I have a very special treat for all of you.

This is the story of the first Age of ponykind, starting at the beginning of time and spanning 1806 years. It is named after Penumbra, the first Wild Alicorn. You will recall from Flurry in Time that Nyx's mission is to seek out and bring back any Wild Alicorns that she finds out on the galactic rim. Flurry thinks the plan is beyond insane. You will now learn why she feels that way.

The Age of Penumbra is where ponykind first grows from three tiny herds into an advanced and unified civilization exceeding two billion. Many amazing things happen during this age -- things that are sometimes very unpleasant for our ponies. Ultimately, the events depicted here were critical to bring ponykind to where they needed to be. But sometimes, things get so bad that there is no way to see beyond the disaster until a time in the future when things look up again.

This document is a few years old. I've just read over it and made a few small tweaks to ensure it is up to date with our current vision for the saga.

After the Age of Penumbra, ponies enter into an excessively long and difficult period known as the Calamity of Alicorns. I will reveal how that went another time.

The first page or so of this story covers the creation of Realspace and its galaxy. This includes millions of worlds and thousands of races. Here, we establish our metaphysical situation with the "Eternals" -- not to be confused with Eternals from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which are an unfortunate coincidental naming. Our Eternals are pretty cool, actually. One of them is named Equinox, which the entire saga is named after. He is the creator of the planet Equus and several of the races in the story, particularly our ponies.

Click here to experience the Age of Penumbra.

Holy crap, this went from historical nation-building with sci-fi elements to a one-pony murder spree. Penumbra seems more of a disturbing threat than the Wendigos, being a creature capable of empathy but rejecting it. What was the collateral damage like from his war with the Alcora?

I gotta admit, though, it was almost surreal and a bit comical (not in a bad way!) how the Alcora kept throwing numbers at the problem, and Penumbra’s just like, “Nah, it’ll be fine!” Meanwhile, Equus is in a state of panic at this murderous god duking it out with sorta-benevolent alien invaders. They can’t even hand the guy over without him thaumatically frying people!

Quite a ruthless background lore you have for your universe.

If I were to criticize anything then it would be the scale of your universe: It's too small and too young.
A single galaxy makes up the whole of the universe? This is tiny when compared to the observable universe.
For comparison imagine a big sponge. If you zoom in you'll notice that the structure of the sponge is made up of tiny pixels. And every single pixel is a cluster of galaxies.

Check out this cool site to get a sense of the scale of the universe: https://neal.fun/size-of-space/

Same for the timescale. Even in a small galaxy like the milky way with something between 100-400 billion stars (and I'm just accepting that a ready-made galaxy popped out of nothing instead of forming over billions of years), a genocidal swarm with an apparently unlimited industrial capacity enabling it to, say, conquer 1.000 star systems every year on average, the wendigos would barely have laid ruin to 1.2 million systems by the time they encounter ponies. A miniscule fraction of the actual galaxy.
And the 1.200 years include the wendigos forming a society capable of building fleets of star ships capable of FTL travel. And develop minds capable of inventing fire, the wheel, a philosophy of wendigo supremacy and a warp drive.

The eternals are eternal. It wouldn't hurt them or the story if you gave all the races a couple of dozens of millenia more to come to where they are. Humans took more than 190.000 years before the first recorded civilizations showed up and it took at least another 12.000 years before the former hunter-gatherers would reach the moon.

But other than that, I liked how much work you put into the backstory of your ponyverse.
Cheers!

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Haha yes, pretty much this.

"Collateral damage" is pretty much the defining trait of the Wild Alicorns. The entire civilization would have suffered a reset, though to be clear, not everyone was killed. Enough infrastructure was destroyed that it essentially sent them back to their pre-industrial age. Cities would be smashed to the point where it's easier to demolish it and start over than to try and repair it.

Granted, they still have their personal skills and talents. Ponies have an advantage over humans in this way. Built-in tools essentially. Comara hooves are like a swiss army knife worth of power tools. Pegasi are masters of agriculture with their abilities to manipulate weather and botany. Unicorns have inbuilt libraries of spell knowledge and can manipulate matter and energy in a myriad of ways. So ponies rebuild, as they always do. It will take centuries for them to fully recover, but this ends up becoming the defining advantage of ponies -- their resilience to overcome. More detail when I write up the Calamity of Alicorns.

