The Wealth of the World

by very trustworthy rodent

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark
Length: 7856

The reformers' movement of nineteenth century Equestria takes a turn for the radical when a group of like-minded isolationists found their own liberated community on an empty island.

In the 19th century of Princess Celestia's rule, Equestria experienced an acceleration of its progress and prosperity as the first westward expansion began. Yet there were some ponies who took this call to progress as a warrant for ever more radical reform. In 1858, 148 ponies left Equestria to realize that radical dream. This is their story.

Written for a Writeoff Association contest (based off the prompt "Distant Shores"), but more broadly intended as an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, inspired by and deeply indebted to his great short story, Earth's Holocaust.

Published 2015-09-06 21:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2015-09-06 21:40:02 UTC

The Wealth of the World

The Wealth of the World
by very trustworthy rodent

The following is a personal account of a journey undertaken by radical reformers who left Equestria to seek a better life. More particularly, it concerns the fate of 148 ponies who took off from Equestria aboard the Queen Sapphire on the 12th of April in the year 1858 of Her Majesty Princess Celestia’s reign. I will preface this account by confirming that these ponies all will have perished by the time that anypony finds this lonely book. For those ponies who are now thinking of glancing through my story simply so they might know the ailment that took us, I should endeavor to warn you against it before continuing, for it was a virus of the mind, and it takes scarcely more than a weak mind to succumb to its poison. If my plan for this account is successfully enacted, it will have been found sealed by magic in a waterproof box and tucked within a chest that I buried myself, off the coast of the island where the Queen Sapphire found her new home. It will have been discovered alongside a few daguerreotypes of my wife and me, a hoofful of our most beloved books, and three of my favourite little artefacts—my gilded snuff box inlaid with a turquoise stone, inherited from my great-grandfather, my brass pocket watch, and my wedding band. I would ask the ponies reading this not to cast away these baubles. We have cast away too much already. Now—allow me to start at the beginning.

The day when the Equestrian government announced its endorsement of the westward expansion was greeted with cheer by pious settlers, the national railroad company, and deep-pocketed businessponies alike, but for me it was little more than a bother, as I was made to suffer a tax rise. Being a stallion of letters and relatively few means, I joined a group of my neighbors in petitioning the great Princess Celestia to lower the burden on our wallets, only to be met with a chilly response from the Steward’s Office, from which I inferred that the government simply didn’t think we knew what was best for us. Mean and grasping as our class might be, our petty concerns were nonetheless part of a broad call for reform that was galvanizing a broad cross-section of the population, and I found myself swept up with those who sought an end to the injustices of the Equestrian system. Now, I had never been inclined to the radical reform movement before, but on this occasion, I was impelled to unite with the reformers in protest, if for no principled reason. Indeed, I admit that, at first, I was motivated only by my sad financial state—but one good filly, who led an organisation that was perhaps the most apocalyptically critical of our monarchy, took it upon herself to welcome me into her cause.

This mare’s name was Distant Shores—a pegasus with a pastel blue coat and strangely dark eyes like misted amethysts. Her cutie mark was a blindfold, that vital accessory of justice. I was at first wary of her, as I was of all reformers, but she had easy manners and a deeper interest in the great literature of dead ponies than I anticipated from one so eager to throw out anything old and dusty. Her organisation had one of the trendy names so common to these reform groups—the Transcendental Unitarians, the Communitarian Society, &c.—but at the conference and dinner party where our interests met, I found that we shared more common ground than would most perfect strangers. She held forth on everything from our own native writing, the luminous poetry of Dreamstar, that late epic Opulana by Inkwell Lane, the mammoth Gothic novels of Mundo Quill, to the ancient literary traditions of the East, the eternal Tale of Keiji, the stories of General Silverhawk, the voluptuous verses of The Tragedy of the Four Kings recited with illimitable reverence in that dining hall! So it was that tying together our causes against the government was surprisingly simple.

In total I cannot say how many ponies were united in this sudden bolt of anger besides those known to myself and Distant Shores, but it was soon beyond our control, and the riot and clamor in Canterlot demanded a response. At last, Princess Celestia emerged from the Palace and declared that she had an answer for us. She presented us with two options: to move to the West ourselves and stake out uncharted territory, or to depart Equestria entirely and found a new land. In her kindness, she would, at a cost to the government, provide a number of us with the means to freely leave Equestria—a ship from Equestria’s own naval fleet. This was greeted with boos and jeers from the mass of ponies who had no desire to leave their homes and families behind, but my private reaction was a great deal more agreeable. I must confess: I sensed a whimsical promise in the notion of leaving Equestria. To leave the old earth behind and make off for new land—it lit a coltish desire for exploration and discovery in my heart, as though I might be following in the hoofsteps of Hurricane Swift in Gales of the Appelantic. I could not but fancy myself as the noble seafarer, the itinerant pilgrim, that archetype of adventure! I turned to Distant Shores, and I knew at once that she shared my feelings! Our destinies, I fancied, were then united as one, the constellations enveloping us in heavenly purpose.

