An Origin Story: Equestria is Born
In the beginning there were Six.
Woden the Stag, who ruled over the wild wood and the spirits of the hunt. He carried in him great honesty and an unvarnished way of looking at the cycle of life. He taught life & death to his frenzied followers. Madness seemed to rule his herd. From Woden’s herd came the hunters of the world; manticores, bears, cockatrice, timberwolves, and all the creatures of the wood.
In the sharp and high mountains ruled Brigid the Firebird. She was a being of great loyalty and a great temper. Her anger could make the earth shudder and the mountains melt. She was a solitary creature, and tended to the solar cycle faithfully. From her fallen feathers came the birds of prey and from her tears came the flowers of healing. Her children, the phoenixes, scattered and lent their magic to their mother’s task.
In the oceans, deep & cool, lived Brigid’s twin, Kuu the Swan. Kuu laid a glowing egg each month, then placed it in the sky for safe keeping, and then set off to explore the seas & lands that it touched. Her kind heart was over laid by her flighty nature and often she would for get a plea as she got distracted by other plights. From Kuu’s eggs came the songbirds and seabirds and gentlest of creatures, her last egg never hatched but seemed to wax & wain in the night sky. From her down feathers came the creatures of the sea, each more unusual than the last.
In the hot and arid desert came the great and fearsome winged fire breathing Dragon, Set. With him came the heat of summer and the winds of change. His bountiful generosity was hard to win and easy to lose. He was a just but very hard heart. He seeded the world with gems and created dune seas that protected the lands from the Chaos of the Discord. His children, the dragons & the serpents guarded their territory with fearsome strength.
From the frozen wastes came the freezing breath of Caecius the giant Ligar. His steps brought frost and his easy laughter made the heavens freeze and snow upon the land. With his presence came both the cold of winter & the warmth of stories by the fire. His children; the lions, tigers, griffins, panthers, and sphinges, patrolled the lands and kept the lore of the First and the Creative Battles.
From the grassy and flat plains came the wise Alicorn witch queen, Oya. Her weapons of will and word could make storms out of zephyrs and a feather into a hail of arrows. Her possessive and obsessive nature made her dangerous, but her foresight and knowledge of magic in all forms was unmatched by any others. Her herd of zebra, buffalo, donkeys, oxen, and antelope all carried a part of her great magic and could collectively call mighty powers.
In the beginning she was the one who truly saw that the age of the six realms of Balance would end in war.
She also saw that they each would have a chosen champion who would then settle their wild lands and create a land of peace.
Oya had three daughters. One was a filly with wings, Zepheria, and she had the ability to control weather magics. One was a filly without wings or a horn, Demeatria, but a deep connection with the earth and the plants and animals that called it home. The last was a filly with a horn, Hecita, & she had the power of sheer magical power and finesse.
The three fillies grew to be wise mares like their mother & loved each other & their herd with all their hearts. It was in these feelings that Oya knew what needed to be done to finish binding the magics of Order to the land that she & the other Six had created and sheltered from the Chaos.
The Six magics needed a binder, a last magic to hold them together in both heart & mind. But the Six their hearts were not open to the binder, being from the Chaos, they were hard & unable to do more than be concerned. Even the kind Kuu did not love like the new and growing herd of ponies under Oya’s rule.
One night Oya called the Six to the center of the land & together they called up a monolith of great size. Brigid and Set shaped it and fused it to the bedrock. Kuu and Caecius filled the interior with a matrix of ice and crystal to channel the power. Woden gave the power and Oya shaped the power to give it reason and will. They agreed that of all the races that had sprung up that the ponies would be best able to channel this last power.
To hide the Keystone, Brigid and Set raised more monoliths and made them look like mountains. Woden raised a wild wood around it and called the most territorial of his hunt to the place. Kuu circled it with a wide river and set a sea dragon to guard it. Caecius set mighty winds to circle the place and froze the tops of the monoliths to make them treacherous to climb. Then Oya made it seem like it was meant to be there and made the magic subtle and slippery so that no one would know what kind of place it was.
With their work done, the Six retreated and waited for the day that they would be called upon to activate the Keystone’s ultimate power.
Oya gave one last compulsion to her daughters before she left them & their herd, Love & Tolerate. With her last breath, she gave them the magic they would need to grow and tend the land & sky of their homes-to-be.
