Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

by Caballine_Dreams

Chapters

Chapter I: A Nascent Dawn
Chapter II: The Nemoricolae
Chapter III: In Memoriam
Chapter IV: Icarus
Chapter V: The Scourge of the Earth - Part I: Reckoning
Chapter VI: The Scourge of the Earth - Part II: Aeonus

Chapter I: A Nascent Dawn

Chapter I

A Nascent Dawn

~/~|~~

Harmony.

She’d spent her entire life, such as it was, dedicated to its propagation. Dedicated to the cause. Dedicated to the belief that as individuals, ponies possessed within them the capacity to live and act as a cohesive, harmonious whole.

How wrong she’d been.

Princess Celestia: Regent of the Sun, Ruler of Equestria, Demi-Goddess of the Realm stood alone at a high arched window in her illustrious throne room, looking out over glorious Canterlot. Under her watchful gaze, her little ponies went about their daily business, trotting along the well-worn streets and alleyways, cantering through the markets and arcades, engaging in society and commerce. There was no question they’d prospered under her rule. She’d given them her protection, she’d given them hope for a better future, she’d given them wings: she’d even apportioned—to the greatest of their number, long ago—a measure of her eternal power, albeit to, in some notable instances, disastrous effect, as one such spectacular miscalculation—standing ignominiously out amongst all the other regrets and failures any immortal was doomed to accumulate—would bitterly attest.

Regardless, the undisputed fact remained that under her undying, maternal aegis, ponykind had made the relatively meteoric transition from being a threatened species—predated upon by a multitude of bigger and more belligerent races—to the predominant civilisation in the space of a few short millennia.

Short to her, anyway. Time is a constant, that she accepted, but her perception of it was, nevertheless, fundamentally altered by virtue of superabundance.

What’s a few thousand years when you’re destined to live forever?

How old was she, exactly? That, Celestia did not know, or least she could not actively remember. Her earliest memory was of the seaside—white sand beneath her unshod hooves, bracing sea breeze swirling in her nostrils. She had not come out of it, as some of the earliest known mythology would suggest; she’d just happened to be there when her first memories had been formulated… whatever that meant. Had she been born there? Did she, in her fabled uniquity, even have antecedents? Had she just spontaneously shifted into existence, First among Believers? She could not remember being anything other than what she was now: fully grown and possessed of an inimitable magical power.

Her mane was about the only thing that had changed in all that time. It was pink, once, like the not-so-golden fingers of dawn. Before her ascension. Before her coronation. Before her apotheosis.

Before the need for such pretension.

For ten thousand years she had watched, and she had waited, knowing not for what, adopting a policy of least interference. Until finally, they came.

Ponies.

~/~|~~

Celestia looked up, away from the bustling city streets of Canterlot, stirred from her reverie. She did not see, she did not hear her coming so much as she felt it. In fact, the mare in question so consummately employed stealth to the point where she gave no discernible, no tangible, no measurable token of her existence. And yet, there were some things in this world that she, Celestia, with the very might of the Sun and the wisdom of the ages at her command, had never been able to measure, much less explain or understand.

Her unmistakable presence was one of them.

~/~|~~

She wasn’t sure when she had first noticed them. Truly, no things in this world come into being overnight or without precedent: her enigmatic self being the one possible exception. They looked different, then, she seemed to remember. All greys and browns and tans. The occasional earthy red, perhaps, but even that was something of a once-in-a-generation event. A quiet, simple, hardy folk, struggling and fighting to survive the primal harshness of a pre-civilised existence.

Of course, there were many that did not survive.

Countless ponies died in those early years, succumbing to the dreaded proto-plagues, to predators as innumerable as they were rapacious and to the vagaries of wild and untamed weather systems, as hopelessly inefficient as they were deleterious. Disaster after unmitigated disaster, massacre after bloody massacre, the stoic Ponies of the Earth endured. Even as entire populations of their beleaguered fellows were wiped from the face of the earth, they never gave up: never stopped striving for a better tomorrow, for themselves and their progeny. Battling on to the bitter end.

Celestia admired that.

Wanted it.

Even though they did look very different then, in that far-flung realm of pre-history—bigger, unshorn and relatively achromatic—there was no escaping the fact that they bore more than a passing, if somewhat diminutive resemblance to her well-proportioned self. Who could they be, then, but the Chosen ones: children of the Divine? Who was She if not destined to provide for them, to shield them from they who would, in their blindness, destroy the race which would ultimately prove to be the source of both her greatest triumphs and most spectacular failures?

How could she not come to their aid?

So it was that She, Celestia, came, perforce, down upon the last and greatest of their settlements, about to fall, besieged as it was on all sides by fell beasts and wicked creatures—boldly ensconced upon a great mountain at the very centre of the world—like an aureate goddess, in gloried theophany, to the awe and wonderment of all. She spoke to them then, in exalted and inspiring tones, in a language that they had no knowledge of but by way of some powerful sorcery understood; on the nature of her and their existence; on matters regarding the safety and contentment of a people, freed from the spectres of poverty, predation, famine and war; on the creation of art, philosophy, and cultural, magical and technological advancement, made possible only by the attainment of said freedom; of the fundamental tenants to which all ponies must adhere, pursuant to the cause; those of Charity, Compassion, Devotion, Integrity, Optimism and that most ineffable and elusive of traits that resided in varying degrees within them all: Magic; lastly, of her vision of a great and prosperous nation and beyond, incorporating all of the aforementioned—and many more constituent and complimentary—Elements of Harmony, for her and her people.

Their people.

The Ponies of the Earth, heretofore unconquerable—in spirit if not in body—upon seeing this glorious apparition, upon hearing Her noble and assuredly divine words, cast themselves down before Her hooves, pledging fealty to Her, so enraptured were they by Her resplendent majesty: a perfect eidolon of all that they held to be good and fair and beauteous, and all other such words to which they’d previously attached little worth or meaning, such was the bleakness and the despair of their savage, primal world.

Celestia felt a great stirring in her breast, a wetness in her eye and a tremulousness in her heart at seeing the indomitable Ponies of the Earth bowed down before her. So touched was she by their faith in her, so moved was she by their willing acquiescence, that she in turn pledged her silent, though no less commensurate devotion to their cause. It was on that most momentous of days, that would so fundamentally shape the wave of the future, as she walked among her Chosen—her every hoof step falling among their prostrate forms like a white-gold beam of the revelatory sun—that Celestia vowed, come what may, to defend her little ponies to the last.

Even if it should cost her own immortal life.

~/~|~~

Celestia raised her head up high on the arched, marmoreal column of her neck, her fabled auroral mane coruscating and sparkling in the evening sun, unfurling as a pastel rainbow banner born aloft on a stellar wind. Her eyes remained closed and her face radiated calm, even as her heart was rent in two. The slow movement of her lips did little to disturb the form of her sadly serene smile, so softly spoken was her fateful utterance.

“So… you’re finally here. I knew you would come. I’ve been waiting all this time… for you.”

~/~|~~

In seeing to their defence, Celestia knew what had to be done. It was true, the Ponies of the Earth had shown remarkable military discipline in the face of overwhelming odds: an innate capacity for valour and a true willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater whole. And yet, amid so noble a stock, they lacked a singularly great and inspired leader. The various warlords and would-be-kings—despite their best intentions—had kept the populace scattered, unwittingly divided beneath differing banners, all but ensuring the downfall of the many former outlying settlements and city-states. Fiercely independent to a fault, they needed a strong central authority, a leader who could rule undisputed and unchallenged. No mortal pony could ever hope to command the requisite respect and devotion over the course of their short life-span to rule them effectively.

Only an eternal Monarch such as she could.

But the Ponies of the Earth were a proud and stubborn people. Celestia knew that she could not contain their more radical elements with love and tolerance alone. Within their heart of hearts, the embers of sedition smouldered within them all, waiting only to be kindled. They would not tolerate the singular convictions of any one pony foisted upon them, even one so great as her: even one who kept their best interests foremost in her mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Given the nature of her incredible power, they might begrudgingly accept her will at first, but given time, Celestia knew, the firebrands and agitators within their ranks would turn them, as a whole, against her.

Steps had to be taken to ensure this did not come to pass.

So it was that She, Celestia, in further seeking their obeisance, gathered with her all the great spiritual, political and military leaders of the Ponies of the Earth, in the echoing stone hall of the mountain citadel—bedecked as it was with the pomp and pageantry of a proud warrior people—away from the clamouring of the masses, to make them an offer that they could surely not refuse. Either join with her in creating a great and powerful civilisation that would endure all the ages, or turn their back on her and succumb to the fate of all mortal races.

There were few who dissented. Of those that did, fewer still lived long enough to regret their foolishness—of that Celestia made certain, thus effectively decapitating any potential insurrection. It was an unfortunate, though necessary evil. She was a pacifist by nature, benevolent even to a fault, abhorring all forms of bloodshed, but she was also no fool. It was up to her and her alone to make the hard decisions. If a few had to die to save the many, then so be it. Further to that end, in that very first Council of Elders, Celestia drew her immortal blood with theirs, binding them eternally to her. Her golden ichor flowed through their veins: ennobling them, giving them the gifts of long-life and foresight, and further eroding what she saw to be the excesses of their free will.

It was their blood within her veins that would ultimately prove to be her undoing.

Having thus established herself as the predestined ruler of the Ponies of the Earth, she declared, by inaugural royal proclamation, that the mountain citadel that had held out for so long against the rising tides of destruction was to be renamed Cadytum—its original name she either didn’t remember or didn’t care to recall—and was to be the Capital of a great nation, the seat of her power; a golden fount from which the tide of ponydom and the very sun itself would spring.

And so Equestria was born.

Chapter II: The Nemoricolae

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Modern Equestria

Chapter II

The Nemoricolae

~/~|~~

There was no forest that could not be felled. There was no mountain that could not be scaled. There was no river that could not be crossed or dammed. There was no beast that could not be mastered.

There was no enemy that could withstand them.

Princess Celestia, in those earliest and most formative of days, led her little ponies to victory after glorious victory, visibly presiding over every major battlefield in her aureate barding, the Ponies of the Earth seeming to flow from her like marching death-rays of the sun, champrons and crinieres aglow with Her supernal light: purifying flames devouring all who dared stand before them.

The immediate defence of Cadytum, aided by her immensely powerful magic, had proven to be far less problematic than Celestia had originally anticipated, and her mind quickly turned—albeit reluctantly—to thoughts of conquest. To taking back the lands that were rightfully theirs.

To pressing home their newfound advantage.

To do that, Celestia knew, they would need more space than their mountain home and its precipitous terrains could offer them. They needed staging grounds to marshal and train troops in the art of full-scale warfare, arable land to grow crops and support more warriors, open space for new settlements and cities.

The fertile lands surrounding the mountain, once tended to by ponies with an agrarian eye, had fallen into decay. The forests, formerly kept in check by those self-same equines, had grown wild. Monsters and beasts of all manner and description had come to seek shelter in those shadowy woods, lured in by the veritable cornucopia of easy prey the castellated— and thus isolated—city of ponies represented.

No longer.

Celestia, having surveyed these lands immediately proximate to her own stronghold, decided that the forest, as it stood, was beyond redemption. Her generals had duly informed her of the fact that there dwelt within the shadow of the mountain the equine Nemoricolae, enigmatic keepers of the forest: tree-worshipping pacifists who had no love, as she had no love, of bloodshed.

“Do they then,” she had asked, “love cowards?”

She had no love for them. No love for those who would hide from the Shadow within its depths, denying the Light. No love for those would renounce their duty, to their people and to her, their Princess Regent.

Their Goddess.

Having sought assurances that such a thing could be done without arousing any unwanted attention from the less than amiable denizens of the forest, Celestia, taking with her a cadre of elite scouts and a diplomatic contingent—along with her ever present personal guard— went to treat with the mythical woodland ponies, the shadow shod Nemoricolae.

The forest proved as treacherous and as impenetrably labyrinthine as she had feared, and only the skill of her scouts and the aid of her magic allowed them to make any kind of progress. Not only had the land grown wild, it seemed, it had grown evil as well. The ubiquitous shadows seemed to linger longer and lie more heavily, and even the holy light from the horn of Celestia herself could do little to disperse them. Roots and branches conspired against their passage, twisting toward them unnaturally, as if animated by a malevolent spirit. One veteran scout was caught completely unawares by a mysterious pitfall in the ground—a “pitfall” that several other ponies had walked over moments before without incident. No hole or body could be later found. A standard-bearer that Celestia had come to know personally was struck by a lashing vine. Seemingly fine at first and in good humour about the incident, he later suffered what could euphemistically be called a rapturous end.

