Brutal Black - Scorched Earth

Introduction
To Know a Dog

Rewrite in Progress

Welcome to Equestria! Land of infinite wealth, peace, and prosperity. Not a war to be had in around a thousand years and steadfastly holding against threats as they arise. A land where foals need not fear what night nor day will bring. A land overflowing with riches both financial and emotional. Adventure waits around every corner and almost every story will have a happy ending. A land ruled by a government with a scary amount of control over the flow of information and that is more or less deadlocked technologically regardless of outside development.
Evidence of outside progression is obvious if you know where to look for it. Electric ovens, lights, appliances, speakers, and instruments. Multi shot cannons utilizing a smokeless propellant, (or perhaps compressed gas?) were used to fuel parties. Trains designed to burn coal but clearly no longer doing so. For entertainment more tec got let in than anywhere else while dangerous technology got kept out. Bakers had microwaves for crying out loud while most ponies wrote with quills. Royal guards carried spears and wore armour while we had guns.
You may be saying to yourself, “isn’t history filled with naive primitive people meeting advanced people and then the advanced people shooting the arms and legs off of the primitive people and taking all their stuff?” Why yes, yes it is. However, those rules don’t apply in Equestria, they find themselves in the unique position of being the naïve primitive society with the WMD. Let me tell you about the bitches.
There are four magical bitches with enough power between them to dissuade any attack. We're talking nearly immortal, nearly invincible, and almost unfathomable power. Shield a city, imprison a god, turn the world, travel through time, cast any spell, raise the sun, raise the moon, raise an army, raise the dead. (Not sure about that last one.) No one can touch them, no one beat them, and to top it all off they are completely benevolent. Its enough to make you scream.
Just to get a handle on their power consider this. When Luna went to the moon or at least how they tell it she was just teleported there. The moon is the most desolate place you can imagine, it’s a vacuum, no water, no food, no shelter, no goddess damned air. There is however incredible radiation bombardment, extreme temperatures, and pretty much constant meteor strikes. She endured that for a thousand years, that’s ruffle 30 lifetimes. The time alone should have killed her. Even if she could magically make everything she needed from scratch she would need some sort of shield to hold it all together. Cadence was a wreck after only a week of holding a shield and Luna did it 52,000 times longer. After that she wasn’t tired or broken, she came back pissed off and ready for round two. If that couldn’t kill her than could anything kill her? Remember, this is the bitch who lost! I shudder to think what Celestia could do. Of course there is always the possibility that Nightmare Moon didn’t need any of the stuff we think of to stay alive. In which case again, can anything kill her?
At least that’s how they told it to us back home, and why Nightmare Moon became a symbol of endurance, strength, perseverance, and power. I’ve heard that that isn’t exactly what happened but I prefer that version even if it was more propaganda to keep us out. Myself I had her image carved into my right molar so that I can always keep her symbol with me. Hurt like a bitch getting it but I’m told it doesn’t hurt as much as brand art.
My buddy Woods was born with a white cross on his back like the ones you see on donkeys. Of course there was no donkey in his lineage but no one believed that. He eventually got tired of being called a mule so he had some artists tie him down and they branded an eagle with Nightmare Moons wings to incorporate and cover up that cross. If anypony still thinks there is ass in him they know better than to say it to the guy with a mural cold branded into his back.
If it was as easy for ponies and griffins to get tattoos as it is for Minotaurs than everypony in the Kingdom would have a Luna or rather a Nightmare Moon tattoo. Whatever made her so strong is still out there somewhere and a lot of ponies follow that as a god, the thing that came closest to ever taking the goddesses. Personally I take it as a good luck symbol. In a way we were quietly worshiping the goddesses while officially being their enemy.