Distant Shores she was, and distant shores would receive us—how auspicious her name seemed at that moment! We clasped hooves and cheered like we had gone mad. The next day we were married, and I pray that the daguerreotypes we commissioned survive in this box as a record of our happiness.

The ship to take us away would be the Queen Sapphire. As I understand it, there was some competition among those who desired a place on the vessel; Shores and I were judged to be of particular distinction within the reform movement and as such we were guaranteed passage. It goes without saying that Shores was distressed at this preferential treatment, but it was explained to us that once we had founded a new land, we were free to pursue our own dogma and thus allow whomever we chose to make their own migrations from and to that land. For Celestia’s land, however, it would be Celestia’s dogma. For the pragmatic cause of the reform she sought, Distant Shores could not argue.

Shores and I were not the only ponies who earned special treatment. Besides the two of us, there was also a stallion by the name of Scarlet Flame, one of Shores’ co-conspirators, and the very sort of radical that I was disinclined to know. Like me, he was a unicorn, and our names shared a peculiar similarity; for these reasons among others, Shores sometimes accused me of jealousy in our worse moments, but the more basic truth is that I did not like the pony. Scarlet was cultureless, and seemed purely hateful of Equestrian civilisation. The matter of improvement was to him immaterial; what was most important was to stomp old trumpery beneath the hoof until it was dust. Stout, unthinking, and resentful, his character and his ideals were objects of elemental distase to me. His singular virtue, I believe, was that he acted to balance Distant Shores’ whimsy with the gravel-voiced rhetoric of destruction. At this early stage, I hoped that he would play only such a balancing role in our new world. As for the mark on his flank, it was a great bonfire; this image illustrated the nature of his heart better than any I could devise.

We sold our property and took only our most valued personal belongings onto the ship—for me and Shores, this meant far more books than was ever necessary. As noted, there were 148 passengers overall, crammed together into bunks in wooden compartments loaded with chests and baggage cases. We the privileged few slept together in a larger cell—Distant Shores, myself, and Scarlet Flame. Even our crew was composed of reformers. The ship’s captain was a wiry earth pony who called himself Almarine, a venerable stallion to our cause. We were to set off on the 12th of April and find ourselves a new home.

The day of departure was more tearful for Shores than for me. I was an only foal who knew little of my distant family, and my parents had passed several years ago—my mother of the flu and my father of consumption. This left me lacking in filial ties when contrasted with Shores, who had an unmarried younger sister in the textile trade, and whose mother was not yet sixty, by all accounts still red-cheeked and healthy. I let them have privacy to say their farewells, but later on, Shores confessed to me in plaintive voice that she was unable to explain or justify her mission to her mother. I could offer little but comfort.

The Queen Sapphire was docked in Manehattan. I still recall now my last view of civilisation as we raised anchor and set forth into the Appelantic Ocean. Amid the great sea, we reckoned ourselves pioneers, and looked back with presumptive superiority at the old world. Today I feel no pioneering spirit well up in me as I think on my final view of that formidable city—only an abiding sense of loss.

As to the details of the journey itself, I will not bore you with the many trials of seafaring. We were on board the Sapphire for two-and-a-half months before we made landing. Myself being prone to seasickness, I suffered for a good portion of this period; Shores fared better, generally speaking, although I did see her leaning over the decks more than once. We were quickly accustomed to the solid taste of oats, though at least where concerned drinks we were quite overburdened with all manner of spirits and wines. It was apparent that many of our fellow passengers had seen fit to take their vices with them, which Scarlet heartily disapproved of. As was the custom, we were all made to suck on limes from time to time as insurance against scurvy, an unpleasant practice.

Indeed, by the time we spied a green island of sufficient size to host our group, most of us were quite exhausted with life at sea. From our oceanic vantage, the island resembled first a darkened mountain, swarmed on all sides by moss and mist, but, as we drew closer, we saw that this mountain sheltered a vast forested flat-land that was surely suitable for the accommodation of everypony on board and tens more besides. We were all revelry as the ship approached—and yet our joy was not universal. I recall Scarlet Flame and his tense look, his small, squinted gaze never leaving the shore, and I wonder now if he had any inkling of what was to come.

