Empty Equestria: the Mystery of the Pre-Classical Collapse · 8:13am Nov 9th, 2015
This was written a while ago, elsewhere, but I was inspired to dig it up and post it here by Carabas's blog post about Diamond Dogs in his Palaververse.
The basic issue is this: Equestria is United States, if the USA was a fantasy kingdom of magical technicolor ponies and ruled by a benevolent solar God-Queen. And the ponies haven't always lived there, either: we know they migrated there to escape the cold in their old homeland. So, why was there this nice, uninhabited land for them to settle in?
When the Three Tribes fled south from the windigo-caused Fimbulwinter that had swallowed their ancestral lands in the Old Kingdom, they found Equestria: a lovely land, beautiful, temperate, rich in gemstones and fertile soil, and empty. There were a few scattered flocks of sheep and herds of cattle living here and there, the occasional dragons nesting in the mountains, but no civilization. They couldn't even find any ruins to indicate there had once been a civilization, here.
And while the vast majority of ponies of all three tribes just shrugged and went on with the business of settling the new lands and building a new, multi-tribal society, there were some who were concerned about this: paranoid pegasus strategists, curious unicorn scholars, and canny Earth pony traders. Why was this rich, pleasant land open for them to move in and settle on? Was it possible there was some subtle but terrible danger here?
Pieces of the evidence began to appear: a collapsed mine in one gem-field here; a neglected and overgrown orchard there; strange, antlered skulls revealed by plough in some fields; rusting pieces of armor and moldering bones discovered among the roots of toppled trees. The emptiness of Equestria was already starting to make sense, when the first contacts happened: Earth pony scouts exploring the denser forests met with deer, while ambitious unicorn miners broke into the tunnels of the Diamond Dogs.
Before the ponies, the lands now known as Equestria had been shared by two very different civilizations: the magical forest kingdoms of the deer, and the underground realms of the Diamond Dogs. The elegant and aloof deer did not get very well along with the brutish, crafty and greedy Dogs, but for a long time the two civilizations mostly ignored each other. There was some trade, and the occasional clash or raid, but on the whole there was neither friendship nor hate between the two races.
Slowly, over generations, things began to change. The deer had always used potions and other subtle magics to shape the forests they lived in, and the Dogs knew how to channel the underground flows of magic to seed gems and grow seams of ore. As both civilizations flourished and expanded, their magics began to interfere with each other. At first, it was a rare affair: the trees planted too close to gem-fields grew unpalatable fruit, or the tunnels beneath a deer grove became dark and confusing, easy for even the Dogs to get lost in. But such things kept happening more and more often, and sometimes the results were worse: spontaneously generated timber wolf packs rampaging through a deer settlements, or strangling roots bursting through the roof of a cavern to grab and choke at anything in reach.
The lack of contact and familiarity between the deer and the Dogs made diplomacy hard, and attempts at cooperation even harder. And as the clashes continued, both sides began to slowly fear and hate each other, and to think that maybe they were doing it on purpose. From there, it was not a long way to war.
It was a long and nasty conflict, fought with claws and antlers, spears and mattocks, and magic against magic. Blood was shed in the forests, on the fields, and in the tunnels. Deer cities burned, and the delvings of the Dogs collapsed. Dragons entered the fray, looting the gem hoards of the Dogs, and monsters like chimeras and manticores returned to hunt the deer. In just a couple of generations, the two civilizations were devastated, much of their works destroyed or lost, their people reduced to wandering bands of nomads or small packs huddling in the ruins of their ancestors' work.
And before either side could recover enough to start rebuilding, the ponies came from the North, and everything changed. They were prolific, adaptable, magically powerful, and perhaps most importantly optimistic, having escaped the cold and strife to this land of plenty. They took the abandoned lands, and made them their own, building new towns and farms and castles, giving the rivers and the forest and the mountains new names. The age of the deer and the Dogs was over, and the age of Ponies was dawning.
Makes sense to me. A disturbing amount of sense, really. I may need to consider adopting this theory.
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Heh, thanks.
I think it's less disturbing than the other alternative suggested by the US - Equestria parallels; namely, that the ponies did away with the native peoples whenever they got in the way of the Manifest Equine Destiny.
Also, this ties the elf-like deer introduced in the comics (I'm apparently unusual for liking them!) and the Diamond Dogs (whose abandoned mines also show up in one of the early comics) into the general history of Equestria.
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It's interesting that the comics explicitly made the deer elf-like, because this gives us an elf-dwarf war with humans moving in the gaps.
Not that I mind, mind you. It's a great mythic core. That's why it keeps cropping up.
Interesting, I may place a pin on that if you aren't opposed
There is also a big point to make that everywhere besides Equestria is kind of a dump or an ongoing dumpster fire
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Sure, go ahead!