But back to the Wild Alicorns, yeah these guys are something. They are a force of nature. The worst was Hyperion, who actually directed his full wrath against ponykind as a race, intent on wiping them out. There's a reason for this, but the norm is for Wild Alicorns to simply lose all interest in ponies and just do their own thing. Then, if ponies got in their way, they'd get trampled, even if it wasn't out of malice.

Twenty-eight Wild Alicorns arose on Equus. Most brought devastation. Some far more than others. Many died from exceeding their horn's throughput and drawing too much power from the Aether. This is always fatal. Others left Equus on their own, to search for more from life among the stars. One, Nyx's son Stargazer, was sent to the stars in order to save his life. This one is a remarkable story I will elaborate on at a later time.

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It's too small and too young.

It is how old it needs to be for all the drama to happen.

This is tiny when compared to the observable universe.

Ahh, you are comparing it to our universe. Yeah, please don't. Realspace is its own reality, unrelated to our universe in terms of size and so on. The Eternals manifested Realspace with just the right amount of size. A single galaxy is sufficient, since the timeline is only 200,000 years front to back.

You can compare it to a game, perhaps. If you play a game, the "world" which you are playing in exists only for the amount of time necessary for your game to finish. Some games have crazy-large galaxies like our reality. Elite Dangerous comes to mind. Others have a universal map which is far smaller.

100-400 billion stars

In our galaxy, sure. But again, if you take this realm as its own thing, rather than comparing it to our reality, it's a lot easier to understand. I mean, even MLP might only be the one world and that's it. The size of the environment only need be as large as necessary for the events to take place. If you consider that Eternals can literally make anything of any size within Realspace, then the decision to make one galaxy with millions of habitable worlds (and perhaps hundreds of millions of star systems, most of which are not inhabitable) then this is simply what they decided to build. It need not be larger because being larger was not necessary for the scenario they intended to create.

The key here is you just need to get your mind around Eternals creating a universe different from our own. Ours fits our reality and our lives. Theirs fits their reality and their lives.

a genocidal swarm with an apparently unlimited industrial capacity enabling it to, say, conquer 1.000 star systems every year on average, the wendigos would barely have laid ruin to 1.2 million systems by the time they encounter ponies. A miniscule fraction of the actual galaxy.

Okay so to be clear, the Wendigo have not destroyed the majority of budding civilizations across the galaxy. They only spread to a certain point in the time given. They spread like a virus, which is pretty serious when you consider geometric growth. When the Alcora discover them, they are a lot like white blood cells attacking that spread. Then it turns into one gigantic kerfuffle with each side trying to fulfill its own agenda.

And the 1.200 years include the wendigos forming a society capable of building fleets of star ships capable of FTL travel. And develop minds capable of inventing fire, the wheel, a philosophy of wendigo supremacy and a warp drive.

Well, no no what happened here is Pandemonium kinda cheated by essentially giving the Wendigo all these things. They didn't develop it. Also, the way the Wendigo work, each of them has a complete set of knowledge from their entire race. They are a collective in that sense. Their reproductive system is rather unique, and I'll get into that more at a later date.

if you gave all the races a couple of dozens of millenia more to come to where they are.

Perhaps... though it works pretty well as-is. The main thing to keep in mind here is that building a civilization only takes so much time once you have everything you need to get going. Ponies were given their biological advantages with thuamaturgy from day one, along with the knowledge on how to use it. Alcora and Wendigo were given everything their Eternal wanted them to have at the very start as well. The drama was to see where all these races would take it once the starting conditions were underway. To add many more thousands, or worse, millions of years to the timeline would result in far more disparity and unpredictability in the system as a whole.

Our story is a bit different than most epics in the sense that we attempt to account for everything. There's no hand-waving of details. With most stories, you'll find a concession somewhere in the lore which goes something like: "Since time immemorial..." We don't do that apart from the Aether itself, which is, by definition, unknowable to the fullest extent anyway.

One thing that might help is to consider how fast humanity has advanced in the last 200 years. Once we had the knowledge and tools to advance, it took very little time to move from the steam engine to the fusion reactor -- from crude sailing ships to starships that can land themselves -- from the telegraph to the smartphone. Civilizations can advance far faster than you might think.

oh, so the other eternals were cheating.

I replied here with an answer that in hindsight would better belong in this thread, so I'll just say that yes, much can happen in 200 years ... but population buys manhours buys space navy.

So I'm guessing that wendigos and alcori not only started overpowered but also with max population?

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Wendigo and Alcora are both spelled the same in singular as in plural. It's an oddity we discovered when coming up with terms and names.