It was a cool morning when our weary vessel beached on the shore. Hungrily we spilled out over the sand, eager explorers all of us. Shores and I stayed close to one another, talking idly about the life we might lead here. We ventured into the forests, where the birdsong was high and clear through the canopy, and came to a little cave sunk into the mountainside. We remained there for some time, to take in a little private happiness amid our new surroundings, and in doing so, discovered a tiny nook in the rocky wall, closely concealed. Together we resolved to store our most valuable belongings here, including the blank diary that I write in today. You may think my actions cynical or mean—to hide our private belongings from such a well-intentioned set of ponies—but I am thankful beyond measure to my former self for making this decision.

Once it was determined that the island was well-positioned as a home for us, our ragged band met together on the edge of the forest and we called the crowd to order. Shores and Scarlet Flame elevated themselves on a jutting rock formation and addressed the pioneers. We convened there to lay down the foundations of a new society, united as one voice.

Scarlet Flame did much of the public speaking; he was an exceptional rhetorician. The trite word to apply, I suppose, in fitting with his name, would be “fiery.” His deep voice blazed with feeling and his oratory cracked and popped at every hinge of its rhythm. When it reached the climaxes, that voice soared upwards and outwards without losing any of its startling power. It was a skill I envied.

Scarlet declared first that certain things would have to change. This new society was to be a society of equals, in which every action by every individual would be free and voluntary. There was to be no class or rank, no enforcement of coercive law or taxation, no false divinity as we saw in Princess Celestia.

“We will liberate ourselves!” cried he jubilantly. “We will liberate ourselves from the evils that burden ponykind and thus restore the goodness of the pony in his natural state! On this day we will cleanse those evils from this island!”

With that emancipatory exclamation came a discussion of what sins were the most immediately forthcoming among ponykind. The monarchy of Princess Celestia was the first and bitterest topic. Symbols of Equestrian domination were to be discarded—the ship was to be repainted to conceal its origins, its Equestrian flag burned, and all the Celestia-worshipping ornaments and heraldic symbols contained within its vast wooden case were to be thrown out to the sea. This was an easy decision.

But, in the end, we were no longer under the dominion of Princess Celestia, and so we looked to ourselves to distinguish divisions of class among our group. Indeed, there were a few younger nobles who had come along, and they had brought with them some articles of trumpery and finery—gilded trinkets, silken robes and hats, all manner of gleaming objects emblazoned with family heraldry. With some reluctance, they forfeited these to the mob.

“Meaningless symbols of wasteful cruelty!” roared Scarlet Flame, holding up a shining goblet in a shaking hoof. “Hollow instruments crafted only to celebrate and perpetuate the material wealth and power of an oppressor class so that they might play at being noble and moral, when we all know from their actions that they are, as a matter of fact, deeply ignoble and totally—totally—morally degenerate!”

The ponies cheered and smashed up the remaining trumpery of aristocracy on that beach, throwing the torn and ruined artifacts into the sea. One last holdout, a silver-coated unicorn mare, was clutching her belongings fearfully as she backed away. She was encircled by the others, and seeing no escape, began to protest the ritual.

“Please, please!” cried the aristocrat. “These are family heirlooms. How can I teach my foals of their heritage without them? These are not just symbols of power but marks of history—of culture—of civilisation itself. How can we build an new society without a knowledge of history and the roots of civilisation?”

“That history is one we must disinherit!” replied Scarlet Flame. “That history is but a gruesome tale of blood and domination! Discard those trinkets and liberate your foals from that heritage! No more shall we know of ponies who hold dominion over their fellow!”

One by one the reformers took everything the young mare clutched so tightly in her hooves— the fur-lined robes, the gilt ornaments, the dusty family chronicle—and brought them into the throng, where they were angrily destroyed, and thus was the last aristocrat denuded, standing as an indistinguishable equal among writers and labourers and scroungers.

The distinctions of class and rank now duly disposed of, the mob turned its collective mind to consider other instruments of inequity that might be dealt with in a similar fashion. A dark red earth colt spoke up, a colt I knew to be Bumper Crop, the leader of a group among us that was known for its steadfast opposition to the settlers’ movement in Equestria.

“I know that some of us have brought weapons to this island!” he exclaimed. “Now I am in no doubt about the essential goodness of all these ponies gathered here, but what is a weapon but the means of enforcing the power of one at the expense of many? What is a weapon but the means by which our government and others have waged their wars of conquest? Swords, guns, any and all munitions—they must go to the sea! Even today, the settlers moving westward brag of their guns and the ease with which they can pick off native buffalos. Weaponry is the greatest folly ponykind has ever burdened itself with!”

This plea drew applause from the crowd, and once more, the group rushed to gather an undignified assortment of swords, knives, and guns from their luggage. I saw Almarine retrieve a little blade from his saddlebag and toss it atop the pile, kissing it just before he did so. When no more weapons were forthcoming, the ponies, in a blissful fury, seized the cruel metal of war for the last time and hurled the arms into the sea. I privately prayed no murderers had stored away weapons, as I had my books and baubles.