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Once upon a time, there was a world with magic. It was a wondrous world but it was also terrible. The spirits of Chaos had eaten away at the barrier of Order and had taken residence in the hearts of the children of Order. With sins like greed, lust, jealousy, anger, gluttony, pride, and sloth taking heart in each child and warping the powers of Order.
The dragons were first. Dragons by nature were solitary creatures and as such no one knew that they were becoming warped until it was too late. Greed and gluttony took hold & changed their magic to such a degree that their biology shifted and become dependent on the amount of prized objects they hoarded away. The more they grew the more that they wanted and before long they were committing acts of theft and fraud against the other citizens of their land.
The creatures of the wild woods and great cats were corrupted next. The seeds of anger and lust took hold and turned them into monsters that desired the thrill of the hunt and the kill to the point that they left the woods to seek more prey. Their magics and natural weapons became more fierce and varied. Fangs started to drip with poison, glares that once paralyzed now killed, claws that once just provided purchase on difficult terrain could now rip and rend the flesh into ribbons.
The phoenixes that once faithfully tended the sky were filled with sloth. The great keepers of the sun almost vanished completely as they stopped flying and thus stopped burning with their inner fire. Only the first phoenixes were able to partially resist and thus survive the cycle of death.
The griffins and sphinges were seized by pride and anger. They would fight with any who offered insult and called it honor. Their growing civilizations were almost cut down as they tried to start war after war with the other new civilizations.
The ponies were the last to become corrupted, but it happened just as the next wave of Chaotic spirits came and started to freeze their lands. Coupled with the dying phoenixes, the plains and hills of their kingdoms became barren fields of waste. With all three ill tidings on their doorstep, the three kingdoms almost came to war, and thus would have destroyed the last of the magics of Order.
Just as the last hope was about to die, the ponies re-discovered the last of the great magics of Order, Love. With that newly rekindled fire, peace returned to the ponies and the spirits who could be expelled were.
Out of that fire of Love also came a return of the Alicorn Witch Queen. The ponies had inadvertently called her out of Time when they had combined magics to create the Pax Equestras & form the United Kingdom of Equestria. The Witch Queen sealed the hole her appearance made, but not before Discord’s son slithered through and vanished into the world.
To help protect her little ponies from this threat caused by her arrival she created three daughters; Celestia the Charitable, who would aide the phoenixes in raising & tending to the Sun, Luna the Hopeful, who would take over the duties of the Night, and Cadence the Faithful, who would guard the Keystone and the ley lines of magic that had grown out from it over time. Together the three could harness the seven magics of Order and once again seal away the spirits of Chaos. She then filled them with what they needed to rule and protect all their new subjects.
As she left a burst of magic created a castle and city in the prairie. It was called Caballiopolis and was declared to be the capital and cultural heart of the Kingdom of Equestria. The castle was all gleaming white stone and the streets were paved in honey colored cobbles. Every pony had a bed and every family a house that day.
Over time their population grew and more cities came to be. Cloudsdale grew from the Weather Factory that the pegasi maintained. Canterlot was at first a mining town created by the unicorns as they searched for gems to create jewelery and to trade with the peaceful dragons. Manehatten and Fillydelphia grew from crossroad villages in the farming districts into the commerce centers of the kingdom.
It seemed like ages had passed and the ponies had all but forgotten the reason the two alicorn sisters sat on the Triple Throne of Caballiopolis. They forgot about the danger that the three alicorns were created to fight. They forgot that the world wasn’t always peaceful. Every year they did Hearths’ Warming Eve plays and told the story of the Founding, but over time the story became sanitized.
As peace prospered, Discord’s child’s growth was stunted. If there was one lesson that ponies remembered, it was that peace was their protection. He traveled the world feeding on small wells of hate & chaos. Then he found the feral dragons.
The dragons had split into two tribes. Those who lived near Equestria had been saturated with the new serge of Order and Love. They changed to creatures of reason and protection. The dragons who lived farther away from pony-kind were feral and greedy beasts who thrived on hate and the seven sins that hate spawned.
Discord’s son thrived and grew into his powers and became one with his father. It was from the desert that he returned to Equestria, determined to break the hold that Love and Order had on the lands and reclaim it for Chaos.