What's in a name? Is it the legacy of all those who have carried it? Does the individual determine what his name will mean, or is he doomed to be identified only by his ancestors? Does the individual determine the meaning of his name, or does his name define his life and who he shall be? Mainly, this is a story about the unspoken history of Equestria's rise, but in a sense, this is also a story about names...

The first name of importance is that of the unicorn ambassador Jacques Hollande-Cadenza. Now Jacques lived before the winter of the Windigos and long before the birth of Equestria, when the races of ponies were still divided and locked in an endless rivalry, and when no race had any love for the others and only kept peace because they had to cooperate to survive. The Earth Ponies grew the food and harvested the resources, the Unicorns crafted and sold their goods, the Pegasi ensured fair weather conditions, and the Alicorns brought about night and day. But even with cooperation being a necessity, no race was keen to share their abilities and possessions with the others, and this is where ponies like Jacques were essential.

Jacques was an ambassador, and ambassadors had the difficult yet crucial task of getting the races to cooperate. Jacques was a rare type of pony for his time, for he was a unicorn who had fallen in love with and married a pegasus. Such crosses between the pony races were blasphemy in this time, and Jacques was chastised for it but he didn't care, for he loved the mare he married with all of his heart (and adopted her last name, Cadenza, under hyphenation), and he cared not for the prejudices of other ponies. And it was his job not to care, for it was bigotry and prejudice that kept the races apart and therefore the duty of ambassadors to ignore these prejudices in the interest of diplomacy.

But Jacques was unfortunate, for he was ambassador to the wrong empire at the wrong time. Jacques was the Unicornia ambassador to the alicorn kingdom of Aria, and Aria was ruled by the alicorn King Tyrannus Horatio Aristozka. Contrary to his name, Tyrannus was a just ruler... until he changed.

Slowly, and from nowhere, Tyrannus became more and more vindictive. He began to oppress his people, stripping them of their rights and casting unreasonable judgments upon them. He began to execute anyone he suspected of opposing his rule, and issued death threats against those who he disliked or who did not adhere to his ideology. Jacques was one of these unfortunate ponies. Because he had married a pony who was not of his same race and had children with her, he was branded a heretic and an abomination by the alicorn king.

Jacques mainly ignored the death threats thinking that Tyrannus wouldn't risk a war with the unicorns by murdering their ambassador. Sadly, Jacques was wrong. He was very fatally wrong. One afternoon, while Jacques was relaxing in his house in Aria with his wife and daughters, Tyrannus cast a massive spell of destruction upon the home. The spell impacted the house directly, and within seconds it was reduced to flaming ashes and broken glass, and the Hollande-Cadenza family was reduced to nothing but blackened, smoldering pony skeletons dead beyond any glimmer of life.

As luck would have it, however, one member of the family was absent from the house at the time of its destruction, and by this blessing that member survived. That pony was Jacques' only son, Rodrigo Cadenza.

Rodrigo was a dark maroon stallion with a long, deep blonde mane and tail. He was a unicorn, but bore a pegasus name, inherited from his mother. He was a mature pony, about half the age of his father but recognized as an adult. Rodrigo had been out shopping at the marketplace in Aria when the attack occurred.

Upon returning home, Rodrigo immediately dropped the bag of groceries he was carrying, and was greeted with the gruesome sight of everything he had ever known and loved in a pile of smoldering ash. Rodrigo was surrounded by a dead, pervading silence, so quiet that even the shopping bag could be heard touching the ground with a comparative racket.

Rodrigo didn't hear nor care about his fresh groceries hitting the ground. He was numb from the scene before him. His heart had shattered inside, and tears poured from his eyes in droves. He felt as though he had died hundreds of times over. He sat there and wept for hours.

Eventually Rodrigo began to scavenge the remains of his home, but found nothing of value, save for his mother's sapphire locket. It was now all he had left of his family. There was nothing left for him in Aria now, but Princess Platinum had to be notified. Tears blurring his vision, Rodrigo ran as fast as he could to Unicornia.

Author's Note

Please forgive my archaic writing style. I tried to make this as coherent and eloquent as possible.

This is the exposition chapter.