The Shimmer Effect

Malshine woke up to a throbbing pain in his head. He rose from his cot in the castle’s infirmary to find himself in a place he had not seen before, a place made of cloth and paintings covering up solid gray stone. There were windows, but nothing else really. Turning his head to the left, he saw a few ponies laying in cots beside him, and to his right nurses caring for others. Where am I? He thought to himself. Did she bring me here? The previous events before he passed out were still clear in his mind, he remembered, Rainbow Dash was it? It made sense, she was a pegasus and her cutie mark was a storm cloud shooting out a rainbow lightning bolt, that cutie mark analysis class had been good for something finally. Her main was also in the color pattern of a rainbow, so that could explain it to.

“Hey, ‘bout time you woke up from your beauty sleep.”

Speak of the devil. She waked into the room with a some what sense of  urgency in her steps, and glared slash stared slash looked with wonder at the gray pony, “What in Equestria were you doing in that explosion?” she said.

“So thats what you call this place then huh? Equestria. Not bad I suppose,” he replied.

“Can you start making sense now?”

“The thing about that is that I need to know what constitutes as making sense.”

“What?”

“Oh sorry, I’ll tak slowly. The-thing- a-bout-that-is-that-I-need-”

“Enough games Mallshine, tell me or I’ll have you arrested for disturbing the peace.”

“It’s Malshine love, it’s not that hard to memorize. Kind of hard to forget really.”

“Just tell me!” she yelled at him.

“Hey you stole that line from me.”

“Guards!” Rainbow yelled out.

“Ok, I’ll tell, geez,” Malshine said. Rainbow Dash had sent the guards off on their way with a quick look. A moment later when some of the nurses had left to attend to other patients, Malshine spoke with a sigh in his voice, “I caused that explosion, but it was kind of out of my control.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m not from this time period. More specifically I’m from Fifteen-hundred years ago.”.

“What?”

“The explosion was from the time spell, and I actually couldn’t control where I ended up. I just went as far as I could go.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I know this is shocking, but I do have a reason for coming to the future. It’s about the kingdom before this one.”

“There was a kingdom before this one?”

“Oh, you don’t about it?”

“Sorry, most of the history before Equestria’s founding was destroyed during a huge deep-freeze, before Equestria was even founded.”

“Well, you might want to take a seat then. This may come as a surprise to you.”

______________________________________________________________________________

“Rarity, come here! I think I found something!” Twilight said as she pulled a book from the bookshelf down. They had been at the castle of the two sisters for a bit over a hour now, and Rarity had started complaining about the dust, the wild creatures roaming around, and anything that was dirty in the slightest.

“Oh, please don’t tell me that you grabbed another book that you think I’d like because it’s about ancient fashion. I mean, the first few were great, amazing even! However, after the fifth and sixth, I started getting less interested.”

“No, I think I found something that tells us about pre-Equestrian history. Here look at this.” Twilight floated the book in her magic as she passed it to Rarity, who then took it into her magic, and started reading the title.

“Legend, King, God: The Tale of Harmonicus. Twilight, this seems kind of like a story book more than  a history book.”

“That’s what people thought of the story of Nightmare Moon, but we all know how that turned out.”

“Fair point I guess, but still I’m taking this with a grain of salt,” as rarity said that she opened the book and started reading.

Long ago, before Equestria, there was only the alicorns. They lived in a world before cutie marks, the three tribes, and the Immortal Alicorn. A constant state of chaos was the world they lived in.

He was not born, he showed up on a hill top one day. He was not a colt, he was fully grown. He did not look like the others, he was taller, slender, and had a sense of importance with him.

When he looked out from the hilltop and saw the chaos that was unfolding amongst the ponies, he stomped his hoof on the ground. Everypony looked up at the hill and gathered toward him in all of his majestic glory. Once everyone gathered, the king summoned a magic into his horn, then shot it out in a beam of light. In a flash, there were no more alicorns, but in their place unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies.