Back to Equestria. So for the first time in history the peaceful tribals have a super weapon we can’t touch and wealth they cannot even fathom. Celestia took the best chunk of the planet from us so she could play her little game with her pets in her perfect peaceful kingdom and she has been relatively successful. Successful in casting the illusion of peace and prosperity anyway. 20 years ago they had multi shot cannons running smokeless propellants that fired god damned parties and no one batted an eye, but if you slapped a pistol down on the table in front of them they wouldn’t have a clue what it did or why somepony would need it. Similar mechanical process and the same lineage but no one would ask what the cannon was originally used for.
Really I don’t see how anyone could watch this and think it’s peaceful and happy. Maybe it was a really peaceful place that somehow couldn’t maintain peace for two months. I’ve been reading up on some history and it turns out that even with those four living breathing super weapons they still got attacked what? Five times in a two year period and almost lost the whole kingdom? Ha, I guess that is the problem with super weapons, they don’t work very well up close. Shit, one of those times, no wait two of those times, was the black and white bitches fighting with each other! Or am I getting those confused? Ah, no bother. I refuse to think that these crises were an all at once thing, I think this was more or less business as usual or Celestia wouldn’t have always sent her pets to straighten them out. She would have done them herself if it was anything to be alarmed over.
The biggest wad of shit you would ever swallow is believing that the world was as peaceful as Equestria pretended it was. It really was sick, they were sitting on such wealth and they didn’t even know it. They actually had to invent things to go throw their money away on because they had so much bucking more of it than they needed! While pretty ponies paid up for mud baths at the spa zebras soaked their hooves in blood killing each other over the last well full of dirty water. How gifted we were to live in such a tightly controlled society where we didn’t have to know about such things.
When the changelings attacked they attacked Canterlot first. What does that tell you? That tells you than Equestria was the best source of love on the planet. Two, it tells you it was worth tangling with the sun goddess to get it. Hell, it was worth tangling with three of the bitches for it, or was it all four? And all the Royal guards too, biggest military force in Equestria, can’t forget them! That willingness to take on such a force leaves you three possibilities about this planet. One, there isn’t a lot of love to go around on the planet. Two, the rest of the planet is too brutal to successfully enslave for love. Three, a nation guarded by two goddess’s and two incredibly powerful magic users is the weakest and easiest to crush nation on the planet.
Indeed if they had tried for the Griffin Kingdom they would have gotten even more holes in them, hell, maybe they did try the Griffin Kingdom first! Maybe that’s why they showed up full of holes! If the Changelings had taken some place like the Kingdom with relative success there would have been a lot more blood. People cutting each other and dueling just to draw blood and compare colour. Anything that bled green would be dead. If they disguised themselves and it came to open combat it wouldn’t be much different than fighting any other army of ponies.

Wow, I seem like a real cynical son of a gelding now don’t I? I haven’t even introduced myself yet and I’m off about Equestrian propaganda and whatnot. Ah hem, my name is Carbon, Carbon Black. Black is a family name. I would introduce myself further but it would be a waste of time. As before you can understand a dog you must first know its master, so must you know about the Griffin Kingdom before you know me.
Griffins are half lion and half eagle, they are predatory and that is probably what started them off fighting the earliest wars. Not that I haven’t heard of huge wars over grazing lands when things got tight, like the war between the Arabians and Camels from Saddle Arabia and the Clydesdales from way up north in Dragonstan. The Griffins have been fighting with the Hippogriffs probably since the beginning of time. Hippogriffs are half eagle and half horse. Griffins had larger clutches of eggs and were smaller and more agile but the Hippogriffs were twice the size and had territory into Dragonstan. Can you imagine how tough you have to be to rule Dragons?
The fighting between the Griffin Kingdom and Hippogriff Kingdom finally stopped when a fight in Equestria cooked half the planet and froze the other half. Just about half of everyone was dead in a week. In one week! There have been plagues that kill one third of the population over a number of years and change the world, this was half in a week! The year of Equestria’s power struggle is actually the year we use for a reference year now. Equestian Peace Time, as it is somewhat sarcastically known. Also as Nightmare Moon Banishment year (NMB) and Cataclysm Day. After that the two kingdoms put aside their differences and worked together to brutalize the shit out of the rest of the world. Never tried for Equestria though, Celestia may have just finished the job. We got along a lot better though, I think there was even a Griffin Hippogriff hybrid at the Equestria games, had one hoof and one paw.