Finally, when all the weaponry was cast off, the ponies regrouped again at the rock. It was clear that they were considering whether there might yet be more terrible evils lurking among their belongings, inherited from the old world.

“I have never seen anything like this before,” said I to Distant Shores. “I will be interested to see the impact of these reforms.”

“They’re not finished yet,” said Distant Shores. “Just watch.”

After some minutes of diffuse gossip and discussion, another pony took it upon herself to speak. She was an earth filly from the textile mills—a labourer—named Cotton Lilac. Her voice was high and sharp, and it brought us all to swift attention.

“Money!” she exclaimed. “If there’s one thing this place doesn’t need, it’s money! When I turned ten, my momma sent me to the mill and since then I learned to know my value by the bits in my purse. Today, I am nineteen years old, in the prime of my working life, and I cannot take it anymore. Why must we depend on money so? Paper and coin, that’s all it is. I will not be valued by those bits anymore!”

This set off a riotous succession of cheers and Scarlet Flame declared the abolition of money at once. Our wallets were hastily emptied of bits until there was a small fortune collected on that beach. Checkbooks and receipts and ledgers emerged as well, and all records of debt. Indeed, many of the ponies gathered on the beach were poor debtors, and they rejoiced to see their financial documents destroyed. It seemed to me that the abolition of money had pushed the mob into an incomparable state of frenzied joy, and I watched with interest as they tore up their debts and cast away the burdens of currency.

Scarlet Flame appeared satisfied with this passionate display, and he called for order. Now that we had decisively thrown off our shackles, it was time for us to devise a new base upon which a virtuous society could thrive. Firstly, it was decided that the island would henceforth be known only as The Island, for to name it after anything else could imply superiority. To name it for a pony implied the superiority of that pony; to name it for an object of artificial beauty implied the superiority of its creators; to name it for an object of natural beauty implied the inferiority of ponykind in the face of nature. Furthermore, noted Scarlet, The Island was for all intents and purposes the entire world of ponykind, insofar as ponykind was good and true and unimpeded by evil, in which case all the ponies beyond the shores of The Island were barbarians—no more true to the natural goodness of ponykind than the carnivorous giant cats of Zebrika. What else could this place be but the lone Island of freedom and reason amidst that barbarism?

Secondly, it was agreed that The Island would not be constituted as a nation in the manner of Equestria. “The nation is a fantasy!” cried Scarlet. “Let us abandon those capricious borders that herd in honest ponies and cast a veil of prejudice over their eyes!” So it was that The Island was founded as nationless by design.

Having established the most basic philosophical elements of our society, it was time to consider more physical matters. Our group was constituted mostly of labourers—over half of us, I would suppose. We were two-thirds earth pony, and there were only eight unicorns, myself and Scarlet Flame included. Our differences in skills and background would have to be accounted for. More pertinently, we would have to find a spot to make our first settlement. A expeditionary group of volunteers was quickly assembled to seek out good land and establish such a settlement. Scarlet Flame insisted upon leading this expedition, and having no desire to argue, I allowed him to take the reins.

From that day we began the hard work towards a new civilisation—felling trees, building, cooking, farming. We were peaceful and diligent in those first few months. I, alongside Distant Shores and others of the intellectual class, was put to work planning, allocating, and delegating, though we all indulged in physical labour. In those early days, I pleased myself with the thought that there was no society of ponies more honest, more thoughtful, or more assiduous than the one in which I lived.

By the third month, we had settled into a comfortable routine. From the lush forests, we had carved out a plain suitable for our habitation, and upon that built enough simple huts and houses to accommodate everypony here. Out of necessity, our early diet had been reliant on The Island’s abundance of grass and leaves, but as we arrived at our society’s 100-day anniversary, we had sustainable farms growing crops and vegetables. In a radical move that contravened the selfish pettiness of the old world, these farms were owned collectively and served our community first.

The first hiccough in our grand plan was a brawl that broke out on the 101st day since our arrival. It was the second day of revelry in a planned week of festivities, and some drunkards started a fight. The true reasons for this outbreak of violence are lost to history, but it left us with several injured ponies and a glummer atmosphere than was usual on The Island. Naturally, we were all quite put out, but Scarlet Flame in particular was incandescent with rage. He stood upon a stump so that his fearsome orange mane was lit by the moon, and from that perch he called the village to order.

“We are yet blighted by the sins of the old world!” cried he. “We are yet brought to blows by this poison!” He held in his hoof a bottle of whisky, which he then threw down in dramatic fashion, smashing it in the village square. “Can you imagine what great, great creatures of virtue we ponies could have been had the devils of Tartarus not brewed these spirituous concoctions to confound our good senses? Let us embody that virtue and cast them out! Let us smash and burn these devilish spirits!”

