heard from Equestria’s rulers, besides of course at Court Hearings where they were given the final say.

This brought for The Civil War of Equestria.

The Earth Ponies grew tired of the hard labor their life brought forward, and thus refused their services to any of the other races.

They simply turned their back on the world and began living amongst themselves in equality.

The Unicorns would have none of this, for without the hard laboring work of the Earthies, they were being refused basic foods and services required to sustain the lifestyle they grew accustomed to. They began marches upon the Earthie cities, setting fires to their food supplies and homes unless they agreed to comply and return to their work.

Many of the Earthies followed along and fell back into place, but a Rebel Force began in resistance to this tyrannical movement. The Rebels began strikes against Canterlot and the Crystal Empire, beginning the start of 8 full moons of war and bloodshed.

The Pegasi did not join in until the end of the war, being divided down the middle by the conflict.

In the end, the Princess’ travelled across seas to the land of The Striped Ponies, to ask for the wisdom of this elder culture. The youngest of these, Zecora, agreed to return to the homeland of the Princess’ and find a cure for the disease of war.

Upon her arrival, she claimed to sense vibrating energy throughout the land, leading her to believe a powerful force was beneath their very hoofs. She began to dig along with the rulers, until they uncovered a massive sub-terra chamber. The ruins of an ancient city lay below, no living beings remaining in the dusted architecture of the past society. Or so they thought.

In the heart of the city, Zecora uncovered a trove of six crystals, thrown to the ground from where they once sat in a prominent placement in the Town Square. She claimed these to be the answers to their questions.

Upon the crystals arrival to the surface world, the storms of war began to clear. The ponies looked around the war-torn planet with a new look of clarity at what they had done. After making pardons with one another, the society returned to how it was before.

The crystal empire fell to the hoof of an evil overlord known by Sombra, a black mass of murder and evil that swept across the country-side in a single swift storm. He disappeared just as he had appeared, into nowhere. With buildings scorched and a maleficent cloud of pure darkness swirling over the skyline of the city, residents lived in fear of their new warlord.

He rarely made himself physically known, but he was there all the same. If a pony broke a law he had set or stepped out from the boundaries of the kingdom, he would appear and smite them down with a single swift blow of his dark scepter. Not a single soul knew where he had appeared from or what kind of foul creature he truly is, no one besides the Princess’.

Once more, not a single soul knows of what happened next, but rumors have a way of finding their way over to me. The rumors I have heard and do truly believe tell the tale of the Princess’ assembling a squad of seven knight, the strongest in both mind and body throughout all of the land, and equipping them with swords which drew energy purely from the prescence of the sky above.

These seven brave souls were sent away on a valiant quest to penetrate the boundaries of the city and bring salvation to the ponies stuck inside.

This is but the first reports of such a force, and the last report of Sombra being seen. He vanished that night for hundreds of years, along with his kingdom.

As previously mentioned, the Princess’ were wrong with their assumptions of the complete abandonment of the sub-terra city. A single beast thrived within the ruins of his old home, living of the life-endowing juices of sub-terran slugs. These juices bestowed upon him paranormal health, and thus he survived for years. This creature’s return to the surface brought about a new face of evil on the world: Discord.

He began simply ripping shreds into the fabric of reality around the world, transforming it into a limbo between hundreds of realities. Giant carnivorous lizards ran rampant, metallic beast exterminated life in a single burst of energy. It was pure chaotic discord.

The Princess’ knew they could not defeat the beast by themselves, so while they confronted the orchestrator of this mad world and brought an end to his anarchy through use of the sub-terran stones, dubbed the Elements of Harmony, the Knights closed the holes in reality slowly enveloping the planet in disaster. The combated any beasts which found their way through the gateways, until Discord was contained in stone and the connection powering the portals was lost, closing them once more.

This report differed though, for a total count of fifty knights were claimed to have been there.

The final report of the Knights was during the Changelings Advances, when an insectoid race of creatures grew desperate for a food supply and invaded Canterlot. They disguised themselves as everyday passer-bys and infiltrated the down, slowly draining the ponies of their emotion of love. When the Princess’ realized something eerily wrong was taking place in their home, they dispatched a league of three Knights to get to the bottom of the case and send the Changelings back to their land.

Following rumors were also told about the Griffin Revolts, The Second Civil War, and The Tambelon War, though I dismissed such rumors as just that.

Ones which I do believe is that the Knights had helped in the battle against Nightmare Moon during her transformation and return, when Discord returned, the second war against The Changelings, and Sombra’s return, though such a subjects are very coveted.

But then something occurred which no one can explain. The Knights appeared and began a slaughter on the citizens of Canterlot, wiping out dozens and burning the city to the ground. When a rescue team was sent to the castle to request the aid of the Princess’, they were found to be missing. Canterlot burnt to the ground that day.

The Knights continued their raid, not just in Pony colonies, but among the Changeling lands too. Then as it seemed the worst was over, after the Royal Equestrian Army had shot them down with javelins to the hearts, a darkness appeared. Just as Sombra had appeared, the same darkness brought a plague upon the land.

The air was poisoned, and many suffocated to death on the spot. The lucky few hundred who were able to locate a gas mask within time survived to watch the rest of the planet die off. We had no way to communicate with the lands across sea, for all birds dropped dead from the sky within the first few minutes of the Plague, and even if a Unicorn acquired a gas mask, they succumbed to the disease. We were cut off and dying.

After a few hours of the corpses laying dead, a few would rise up, but they would be different. They would have a look in their air of the most intense kind of pain one could possibly comprehend, or perhaps beyond. They became feral, insane, and lost. They would wander the wastelands of Equestria and search for any alive to torture. They were not cannibals and they were not zombies, they were highly intelligent and simply desired to cause you pain. They lived off the pain of others. They were dubbed Punishers by the survivors.

Some boarded themselves up or created closed off communities, but most of us travelled across the world by ourselves, scavenging towns for food and water.

Crops and water instantly turned to dust when the Plague arrived and the last report of rainfall was nearly 8 years ago. This is our world now.

At night the darkness will return and pull ponies straight up into the air and away into the sky to never be seen again. If you go outside at night, you can hear the screams of your loved ones begging for your life. If you continue further outwards, you will begin to be surrounded by a dense black fog. Be dumb enough to ignore the sign and continue forth with your quest and you will begin to see things...terrible things. I know this for I am the single pony I’ve met or heard of who survived such an outing into the darkness.

I am nameless. I am without a specialty. I would describe myself for you, but I have yet to see my appearance for myself, as it is a rare but glad occurrence to find a mirror. I’m told I’m brown all around with light green eyes and a gray muzzle, but that is me trusting half-insane survivors.

I travel by myself, settling now and then at various camps I stumble across in the plains of what was once Equestria. I stay and rest, take whatever food and water I am given, then continue on my way. I refuse to create emotional connections to the citizens there, for they would try to stop me from continuing forward.

My first memories were of an empty house, living alone in starvation until an orphanage found me. They never gave me a name though for I was forgotten as soon as I was dropped on their grounds. I do not hate them or my parents for such neglect, it’s the sort of lifestyle I now thrive on. They taught me to survive in a world like this.

My mark is white splotch, an oddity I have tried to decode my whole life. I simply hope that it makes itself obvious sooner rather than later.

The final thing I have to say as I sit upon this muddy hilltop, overlooking the ground up remains of the valley below, is the purpose of my epic. I write in this journal so that one day I may be remembered as the pony who travelled the world and brought it salvation. With the clues I have acquired throughout my life, I believe to have found the place which the Knights now reside.

Time to refresh my gas mask and head on my way.