Prolgue: Prelude to Anarchy
Prologue: Prelude to Anarchy
Princesses of Equestria Celestia and Luna, the Dawnstar and Moonjewel, the ones at whose behest the heavenly bodies did their celestial and eternal dance, had simply disappeared.
They hadn't “disappeared” in the sense that they had gone on an unannounced vacation as some thought, or simply fallen prey to illness or melancholy as others had surmised. The pair had just up and bucking disappeared.
At first nopony noticed, as the sun rose and set in its seemingly contractual arrangement with its sibling the moon with nary a disturbance to order to be seen. The countless supplicants and petitioners to the respective Solar and Lunar courts were rather used to being turned away or not being seen at all, and a new royal pony princess had recently joined the hierarchy whose job it was to deal with social issues, so nopony noticed on that front either.
It wasn't until Princess Twilight Sparkle, the newly ascended member of Equestria's alicorn royalty, had attempted to write her former mentor the Princess of the Sun to inform her of some new friendship lesson or other and got no response, that someone high up in the Principality's chain of command began to worry.
Of course, as anypony in Ponyville and beyond would tell you, Twilight Sparkle was often rather prone to worrying, despite having found ways to cope with the effects her anxieties exerted on her.
When her first letter received no timely response, she wrote another in a more conversational tone and waited a day. It read something like,
“Dear Princess Celestia,
I assume you must be incredibly busy with an influx of royal duties. I can think of no other reason why you would be so long delayed in replying to my letter. If you ever need any assistance coping with the burdens of leadership, I am more than up to the task!
Your Faithful Student and Fellow Princess,
Twilight Sparkle.”
The next morning, Twilight awoke not to the magical “pop” or fiery, raucous belch of her little draconic assistant receiving another message, but to stark silence. It was a silence louder than anything she'd ever heard.
Perturbed, the Princess waited until evening and wrote another letter. Then, she awoke from a restless sleep and wrote another. And another. Then over breakfast she wrote another.
Soon, Princess Celestia's quarters were absolutely full of letters from her faithful student. It was later discovered that the ones on top of the massive pile of parchment became decreasingly, well, sane.
Some choice morsels included, “Dear Princess Celestia,
should donkeys be allowed the right to vote and marry?”,
“Dear Princess Celestia,
You're secretly my mom, aren't you?”, and
“Dear Princess Mom,
Today Flash Sentry bought me a skimpy leather saddle and asked me to call him 'daddy'. Isn't that weird?”
As the Princess of Friendship became progressively more unhinged and fraught with worry at her beloved mentor's lack of response, and the letters became more numerous, a passing servant in Canterlot's royal palace was nearly suffocated as a veritable tide of parchment flooded into the halls from Celestia's private quarters.
And on that day, when the door to the vacant chambers swung open revealing no beloved Solar Sovereign had been inside for days, so too opened the proverbial gates of Tartarus, ushering forth…
The Madness of Marekind