The alicorn gathered Magic into his horn again then shot out another beam of light outward toward the the ponies. All the ponies now had different marks on their flanks, and new sense of purpose with each pony.

The alicorn looked around, but was still not satisfied with his work. He stomped his hoof down, and a wave of energy came from it. This caused everypony to now give their every last bit of attention to him.

He stopped his foot, and big stone tablet rose from the ground. The tablet read as such:

Be Honest

Be Kind

Be Enjoyable

Be Generous

Be Loyal

The next day, he declared himself as their king, and used his magic to erect a hole castle and multiply villages for the ponies.

“Twilight,” Rarity looked up, “do you really think that this is real? It sounds like this telling the origins of the world as we know.”

“That’s because it is,” the two unicorns were surprised to see Rainbow Dash, and a gray colored earth pony walked in with a guard from the castle.

“Rainbow Dash, what are you doing here, and who is this?” Twilight asked, staring at the gray pony. His cutie mark appeared to be a puppeteer's handle with it’s stings attached to a ball of light.

“Yeah, about that,” Rainbow Dash stated, “So, I found this pony in the aftermath of an explosion by the forest edge, and well, he says he’s from the past.”

“Specifically Fifteen-hundred years ago, and about Five-hundred years after the events in the story you just read,” the pony said walking toward the pair. He then held out his hoof then said, “Hi, I’m Malshine. Pleased to meet you.”

“Rarity,” Rarity said as she shook hooves with the pony.

“I’m Twilight,” she said as she did the same, “If don’t mind me asking, why you here?”

Malshine smiled, “That’s the question I get a lot these days. Well, to really answer that you need to hear the whole story. So, you know Harmonicus, but his kingdom is still a mystery to you. Allow me to enlighten you about the kingdom of harmony.”

“The kingdom was huge, it covered every corner of modern day Equestria. Everypony in it was happy, and Harmonicus was their king. The way nobility worked back then was that every noble earned it or was born into it, and the sign of their nobility was that Harmonicus had made them into a alicorn.”

“The three tribes lived in harmony, just as every one should. The Unicorns were the scholars, the Pegasi the guards and weather keepers, the Earth Ponies were the farmers, but everyone had the opportunity to be what they wanted to be.

“For the most part, everypony was happy, they lived in a world with relatively no conflict. That is until, Dawn Shimmer, my brother, decided that the law, and everything it stood for was wrong. The formation of the three tribes, cutie marks, and the code of harmony was just way for Harmonicus to control us. Sadly, I thought he was right at the time. He convinced me that if I help him rebel, and gather a following that he’d make me a god amongst ponies, and I believed him.

“I should explain something about our family, we were nobles, so we were born as alicorns.”

“Wait,” Twilight stopped Malshine’s speak, “if you were an alicorn at birth then explain why   you’re an Earth Pony.”

“Patience please, I’m telling a story,” he said smugly. “Any way, so after we started planning to overthrow the government, we went to the slums of the cities, and from there we gained a following.

“My special talent is hyper-persuasion, so it was very easy to convince people to join us. I even could use my magic to ‘influence’ the more persistent ponies. However, I only had to use that to move police away from meetings, and every time we met up with ponies they seemed to agree with my brother before I even had a chance to talk to them. I guess they always wanted to rebel, but never had a reason to.

“I digress, so we planned on  trying to fight harmony with disharmony. To do that, we got five ponies we felt that embodied the opposite of the rules of harmony, dishonesty, irritability, covetousness, cruelty, and indifference. At first it worked well, we had taken a few districts in the private sector, and was about to capture a part of the business district too. Then, true to his element, indifference decide that it would be better to not be apart of this army any more. We, barely won the districts, and had lost so many soldiers in the process.

“There was still hope.We had my brother and me, the only alicorns in the army. I could make entire units turn coat for the time being, and he was gifted with magic, just like you princess.

“How did you that I was a Princess, and that my talent was magic?” Twilight asked.