After having watched half of her personal guard and several distinguished, though no less rotund diplomats devoured by a hideous serpentine creature that none of her scouts had ever even heard of, much less were on the look out for, Celestia realised that they were hopelessly lost. Thankfully, it seemed that the very woodland ponies that they had ventured into that death-trap of a forest to find had come to the same conclusion, mercifully appearing to them in a clearing, cloaked and shrouded in the vestments of nature. Affording them—rather rudely Celestia thought—no time for a formal introduction, they led the Royal party through the forest, by secret ways and hidden paths, at length to a city artfully concealed in the shadows of a great and ancient oak.

They were taken through the city streets, down the main road, flanked on either side by an arboreal colonnade and a swelling crowd of curious onlookers. Celestia turned her regal head to observe them as she passed them by. They were different again from her Chosen; leaner and more delicate, with longer muzzles and larger eyes, clearly unaccustomed to any kind of hard labour. They whispered to one another and pointed with elongated hooves, forelegs adorned with vines and flowers. Fearful mothers shielded wide eyed foals and gawking stallions gathered to watch the strange procession, eyes replete with awe and fascination. The few elder ponies among them shook their heads sadly, muttering darkly, as if they knew something of her coming that the young did not.

For even in their severely depleted state, Celestia knew that they were an imposing sight. Most of those assembled looked very young, and probably knew little if anything of the arts of diplomacy and war: of the outside world, even less. Her armed and armoured personal guard; her caparisoned standard-bearers bearing the mark of the Nascent Dawn; her diplomats dressed in the finest silks and jewelleries the Ponies of the Earth could afford. Celestia herself, of course, was quite a sight to behold. Her ivory coat stood out like a beacon lit amid the subdued earthy tones of the forest, and the eoan pink of her mane was impossible to ignore. The length of her elongated horn glowed with a pale, inner light, reflected by the gemstones inset in her intricately embossed peytral and crown, radiating outward to banish any shadows that dared venture near her.

She was, in a word, magnificent.

There were those among the woodland ponies who immediately fell down on one foreknee as she passed them by, bowing down before her, as if overcome by her majesty. One small foal ran out in front of Celestia and her company, stopping and turning to look up at her with impossibly wide eyes. His frantic mother, realising too late that he was missing, rushed out from beneath the cover of the trees, calling out to her child. Celestia, upon seeing the mare’s erratically roaming gaze, her milky white eyes and her stumbling, uncertain gait, took pity on her. She bowed her head down low, so that her horn was almost touching the forehead of the benighted mother cradling her errant child, the faint light adorning her spiralled horn beginning to wax at the tip. The light grew brighter and brighter, the aureate nimbus forming about her growing outwards as those watching the spectacle were forced to shield their light-sensitive eyes. The bubble of light expanded and expanded, until finally, with the sound of air being sucked into a vacuum, it imploded into a single brilliantly white point on the tip of her horn, which she touched against the mother’s forehead.

There was then an explosion of blinding light and a distant swelling of otherworldly, aethereal music, as though the harps of the fabled Pegasi themselves accompanied the Advent of Celestia. The mare in question was lifted up weightlessly into the air, borne as she was upon the magic of Celestia; her mane and tail blown windlessly all about her, her sightless eyes slowly opening to blaze with an inner light.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. The golden sunburst that had descended to illumine the forest faded away, and the aethereal music died with it. The Shadow returned once again to reclaim dominion over all. The previously blind mare hunkered down low on the ground, clutching her child tightly to her, her now sightful eyes closed in humble obeisance as she shook and sobbed before the great Alicorn. Many of those observing the ‘miracle’ who were still standing had also fallen down on their knees, joining their brethren in bowing low before her.

Little did they know that the hapless mare had just unwittingly doomed herself, her foal and the entirety of their people.

There had been no need for the lights and the music, of course. Such a simple spell—for her at least—as one to restore a being’s lost eyesight hardly called for such a grand manifestation. It had, however, served several purposes. The first and most salient of these was to shock and awe those assembled, to further establish her credentials as a supernal being in her own right, one worthy of their respect and adoration. The other more subtle, and arguably insidious purpose, was to provide a suitable distraction, buying her the time and the mental penetration she needed to effectively read the mare’s mind, learning almost everything she knew about the woodland ponies’ culture, history and way of life in a matter of seconds. A little ‘field research’ made it easier to feign—or at least hint at— omniscience, after all.

In that respect, she’d often contemplated her own divinity, or lack thereof. Deep down, in her heart of hearts, she knew that it was wrong to play God. But if it meant that her little ponies could lead happier, more fulfilling lives, freed from the evils that would otherwise plague them, then surely the end would justify the means.

Wouldn’t it?

For what use is freedom to think what one will and to be what one desires when one is subjected to the cruelties, the iniquities of a rational, natural existence? Absolute freedom begets absolute suffering. Celestia knew this to be true, having had seen firsthoof the brutal reality of natural selection, whether it be driven by a twisted form of sentience or not. She would not suffer such a fate to befall her little ponies, no matter what she must do to prevent it.

No matter who must die that she might preserve them.

And they would die. Every last one of them to a foal for their treachery.

The leadership of the Nemoricolae, the Arbour Judicature, in stark contrast to their clandestine way of life—or perhaps deliberately in spite of it—practiced full disclosure with all those who lived and died under their rule. After all, what need of secrecy is there when your people have no contact with the outside world? They themselves, however, were hardly so isolated. They had, in their xenophobic cacoethes, communed with the Dark Powers just beyond the horizon, of whom Celestia had been able to discern little. They had informed them of the presence of Cadytum, the last stronghold of the hated Ponies of the Earth—a stronghold that lay in their very forestial midst—in exchange for a form of amnesty. Those ponies assembled around her had known of this arrangement, or at least had heard of it in passing, but were to a fault largely uninterested in the events of the world without the forest, and in their naivety understood not the implications.

The Nemoricolae had not escaped detection. They had not evaded the great Shadow that swept across the land in her little ponies’ wake, as she had previously thought.

They were, in fact, actively harbouring it.

They’d brought it here themselves, as a means to but one end: to destroy the last remaining vestige of the Ponies of the Earth, whom their heathen leadership viewed as an affront to the ‘Balance of the Natural Order’, or some such superstitious nonsense. Religion wasn’t actively observed by the average woodland pony, excepting the occasional holiday or gift-giving tradition. It helped to explain why the ponies that had found them had not realised the mortal danger they would be placing their people in by bringing her and her Royal party back to their secret city, hidden amongst the shadows of the trees. They had no idea that their leader’s professed intentions toward their guests were anything other than a nonsense or rhetorical flourish, having had doubted the merest existence of the fabled Ponies of the Earth—whom many of them placed in the same fantastical league as the mythical Unicorns and Pegasi—in the first place. They didn’t even know if the strangers they had found even were Earth ponies, and certainly had no idea what Celestia was or what she was capable of.

She, however, had seen enough.

By the time a visibly shaken and fearful group of elaborately dressed woodland ponies— presumably the very traitorous Arbour Judicature in question, roused into action by the quickly spreading rumours of her and her party’s presence—tentatively approached them, Celestia had already made her decision.

Ignoring the bleating supplications and duplicitous schemings of the accursed heathens, now practically falling over themselves in their rush to propitiate her, Celestia cast her dispassionate gaze one last time across the sea of earthen-coloured faces. All, save for a few trembling elders, were wide-eyed and clueless as to the gravity of the situation. Some eyes were filled with hope, some with wonder. Others with reverence.

All innocent.

And yet, all irrevocably tainted by the encroaching Shadow. It had weaved its way through them and their homes, their land, their people like writhing tentacles of darkness, poisoning everything that they touched.

They were all beyond redemption.

As Celestia began to cast the final spell she would ever expend upon them, her eyes fell on a familiar pair of faces in the crowd.

The bright, wide eyes of an enraptured foal, brimming with fascinated curiosity, just beginning to learn as he was about the world and his place in it.

The grateful eyes of a mother, eyes that had been blind not some five minutes earlier, filled with tears of joy as she contemplated the reality of a new life freed from the darkness that had claimed her.

As the brilliant motes and ensorcelled wreathes of aureate light swirled and closed in about her own vision, as the few members of her party that had survived the treacherous journey teleported away, borne upon golden wings of the aether, Celestia knew that she could at least give her that freedom.

~/~|~~

The eyes of Celestia were slowly cast open, lids cracking apart as the sundering earth, and there dwelt within them the sorrow and the weight of ages.

“Did you really think to hide yourself from me? I see you now, as clear as the day I first saw you. The day I looked upon you and knew that you were the one.”

~/~|~~

It took several months for the forest to stop burning completely. Nothing had remained in the wake of the Solar Princess’ purge. She herself had been teleported away, moments before the conflagration, back to Cadytum with the rest of her company. Every tree, every living thing, even the shadows themselves had been incinerated, whether nearly instantaneously as in the case of the hidden city and its inhabitants, or over time as the unstoppable fires had inexorably spread.

Celestia felt no guilt. There was, after all, no denying the necessity of her actions. Without her timely intervention, the Shadow would surely have spread beyond the confines of the forest, to claim the Ponies of the Earth’s mountain home and eventually mantle all the world in sorrow.

And yet, every time she closed her eyes, all she saw were the eyes of a mother and her innocent child.

Chapter III: In Memoriam

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Chapter III

In Memoriam

~/~|~~

Celestia stood alone on the great balcony of the citadel’s throne room, as she had always stood alone, gazing out across her shattered demesne. Where once there had stood an ancient forest, vast beyond all mortal reckoning, there now was little more than bitter ash.

She could taste it in her mouth.

Celestia—despite her earlier conviction in having done only what was necessary—felt a crushing sense of loss. It was to her a special kind of agony, to look out across that blasted landscape, and know that all that the forest was and all that it contained—its species, its memories, its history—were irrevocably lost, swept away as if they’d never existed by the hoof of a uncaring God.

And there was lain upon the great Alicorn’s heart a scar as on the solid earth.

She had wandered the paths of the Lost Eriatum; she had journeyed beyond the Sea of Dreams to traverse the enchanted Plains of Aed; she had flown the length of the Crystallarium with the Sky Serpents of the Far East, beyond even ancient eremic Narzus. She had seen entire empires rise and fall, stars born into the ceaseless aether, and throughout all these ages had she stayed her hoof: permitting herself only to observe, never to interfere, lest she disturb the very Balance that, her latter abhorrence of which, would ultimately lead her to take her Chosen under her maternal wing.

Given enough time, the forest would return. She’d seen it before. The process of renewal was as eternal as she was. She would live to see life return to these lands, and so would the descendants of her Chosen. The sun everlasting would rise upon the morrow, and the stars would wheel forever overhead. In the grand design of all things, this infinitesimal act of destruction would change nothing.

Still. She couldn’t help but wonder. Couldn’t help but question the validity, the proportionality of her response. Because of her singular, peremptory action—an action she would never have considered prior to the advent of the Ponies of the Earth, whom she had sworn to preserve at any cost—the enigmatic Nemoricolae were no more. All their knowledge, all their secrets—their art, their culture, their very way of life—were lost forever. She had single hoofedly wiped out an entire civilisation, struggling only to survive, as her Chosen had once struggled. How could she have let the traitorous actions of a few compel her to commit mass genocide? Could it not be that there had been another way, a less catastrophic way, to purge the Shadow and spare the Nemoricolae from the flame?

It was a question that she knew was not only on her mind.

For their part, the surviving members of her company had said nothing. They were the only other firsthoof witnesses, after all. The intimate knowledge of exactly what she had done would pass from them, in death, unrecorded and undocumented: a history to be written in the manner of her choosing. In time, should she so wish it, ponykind would forget the ultimate fate of the Nemoricolae, and perhaps even their very existence. She need only wait until the last of her Chosen from this era had breathed their last, and so in their inevitable deaths find absolution.

That only one pony might know her sorrow.