A very good question about starting population. I would say they definitely began with a large population, but it's hard to define what "max" is. There is a distinction between these two groups, however, in that the Alcora are far more sensitive to losing members of their own race than Wendigo are. They do not take kindly to one of their own being killed. Hence the sudden and irrational "hit it with a sledgehammer" approach to Penumbra.

Another curiosity for musing is what was behind the Eternals' experiment in terms of "rules". I can shed some insight onto this, but the full extent is beyond the scope of the story.

Eternals were not trying to "win a game". Each had their own individual goal when it came to the races and worlds they created. I tried explaining much of this in the first page of the document but risked getting far too heady if I expounded on it more than I already have. What I can say is that Eternals all agreed to not directly influence one another's races. Abraxas could not do anything directly to the ponies, but she can direct the Alcora to do something to them. Likewise, however, Equinox can 'block' Abraxas from affecting his ponies by putting up other systems which ensure things go as they should. Ultimately, Equinox's ace up his sleeve was the Wild Alicorns and the force of Harmony. The way these worked ensured his ponies' success despite the apparent disadvantages they brought.

Another thing to keep in mind is that from the perspective of the Eternals, the entire project is static. Meaning they see the whole timeline of Realspace as a fixed entity, happening all at once. It's kind of like how you can have a movie on your computer and it is a file that exists as a single entity, despite the fact that it has its own timeline. That timeline is separate from yours, as you can flick back and forth, viewing the whole thing at once. The same is true for Eternals when it comes to Realspace. They see the whole thing. So when one of them has made an alteration, that is visible to them all. Everyone knows what everyone else is up to.

For Equinox specifically, the way he chose to deal with his ponies was to give them the maximum amount of freedom possible. Rarely, he intervened by incarnating himself into the world as an avatar and having interactions with key characters at key points in history in order to nudge them in the right direction.

And fun fact: The most mind-blowing example of this is Whammy...

That's right -- Whammy is Equinox. Now look back at the whole of Flurry in Time knowing this.

See this post regarding why we've had to accept open spoilers as necessarily present in order to discuss and further develop the saga. It won't be long before you'll see that things like Whammy's involvement are integral to understanding the whole saga and how it turns out.

Ah, I understand. A static 4 dimensional art piece embedded in a 5 dimensional frame.

Nice high concept idea, although a little bit sad, since it removes all illusions of free will and renders all emotional investment kinda pointless.
That is best kept far away from the regular reader an buried under a mountain of spoiler tags.

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Free will is on my mind regarding this. I've got a way of handling it which preserves it.

Essentially, the author/creator gives characters two things:
1- Their personal traits
2- Their circumstances

But the characters themselves have free will to decide what to do with what they were given.

Knowing what someone is going to do doesn't remove their free will. That only happens if you reveal to them what they are going to do.

Writing stories with complex and compelling characters is a fascinating experience. I've certainly learned things I never would have considered before. Things such as your characters being truly alive in a very literal sense. It gives you a very interesting perspective on the universe and its nature as well.

When I write these ponies, they often surprise me. It's a fairly regular thing that I do not know what to expect from them until they show me. This is super weird sounding, I imagine, if you haven't written, but it really does play out like that. I believe our characters do have free will, even though they are works of fiction and we determine many things about their lives. As individuals, they present themselves to us as living beings, and it's almost a humbling sense of responsibility to ensure that their story reflects their will in addition to ours. Does that make sense?

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Duvet and I will be having another discussion on the topic of spoilers in a moment. It's worth revisiting again to make sure we're handling all these revelations in the best way possible. I will make a new thread on that topic once we've decided exactly how we're going to deal with it.

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Of course it makes sense. You wrote an environment and you wrote characters that interact with your environment. You can't predict what will happen if you follow your own rules for how characters and evironment interact, since every interaction changes the current state of the environment.

That's why it's so hard to convincingly write something that takes place over such vast stretches of time. Other established series tried to handle time jumps in their narrative and then found out that there is so much left to tell in the time they skipped.

Take the SciFi epic series Perry Rhodan for instance: The immortal protagonist, founder, long time leader and pioneer of the Terran Empire finds himself 500 years in the future. Not that worrying, since he took care of his people for 5.000 years in one way or another and he left behind a strong and resilient civilization capable of moving suns and travelling to other galaxies and even conquering them if they wanted to. But after returning home, he finds out that a race he never heard of is ruling the Milky Way galaxy, Terra and Luna disappeared from the solar system (again), and he and his fellow immortals are considered Myths.