There was solemn agreement among those gathered, and we lit a fire, upon which was thrown all the spirits and wines that had been brought from Equestria. The fire blazed up in ruddy celebration, as though in a merry state of inebriation itself, and there was a great stomping of hooves. Being not a drunkard nor a teetotaler, I was broadly indifferent to the ritual, but I spied a few gloomy topers lurking by the fields, shamefacedly examining their hooves. Many of them I recognised as seastallions—the crew of the Queen Sapphire. Captain Almarine I spied, guzzling down the last cup of wine as his fellows demanded its relinquishment. All fluid consumed, he held out his empty cup to them with a look of defiance.

When I witnessed this burning of the spirits, I supposed it to be an isolated incident and unlikely to recur. Perhaps the corrupting influence of alcohol was a genuine phenomenon. In hindsight, this second purification only established a systematic means of continuous moral rebirth that would prove a necessity over the course of our Island’s short, dim history. As I have come to reflect on that history, I am forced to consider that our failures were not the product of ill tactics but evidence of a basal sickness within our notion of Reform itself—that the reformed society we sought was no more truly organic than the Tradition we had so arrogantly designated as the suppressive superstructure of false gods.

Yet it did appear for a time that we had found paradise—this I cannot deny. For the best part of a year we lived in harmony such that would make Princess Celestia envious, interrupted only by that regrettable drunken episode. Then, in the March of 1859, disaster struck.

By the time of Hearth’s Warming Eve, the drinking incident was forgotten by all those but the most determined drunkards. Distant Shores and I were considering the possibility of foals—if only! Scarlet Flame was heavy-hoofed as always in his capacity as our chief organiser, but the ponies of The Island responded to his booming rhetoric. Our store of oats would pull us through winter if nothing else, and when spring at last glistened on the horizon, we thought that the worst of our struggles was over. If only, if only. O what terrific folly, our self-willed exile!

So then—disaster. An earth filly named Sewphie was found dead—bludgeoned with a rock. She was a friend of Cotton Lilac, the mare who stood up and condemned money on the day of our arrival. Tragically, Lilac had stumbled upon the body herself, during a turn in the woods. Her pale form lay on its flank, in repose amid frosted flowers, natural and angelic.

In the following weeks, Lilac testified that the murderer was probably motivated by the banal intricacies of a predictable lovers’ dispute, but we shall never know exactly who committed this crime. We shall never know because the question on the lips of the Islanders was never “Who is the murderer?” Their question was merely, “How is there a murderer here?” It was their question because it was Scarlet Flame’s question, and any other path of inquiry was secondary.

“How could this happen?” he thundered to me and Shores during a private meeting. “What has gone wrong? What reason could there be to murder?” His influence among us was such that we became preoccupied with preventative measures—what could corrupt a pony so deeply that he would commit murder, and could it be cast out like the weaponry and the spirits?

It was at this juncture that first found myself in conflict with Scarlet Flame. Until this point, I had tolerated his radical tactics as a pragmatic necessity, but this murder drew a schism through the Island’s leadership. Shores and I were of the mind that this incident, though tragic, was a fundamentally inescapable consequence of pony society. The criminal should be punished, we argued, but not all our village. Scarlet, however, was resolute that we could source this evil act to the influence of some artificial structure of thought, a withering vestige of Equestrian beliefs. As such, the whole sick body of our society needed moral medicine.

“Who can say whether it is natural for the pony to murder?” he asked us, and truthfully, we had no scientific answer. “You will point to years of historical precedent, but that history was shaped by cruelty and segregation. Who can say whether murder is not merely a consequence of an ill-devised system of political economy that places higher existential value on some ponies to the detriment and deprivation of others?”

It is most regrettable that these arguments stymied the investigative process, such that our political troubles defined its winding, weary course. At the third hearing, held in my own home, it finally unravelled, the red string of our so-called destiny tangled into irreparable knots, the spool clattering sharply on hardwood floor. During a tense but fruitless interrogation of one of the seastallions by Distant Shores, Scarlet rumbled to life and stood to deliver one of his speeches. I have described this pony as destructive before—this speech, I think, served not just as a general evocation of destruction but as the enactment of our own destruction. Our society was forever severed from that day forth, and doomed to collapse. From Scarlet’s lips came poison more potent than any spirit, more piercing than any sword.

“Poor Sewphie!” he exclaimed. “Poor, poor Sewphie! To be coldly murdered and, from the view of heaven, see her earthly companions apologise for the sin committed against her!”