Such was her fate. To forever remember, outlasting all others. To eternally mourn the loss of the Fallen Nemoricolae. The knowledge she had extracted from the hapless mare was now precious to her, for so long as she remembered, a part of them lived on in her.

She, alone as in all things, would remember them.

So it was that Princess Celestia, God-Princess of the Ponies of the Earth, became Steward of the Memory of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

~/~|~~

With a stuttering shimmer, the cloaked mare cast off her spell of concealment, unveiling her image to the eyes of the world. Her stance, while weary and age-worn, remained interminably defiant. Her eyes blazed under the heavy folds of her hood, radiating a power not unlike Celestia’s own.

“I’ve lived many years and thought many things, Princess. I now know many of them to be lies and deceptions, implanted in me by you. That I might one day escape your gaze, live my own life apart from your dream, well… that was never one of them.”

~/~|~~

Celestia walked alone, as she had always walked alone, her solitary hoofsteps echoing throughout the cavernous vaults and underground halls of Cadytum. The monolithic stone structure was deep and vast and old, extending many fathoms down into the very heart of the mountain. The Ponies of the Earth occupied but a scant fraction of its upper levels, and here at least, Celestia could be assured of her solitude.

She’d spent an arduous afternoon holding court with her generals and the Elder Council, First among her Chosen. They were not so brazen as to openly question her methods, but they could no more hide their discontent from her than she could feign enthusiasm for the same transgressions. She could see it in their eyes, feel it in the veiled earth they trod, taste it upon the very air they breathed. With each passing day, her kinship with them grew stronger, and ever their mortal blood flowed deeper down into her eternal veins.

There’d been no state or sense of enmity between the Ponies of the Earth and the Nemoricolae as a whole, taking into account the fact that many of the latter had doubted the mere existence of the former. If anything, the Nemoricolae were the closest thing to family that they had had. And now they were gone.

The Ponies of the Earth, like her, walked alone.

Celestia strode purposefully past massive columns in the darkness, hewn out of the very mountain itself, architraves graven with intricate designs of blood and war. Grotesque stone faces leered down at her from lofty capitals, glowering in and out of existence by the aureate light of her horn. The air down below was unnaturally cold, and even Celestia—ordinarily immune to any such variations in temperature—began to feel its bite. The Ponies of the Earth, while not beholden to the same consumptive superstitions as the Nemoricolae—hallowed be the Memory of the Fallen Nemoricolae—they yet refused to venture down into the depths of the citadel. What it was that they feared, aside from the preternatural cold, Celestia did not know. There was indeed a presence here; of that much she was certain. An oppressive sense of weight that bespoke an ancient malevolence; a brooding malice manifesting itself as the warping of the echoes of her hoofsteps into a loathsome clangour. If she listened hard enough, Celestia could almost make out whispered voices: minatory susurrations lingering on the very edges of her perception.

She and her Chosen were not welcome here.

Princess Celestia, dauntless as the rising run, forged onward. She would not be so easily deterred. The ten thousand year old Demi-Goddess heeded neither threat nor warning and respected no borders. She came and went as she pleased, and while once she would have stayed her hoof in the face of provocation, woe betide any who would think to stand in the path of the newly coronated God-Protector of the Ponies of the Earth.

There was a presence here, yes, but there was also something else.

Power.

She’d felt it the very first time she’d descended upon the citadel, coming to the aid of the Ponies of the Earth in the hour of their direst need. She could almost smell it now, such was the potency of its allure. And as the Lepidopteron is drawn ineluctably to the light, so too was Celestia drawn to the flame. Her heightened—if not entirely particular—senses when it came to matters of the Arcane told her that this was a power worthy of possession; and if it could not be possessed, then it must be destroyed. In all her ceaseless, aimless wanderings in ages past, she had seen many wondrous things, encountered a multitude of strange and powerful beings—ever to wander among them as the solivagant hoof of God—but few if any of them could rival the sheer emanation of power coming to her from within the blackened heart of the mountain.

Could rival her.

Celestia stopped in front of a great wall, upon and from which alien and familiar figures both were graven and sculpted in stone. Channelling her power through the length of her form, she slowly illumined the whole extent of the voluminous hall—larger than its contemporary on the upper levels by an order of magnitude—its impossibly high ceiling barely visible by the cast of her horn.

What drew her eye, however, was the grisly scene wrought in marble high relief before her.

It was a depiction of a battle. Or, perhaps more properly, a slaughter. Creatures both known and foreign to Celestia were strewn violently about the field of war: dismembered, decapitated, disembowelled. Gryphons, Minotaurim, ancient Canidae—a host of beings that defied even her expansive faculty for description and even a few mighty Hydrae—none were spared from the storm of Death that whirled victoriously all about them.

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, however, was the sight of what looked to be the broken bodies of a form not dissimilar to her Chosen, lain dead amidst the wreckage of flesh and bone.

What great force, then, what grand army of antiquity could be responsible for such extensive devastation?

There was no army. No great host that assailed them. There stood, towering ignominiously above the carnage, rising up as one exalted from the bloody ordure of the Fall, but a single creature, in whose form Celestia fancied to be distilled the very essence of ruination and war. The bipedal serpentine bicorn stood alone, and from its gaping maw there rained down upon its victims a cataract of woe. Its physiognomy was of so hideous an aspect, so appalling a form, that Celestia could scarcely bear to look upon it, lest she flee in mortal terror and never again return. The stone eyes of the creature, while necessarily dead and cold, radiated a sanguinary madness: an insatiable, eternal bloodlust that was without beginning or end, that would endure forever after the mere form that it animated’s fall.

In this figure, and in this figure alone, there was found a maniacal savagery beyond even Celestia’s near infinite comprehension. It was the veritable definition of incorrigible evil, so far beyond the pale as to eliminate it from consideration, and so was it an anathema to her very soul.

She could not allow such a corruptive abomination to remain extant in this world.

Her world.

Calling upon the might and the righteous fury that was her birthright, Celestia smote the fell Mad-work, blasting it with Goddess-wrought incinerative fire: hot enough to render even diamonds before her as withering ash.

And yet, against this unstoppable, all-consuming onslaught, the hateful tableau endured.

The relief, as a whole—but the baleful figure that occasioned so much loathing in Celestia’s breast in particular—began to glow. At first, Celestia, assured in the inevitability of its destruction, in the nature of her insuperable power, saw before her eyes an end to the madness: a final close upon that marmoreal chapter of woe. What she failed to perceive, however, beneath the igneous glare of her own making, was that the glow was a malevolent blood-red, not the white-hot brilliance befitting all rational expectation. Too late she foresaw—as she could be said to foresee all things, if only a fraction of a second before their occurrence—the arcing discharge that reached, with sanguine claws, for her heart.

The stone beneath her shattered as Celestia’s immortal hooves tore great furrows through the unyielding Earth, the light from her horn instantly extinguished as her body was blasted backwards with enough force to make the very mountain itself tremble before the unholy might of the discharge.

On the upper levels of the citadel, The Ponies of the Earth stumbled and fell, clinging to walls and sheltering under tables as dust and loose stones rained down around them, riding out the ostensible earthquake together. Little did they know the true significance of the assumed to be geological disturbance.

It was a disturbance far graver than any mere tectonic activity, barring the Equid Apocalypse, could ever hope to be.

Far graver and more consequential than even Celestia realised.

Rising up from the swirling dust and shattered stone, her grievous wounds healing with the celerity befitting only an Immortal, Celestia beheld, with captive horror, the malefic red gleaming of the high relief, now set glaringly against the deepening shadow, unmarked and as hideous as ever. Wholly wreathed in the malevolent blood-light, the ghastly work took on an ever more disturbing aspect, almost seeming to move before her very eyes: mutilated figures acting out, as but one writhing mass of flesh and limbs—made brothers in the mortal commonality of death—their harrowing death throes. Again, on the very edges of her perception, Celestia could faintly make out the blasphemous utterances of a whispering malice, and now intermingled with these dark intonations were the distant screams of the dying and the maimed, shrieking and screeching and wailing voices.

The fell effulgence waxed and waned, as if taunting her with the tantalising prospect of its ultimate dissolution, pulsing evilly before finally fading away. From the mad eyes of its Master was it last seen to depart, and from these malignant orbs it bore down on Celestia as if the Beast itself beheld her in the flesh. To her great shame, Celestia wilted under that most withering of gazes, shrinking away as if in fear: an emotion hitherto all but unknown to her.

The Mad-light in the stone effigy’s eyes at length flickered and went out, leaving Celestia alone in the darkness, with only the distant strains of an inequine roar echoing in her ears. Hunkering down low on the ground, hanging her head so that her nose was almost pressed against the shattered stone, the immortal Princess did something that she had not done for many centuries.

She wept.

~/~|~~

Celestia drew up short, freezing in place in the manner of one transfixed by an arrow or crossbow bolt, her unwaveringly steady breath catching in her throat as her practised speech died on her lips. Having felt the particular signature of the magical emanations as the cloaked mare revealed herself, the realisation of exactly how she had concealed herself from all eyes apart from her own dawned on her last. This was a power endemic to but one people; a secret cognizance kept only by their own. Turning to face her at last, her eyes brimming with pain and betrayal, she spoke but a single tremulous word, one that echoed across the ages.

“How?”

~/~|~~

The journey back to the upper levels was not a long one. Any other pony, deprived of her infallible sense of direction, could very well have gotten lost within the labyrinthine turnings of the underhalls. But not Celestia.

She had seen enough of the Darkness for one day.

Emerging from a winding stair into the dying rays of the setting sun, Celestia breathed a great sigh of relief. Trotting out onto a nearby open balcony, she lifted one golden-shod hoof up to drape it over the ancient balustrade, admiring the way it sparkled and glimmering in the evening light. Her eoan pink mane was blown back by a gentle breeze, silken strands caressing her neck and pooling lightly on her withers. The scent of a breathless life eternal, brought to her as on a distant wind from beyond the alien waste of her own making, moved her trembling spirit to rapture.

This was where she belonged.

Not in some underground vault or tomb. Out here, in the open air, at work amongst the greater world. The inner workings of the earth could take care of themselves, bereft of her intervention.

Her kingdom was not of that realm.

Standing alone on that lesser balcony, content, as she had once been content, to merely watch as the sun slowly descended upon the horizon, Celestia became aware, by slow degrees of awareness, of a distant sound that brushed faintly against her ears. At first, a not yet supressed terror engulfed her, its cold jaws closing in upon her heart. Had the whispering malice that had plagued her earthly waking dream seen fit to follow her even here?

But this was a fear that was quickly dispelled. It was not a sound born of the same inimical unbreath that had tormented her beneath the earth that reached her now. It was a sound that she had seldom heard the like of before.

It was the distant sound of somepony singing.

Celestia, intrigued, abandoned her watch over the setting sun, heading towards the source of the inexplicable vocalisation. The Ponies of the Earth were not a particularly musical people. They played few instruments, and to her knowledge at least, sang few songs. And yet, the closer she got to the echoing strains of the musical emanation, the more certain she became as to her supposition of its source.

It was, in fact, not the sound of any one pony singing. It was the sound of a multitude of ponies, voices lifted up in unaccompanied song.

Rounding the corner to her war room—the room from which the strange music originated—Celestia was struck by what she saw. Drawing back before she could be spotted, she observed, as one from the shadows, the Song of the Ponies of the Earth. The entirety of the Elder Council, First among her Chosen, along with her generals were gathered around the massive table in the centre of the room, upon which all their maps and plans were laid. All eyes in the room were closed, and a single solitary shaft of ailing golden sunlight fell upon the table top, adding a further sense of funereal gravitas to the already foreboding scene.

It was no cheery anthem or drunken sea shanty that reached her ears. This was a song of unparalleled solemnity; a song of sorrow and of loss, wrought only as an a capella commendation to the grave.

The Ponies of the Earth, as she did, mourned the loss of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

Chief amongst the mourners was Icarus, youngest among both her generals and her Chosen as a whole. He was the son of a great line of descendance, from which many noble heroes and venerable leaders of the past had come. From birth, by right of lineage, he had been destined for greatness, and so many of his people believed in him. He held great sway with the Elder Council and all but commanded the loyalty of her generals, and thus far, to both Celestia’s great pleasure and credit, he had proven extremely amenable when it came to questions pertaining to the cause. Celestia, while appreciative of his utility as a determining force, did not envy him his heritage. The weight of her own expectations had been enough for her to bear alone.