“Rainbow Dash caught me up on your status in the kingdom, and I took a class on cutie marks when I was younger. It taught me how to identify peoples talents by just looking at them.

“Back to my story, we starting to divide amongst ourselves. Irritability hated us all, Covetousness didn’t trust any of us, especially Disharmony; but who would trust her, and Cruelty, I’ll let you think up what he did, because he probably did do it at one point in time.

“It was amazing we were able to infiltrate  the castle. When we got in there, we headed to the throne room to meet with the king, and when we did, they were prepared. Dishonesty was the first to fall. We all hated her the most so we used her as a shield at one point, and it was the last thing we all agreed on, minus her of course. I believe it was Covetousness that died next. Yes, she dropped one of her special items, and went out to pick it up. Then got blasted by a soldier's magic. Forgot how Irritability died, but Cruelty, talk about painful to watch. He was destroyed by the elements of harmony used Harmonicus himself. However, that opened up him up to be attacked, and Dawn did not hesitate.

“Now, immortal alicorns can’t die of old age, or be killed by normal weapons. They can however can be killed by heavily concentrated magic attacks. So, he used every ounce of magic in his body to conjure a sword made of pure magic, and then, well, you know.

“He killed him,” Twilight muttered, “your brother killed the one who gave us harmony. How could do that?”

“How could I let him do that is a better question,” he said in a depressingly low voice, “ if it wasn’t for me, none of this would have happened. Harmonicus would still be alive, thousands of ponies wouldn’t have given their lives for a pointless cause that would only hurt them in the end, and my brother wouldn’t have become a killer.”

“You still haven’t told us why you’re here,” Rarity said.

“Yeah about that, so after Dawn killed Harmonicus, the rebels gave up.”

“Why, wouldn’t they like that he had been killed,” Twilight asked.

“They wanted to try him first, and Dawn had promised that he would. So, when he had murdered him, the response wasn’t positive. That’s actually when things started to go really downhill. The rebels struck a deal with the kingdom to bring us in for trial. We barely escaped from the mobs. If it wasn’t for are magic and being able to fly at the same time, we would have been gonners.

“We went into hiding, and it was the worst months of my life. Dawn would not shut up about wanting to try again eventually, and we were exiled from ever returning to the kingdom. If anything good came from this, it would be that, Dawn learned that disharmony is no way to run a kingdom or army, but he still hated harmony.

“Back at the kingdom, a replacement king was chosen, but was in no way as good of a king as Harmonicus was. The best thing he did was plant a tree in the name of Harmonicus. This was called, the Tree of Harmony.

“So that’s where the tree came from,” Twilight said.

“Yes, and from it, two things came. A resting place for the elements of harmony, and a prophecy.”

“A prophecy?”

“Yes a prophecy. It says that when an Immortal Alicorn dies, another will take it’s place when Another the world needs them the most.

"Dawn wanted to destroy the tree, he hated what it stood for, and thought it burn for its evils. However, I had learned over time that harmony, though wasn't perfect at first, would be later on with time. I couldn't let him destroy the tree, and that’s why I took us hear, so that he-”

“Wait, he’s here?”

“Yeah, he came with me the time spell, but I’m sure that the elements of harmony plus the Immortal Alicorn can deal with him once we find him. By the way, who is the Immortal Alicorn here?”

“That would be, Princess Celestia, and her sister, Princess Luna. They work together to run this country, and I do think they are going to want to talk to you about your arrival.

“No problem, I can be at their every request if I must. It’s the least I could do to start me redemption for what I’ve done.”

“Great, I’m sure they’d be glad to hear that. Now about your brother.”

“Aw yes, I presume that he is probably recovering from the whole experience of time travel. He could be in the Everfree right now doing just that.”

“Your highness,” A royal guard walked in with a some what concerned tone in his voice, “there is a maroon Alicorn in Ponyville preaching words of rebellion, and slandering the name of the government! Worse, I think he might be convince some of them” They looked back at Malshine.

“Or, you know, he could be doing that. That is definitely a possibility as well.”