A thousand years is quite the generation gap, so Princess Luna decides she has to get with the times. However, this isn't quite as easy as she thinks it will be...

This story is a sequel to The Witch of the Everfree

Saddle Arabia is a land of mysteries and ancient legends, and Sunset Shimmer sees it as a great place to escape from her mistakes for a while. What caused her to flee Equestria, and can she find a way to prove herself and win back the favor of the ponies she wronged?

More importantly, can she avoid starting a war?

I'd like to thank all my followers, fans, and patreon subscribers. Without all of you, I'd be worse off in every way.

For a thousand years, Equestria has been too close to the sun. With the land rendered largely uninhabitable by the scorching heat, the ponies of Equestria have retreated into the sky. Now airships roam the clouds, severed mountaintops, held aloft by ancient and powerful magics, serve as the home for ponies everywhere and the land is mostly at peace.

But that peace is threatened when an ancient prophecy heralds the return of the one who caused all this change. Daybreaker. Princess Luna's older sister, imprisoned in the Sun for a thousand years, is about to return and, according to legend, burn the land to the ground.

Can the three students of the Princess defeat the mad empress? Or did Princess Luna's desperate use of the Elements only buy Equestria a thousand years of borrowed time? Either way, it will be an adventure for the history books.

So after reading Reformation ... It's a Pony Thing and Twilight's Pirate School, both by the wonderful Let's Do This, I realized that they effectively boiled down to the tagline 'My Little Pony - Everything is Better with Airships'. This story and, indeed, this setting are the result of my mind taking that idea and going wild with it.

This story is written in full and will not interfere with my other work. The sequel to Phoenix is still in progress and sadly taking a little longer than I had hoped, but it's coming.

After the Elements free her from Nightmare Moon, Luna asks Celestia, "What happened to my daughters?"

Celestia escorts Luna to the Canterlot Sculpture Gardens and shows her the Reliquary of the Heroes.

Under the statues of her millennium-dead daughters, Luna learns how they lived in the shadow of Nightmare Moon's treason, and how they died as glorious heroes of Equestria.

Sequel: With Her Majesty's Coast Guard.

Recommendsday!

Content warning: Pandemic. Note that this was published before current events.

This story is a sequel to Convergence

Equestria was just a game, one of an endless number of semi-illicit online games created to take advantage of the ubiquity of cheap augmented reality hardware. But that changed, when for no reason anyone knows, the virtual population of Equestria woke up.

Two decades have gone by since then, and the world has been transformed. The former game network has grown to encompass the backbone of trade, infrastructure, and research the western world over. Its vast computational resources have given rise to an infinitely subdivided world of overlays and sublayers, coterminous with the various cities and towns within Equestria. Every person in the modern world is assigned a Synth, a pony personal assistant that adapts to their needs and helps them access those parts of the world governed by Equestria's systems.

It is a world Dakota barely remembers, thanks to an automobile accident that turned most of her body to mush. But thanks to the medical miracles created by joint equestrian-human research, her life is saved by a remarkably new series of implants.

But Dakota isn't content to sit around while her body slowly knits itself together. There are unanswered questions to answer, questions that will ultimately lead her to the oldest mystery of both worlds.

Updates every Saturday.

Sponsored on Patreon by the Illustrious Canary in a Coal Mine. Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail. Cover by Zutcha.

This isn't part of the Optimalverse, or any other established fan-universe.

Twilight Sparkle was only a filly when Equestria detected the enigmatic Signal. A series of increasingly complex mathematical proofs, the Signal transformed from an intriguing curiosity to reliable evidence of extraequestrian life.

And as it happened, Equestria's exploration of their own solar system was nearly complete. With colonies orbiting every planet and large body, and an asteroid belt filled with miners and prospectors, Twilight's civilization was just about ready to turn its focus outward. The signal was less than ten light-years away, within reach of a daring, experimental voyage. A voyage Twilight Sparkle would lead.