The young Icarus was handsome and august, possessed of both a lordly bearing and a great sagacity beyond his age. He was tall and broad, as unmatched in personal combat as he was in his letters and, apparently, in song. His coat was the colour of the newly risen dawn, and his lustrous mane was an unusual vermillion, cut through with a streak of white smoke. He had been the first to swear fealty to her, to offer up both his own blood and the blood of others in exchange for her own, and so had he cemented himself in the forefront of her considerations.

When the others fell silent, Icarus, standing tall above all ponies before the light of the sun, sang alone.

This was an air of a different provenance, and Celestia, despite never having heard it before, recognised it immediately. Still sorrowful, yes, but hopeful as well, which made it all the more heartbreaking to her. His voice had a beautiful, almost aethereal quality to it—lent further grace by the fragility of the composition—and through it swept the wind through the trees and the waters over stone. It was the Song of the World itself, beautifully played as if through the finely tuned vocal chords of one of its favoured children, they who would walk the Earth no more.

It was the lost Song of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

For the second time that day, Celestia, overcome with the beauty and the musicality of mortal sorrow, wept alone.

Chapter IV: Icarus

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Chapter IV

Icarus

~/~|~~

The young general stood outside the closed gilt double doors of Her Majesty Princess Celestia’s illustrious throne room, eyeing off the golden reliefs on the panels. Depicted within them was a race of people entirely foreign to him. His father—may the Goddess rest his weary soul—had often speculated upon their nature. “Son,” he would say, draping a foreleg over Icarus’s shoulders to draw him closer, the heavy scent of alcohol lingering on his every breath. “Son, you must never trust anything that’s all neck and no torso.”

Despite the practical impossibility of putting such a prejudice into real, applicable action, Icarus had nonetheless taken his father’s words to heart. He would never again trust anything that was “all neck and no torso,” and over the course of his life and career a number of unfortunately lanky stallions had been on the receiving end of his suspicions as a result.

Icarus ran a hoof idly over a golden panel, marvelling at the intricacy of the workmanship. He’d often wondered who had built this place: why and when they had built it. The grandeur of the citadel, on him of all ponies, was not lost. It was a work of terrible, foreboding beauty, one that could only have been wrought by the hoof of a power beyond his people’s own. It had been completely abandoned when the Ponies of the Earth first found it, left to the invidious ministrations of Dust and Time. Not even the dauntless creatures of the forest had thought to inhabit it. Whether that was because they genuinely feared it or because they couldn’t figure out how to open the outer gates, Icarus did not know.

He’d lived within the castellated walls of the mountain citadel for almost his entire life. His father had brought him to the last stronghold of their people as a colt, after the riverside city his family had long dwelt in—fair Equaem, Jewel of the Southern Plains—was sacked by the ever encroaching horde of Darkness. His mother and sister had been slain during the siege, along with the rest of his extended family. He and his father were all that was left of that illustrious line. And now his father was gone, succumbing at last to chronic alcoholism and the lasting injuries he had sustained during the ill-fated defence of the city. Prior to his ultimate degeneration, he had taught Icarus everything he knew, as his father had taught him, and the young general was eternally grateful. He wouldn’t even be a general were it not for his father’s influence. Yes, he was a cunning strategist and a shrewd tactician, and as good a front-line fighter as any of the ponies that served under him. But he was young, and youth inevitably bred suspicion and mistrust amongst those who were not its objects, regardless of the ability of those who were. He had, to date, fought three legitimate duels to the death—of the illegitimate attempts on his life, there had been several—all against jealous stallions who were his superiors in age only. Of the three, only one had he consummated; to the other two he had extended the hoof of mercy, and they had gone on to serve him and his people well in differing capacities.

Of the third, well... suffice it to say, Commander Othelian had always been noted for the unusual length of his neck.

Summoning his courage, Icarus pushed against the ancient doors, throwing them open to cast his body headlong into the great light beyond.

~/~|~~

Perfection.

She was perfect.

Icarus stood, bloodied and wild-eyed before the one who would uplift him; the saviour of his people. The venerable, the beautiful, the eternal Celestia: Goddess of the Empyrean, Princess elect of the Ponies of the Earth. His sword fell limply from his grasp, clattering on the ancient stone beneath his hooves, bedewed as it was with the blood of the fallen. Those few of his privileged kin still standing around him were similarly enthralled, gazing upon Her with the tears of a tremulous hope in their eyes.

There had been no hope. The war was lost. Their enemy was far too savage, far too numerous. In recent years, it had been all that they could do to hold them off. Their meagre supplies were dwindling and many of their people had already given their life for the cause.

Too many.

As it stood, they no longer had the strength to repel them. No longer had the numbers necessary for any kind of serious counter-offensive. And even if they had, where then would they have struck? Their enemy was a nebulous congregation of incongruous parts, seemingly bereft of any central species or leadership. A tidal mass of Darkness, shifting and twisting around their best efforts to contain it: the commonality of an irrational hatred of the Ponies of the Earth the only unifying factor at work amongst them. Such was the common wisdom. Icarus, wise beyond his years, had—in his youth and at a time when the situation had not been quite so dire—posited the existence of a greater force at work beyond the veil: a force that organised their otherwise dissimilar and scattered enemy and drove them ever onward. It was an outlandish notion, one that received little acceptance or credence amongst the conservative quasi-leadership of the last stronghold of the Ponies of the Earth, the Council. They believed in the exclusivity of considered strategic thought to which they and their people were the sole objects, and from the relative safety of the mountain citadel they would outlast their enemies, resolving to outwit, outmanoeuvre and ultimately crush the monsters and savages beneath the immense weight of their inscrutable machinations.

Icarus couldn’t help but feel that they, in their obdurate refusal to accept that which was plainly before them, bore sole responsibility for many of the deaths. Using his nobility as a platform, he’d railed against their myopic stratagems time and time again, and time and time again they’d committed to the same disastrous combat actions, overreaching at every turn, fuelled as they were by the overweening pride and arrogance that so characterised the old way of thinking: an obsolete way of thinking that the overwhelming majority of the Council inveterately subscribed to. In spite of the mounting empirical evidence of their manifest inability to defend their people, it was only the influence of his father and his noble bloodline that ultimately preserved Icarus from the Council’s retribution. By the time he had risen sufficiently through the ranks to prosecute his agenda, it was already far too late. The damage had been done. There was no turning back.

It was over.

All of this—the salvation of his people, his life’s work, his raison d’être—meant nothing to him in that moment. All he could see was Her. The world around him faded away, and the plight of his people was forgotten. His vision tunnelled in upon Her, blinding him to all else that moved and breathed and would have his love.

A falling star had pierced his heart, and Icarus, as he once was, would never rise again.

~/~|~~

Icarus walked slowly among the broken bodies of the fallen, stepping over severed limbs and discarded weapons. It was a freezing cold late autumn morning, still quite dark, and the frost on the grass crunched underhoof, soaking the plates of his armour. Slicing through the chill that would otherwise have numbed his olfactory sense into a state of irrelevance, the acrid scent of smoke and death assaulted his nostrils: so familiar to him now as to almost be of some small comfort to him, were it not for the carnage and the horror that was inevitably associated with it. He’d known many of these ponies; a few of them he would have considered to be close friends. They were all crack troops, some of the finest warriors he had ever had the honour to serve with. And now they were gone. The latest victims in a war that could only end in their ultimate destruction. Many of his enemies, too, were lain dead at his hooves, at a ratio that was at least three to one in the equines’ favour: a testament to the skill and the valour of those that had perished here.

It didn’t matter.

No effort, no matter how valorous, could now avail them. Looking around him, Icarus knew that even if every pony fallen here had slain five or more of their opposing number, they still would have been utterly overwhelmed.

It was hopeless.

Icarus was distracted from his thoughts by the grisly sound of somepony, somebody gurgling nearby. Stepping over several more bodies, he stood, as the apostatising Blade of Fate—the great Adjudicator of Life—over the shattered remnants of one of his once mighty enemies. A minotaur. This was one foe at least that had not fallen quite so easily. Icarus could see the bodies of several of his kin strewn violently about its ruin, ruptured and rent asunder by the fell strokes of the creature’s massive halberd. Though all minotaurs could be fairly said to be thus, this tauriform in particular was an impressive specimen. Now lying supine in defeat, the beast must have stood at at least eight feet tall and weighed the equivalent of several large stallions entirely clad in heavy war plate. It itself was all but unarmoured, wearing only the tribal markings and accoutrements befitting such a savage, along with a lone spiked pauldron and death’s head vambraces: more for effect than any real preservative consideration. One of its impossibly muscular arms was lying severed on the ground nearby, gathering frost, and by the relative positioning of the two objects—the arm and the body it was once so dangerously connected to—Icarus surmised that this minotaur had continued to fight even after it was hewn off.

A mighty foe indeed.

Icarus’ hatred for the creature was tempered only by his admiration of its combat prowess. The Minotaurim were an ancient and prideful people. He’d heard rumours of a great civilisation of them still in existence in the far south, beyond the vast sea that he had visited several times in his early childhood, but those that dwelt nearby were ignorant savages, fit only for the slaughter. Not that that had stopped his people, at different times in the past, from trying to reason with them. All attempts at negotiation thus far had inevitably met with the same, decapitatory conclusions.

Just as this encounter could only end in more death.

Slowly becoming aware of his presence, the minotaur shifted laboriously on the ground, as if trying to get up and carry on the fight. The beast was obviously in great pain, having been pierced and scored by blade steel in a crippling variety of places, and the cold was sapping whatever strength it had left. There had—apart from the loss of an arm and a particularly nasty slash across its muscular neck—been no decisive blow laid upon the creature.

It was a death by a thousand cuts.

Opening its heavy lids and snorting contemptuously, twin gouts of hot steam and misted blood issuing forth from its flaring nostrils, the fallen monstrosity looked up at the heavily armoured Icarus—bigger and more imposing than the majority of the ponies it had slain by far—with a not yet diminished defiance blazing in its red irises. Its mouth moved slowly, fresh blood bubbling up from within the depths of its ruined oesophagus.

It was trying to speak.

Icarus, in no mood for the blasphemous utterances so frequently occasioned by his foes, pressed an armoured forehoof down against its throat. The creature flailed and floundered weakly as he pressed slowly and inexorably down: the light of a life known only in the service of the great Moloch of war slowly fading from its eyes.

Icarus maintained eye contact with the tauriform until the very end. He would not dishonour himself by looking away. Wholly bereft, as by the horrors of war, of the bitter pathos that would once have filled his breast at seeing the indomitable creature below him so defeated, Icarus listened, with little satisfaction, to the sound of bones and cartilage crunching beneath his hoof, to the desperate gasps and liquid gurgling as his foe breathed his painful last.

For this warrior at least, like so many of those fallen around him, the war was finally over

Gazing down upon the creature’s rapidly stiffening corpse, wondering what possible reason it could have for being there so far from home in the first place, Icarus was dimly aware of the fact that somepony was calling his name. Cutting through the mist like a windfish breaching water, a lone mare galloped around and leapt over the bodies of the fallen, hurriedly making her way towards him. She was of a medium build, with a tan coat and black mane, wearing only light armour, with a heavy crossbow slung over her back and a quiver of bolts hanging off her flank.

“Commander!” she hailed him, stopping a few feet away, her breath rising from her muzzle in heated gasps. Lifting off her champron and abandoning it to the frozen earth, she shook her mane out and slowly turned her head from side to side, taking in the extent of the carnage, turning at last to look at him with a mixture of horror and disbelief.

“They’re all gone... aren’t they?” she whispered incredulously.

“Yes,” he replied simply, not looking up from the body of the minotaur he had put a final end to moments before

“No! Commander, we— they can’t—” she stammered, wild-eyed, turning away from him and galloping over to a nearby body. Finding that pony to be unquestionably deceased, she ran to another, then another, and then yet another. They were all dead. Every last one. There were no survivors.

It was an ambush.

By that time, more ponies were arriving on the field, picking through the equine detritus and meting out swift death to any non-ponies that were found to still be alive.

Icarus was as oblivious to them as if they never existed in the first place. He was entirely fixated on the fallen form of the minotaur. The creature looked almost serene in death, and were it not for the many and grievous wounds inflicted upon its personage, Icarus might have imagined it to be sleeping peacefully. A single thought echoed again and again through his troubled mind.

