War. War never changes.
The details are trivial. The facts… meaningless. The reasons as always, purely our own.
The war that destroyed Equestria was fought over rocks in the ground… coal and gems. Zebra coal was needed to feed our ever growing economic engine, while the Zebras needed our gems to quench the thirst of their arcano-technological revolution. Our mutual need blossomed into trade that eventually crisscrossed the entire world. For awhile it was good.
But all things come to an end.
Two decades after Princess Luna’s return, that trade devolved into a bickering quarrel between superpowers bent on controlling the last remaining resource of coal and gems. The knife was poised. The gun cocked.
The end of the world occurred pretty much as we had predicted; a single spark struck by pony hooves that quickly raged out of control. It was a great cleansing that plunged the world into an abyss of balefire megaspells and taint. In two brief days, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. Balefire rained from the sky carried by Zebra missiles and ours own superbombers. Entire lands were swallowed in flames and fell beneath boiling oceans. Ponykind was almost extinguished, our spirits becoming part of the ambient radiation and chaotic magic that blanketed the lands.
But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Even as the first Equestrian city, Cloudsdale, was vaporised in a flash of green balefire haze, we, the pegasi closed off the sky to preserve the last remnants of Equestria. The Enclave.
In the early days, we heard the dying cries of the ponies trapped below. We heard ponies pleading to let them into our safe heaven. We heard the returning heroes of the Second Strike army demand that we send aid to Equestria. We heard from our own that what we did was wrong, cowardly, disloyal… the first was to voice those words was Ministermare Rainbow Dash, followed by Scootaloo, then by so many other…Dashites. We heard them all, cursing our name as their voices slowly fell silent in the drowning hiss of background radiation.
The cloud curtain remained closed. We kept it close. And when needed, we turned our guns on our fellow ponies. The same ponies, that days ago were our comrade in arms, our friends, and our family. We did what we had too. We spared ourselves the horrors of the holocaust. We told ourselves we did the right thing.
A quiet darkness fell across the world...But war, war never changes.
Survival was itself its own horror. The apocalypse was simply the prologue for a new chapter in pony history. It was as if the Great War had been forbidden fruit soaked in blood. Once our hooves had reached for it, once it had touched our lips, once ponykind had known war, we were forever stripped of our innocence. It poisoned the ideals of friendship. We could no longer stop the selfishness, the paranoia or the gnawing desperation of dwindling natural resources.
Two hundred years have passed and ponykind everywhere continues to be at war. The enemy was now ourselves. Below, in the radioactive ash and ruins of nuclear devastation, ponies fought ponies over linger scraps that a better age would have called garbage. Their goal was survival. Their prize, another mouthful of stale food, two hundred years old. Nothing grew beneath the darkness of the Cloud Curtain. Not without sunlight.
While in the bright peaceful, clean skies above, we fought over resources to keep food on the table, to keep Equestrian civilization going for one more year. First we fought the remnants of our old enemies, the Zebra Alliance then our allies, the surviving Griffins. Enemy or ally, it didn’t matter anymore. We destroyed their mountain cities, murdered their people and stripped it bare of resources.
It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.
Each conquest gave us a few more decades but the writing was already on the wall. Two hundred years have passed and we stood alone in the Equestrian skies. It was only a matter of time before we looked to our fellow pegasi and began turning inward on ourselves.
But in the minor city of Zephyr, life within the Enclave had already begun to change.