Thus he spoke first of the folly he was witnessing in this trial and its utter futility where concerned the cause of this crime. He spoke of history and of the many forces that had led us to this great Island, where at last we were free from oppression and domination. He said that for our tiny idyll to suffer even now at the whim of cruel murder suggested a deeper root to the evils of ponykind than wine or money or guns. He asked what was the first sin of the first pony civilisation.

“What is it?” he barked. “Can you even guess? The more I think of it, the more convinced I become. We have doomed ourselves to failure because of this one thing we cannot bear to cast off. Like the bird nursing the foreign chick of the cuckoo, we have been so close to this demon—since our very foalhoods, in fact—that we cannot imagine life without it.”

We all looked at one another in anticipation, but no voices offered themselves before Scarlet Flame spoke again.

“This! This is what I talk of.” In his hoof he held one of Shores’ book. “The curse of written language. It is strange to me that so many consider these scribblings to be pure representations of pony thought when they are so consumed with material evils. As spirits poison the body, so does the written word poison the mind.”

“Books?” said Distant Shores. “You can’t be serious. Books can certainly contain wicked things, but they can also inspire ponies to goodness.”

Scarlet shook his head. “Inspire them more than their fellow pony? Inspire them more than the beauty of natural world? A book can carry ponies into mysterious unrealities that confound natural sense and practical reason. The only book that could ever reflect true goodness is a book in which is written but a single command: look to the world.”

There was an outcry from the audience, and a ferocious debate swiftly consumed the theater of justice. Shores and I looked to each other in desperation. Neither one of us had any inkling of Scarlet Flame’s radical plans before that moment; indeed, both of us being bibliophiles ensured that we would never consent to such plans.

Alas, the most devout reformers were already fuming for a third purification! But where there were once a majority of ponies ready to join with Scarlet Flame in bringing down destruction, this matter proved to divide us in a manner that was unprecedented on The Island. We were no longer bound, but were instead ruptured by our ideals.

When all clamor died down it was clear that this matter would have to receive a fair hearing among the townsponies. I stubbornly resisted the notion of a popular vote, but my wife, for all her love of literature, believed that the virtues of fairness and consent superseded her own sentiments. Naturally, in the course of this argument, the murder had been totally forgotten—what fools Scarlet made of us all, and of himself!

The vote was held the next week in the village square, and to my relief, the result was a two-thirds majority in favour of keeping written language alive—but it was not the end of our trouble. Scarlet Flame’s cult, which held sway over Bumper Crop, the farmer who hated guns, and also many of the seastallions, who had deserted the Captain Almarine to his sadness, yet numbered 45 in total, and they were insistent that they could not live with us in moral squalor. With characteristic bombast, Scarlet insulted directly the ponies who had voted against the motion, including the tearful Cotton Lilac, whose friend had died for Scarlet’s thoughtless cause. He declared that he would leave our settlement and found a new one—any pony with moral courage could follow him. It would be a settlement without the degenerating influence of art, and thus without murder.

We almost believed he was bluffing; when evening came and his little cult actually left, it startled us all. We supposed that he would return in a few days begging us for access; when he did not, we began slowly to forget about him. Or at least, we began to try.

What followed was the second period of peace on The Island. Lasting from the March all the way through to Hearth’s Warming Eve of 1859, it was a chillier and more fragile peace than the first. For the most part, we were a divided race. Those of us in the first village, at least, did not talk of the second—did not know even where it was situated, and if somepony did, we were in no hurry to ask. It was a point of soreness to consider the bleak circumstances of our split. I suspect that our murderer slipped out with Scarlet’s group; we never found the culprit among our depleted numbers.

Yet there was peace. Rumours abounded of the second village, and I endeavoured on the whole to avoid hearsay, but with our territories in such close proximity, it became difficult. Every so often, a pony from our settlement would wander off into the woods to join Scarlet. In total, I believe we lost five ponies this way. On the other hand, no ponies came back from Scarlet’s village, and while my heart would have liked to believe that this was because we were mistaken, and my counterpart’s vision of a utopia had come true, my head convinced me of a darker notion: there was no escape from Scarlet’s village. Echoing calls and chants came through the trees, from which I could discern no words, and there would follow a great stomping sound. I thought it could have been an ongoing celebration at first, but it would be a most queer form of celebration were that the case—too rigid, too precise. Though many of us in the first village enjoyed a turn in the woods from time to time, we never once encountered our old neighbours amid the trees. Some of us supposed that they were too far away, but The Island is not that large, and we took many walks in the wood during the summer.

My fears were confirmed in early December, when a sea blue stallion tore up through the rotting, snow-crusted undergrowth and nearly frightened a poor filly called Cowry to death. He was a runaway—he had not gone with Scarlet Flame during the initial dispute, but disillusioned with slow-paced agrarian life, he had followed after in July. They brought him up to the office to stand before me and Distant Shores, and we heard his testimony.