Why?

As a familiar, heavy armoured hoof was laid on his shoulder, Icarus thought he might finally know the answer.

~/~|~~

Icarus stood on the seashore, gazing out across the vastness of oceans, watching the waves come in. Except, he wasn’t a colt anymore. And he wasn’t alone.

An aged stallion stepped up beside him, lifting his weary head to take in a deep draught of the invigorating sea breeze. Like Icarus, he was unarmoured and unappointed.

Just a pony.

Nothing less. Nothing more.

“I’m sorry.”

~/~|~~

Icarus swept down the length of the throne room with powerful strides, his long voluminous cloak billowing out behind him. At the far end of the room, illumined by a great shaft of aureate sunlight, there was Celestia—incandescent as the distant Stars—sat upon her golden throne, ageless and immutable as the Firmament above. Her eyes were closed and her face radiated the serenity and calm befitting only an Immortal. She was entirely motionless, as one transfixed by the cold hoof of Death, and Icarus might have fancied her to be deceased were it not for the fixed rigidity of her upright pose.

If he could have been said to have a weakness, it was Icarus’ love of beauty that would have inevitably been cited. Over the tumultuous course of his short life, he’d admired, won the affections of and lain with many mares, all of them beautiful. He of course, by virtue of his not unremarkable physique and station, had had his pick of them, and knew a thing or two about sheer physical beauty.

At least he thought he had, before he met Her.

On the day of their meeting, his perception of beauty and the relative comeliness of mortal mares had undergone a radical alteration. That which he had once thought fair, now to him seemed plain. That which he had once thought exquisite, now merely seemed adequate. He yet sought the company of those lesser mares for the cold, lonely nights that were all too common an occurrence upon that mountainous clime, but he no longer beheld in them his earthly salvation. No longer thought to ride on lover’s wings up into the highest reaches of the Heavens. His heart had been stolen away from him forever, as had the very blood that ran through his veins.

He had eyes only for Her.

In the vastness of her pulchritude, truly she was without earthly parallel. Even the most vainglorious of mortal mares was as a peasant before her infinite majesty. Within the unfathomable depths of her canted eyes, there shone the light of Creation, and her elongated horn, like a blunted spike of helical pearl, seemed to forever reach—borne high upon the marmoreal column of her neck—for the Heavens. Her flowing mane, an eoan pink manifestation of the morn, eternally dawned upon the white empire of her body, and where fell her golden-shod hooves, there walked the incomparable Sun, high portent of the coming morrow.

Of these many and manifold pleasures, none alone—or indeed in blessed conjunction—could be said to have captured the captious heart of Icarus. It was in her one other feature, that most beauteous, that most magnificent of the divine endowments with which Celestia was so profusely imbued, that he found, into the abyss of abject idolatry, his ultimate precipitation.

Her wings.

~/~|~~

In the echoing stone hall of the mountain citadel, Icarus stood at the front of the crowd of ponies that had gathered to hear Her speak, alongside several elder councillors. Celestia herself stood upon a raised dais, addressing the host assembled before her.

Of the veracity of the sentiments she so eloquently expressed, there could be little doubt. Without her aid, they were lost. Every pony in the room, mortal and immortal, knew this to be true. The great Alicorn that would have their allegiance was the only thing that could now save them from their ultimate fate: the fate of all mortal races.

And yet, in the face of this fundamental, unequivocal truth, there were yet those who dissented.

For not only did she offer them the salvation of their people, she also offered them a portion of her very essence. She would bind them to her, and in so doing, ennoble them: that they might better aid her in the creation of a great and powerful nation that would endure all the ages.

To the more cynical of those therein assembled, this was deemed too high of a price, too great of a risk. A vocal minority of them raised voice in objection to that effect. Celestia, for her part, ignored them, knowing that the heart of the crowd was won. Sweeping her discerning gaze across the ranks of her Chosen, her eyes finally stopped on one stallion at the front of the crowd that, by virtue of his height and bearing, commanded her attention.

He was the one.

Their eyes met.

And where lain her gaze was Infinity.

Icarus, like all the works of mortals, like all the lives of his people inevitably must, crumbled before the eternal will of Celestia.

Thenceforth, he knew, as She did, what had to be done.

To his left, an elder stallion broke ranks, stepping forward to confront Celestia. He railed against her with a familiar savagery, a snarling vehemence that left Icarus cold. “What have we left to us,” he screamed at her, “but the honest name and memory of our people, untainted by your sorcerous emendations. Hearken to me, Brothers, and know that there is no supernatural extension that might now avail us. Quit our house, God-ling, and leave a doomed people to die with honour.”

There was a minor outcry of support for the stallion’s sentiments, several more ponies stepping forward in defiance, but the vast majority of those assembled in the great hall remained still and deathly silent.

Celestia, in the face of such provocation, simply closed her eyes and turned her face away.

Tilting his head back, mouth closing upon its hilt, Icarus drew his sword.

~/~|~~

Stopping in front of the raised dais upon which her throne was situated, Icarus fell down onto one foreknee, bowing low before her, the sable folds of his cloak pooling around his hooves.

“Your Highness,” he stated grandly, “I have been summoned.”

“Arise, Icarus,” came Her response, mellifluous voice echoing with the deceptive Ecstasies of Ages, “and look upon They who would have your love.”

Icarus, with tremulous heart and limb, arose, his gaze yet fixed upon the floor. A golden-shod hoof, glimmering with Her glory, was extended to him.

“Honour Us,” she said, “and so in turn shall We honour you.”

Icarus, trembling but without hesitation, took her slender ivory foreleg into his own and kissed her hoof reverently.

Celestia—elegantly, effortlessly extracting her hoof from his hold—arose from her golden throne, standing tall upon her raised dais, ivory coat set ashimmer in the swath of aureate light that streamed down on her from a window high above: the theophanous glare of her presence washing over and suffusing him like warming rays of the evening sun.

“Grieved were We, to learn of your father’s passing. We mourn him, and honour him thus for his sacrifice for his people.”

Despite the gentle warmth projected by her body, her words chilled Icarus to the bone.

“Know, Icarus, that death need not be his ultimate end. He yet lives on—as all mortals must—in you, his progeny. You honour him, as you honour all your antecedents.” A golden-shod hoof was again extended, situating itself under Icarus’ chin. “Look upon Us, Icarus, for We would have your favour.”

Icarus, like the reckless colt before him might once have looked, looked up into the eye of the Sun.

And there was only blinding light.

~/~|~~

Dead.

They were all dead.

Every last one of them to a pony.

He’d killed them. Slain them all where they stood, where they thought to bid defiance to the Nascent Dawn.

Now they need never think again.

One of them, the pony who had stepped out of line in the first place—the ringleader, the High Prelate of the Council, the grand Heresiarch himself—lay gasping on the ground before Icarus, cirque of high-office lying shattered at his side. Reaching up, the aged stallion hooked his forelegs around Icarus’ neck, drawing him down unto his earthly ruin to murmur weakly into his ear. Stubble on the elder stallion’s sadly unkempt muzzle scratched against Icarus’s cheek, and his breath was gravid with the promise of approaching death. Icarus couldn’t make out what he was saying. It didn’t matter.

He wouldn’t remember any of it anyway.

The dying stallion heaved and shuddered, his hold on Icarus, on fragile life itself failing him. Falling back from him at last, the venerable leader came to death, a single tear rolling slowly down his still, silent cheek.

He wouldn’t remember.

What he would always remember, however, now until the end of days, was the heavy scent of alcohol, forever to linger on the memory of his last breath.

Chapter V: The Scourge of the Earth - Part I: Reckoning

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Chapter V

The Scourge of the Earth - Part I: Reckoning

~/~|~~

On wings of the Ephemera,

The Lepidopteron descends.

Upon a dream oft chanced,

Of an Immortal light.

O’er the trembling swards,

That sweep for a bow.

Ere the Aether wrought hooves,

Of Zephyrus gallop through.

That trembling, that guttering flame,

Of Mortal life.

~/~|~~

The great aestival bulk shifted, sonorous, turning as upon the wheel of Seasons, succumbing at last to the Fall.

“Would that it were not so...”

~/~|~~

On tattered pinions wrought from shadow and dust, there winged through the barren halls of Cadytum a singular creature. In its frantic fluttering there was beheld, by eyes attuned to the despairing nature of its fevered undulations, the very heart of the Mortal condition. For with every endeavouring flurry, every febrile beat of its wings in pursuance of a Life everlasting, there was shed more of the essence which constituted its essential, ephemeral being.

Through the ever attingent columns of Light and Darkness—a world of alternating contrast wrought swirlingly upon stone by sunbeams come to die—it winnowed its way through the fragile Dream. Spiralling and spinning and banking and twirling on wings that were ill-fashioned to sustain its temporal elevation, therein forever to lie—or indeed fleetingly—in its fundamental thesis of form, the bane of the Arch-Oneirist, lain dreaming beneath the sands of Narzus.

It was already burning.

And the closer it got to the great Light Eternal, the faster it burned.

~/~|~~

Celestia did not turn to look as the doors to her throne room were flung open. She did not so much as flinch as the gilt panels smashed, with mighty crash and clangour, against the unyielding stone of the walls that housed them. She stood, unblinking, motionless save for the occasional flutter of errant strands of her mane, gently ministered to by the fingers of a light breeze, gazing out of a tall and broad window at the shimmering blade that was the western horizon.

She already knew who it was. Why they had come.

Striding once more down the length of her illustrious throne room, there came noble Icarus, Foremost among her Chosen, accompanied by a cohort of his stalwart and valiant fellows.

They bore grave news.

While the utter destruction of the forest that had once girdled their mountain home in had unsettled and perturbed them, resistant as they were—at their existential peril—to change, it had nonetheless afforded them opportunities that they scarcely could have dreamt of before. With the Shadow driven back, the immediate threat neutralised, the Ponies of the Earth were finally able to send out advance scouts, to investigate and report back on the state of the realm. The news, as expected, had been almost universally dire. As previously thought, there were no known free cities left standing, and those that were still intact, namely great Equaem to the south—and to a lesser extent fair Guivarium in the west—were all occupied by the forces of Darkness.

Judging by the number of scouts that had returned compared to the number that were originally sent out, it could be reasonably surmised that the enemy, despite their assumed to be heavy losses, yet had free reign over the Plains of Edere, beyond and surrounding the alien waste that in turn now encircled the mountain. To the north, the River Maerir, born from the gap between the Horns of Tellurus—two perpendicular mountain ranges, the southmost end of the southern range where Cadytum was located—flowed red with blood. Those few scouts that had returned, more frequently than not, bore the fresh scars and bloody emblems of a narrow escape, and spoke of their individual ordeals with no small amount of dread and terror.

For in the prosecution of their reconnaissance orders, many of them had borne witness to the frightening degree of organisation with which their enemy now seemed to be imbued. The purging of the woodlands, while having destroyed the immediate enemies of the Ponies of the Earth that dwelt within them, had not eliminated the greater threat entirely. Without the forest, many creatures of Darkness had endured the great conflagration. Chief among them were those that roamed the open plains, sowing the seeds of desolation in their wake. They had been loath to enter the forest in the first place, content to remain behind and slay those that ventured out from within its shadowed depths, thus evading the consumptive flames that might otherwise have claimed them.

In recent times, however, the extent to which those same marauders had been able to utilise their talents for death and destruction had been on the decline. With scarcely enough able-bodied ponies left to man[¹] the walls and see to the ailing defences of the citadel, let alone push out from within it in force, there was found in their current state of attrition a dearth of equine victims such as never had been experienced before. Of alternative sources of comparable prey, the immediate world was found to be wanting. All of the outlying settlements and formerly secret, concealed villages had long since been uncovered and razed to the ground. There were no ponies left for the slaughter.

The Scourge of the Earth took no prisoners.

Beyond the shadowed veil of the forest, their enemy, thus deprived of their favoured sport, had grown increasingly restless. Fell Canidae, self-styled “Scourge of the Earth,” distinct from their bipedal coevals in their quadrupedity and enhanced savagery, comprised both the “leadership”—so-called—and the vast bulk of the enemy’s number. Truly they were a force unto themselves. Without the ebon ambit of the fallen cities of ponydom, wherein dwelt darker masters, they answered to no-one. They swept across the Plains of Edere like a tidal wave of blood and rampant Death, eradicating all who thought to stand before them. They themselves were the lesser offshoot of a fearsome, legendary race, long lost and presumed to be extinct. A people at home only on the rolling plains and open dales of Ederim[²], hunters and warriors to the last pup.