The thousand year old Griffin/Hippogriff Kingdom is one of the largest nations in the world stretching from the northern provinces of Dragonstan to the Forests of Zeumbia and Zambodia to the deserts of Saddle Arabia and the Zebra Deserts. While not directly linked by land we have fought for the Plains of the Zerengeti. Equestria is pretty much a peninsula that uses the nation of Caledonia as a buffer zone. Caledonia boarders on Zebra territory. If there is one admirable quality about Zebras it is that those tenacious bastards get around. They handle the cold, desert, forest, you name it. When they couldn’t beat the horses in combat they poisoned the shit out of them. I don’t think anyone has ever taken Zebrica from them. No worldly nation has ever tried to take over Equestria.
However, the Kingdom has been trading with Equestria for some time. Mostly we trade our manufactured goods for raw materials, gems, and of course bits. Say what you want about Equestria but those pacifists make for one stable dollar. Trading between nations is usually done with bits and the black market runs on bits. They used to trade us gems too, then Celestia must have figured out what we needed them for and put an end to that. Which actually begins this adventure come to think of it.
Development on an industrial scale needed gems and lots of them. It wasn’t long before some smart ponies figured out how to kill a lot of ponies with them though. Celestia must have heard the blasts or felt their heat because as soon as they started going off we were cut off from Equestrian gems. I don’t know if she ever knew what we needed to make them exactly thus the total ban on trading gems with outside nations.
Here I have to talk about gem weapons don’t I? The eggheads back home had come up with some unfathomably powerful shit. The biggest ever used took out an entire city, reduced the whole thing to matchwood. Those that survived died days later. Never even knew what those damn things were called but even bigger ones were built than the ones that went off. We just called them dragon snares because of this big ass cloud they made, looks like an enormous snare. Lucky for us just about everyone who knew how to make them died putting one together. Lost their secret weapon to secrecy and the research notes were on paper at the facility, ha.
Black knight were one of the nastiest things ever made. Fairly large explosion could crush a couple blocks but the real danger came from the fallout. Those who were anywhere near that bomb when it went off, like for instance, inside a half hour jog, died three days later shitting blood and turning to mush. They were even relatively easy to make but pretty much everyone agreed never to use them again.
White Knights were the most dangerous weapon of them all of one reason, they are small. They only take out a block or a big bunker or I don’t know, the side of a mountain? Column of tanks? Shoot a couple and they are toast. Squadron of high flying Pegasi? Shoot a couple up and watch it rain carnage. They didn’t even have the fallout or any after effects really. They were the biggest damn thing you could actually get away with using and that’s what made them more dangerous than even the Dragon Snares, ponies actually used them. They were the tactical Dragon Snare if you will, you could shoot them to take high value targets or fire a cluster of them in one missile to take out multiple targets. You could even have a squadron carry them as easily as they would rocket launchers.
They were little more than two perfectly aligned, perfectly cut diamonds that were near pure of flaws which focused magical energy and smaller gems to produce energy, reflect it, and amplify it. The focusing diamonds were far apart until the bomb needed to go off when they would slide nearer together. When they were slid into position they would focus magical energy directly into each other which would be reflected off other gems and reflectors in the mechanism and shot back into the first stronger than before, repeat until meltdown. Upon meltdown both diamonds get so hot they crack or melt leaving you with a blob of pure focused magic, sort of like losing your grip on a hoofful of the suns core in atmosphere. A regular one has a guaranteed kill on flat ground radius of about 500 yards. Small ones are down to 200/300 while the biggest ones are up to a thousand. Alignment and cut was critical or they would only get hot. The better the quality and cut the bigger the boom. If you did everything right on the focusing diamonds then a lot could go wrong in the mechanism and they would still go off. Fake diamonds wouldn’t work as they weren’t magic, so the hardest part of the whole weapon was getting the diamonds.