As it transpired, he was a character with whom I was well-acquainted. His name was Lisianthus Logos, and he was one of our few unicorns. He was also among the ex-aristocrats, making him doubly endangered on The Island. Those nobles were a dour lot here, but naturally, they were the best conversationalists of our community, and he told his uncomfortable tale with such dignity that made me wish all the more that it were untrue.

The first of many unpleasant surprises was that Scarlet Flame had instituted a special organisation in his village that he termed “the Vanguard of Reform” to oversee matters that threatened the integrity of the community (such as attempts to write anything besides dated records). The brawny seastallions were employed to enforce these rules through patient intimidation. No violence, supposedly—no violence, at first. Yet the Vanguard were subjected to physical training at night, ensuring that everypony could hear their stomping hooves and morale-boosting chants. Scarlet reassured the villagers that once they had become “new ponies,” as he put it, this group would naturally fade away. As of December, it remained.

By the time Logos arrived, the farms and houses of Scarletville were already surrounded by a high wooden fence; apparently, it served to incubate them until they had attained the highest possible state of virtue. In Scarlet Flame’s mind, virtue seemed synonymous with isolation and silence. Unable to find a means to handle the insults and cruel banter that passed between ponies in public spaces, Scarlet and his Vanguard emphasised quiet diligence. Language was declared to be a distraction from inner goodness.

The Vanguard’s Relearning Program began two weeks after Logos came to their gates. These were a special means of educating those deemed to be corrupted. Among the planning class, when backtalk and thievery persisted, they were made to work as farm labourers for arranged periods. When that backtalk and thievery emerged in the farmers, Scarlet placed them in isolation, so they might know themselves more truly. Over a course of months, the enforcement of Relearning became ever more severe—until a natural spectre of ruin came to Scarletville that should have been long predicted.

In his frenzy for reform, Scarlet Flame had neglected the most elemental needs of his populace. Harvests were well below expected levels, and many ponies, especially those detained in the Relearning huts, were already malnourished. As winter’s slow crawl over The Island plunged Scarletville into eerie cold, the lamps went out across the village. In the past month, all seven ponies undergoing Relearning in isolation had died of disease or starvation. The farmers were faring poorly, barely surviving on shallow bowls of oats. At least two had died of pneumonia and two more were violently ill. Yet Scarlet would allow none to leave. They were falling apart, said Logos, falling to ashes, and all that Scarlet Flame thought of was more reform. Hypocritically, he ensured that his inner circle was well fed while others could barely stand on their own four hooves for hunger.

Thus did Logos make his escape by night. He rammed a hole through the fence, and was pursued by Scarlet’s stallions for perhaps two miles. In spite of their doggedness, fortune favoured Logos when he chanced upon an earthy hollow concealed by leaves and snow—perhaps the abandoned sanctuary of some animal. By morning, he had become quite feverish from the cold, and in his delirium, burst out as soon as he saw Cowry’s familiar form.

Our runaway’s story prompted a long deliberation over whether we in the first village could do anything to help. We certainly had the numbers to confront Scarlet, but Logos shook his head. The Vanguard of Reform now consisted of over half the population of the village, and furthermore, they had been effectively militarised. Most would not come peacefully. Those still held in unwilling bondage, he said, may already be too far gone to save now.

It would have been easy to dismiss Logos’ argument as aristocratic fatalism at the expense of those he deemed to be his social inferiors, but there was a point to be made for avoiding confrontation. Scarlet Flame’s private militia would surely attack us if we tried to overwhelm his village through numbers alone. Had we not sworn off war and violence as a means of resolving conflict? Shores and I decided to sit on the information until we could mediate a peaceful solution. I am still unsure that we made the correct judgement, but it did not matter; two weeks later, on Hearth’s Warming Eve, we were invaded.

Knowing they were outnumbered, Scarlet and his brutes came as we slept. My account of these events will be diffused and uneven, as I spent most of that evening being led from place to place in a state of exhaustion. I was woken by Distant Shores to find my house occupied by a small group of my neighbours, including Captain Almarine and Cotton Lilac. There was a commotion outside—shouting and crying. Scarlet’s warriors were herding our sleepy villagers out into the square to hear his declaration of conquest. Those who resisted were given a sharp beating. Apparently, the village had been designated a toxic influence on Scarletville. This diagnosis relied largely on the case of Lisianthus Logos, who they claimed to have been swayed by our reactionary habits.

“We must leave,” said Almarine. “We can’t fight them.”

“Can we?” I asked. “Leave?”