Of their “society,” it could be said that He that was strongest was King. He that was King lorded over a court of open air and grassy knolls, of sweeping plains and twisting rivers. Like the Ponies of the Earth, a love of all things natural presided within their hearts. But where those same Equidae had been tainted by the corruptive touch of civilisation, rent unto the void by the claw of Ur-Artificaem itself, the Fell Canidae of the East March had remained aloof, spurning the apostatising embrace of modernity.

Had remained pure.

For they lived only for the thrill of battle. Lived only for the Hunt. For the crushing of their enemies, their ever weakening prey between the tributary arch of their powerful jaws. Desirous of a final end to the accursed ungulates that would see fit to contain them, that would, in their illimitable audacity, seek to tip off its fulcrum the very balance that would otherwise have sustained them into perpetuity: the eternal balance between Predator and Prey.

For if the Ponies of the Earth were to prevail and prosper, spreading like a cancer of erudition across the realm, their cities and castles—distending like inimical tumours from which more corruptive poison could only flow—would disfigure, in sorrowful measure, the pristine aspect of the world. It was perceived, in the warped fundaments of the Equid nature—knowledge gleaned from the susurrant Dark—that from this course they would suffer no dissuasion.

No dissuasion save one.

Remaining unchecked and unchallenged, the ambit of their civilising influence would spread, and the last of that which was wild, the last of that which was pure, the last of that which was untamed and untainted would be lost. And no more then would the Fell Canidae roam freely across the plains of Ederim, to be awed and feared by all. Such could not be countenanced. Charged, as they were, by virtue of their distant birthright with the preservation of the Natural Order of the world, they alone would put an end to the madness. They alone could.

The Ponies of the Earth would fall before their storm.

In the formulation of their annihilative designs upon the mountain citadel, last stronghold of the hated Ponies of the Earth, there had hitherto existed a singularly insurmountable barrier, one that had confounded them at every turn. A flaw in whose ubiquity there was found an interminable prohibition; a thorn in their collective paw that would suffer no extraction.

The forest.

Its still, claustrophobic interior had held no appeal for them. Without the guiding wind upon their backs and across their muzzles—a map of scents gifted to their nostrils by connivant Eurus—the Scourge of the Earth were scarcely worth the name. Squatting like a brooding giant around the roots of the mountain, the ancient woodlands had long warded off interlopers such as they. It alone had stayed their advance.

And now it was gone.

With the shadow veil lifted—arboreal flood-gates finally opened—hungry eyes inevitably turned toward the mountain, greatest and most salient of its range. The disparate packs and warring clans came at last together, united in deadly purpose: their collective eye fixed on but one prize.

They were coming.

~/~|~~

Flowers.

His hoof delicately traced over the soft contours of a climbing rose’s corolla, trembling petals yielding to his touch. He caressed its erubescent folds as he might caress the cheek of a virgin lover.

She’d always loved flowers.

So did all who dwelt within the fair garden city of Equaem. It was impossible for all but the most obdurate, the most jaded, the truly lost and the fallen to walk amongst the fleeting, ephemeral beauty of her efflorescence and not be moved. Fragile blossoms, bedewed with the tears of a tremulous morn, quivered long upon their stems ere wilting under the weight of the coming Shadow. Parti-coloured petals rained down upon the heads of mortal ponies that walked within the city limits, as if scattered by the hooves of the fabled Pegasi themselves, twirling high above, laughing and cavorting and dallying with the Zephyrus. Long garden beds and curving terraces sang and blushed and glowed with a Life perennial. Water plants with vibrant blooms drifted down slow moving rivulets, passing under cracked stone bridges swathed in creeping verdure.

She loved Life.

A lone pony trotted slowly down a vista of vine-laden arches, petals floating and twirling indolently down upon his head in muted kaleidoscopic flurries, nestling themselves in his mane. The sound of running water, wrought from the statuary amphorae of decorative fountains, tinkled and burbled tranquilly in his ears. To his either side, bronze equine simulacrums flanked his passage, rampant and of noble bearing: venerable ponies of the past haunting his every step.

Always watching. Always judging.

But she was here, where he was not. Where he would never be.

He could hear her giggling.

Looking down, he saw a trail of tiny hoof prints inlaid in the soft earth. Placing a hoof over one such ghostly impression, he was struck by the relative size of his hoof in comparison to her own. The difference was too great. It was wrong. Something was wrong.

“...Hello?”

His voice sounded alien to him. It was too... deep. Too old. Like his father’s. Up ahead, a tiny figure darted in and out between the arches, the distant echo of a familiar, happy laughter lingering in his ears. Picking up speed, he cantered after the elusive phantasm, ducking under pendent vines and the disapproving gazes of his statued forebears. The world around him, heedless of the forenoon, was dark and grey. Everything seemed to have lost saturation, as though in her joyful wake colour itself saw fit to drain from the world, bleeding away with her passage.

“Where are you going? Wait, I— please! Wait!”

Up ahead, there was sudden flare of light.

She screamed.

He ran.

~/~|~~

Wreathed in the dawn aureole of Celestia’s mana, the wooden carving spun slowly end over end. It was a small figurine fashioned in the likeness of one of their canid enemies: a sleek and deadly form. Trapped in the stable orbit of her influence, the Wolf-head could but leer impotently, inanimately at her once per vertical rotation.

Fell are those that roam the earth.

Her ancient eyes betrayed no emotion. The object meant nothing to her. It was a relic. A vestige of that which would not endure. She offered no reaction as it burst violently into flame, falling away moments later as dwindling ash.

Fell am I that would end them.

Turning away once again from the ashen winds of Consequence, she returned to traversing the well-worn route up and down the length of her throne room, hoof falls echoing in the growing dark. She’d dismissed Icarus and his companions some hours earlier, and had, as was her wont, been furiously pacing non-stop ever since. Possessed, such as she was, of wings, one might reasonably have thought her to be above such restless perambulations. But to Celestia at least, walking was a comfort. Physical exertions such as these, practiced ceaselessly over the long millennia, become second nature, and when she walked, much that clamoured and much that troubled her noble mind was cast into silence by the familiar rhythm of her pistoning limbs—her undying constitutional—affording her the mental clarity to concentrate on the matter at hoof, upon the transitory moment that so often eluded her.

It had been a long, wearying discourse, one fraught with fear and trepidation. Celestia had done what she could to assuage their many and grievous concerns, commanding them at length to leave her to her ruminations. In truth, she was almost insulted by the air of exigency they bore. Did they truly doubt her ability to defend her people?

Did she?

She’d underestimated her enemy. Of that there could be no doubt. Her belief in the present Shadow’s decapitation, by way of her peremptory, ultimately regrettable actions, had proven naive. The rabble she’d burnt out of the forest were as fallen chaff when compared to their successors, now united, by her Hoof, in pursuance of her little pony’s ruin.

The fangs of ophidious Conceit had long fallen upon her.

And where fell their mark grew Shadow.

It was true, she had the power. She’d always had that power. That these whelps, these “Fell Canidae of the East March” thought to stand against the Ponies of the Earth, thought to stand against Her? Well, that was reason enough to destroy them.

And destroy them she surely could.

But at what cost? If her rash reaction against the Arbour Judicature’s treachery had taught her anything, it was that power such as hers must be tempered, lest she alone live to regret the consequences. If she so desired, she could wipe them out, blast them off the face of Ederim. But in the wake of such an unprecedented intervention, the world as it once was would be no more. It would be a wound that would never close; a scar that could never truly heal. Unlike the relatively fallow waste of her own making, life as she knew it would not return to lands subjected to the full force of her supernal fury.

If the Fell Canidae attacked the mountain en masse, utilising the entirety of their number as all evidence suggested that they would, Celestia knew that she could not adequately defend her Chosen without bringing down Cadytum with her. In their prodigious enumeration there was found an enemy that could not be so easily swept from the board. If they reached the citadel, they would, by virtue of sheer numbers alone, overwhelm and violently intermingle with the last remaining defenders and force her hoof. Her power, existing in an age before controlled, studied magic, while unrivalled in terms of sheer output, lacked immediate precision. In pursuance of their ultimate destruction, she would bring ruin not only to the Scions of Wolvendom, but to the last of her Chosen as well.

They could not be allowed to reach the mountain.

As mighty as she was, Celestia could not simply fly out and rend whole legions of Canidae unto ash where they stood. She needed time and prepared surroundings to conjure a grand spell of destruction with the necessary safeguards in place, such as was needed.

And of the needed time, there was found little.

With the way at last opened to them, their enemy would not long tarry upon the bloodied Plains of Edere. By all accounts, the Scourge of the Earth were preparing to launch a final assault within days, if not hours. In the direst of instances, stood before the gaping maw of abyssal foes heretofore undreamt of—her own Immortal life by some spectacular circumstance imperilled—it was within her power to precipitate the Arcane works that swirled intemperately throughout her being, but to do so was to tempt the wrath of an already unstable invocation. Any semblance of precision would be lost within a swirling vortex of obliterative forces. The resultant devastation wrought upon the earth would be beyond imagining.

It was a desolation that she could not countenance.

Princess Celestia, Goddess-Protector of the Ponies of the Earth, drew herself up tall, the light of a grand inspiration flaring in her eyes. On the edges of her peripheral vision, ivory and crimson banners were flapping portentously in the evening breeze. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the Mortal veil, the horns of the lost Eriatum were sounding.

To destroy the Fell host that closed in all around them, while simultaneously sparing her Chosen from the flame? It was an impossible feat. Such was her burden. And yet, in the conveyance of its onerous weight, she would not falter. Would not flag. Would remain defiant in the face of Darkness until the very end.

The Ponies of the Earth would not suffer themselves to stand idle whilst a storm of Death bore down upon them. Would not meekly exit this world in the hope of a peaceful admittance to the next. Led by Celestia, they would do the last thing that their enemy would expect, the last thing that they would be prepared for.

Ride out to meet them head on.

Chapter VI: The Scourge of the Earth - Part II: Aeonus

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Chapter VI

The Scourge of the Earth – Part II: Aeonus

~/~|~~

Ivory are the founts that stalk,

The halls of those that fall.

Before the bell, before the hour,

That tolls their final call.

To lands that, erelong, are not,

No more their forebear’s walls.

In crystal glade and deepest shade,

Where slain the Sun’s free will.

And so the Six again shall sit,

In the heart of Eriatus ‘til.

Where flamed, where shamed, where lay defamed,

There fall the last of the Hypaethral.

~/~|~~

She turned to face him then, dewy eyes lit up by the light of moonbeams.

“Do you really think so? That they’re up there, watching over us?”

Somewhere deep inside, arenaceous time was shifting.

“Of course.”

And so too the inanimate stars overhead offered not their guidance.

“Where else could they be...”

That Senescence, in all the captivating strains of its manifest horror, might at last consume them all.

~/~|~~

Where now Eternity?

Princess Celestia, as one beset by the agonies of resurrection, lifted her gaze up from out the Shadow—ivory head risen as the Godhead rising—and where fell the light of the Sun upon her burned pretension. Her face, like the face of all noble Equidae, blazed with the innate glory of its form. In that vast panorama, inlaid with the waves of magenta seas, there was beheld—by those fit to comprehend the grandeur of its estimation—the great Truth Indubitable: that equinity, perforce, must equate with divinity. And so it was that, momently, in observance of the incontrovertible truth, much that would be seen to inspire, and much that would command the hearts of mortal equids sloughed off the stygian nightmare of her witherling cheeks, falling away from her in a threnody of failing ash.

The sun was setting on the first day.

The First Day of Reckoning.

Golden bands of that descendent orb’s light fell over the mountain citadel in broad swathes, laving the ancient fortress—appropriated home of the Ponies of the Earth—in melancholy splendour. The alien architecture of Cadytum took on an ever more surreal aspect as the light of day waned away: edificial shadows springing up where, in rightful observance of the Old Laws of the Universe, no shadows ought to have been found. The conical spires and pendentive domes, aided by the agency of a recreant Sun, cast their unearthly silhouettes down upon the quailing earth.

It could well be the last day.