Okay, now back to me. In the year 1010 EPT I was born and raised on a farm just outside of Ponyville, I am from the Griffin Kingdom. The farm grew wheat between the rocks making it a truly modern rock farm, such a quaint place could never have produced a monster like me; that could only come from the Kingdom. Never confuse where I grew up with where I am from. My name is Carbon. My parents named me that because I am black. Carbon is black. Carbon was the blackest thing they could think of without working the word night into my name somewhere and they were not creative enough for that. My parents and family were a bunch of insignificant rock farmers and mine workers without a creative bone between the lot of them.
Black. Have you ever seen a black pony before? Even the bucking Lunar Guard is beautiful shades of shimmering grey most of the time. The other kids were are neon colours spanning all the crevices of the rainbow and I was black. Beautiful greens and oranges, shimmering grays and whites, purples and pinks that would make you think of candy but I was black. Pastels that would make an artist drool, stripes and dots that would be hard to paint, eyes that would make you want to squeeze a kitty. I’m not gay, I just spent a lot of time looking at the colours I could have been. No colt or filly wants to be seen with a plain black colt with a blank flank. Oh right, I forgot I was a blank flank longer than anypony I knew. I don’t mean last in the class or a couple months behind everypony else. Try a couple years as the only black blank flank. We even started wondering if I got my mark but it was black so we couldn’t see it. There was an old black Pegasus around named Cloud Chaser, he had a white mane and I was blacker. I heard Luna was black, I was blacker.
Not to say that I mind my color now, I have actually found it quite useful. Not quite a midnight black but a softer black almost. I’m actually light enough that I don’t cut out a silhouette in the dark. I like my name a lot now and my cutie mark, will it just kicks ass. I should probably talk about my cutie mark a bit, as it does relate to this story.
Just like every foal I tried everything to get my cutie mark and found some things I was good at and did a lot of property damage with everything I was bad at. Funny enough I was better at some things than others who actually had their marks in that thing. Running for example, I was faster and had more stamina than some of the branded jocks. I was also gifted at high jump, long jump, javelin, archery, sewing (that one kind of came out of nowhere actually), and I was pretty excellent at fencing if I do say so myself. I never actually won any trophies fencing but I think I was pretty good.
So it wasn’t for my lack of talent that I was ostracized, it was because I was so different. We heard scary stories growing up of adults who never got their marks and had to go live in the forest and those used to keep me up all night. So ya, no one wanted to be friends with the way to old blank flank and I don’t really blame them. Despite my best efforts I was to be known as a failure for something I couldn’t control and I would fade away into the lonely life of a prospector or something. Turns out I was not alone actually. There were a lot of colts scattered around who were physically fit but never got their marks because they never had the right situation to find their skill.
Griffins along with other nations have been sneaking into Equestria for hundreds of years to catch animals and recruit soldiers from the unnaturally dangerous inhabitants of the forest. Without an army of Pegasi it would be next to impossible to stop them and that was the last thing Celestia wanted, she needed her peaceful experiment and admitting they needed a military response to that many ponies would be disastrous. So it was that the griffins continued recruiting in secret and Celestia let them, after all they were making the forests safer. It was actually when we got more mechanised and didn’t keep coming to take away the monsters that things really went to hell.
I don’t know how those griffins ever convinced some higher ups to go along with it but they hatched this crazy plan. They would go into Equestria pretending to be sport recruiters or whatever and find really old blank flanks. They looked for blank flanks that were fit, strong, and athletic then offer them a chance on some machine guns in secret. Old blank flanks will try anything on any terms and it turns out cutie marks started to appear. That’s how I got mine.