The fateful words were spoken by a plaintive Cotton Lilac: “Please. I want to go home.”

I wondered idly why they had not come for me first, but hurried by my wife and Captain Almarine, we snuck into the woods, intending to make for the Queen Sapphire. As it turned out, this was a dreadful mistake.

The Queen Sapphire was smashed up on the shore—not fully dismantled, but beyond our capacity to repair with any speed. Scarlet had correctly predicted our movements and sent no less than six members of his Vanguard there to greet us. For a moment, I stared at the ship blankly; before I could act, I felt the shattering pain of earth pony hooves connecting with my head. I cried out, and heard my compatriots as they too were ambushed. They kicked at our shivering bodies and laughed in the darkness as we pleaded with them, and then ordered us to stand and return to the village. There was no escape from The Island.

The books were already blazing away as we arrived. The bonfire churned and whistled in the winter night—and so the works of Dreamstar and Silverclaw and Inkwell Lane were lost. I could barely summon a response. The villagers stood solemnly before Scarlet Flame on his stump, hemmed in by his goons. He looked leaner, and more frantic in his bearing—his mane dishevelled, his hooves gesticulating in an uncanny, almost mechanical fashion. As we approached, he was jabbering away to the crowd with great fervour, but the sight of his mollified ex-comrades brought his frenzy to a halt.

“So you chose to leave,” he said. “So you are traitors to our mission in the end. Is this not the home we sought? Why did you run?”

I said that it was because I was tired.

Having conquered us, and apparently nonplussed by my answer, Scarlet reverted once more to his tiresome moralising. He announced that from this moment forwards, none of the citizenry were permitted to talk in public save for himself.

“Even now,” said he, voice shaking, “now, now, very now, I fear that even I could impede reform by speaking so freely. I implore you all to think now on your innocent foalhood. Foals are not born to speech—we are taught it! Taught to navigate the many sinful instruments of this world with our ceaselessly lapping tongues! To persuade, to debate, to lie. Hateful tongues!”

And so it went on, like a diabolical circus. I could feel only resignation; though my heart ought to have been hot with resentful anger, it was blackened and frozen in a way I did not recognise, its deepest recesses scorched by ice. I had not even the spiritual means to oppose him.

Suddenly—“Distant Shores! Stop, traitor!”

I looked up at my wife’s name. To my horror, she was galloping for the woods again with her saddlebag loaded with half-charred books. I called to her, and was struck by the soldier at my side. By the time I had scrambled to my hooves, my wife was being dragged away by the stout seastallions, kicking up snow and crying out. It was the last I would see of her. I too was grabbed and, in a dazed state, pulled in the opposite direction. What happened next I cannot precisely say, as I was continuously easing in and out of consciousness.

I know that I first felt a burst of heat from behind. My captors dropped me and there was a terrible scream—successive screams all around, and warmth tickling my prone form. I saw sparks. Were they real or products of my shattered mind? Sparks and flashes in the sky, snow on my tongue, and heat.

Focus hammered at the edge of my senses—the fire! The fire!

I stumbled to my hooves and looked toward the heat. The great bonfire had caught something, or somepony, and spread to engulf the village. It was a black animal that stung and clawed at the eyes, a soaring hellscape of light and choking ash, a howling blaze that captured the sky in a chorus of smoke and screams. My wife, my wife—she was gone, annihilated—Distant Shores receding away, catapulted through streaks of fire, plummeting into the fields where the maw of hell rested. Burning on all sides, burning hair and hoof and heart, burning as only we could, in a ritual of transcendence—where the whole body of this earth would be burnt! This was our last purification.

As I beheld that conflagration, I recalled words from the ancient Book of Oculus, the esoteric Romane scripture. Around two-thirds through the text, the desperate Princess Aurora of Orange is petitioning the demiurge, whose name is usually translated as Eye-Stone, to remake the world without evil, and receives a great monologue in response. After Eye-Stone has indulged in some exaltation at the many beautiful things of pony civilisation, the speech turns on a hinge:

The wealth of the world was born of ponies and will die of ponies

When they see themselves in gilded mirror and hate only the gold.

I still heard the voice of Scarlet Flame through the screaming horror—in madness, joy, or rage, I could not tell.

“Rejoice, rejoice! All suffering is ended! All suffering is ended!”

I ran.

At this moment, I sit in the cave where my wife and I first came upon arrival to The Island, remembering the sensation of her feathers against me as we dreamed of life together. This is a faithful account of our brief paradise and its luminous, self-immolating flight, from watchful peace among the constellations to earthly, frostbitten collapse. If any others remain, they will find me soon, living or dead. I pray now—how I pray now! O Princess Celestia, forgive me! Forgive us!

Scarlet Letter

New Year’s Day, 1860