It has been seven thousand years since the Shattering, and the world was ripped asunder.

Canterlot, the last equine city, is an atmosphere-piercing metropolis of vast size; the final bulwark against the collapse of civilisation. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different – and rigidly enforced – level of technology. Ponyville is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains.

Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Twilight Sparkle has been living incognito for nine years in the city-state of Neon Heights, working as a pathologist in the Third District Morgue. But when a near-dead alicorn named Shining Armour drops onto her dissection table, Twilight's world is wrenched apart once more as her past finally catches up with her, for Shining Armour is a winged Post-Equine from Canterlot's Celestial Levels, the penultimate heights of the Godscraper, and with the dying body comes news of war.

If Twilight is to save her life, she must leave her home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Canterlot's base, starting an exile that will take her further than she could ever imagine with only her saddlebag of medicines, and the foul mouthed pegasus Rainbow Dash, to rely on. Yet the world is an ancient place, and even as Twilight struggles towards her unknown destiny the shadow of an ancient apocalypse looms over the last city of equine kind, a conflict where even the Gods themselves waged war, brought on once again by the hatred of one stallion. Once more the eye of Faust stirs, and the aether rings with the screams of a dire warning, one that the equine race had hoped to never hear again.

The Shattering comes once more. . .

Inspired by British novelist Alastair Reynolds, and my little brother Charlie.