Now, a normal pony in Ponyville couldn’t recognize a machine gun belt. However, anypony can recognise the dagger stabbing through said machinegun belt. I had finally got my mark but anypony I showed it too wouldn’t get it or would be horrified by it. I just couldn’t win. Wait just a minute, I didn’t have the dagger yet did I? I’ll get to that later but I have the only two part cutie mark I have ever heard of and at that point it was still just a belt of ammo. I guess I just decided there wasn’t anything left for me at home and left with the rest of the recruits. I bet they had a thousand new recruited colts and fillies on the boat to the Kingdom before anypony back home caught on.
Back to being cynical now? Okay! Equestria had wealth beyond its wildest dreams and didn’t even know it. One house burns down in Equestria and its sad, a tragedy even, a city burns in Saddle Arabia and no one gives a shit. While ponies were paying up for a mud bath at the spa zebras were bathing their hooves in blood fighting over the last well full of muddy water. Refugees came to Equestria but none of them ever told their story, Celestia would have sent them back.
Gems have to be the most obvious overlooked wealth. You could barely kick over a rock in Equestria without finding big, high quality gems (or a monster). Big pure gems are quite rare. If you want an enchantment then a gem is the perfect vessel. If you want to power a light almost any shiny rock will do. If you want your sword to crackle lightning or you want to run machines or turn belts then you need some big and pure ones. The new industrial age demanded gems at any price and we were cut off from the best source. I’ve seen kids playing with buckets of gems that a respectable griffin back home would kill the whole family for any one of. Do you know what they used them for? Shiny studs on dresses, table ornaments, bartering items, toys, even dragon food! Cutting us off drove the price through the roof at home and made us desperate while the price in Equestria plummeted.
So to recap. Celestia grabbed the best chunk of the planet for her pets to live in and dared us to come after her. She actually did a good job of keeping the world out but times were changing faster than ever before. You could go to prison five years before I was born and come out ten years later to find that automobiles that were once a novelty were now everywhere. Gems were crucial to development and Equestria had them. Griffins had been coming into Equestria since forever catching animals for food and soldiers but that was ignored as it actually helped and stopping it would threaten the society she had built. Now griffins were trading in gems, drugs, and weapons and were getting harder and harder to ignore. The monsters they had once controlled were getting more and more numerous as well and more and more ponies were going missing. The darkness was coming with the money.
History is full of strong ponies meeting weak ponies and then the strong ponies kill all of the weak and take their stuff. But that didn’t happen this time, do you know why? Celestia. That immortal bitch wanted to play princess in her perfect pacifist society but she had something that makes every army on earth shit themselves. She had the sun. She could scorch half the world on a whim but she need not do something so dramatic. Darkness, cold, a famine all would surely grind a proud nation into the dust just as surely as being cooked alive by the sun.
And so there you are. The most powerful magic user on the whole planet gets to play with the sun, and have her little kingdom, and flaunt the riches of her land like a steak in front of a hungry manticore and they had to sit and take it because they couldn't touch the power of the sun.
You might not get how scary that is, having someone else look after the sun, probably because of your electric lights. If you ever wanted to freak out a bunch of tribals tell them you’re taking the sun away, they get it. Ponies way out East killed each other by the thousands trying to fuel the sun, they got it. No matter what happened we had to live knowing that if we stepped out of line then Equestria would bunker down for a brutal three day winter while our half of the planet burned.
Oh, in case you are a griffin with your fancy long lives with 80 only being the average age for how much fighting you do bringing the average down, you’re not going to get pony scale very well. Just multiply every year I say by three and it should be close. Ponies live 30 years if we are lucky, 40 if we are real lucky. One of the reasons we make good soldiers, young adults at age 5.
Off topic again. So Equestria had rocks but wouldn’t export them so it came down to us as Equestrian born ponies living in the Kingdom to go in and buy them without raising suspicion. Then we could send them back home and everypony wins. Well that about catches you up.
Oh god not again. Blllaaarrrgggg!