Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Modern Equestria

Chapter II

The Nemoricolae

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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.

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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.”

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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.