Her plans, contrived as they were by the light of a fitful inspiration, were already in motion. Even now, Lord Icarus, at her peremptory behest, marshalled the remnants of the once mighty armies of the Ponies of the Earth, in preparation for a pre-emptive, final assault. To that end, in preparation for the coming conflict, a portion of her noble mind had she sequestered away, and within it swirled the enochian incantations of a grand spell of destruction, one that glowed upon the pages of her soul and would channel the obliterative, all-consuming fire of her righteous fury into a force of controllable emanation.

But Celestia, for all her power and the sweeping grandiosity of her deific bluster, remained as one ill at ease. If the Fell Canidae of the East March did the unthinkable, and chose to attack during the night—a decision that would force them to strike before the absolute entirety of their number could be assembled—Celestia feared the end, not for herself but for the life of her Chosen.

For the Dream.

Her Dream. Her beautiful Dream. The Ponies of the Earth were that Dream. Were to become that Dream. They had so much potential. To see it all brought to an end so prematurely, so unrealised, would be a tragedy beyond imagination.

A tragedy of her own making.

For Celestia knew that if she should fail in her duty, madness and decay were all that awaited the realm. All that awaited her. Come what may, heedless of her relative invulnerability, she would share in the ultimate fate of the Ponies of the Earth.

So it Was.

And so it would forever Be.

Away in the distance, a flock of white birds was taking to the wing. They flew low around the xenospires of Cadytum, rising up from the heart of the mountain like otherworldly stalks of auburn gold, screeching their clamorous valediction to the crenellations that had sheltered them. Life there, lived under the protective aegis of the Ponies of the Earth and their newfound Princess, had been good to them. But now, the ever westering sun and the sea itself were calling them home.

The white auricles of Celestia, upon receipt of the cries of seabirds, swivelled towards the source. Her majestic wings—stirred into motion by the pelagic cacophony—slowly unfurled from their old station at her sides: feathered limbs reflexively stretching out to almost half their impressive length. Deep down, in her heart of hearts, a traitorous part of her—one that heeded not the solemnity of her asseverations—yet longed to join those avians: to fly away and never return, leaving the troubles of mortals far behind her. It was the same part of her that would stand no more against the coming Darkness, that would, in perfidy as yet unwrought upon the earth, see fit to flee the reach of the ever encroaching Shadow, lest she herself fall under its taint. A part of her that longed to once again walk under an unfettered Sun and, in the madness of self-imposed solitude, dream those dreams that could never be.

A part of her that longed to return to a palace by the sea.

Celestia sighed, reminiscent. That distant, palatial locus was no mere dream, no figment of an age-old imagination. Indeed, it and it alone had borne witness to that of her first contact with civilisation: a contact the very momentous nature of which would fundamentally alter the mind that was made to be immutable. If she had known at the time the very marked significance of the site, she might well have taken better note of its location. For she alone had walked, witless as a newborn foal birthed upon white shores of Aenid, among the forgotten halls of the lost Eriatum: greatest and most powerful of all equine races.

She had, in her gloried Awakening, stumbled upon lost Eriatus itself.

She’d not ventured into the city proper. The architecture of the vestibulate palace alone was enough to intimidate her. Newly birthed, as an ivory incarnation of a then fragile dawn, such works as those wrought by the mightiest and most ancient of Equidae were enough to render her timorous. The graven faces and granitic hooves, held out against her in muted warning, had all the aspect of a threatening menace: one that was encapsulated sorcerously within the colossi that stood guard over the gates of mighty Eriatus. Stood before the stone eyes of the Western Bale[¹], Celestia, in her infancy, had not the heart to enter.

But she never forgot. And she never forgave.

It was a decision that would haunt her forever.

All the secrets, all the knowledge, all the power of the lost Eriatum. In that moment—a moment lived among the very first of her Awakening—it had all been hers for the taking. She’d needed to but reach out her hoof and take it. If only she had known. If only she had understood what it was that she, in her cowardice, had so carelessly thrown away. For theirs was the model upon which the Dream had been founded. Theirs was the race from which the Ponies of the Earth were come. Theirs was the civilisation, theirs was the knowledge, theirs were the shoulders upon which the Ponies of the Earth stood tall. The legacy of the lost Eriatum lived on as the fire in her little pony’s veins: a fire that had in turn been passed to her. It was their spirit that set her Chosen apart, that animated them in pursuance of a greater end than that of merest subsistence.

It was their spirit that had lit the flame of Love in her dispassionate heart.

And where burned the fires of love, so too blazed the funeral pyres of Madness and Hatred.

She would return. Of that there could be no doubt. She would find her way back again. The gloried realm of the lost Eriatum could not remain forever lost. She would rediscover their ancient resting place and uncover their long forgotten secrets, even if it took her another ten thousand years of ceaseless, aimless wandering to do it. Celestia, to that of her incalculable sorrow, knew that she could afford to wait.

Even if there were found no others that could.

~/~|~~

The dawn coloured colt galloped down the broad, winding alleyway, hooves thundering on the cobblestones, in hot pursuit of the filly several lengths ahead of him. She skipped and bounced off of stone steps and kerbs as she ran, flicking her golden tail at his nose teasingly if he got too close, rounding corners suddenly and sharply, always managing to stay just one step ahead. She laughed as she weaved her way expertly around market stalls and in between the legs of their slow, witless patrons: always moving, never slowing, not once coming into contact with any of them or their personal effects.

He, however, was not so fluid in his pursuit. He bumped into stalls and bowled over innocent market-goers—larger than he had any right to be at his age—upsetting apple carts and sending poultry scattering in explosive flurries of white feathers. She moved through the crowd like a fish through water and he flailed after her like a fledgling seabird, flapping and bouncing comically off the sea of equinity, leaving in his wake a forest of upraised, shaking forehooves and harsh voices.

She was too fast. Too agile. He was losing her. Gritting his teeth, he called upon the aid of his superior strength, putting on a burst of extra speed, the muscles in his tired limbs crying out in protest. She responded by slipping deftly into a side alley, her tail slapping against his muzzle as he skidded past the opening, too slow to turn into it behind her.

“Oh for the love of Tellurus...”

Grunting with effort, he wheeled sluggishly around, giving up on the pretence of a legitimate pursuit and cantering slowly after her into the tall, narrow alleyway.

“All right!” he called out to her in between pants. “All right! You win! Again...” he added with a sigh, looking down and idling a hoof against the cobblestones.

Turning gracefully on a bit, she grinned at him from afar, her teeth fairly glinting in the dim light.

“You’re too slow, big brother!” she exclaimed excitedly, prancing on the spot. “You couldn’t outrun a magic carp in a puddle!”

“Hey!” he started indignantly, breaking into a lazy half-gallop to defend his honour. Turning with a giggle, she bounded off once again in the opposite direction, heading towards the light at the end of the roofless tunnel.

The shadows around them peeled away as they neared their point of egress: black shades ceasing to exist entirely as they burst out—as the alate through storm clouds to the sun swept Aether-world above—into the very heart of Equaem. Here the city Was. And here her beauty was most profound. It effected, in ecumenical measure—and with panoramic gestures—a joy and awestruck wonderment within the hearts of its occasional visitors and daily inhabitants alike.

For within the great amphitheatrical hollow so perforated, the bulk of the city lay slumbering. Like a glacial cirque wrought not from the heartless ice and snow of “Ederim Septentrionalis,” but from the gorgeous efflorescence and gently flowing waters of lost Eriatus, the mythical City of Dreams upon which Equaem—which, for all its splendour, remained an ultimately pale imitation of—had been modelled.

The city was in full bloom. Across the emerald swards contained therein, there roamed the Ponies of the Earth, both young and old, rejoicing together in the splendour of Life, set so fragrantly, so abundantly all about them. The young colt, animated by the spirit so imparted, bounded eagerly after the elusive filly, chasing her under the kaleidoscopic shadows of bursting pergolas and over the earthen redolence of freshly cut lawns: the invigorating scent of the blossoms blooming all around him putting a skip in his step and granting new life to that of his tired limbs.

The fundaments of Equaem were old. Very old. The red brick of her grand vaults and libraries bore more than just the weight of the clambering ivy. For it was a city built upon the memory of those that came before them. One built upon the august foundations of a former municipality: a forgotten metropolis erected by the exiled Eriatum in an age past, in memory of their former home, in the years immediately prior to their downfall. Or so it was believed. Little was known for certain. Stood, as one indicted, before the Last Arbiter of Truth, even Celestia herself, with all her supernal might and the wisdom of the ages at her command, could do little but confess her ignorance.

For not even She knew what ultimate fate had befallen the lost Eriatum.

To the young, it mattered little. It was not theirs to dwell on such things. Leave it to the Grey-manes to pore over dusty old tomes and wonder at the fate of those that came before them. Leave it to them to stand idle in wizard’s towers as the world passed them by, gazing off glassy-eyed into the unfathomable aether, seeking to penetrate the depths of space and forgotten time.

Life was here now, for the living, and the young were wont to live it.

But youth—O glorious Youth, by Beauty loved and Age condemned—was soon to depart from him forever.

~/~|~~

Icarus Andohven, Son of Ithdaed, newly appointed Field Marshal of Ederim, Grand Master of the Order of the Lost Eriatum, Master General of the Armies of the Ponies of the Earth, strode purposefully down the ranks of Celestia’s Chosen, assembled as they were in the open air of the citadel’s central courtyard. Following close behind him came two of Celestia’s heavily armoured personal honour guard, assigned to his service, bearing aloft the hopes and the dreams of the Nascent Dawn. His own aureate barding shone brilliantly in the fading bands of evening sunlight: refractive beams issuing forth in blinding arcs where they weren’t swallowed up by the oblivion-folds of his sable cloak. The golden wings on his ornate champron served to distinguish him, as if somehow his majestic height and bearing, contained so gloriously within that full plate of armour—armour wrought from the mystical forges of ancient Eriatus itself—were to fail in that task.

The intricately embossed full plate, as beautiful as it was impenetrable, had been a gift from Celestia, to safeguard the future of her most beloved son. As an artefact of curiosity alone, the ancient barding was priceless beyond measure. As an article of war, however, it was even more valuable. For its creators were not known for crafting anything other than the most resplendent, the most endurant, the most masterful of works. Where she had found such a treasure of antiquity, Celestia would not say. It was not his place to question her.

It was not a gift that she had bestowed upon him lightly.

Celestia had at last named him.

Her Own. Her Champion.

Champion-Protector of the Nascent Dawn; a pony reborn as the Right Hoof of Celestia herself.

Overhead, the ivory banners of that nascent dawn—emblazoned with a stylised orange and yellow sunburst—and the banners of the Ponies of the Earth—a white equid stood rampant upon a field of brilliant crimson, in the fashion of the heraldry of the lost Eriatum—flew together. The west wind blew through them, animating them with a defiant spirit, set against the malice of Eurus.

He would not fail her. And so too would the blood of his people not err in their service.

So too would the Ponies of the Earth endure.

As he walked, petals from the newly wilting blossoms of the courtyard fell in slow flurries down upon the heads of those therein assembled: falling as a sad reminder of all that had been lost. Eyes were cast downward as memories of brighter days, borne upon the melancholy streams of failing Life, pervaded the hearts of those mortal ponies who had lost so much. Their friends, slain; their homes, destroyed; their families, slaughtered. Even now, under the protective spell of Celestia’s aegis, the flames of Hope guttered in their breasts. Their enemy was relentless. Repelled, they would only return. Evaded, they would surely pick up the trail.

Defeated, they would give rise to Another.

Proceeding down the line, Icarus beheld the pall of despair enshrouding the last of his people. He exchanged light touches and words of fellowship and honour with those he knew that served under him, bolstering their resolve with stiff nods and precision salutes. Upon encountering those that he did not know—the fresh recruits pressed into service and the older stallions coaxed, perforce, out of retirement—he deigned to stop and greet each and every one, asking of them their name and examining them with a critical eye honed over years of military service. As was so often the case in dire predicaments such as the one facing him and his people, many of those assembled had either seen too much of war or too little.

Celestia, in her wisdom, had bidden him select only those who could stand and fight and die with honour, for they would need the spirit of Valour on their side if they were to find victory amongst the ashes.

If they were to find victory.