Along with a small crew of the most skilled scientists and engineers Equestria could offer, Twilight is determined to uncover the mystery of the Signal, and brave the final frontier for future generations of Equestrian explorers.

A comment-driven, CYoA story. Please use the links provided in the author's notes of each chapter to vote, rather than the comments.

This story is a creative experiment of mine, one meant to explore the general idea that creativity is often most fostered by restrictions. As a result, I've imposed a number of restrictions on the writing of this story, which I'm stating explicitly here so I can be called out if I break any of them.

1. Brevity is the soul of wit
No chapter may be more than 1000 words long. This wordcount only includes prose, and not the questions/rolls.

2. Every choice matters
When a choice is offered in a chapter, at least one sub-optimal choice must be present, with no indication about which is which other than the prose itself. Every chapter should end with a CYoA-style decision tree when possible.

3. Fate is cruel and the universe is heartless
The decision of the vote must be respected. This means any character could be killed, or the entire story could end in failure, if that's what the votes decide. Where numbers, stats, and randomization appear in the text, these elements are not verisimilitude, but are decided by public diecrolls in my discord server.

Note: Because of the unusual production of this story, its chapters won't be edited in the same way as my usual fare. Feel free to point out any mistakes you encounter.

Awesome cover by Zutcha as you can probably tell. Editing stuff by Two Bit and Sparktail, where applicable.

Advance, lunge. Retreat. It's about speed, but no one can run away. Sunset never thought she'd get the chance to show how far she had come, not in this. Her friends were by her side and they'd always be the greatest change in her life, but this was important too.

Changing bodies when she crossed over to the human world was hard enough. It was a challenge to write, and even harder to learn how to play the guitar. But this sport, fencing, felt nigh-impossible to master. But that was years ago.

Feint, disengage, lunge for the feet. Every time it's a lunge, firing the body like a magic blast from a unicorn's horn, only stronger. Every time she could feel the impact. The bending steel, it spoke volumes about how good the hit was.

Canterlot High had only ever had a fencing club, but the Inter-regional Fencing Tournament would be open to every young fencer, including upstart professionals. Schools like Crystal Prep would be sending their own team members, real competitors who lived with a sword in their hand. But none of them had to go through what Sunset did. She'd win for CHS, and finally give back to the one place that had done so much for her.

Sequel: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/414838/a-summers-gift

Luna's homecoming tour has taken her to every major city in Equestria. Every city but one. Lunangrad, the frozen sentinel of Equestria's forbidding north, and Luna's ancient sacred center.

Twilight, along for the ride, finds herself drawn inwards towards some horrible secret as the world she knows trembles before some great revelation. The Pilgrimage has begun.

The Vigilant Owl: an underground network of specialists, who work in secret to protect the ponies of Equestria from harm. Spread throughout the continent, they use their unique gifts and talents to ensure that the populace can continue to live happily, ignorant of the horrors that lurk just out of sight.

Their newest member: Lyra Heartstrings, Truthseeker.

A Russian translation is being made by Wing Regent, and can be found here.
Fanart of Octavia and Pinkie by Ari-10.
And art of Bloo by Devil Sugar!

Twilight Sparkle accomplished something incredible, something not even the great Starswirl could manage. But ascension into the ranks of Equestria's princesses is not without its difficulties. Before she can take her place as princess of Friendship, Twilight must travel to the underworld and make a ceremonial offering to Death in exchange for her immortality. Twilight is more than a little surprised to discover the identity of the pony under the hood.

After years living in Ponyville and getting to know her friends, Twilight always assumed they were exactly what they seemed: a group of friendly and ambitious ponies. But as it turns out, the sort of pony who saves Equestria and decodes the ancient mysteries of Starswirl is likely to attract ponies a tad more interesting.

Updates on the 3rd or 4th Friday of every month, then daily until that section is complete.

Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail. Cover by Zutcha.