For all his faith in the manifest destiny of his people, Icarus knew what it was to be afraid. Knew what it was to fear the coming Fall. Much of the Immortal Princess’ designs had been made known to him, and he took heart in the knowledge that one such as her walked by their side.

Coming to the end of the line, Icarus came to a stop in front of the last pony standing there, finding himself having to look up for the first time. The red stallion stood before him was among the more impressive specimens of extant ponykind, standing a full head taller than even he did. The equine giant was entirely clad in heavy crimson plate armour, and his massive champron—now held respectfully in the crook of his foreleg—was crowned by a matching pair of white minotaur horns. His enormous warhammer, “Minatory”, was mounted on his broad back.

The pony, like Icarus, had an unusual name.

Though he was known to many simply as “Minotaurim’s Bane”, his real name—the name given to him by his father—was Aeonus.

His former dwelling place—the outlying settlement of Irondale, established before the coming of the hordes of Darkness— had been located to the southeast of Cadytum, beyond the reach of the mountains, and had fallen at roughly the same time as Equaem did. It had been subjected, over a period of weeks, to an ever escalating series of raids: raids perpetrated upon it by ruthless tauriforms, back when they were a more common sight upon the fields of Ederim. The leadership of the settlement, having presided over the loss of the majority of their crops and foodstuffs, as well as having borne witness to the many violent deaths attributed to the agency of their enemy, decided that, as the state of ponydom collapsed all around them, ongoing habitation of the settlement had become an untenable proposition. Stakes were pulled up and provisions were made ready—the ponies of Irondale taking with them only what they needed to get them to the nearby mountain pass and through it to the relative safety of Cadytum.

The treacherous Minotaurim, however, having had anticipated such an action, moved to attack the caravan as it was departing, catching the ponies of Irondale completely off guard. It was then, in that moment, that Aeonus, on the cusp of adulthood himself and already larger and broader than his father and the other stallions in the village, earned his epithets.

Striding purposefully through the ranks of his scattering brethren, as unarmed and unarmoured as the day he was born, Aeonus, making straight for the leader of the party of marauders, faced his enemy: an almost nine-foot albino monster that wielded a massive ebon warhammer, one that could crush the skull of a pony in a single blow. Shrugging off deadly projectiles that were hurled in his direction—projectiles that could well have killed a lesser equine if they found their mark—Aeonus, as one possessed, with the added handicap of a throwing axe now embedded in his shoulder, squared off against the legendary chieftain of the largest nearby minotaur clan in single combat and vanquishing him using only the hooves the merciless gods had given to him.

Having observed this veritable battle of Titans, along with the subsequent downfall of their mighty chieftain, the White Thane of Tor himself, the remainder of the tauriforms fled the wrath of Aeonus, taking with them the harrowing tales of a Red Terror. The attack on the caravan had been routed. But it was already too late. The damage was done. The caravan had been destroyed and all those that had sought refuge within it had been slaughtered. There were now only a hoof full of survivors left. Aeonus, in his fallen father’s stead, taking with him the head and the hammer of the mighty chieftain he had slain, led the last of his people through the mountain pass and onward to Cadytum. He was hailed as a hero upon his arrival and went on to become a legend in his own right.

For amongst ponykind and Minotaurim alike, Aeonus was a living legend. He was a savant when it came to the fighting of tauriforms, and he’d personally killed a great many of them in the course of his military career—an otherwise illustrious career tarnished by scandal and acts of insubordination—becoming, to the vehement distaste of many, something of a collector when it came to the question of the corneous protuberances the Sons of the Minotaurim invariably possessed. But the pride of his collection—the white horns of his maiden and foremost victim—he wore into battle, forever to inspire fear in the hearts of those who would raise arms against that of his own and that of his kin.

He was a pony of the old order, one possessed of a stature to match that of even his most august antecedents. His belief in his divine mission—to one day bring an end to last of the accursed Minotaurim—was unshakeable and a force to be feared. But for the colour of his bloodlust and force of his hatred, he might have caught Celestia’s eye, as his foalhood friend Icarus ultimately did. The two had arrived in Cadytum at the roughly same time, give or take several weeks, and had bonded together over their shared grievances. They had trained together, fought together and rose through the ranks together, though Aeonus, bereft of the influence of a well-connected father, as well as burdened by the weight of his murderous convictions, had never quite risen to the lofty heights that the now Field Marshal of Ederim standing before him did.

As Icarus stepped up to him, Aeonus bowed down his mighty head.

“My lord,” he intoned in an imposing baritone, holding a foreleg respectfully across his chest.

“Would that it were, ‘Bane of the Minotaurim’,” began Icarus, returning the bow and favouring his old friend with a sad smile, “that together we rode against your favoured enemy.”

“That day will come,” Aeonus responded, lifting his head to reveal the fire in his eyes. “And when it does, I shall leave no tauriform yet standing in Ederim left wanting my favour.”

“Alas, then, that that day is not yet upon us.” Lifting an armoured forehoof up to rest upon Aeonus’ plated shoulder, Icarus looked into the eyes of his foalhood friend. “Will Minatory fall upon the heads of those that have no claim to her?”

Aeonus drew himself up taller, working his powerful jaw as he gazed down upon Icarus with steely eyes. “No, my lord. She will not. I would not sully her honour with the blood of mongrels, nor will I stand idle while they yet think to challenge us. This is not her battle, my lord, but ours. Know that, before the day is done, before the last canid lies trampled before us, the hooves that bear me will have drunk their fill.”

“For honour, then. For glory. For a nascent dawn.”

“For a nascent dawn,” Aeonus echoed.

But for a moment, Icarus thought he saw the beginnings of a derisive smile, one that ghosted across the lips of his oldest and dearest friend.

~/~|~~

He had a beautiful voice.

“Honour Us...”

And through it swept the wind through the trees and water over stone.

“...And so in turn shall We honour you.”

There was only blinding light.

~/~|~~

Fifteen hundred warriors.

Icarus furiously splashed his face with cold water, water taken from the filigreed basin in his opulent bedchamber. He splashed himself in the manner of one trying to shock one’s self, upon awakening, into forgetting, if only for a fleeting, precious moment, the nightmares that plagued them. As he gazed down upon his inverted image, droplets of falling water tore concentric gashes in the reflective surface, rendering the chiselled symmetry of his face into a vision of fluidic chaos.

It was no use. There was no escaping it. The facts, as onerous as they were to bear and as much as he might like to erase them from memory, would suffer no ablution.

They were all that was left. His predecessors, even in times of peace would have commanded an army of eight thousand battle ready ponies—six thousand at the very least[²]. In their severe state of depredation, their canid enemy would now outnumber them at least ten to one.

Celestia save us.

Icarus, turning away from the ornate basin, walked slowly across the length of the room, heading towards the balcony, intending to partake of the evening air and observe the colour of the night. The palatial suite he now resided in was yet another fringe benefit of Celestia’s favour. He’d been reluctant to accept his new lodgings, preferring, in such times of existential peril, the military austerity of his old chamber. But Celestia, for all her compassion and forbearance had, on this occasion and in consideration of this one seemingly inconsequential point, remained intransigent. Bold as he was, Icarus had neither the heart nor the will remaining to question her motives.

The suite was beautiful. Of that there could be no doubt. Gilded folding screens, inlaid with the golden visions of a civilisation lost, partitioned the open rooms and offered some semblance of privacy where it was needed. Lacquered bureaux and commodes were proliferated throughout the interior, set alongside upholstered canapés and ornamental “chaise longues”. Rich tapestries and banners hung in great profusion off the stone walls, and elaborately framed looking-glasses stood together in groups of three, reflecting one another’s light and forms.

For all the beauty of the many and varied appointments, there was something not quite right, something subtly but undeniably off. For a start, the proportions were all wrong. Everything was too big, too long, as if all the furniture had been designed for a race of extremely tall and slender beings. Designs and devices, found woven and printed and graven throughout the extent of the domicile, were entirely foreign when beheld by the eyes of analytic ponykind. Many of the creatures, landscapes and situations depicted simply didn’t make sense, as if they were crafted from the chaotic visions of an insane dream world: a world that cared nothing for the law of nature and accepted not the conventions of established science.

Disregarding the peculiarity of the interior furnishings, the unnatural stillness of the air and the inexplicable warping of his reflection in the mirrors, perhaps the thing that disturbed Icarus the most was the notable absence of dust and the complete lack of any outward appearances of decay. How long had the halls of Cadytum stood abandoned before the Ponies of the Earth first came to them? Quite possibly thousands of years. And yet, it was as if the original owners had never left. Everything was clean and immaculate, spotlessly perfect, and remained so bereft of the hoof of equine intervention.

Remained so even in spite of it.

Once, in his youth, during the course of his training, Icarus had been thrown back against an ornamental weapon stand, shattering it with the force of his weight. The next day, as he walked past the place where it had stood, he had been startled to find that it once again stood where it always had, as unmarked and untouched as the day he had first laid eyes upon it.

He’d later experimented on other items scattered throughout the empty halls and uninhabited rooms, scratching woodworks and tearing small gashes in tapestries: deliberately damaging them in order to observe the long-term effects. Whether it took a single night or a week of moonrises, or, in some rare cases—dependent on the severity and extent of the damage—an entire lunar cycle, all objects invariably reverted back to their original, pristine state.

Icarus had the notion that if his people were to vanish tomorrow, becoming, as if by some great spell of extirpative destruction, completely extinct, all traces of them would shortly thereafter disappear, and, but for their crumbling, transient works without the temporal ambit of the fortress, it would be as if the Ponies of the Earth had never existed in the first place.

They were not supposed to be there.

No-one was. The citadel was a monument to another age, a place where the usual flow of time succumbed to the temporal paroxysms of mad gods. There was a strange force at work there, one that emanated out from within the blackened heart of the mountain and conspired against the once indomitable spirit of his people, corrupting their hearts with the weight of its malevolent presence.

Attaining the extremity of the suite, Icarus stepped out onto the balcony, taking in a deep draught of the cool evening air. Where elemental water had failed him, the unbridled aether would provide.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The secrets of the mountain were not his to uncover. He now had but one task entrusted to his care: to ride out with the full force of his house and meet the Scourge of the Earth head on. The plan, as Icarus understood it, was to draw them away from Cadytum and halt their advance long enough to buy Celestia the time she needed: time enough to complete her inscrutably Arcane works.

As for the future, the mares and fillies would of course remain behind, along with the colts and elder stallions. Even if he and all those who rode out with him ultimately perished before the might of the canid legions, Celestia, eternal as the rising sun, would endure. She would—after having unleashed her power upon whatever remained of their enemy without fear of greater repercussions—return to Cadytum to watch over the last of his people and ensure that their deaths would not be in vain.

Ensure that the Dream did not die with them.

Icarus believed in the Dream. Believed in Her. And so in faith he found peace with his fate.

That in falling, the light of his life should at the last be added to the first light of a Nascent Dawn.

~/~|~~

For honour. For glory.

For a nascent dawn.

Those four words had pained him more than any he had ever known.

Aeonus, retrieving his helm from its stand, lifted it up high, slowly bringing it down to rest upon the contour of his head and neck. As he put his forehooves back onto the ground, the Red Terror in the mirror stared back at him, white horns aflame in the dancing firelight.

How had it come to this? Had his oldest friend really fallen so far? On the morrow, they would ride to war together, and it was likely that they went to their deaths. There was a time when noble Icarus would have died for honour, when he would have given up his life in defence of his people alone.

And now he would die only for Her.

Aeonus’ jaw tensed. Icarus, despite his faults, was like a brother to him. The two of them had come of age together in these very halls. Aeonus remembered his own horror upon discovering what fate had befallen the High Prelate, along with a full third of the former ruling council’s members. Their blood was on Celestia’s hooves.

How could Icarus serve the one who had murdered his own father?

Aeonus shook his head. He would never understand. Were he in Icarus’ place, he would think of nothing save vengeance.

For vengeance was all they had left.

It wasn’t right. There had to be another way. There was no—

Aeonus froze.

Thus occupied with his thoughts, the Bane of the Minotaurim had failed to perceive that which should have been immediately apparent to him. Perhaps it was that, accustomed—as all ponies who lived there were—to the strange warping of his own reflection in the mirrors of the citadel, he had failed to discern, in the context of a waking reality, the horrifying image that now laid waste to his nervous system.

For the Red Terror in the mirror was not alone.