That's why I'm wary of large time since so much can happen. In Perry Rhodan, the immortals hold everything together, and I'm guessing you have a similiar role planned for the sane alicorns.

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So we talked it over, and there's really only four paths we can take from what I can tell.

1- We can let the MLP fans of FIT in completely... where they will see everything we're developing as we work on it.

2- We can keep story-reveals hidden, which will result in hardly any interaction at all with the fans because the only real story content they will receive is going to be in the form of written stories. And those aren't coming out for a very long time, on the other side of a very lengthy development process. Not likely people would be interested in sticking around for years without being given anything at all to talk about other than FIT.

3- We can reveal synopsis style writeups of our stories in a particular sequence until the entire saga is revealed. Kind of like the First Age lore, but in the order of the planned books. This would start with book one when Nyx is a kid and be quite a long time before we catch up to FIT.

4- We can do the above but begin where Flurry in Time left off, revealing the stories that are planned to come after FIT up until the end of the saga... Then loop back around and cover earlier books and the rest of the saga.

Option 2 is the worst for obvious reasons. People might enjoy 4 the most because it jumps right into what happens next after FIT. Though to be clear, it would be more a reading of the timeline rather than a proper story like FIT was.

Importantly, we've really got to get busy with Nyx's childhood, since that happens right after the first story of the saga. It also covers the period of time which MLP used to sit in, and we have not come up with any of those details yet. Basically we decided to ditch MLP and immediately transitioned into publishing FIT -- on fimfiction no less. The plan has been that after FIT was done we'd kick off Equinox starting with book one. But before than, I really want to fill in all the gaps in the timeline and get the lore documents done.

The problem with lore docs as I've got them is that they are presented in chronological order, as opposed to narrative order. This reveals massive spoilers by talking about the Eternals and Alcora history on Equus. That's stuff our main characters don't even find out until the saga is nearly finished.

Anyway, that's the challenge we're faced with. We'll make a thread on the topic once we've nailed down the plan.

I've made a small addition to the document at the end of the "Unification" section, just before "Alcora Interference".

Ten years after the Skeltering, the Wendigo returned to Equus, seemingly prepared this time. They brought with them six large battleships, two carriers, a larder ship, and a myriad of strike craft, all prepared to harvest the entire planet’s worth of ponies then raze Equus to ashes. Their battle group arrived, phasing into Realspace in the barycenter between Equus and Gemini. They immediately headed for their target, weapons at the ready. But before they could even get within firing range, a mysterious energy field tore their entire fleet to shreds, leaving nothing, not even wreckage, to land on the planet’s surface. The force of Harmony could not be breached by anything Wendigo related. And the Wendigo would repeat that mistake, instead choosing to wait for better opportunities to harvest ponies for their larder while ensuring the Alcora could not interfere.

Reason for this change is because I felt the Wendigo would not just give up so easily on Equus. They would return, in force, to finish what they had started. And Harmony would be there, denying them their prize while also inflicting serious losses to them.

The Wendigo at this point will not attempt to return to Equus for some time.

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Quick update on this point of free will.

Just had a high level philosophical discussion with one of our proofreaders. We worked out that you can have a static timeline but preserve free will. So we're good.

The discussion is fairly long, but if you're interested, I can provide details. The important thing though, is that we don't fall into the trap you warned about.

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haha, well done. I hope you enjoyed it!
Just gimme the gist of your discussion and I'm good.

And if you want another brainbreaker: How higher-dimensional are your Eternals?
If they are mere 5-dimensional beings, then the only thing they can do is travel in time at will, creating a different future by changing events in the past and travelling forward again, much as we can move a objects in the 3rd dimension to the bafflement of flatlanders.

If they are 6-dimensional beings, then they can fold the 5th dimension through the 6th dimension and get to an alternate reality without having to travel back and forward in time.
However, the 6th dimension can only describe all imaginable timelines from the beginning of time to the end of the universe. And you describe the Eternals as the ones that created the ponyverse. But a 6-dimensional being would very much still be part of that universe.

But if you imagine everything that can ever be (infinity) as a point in the 7th dimension, then you can talk about different universes where every point would be a different universe with e.g. different physics or even magic. But a 7-dimensional being wouldn't be able to freely travel to the universes at will - it would have to travel in a line in the 7th dimension from one infinity to the other, much like we 4-dimensional humans travel from the past to the future.

An 8-dimensional being however could traverse the line connecting the infinities at will and even branch off it - whatever that means in practical terms. Similarily, in the 9th dimension there is no need to travel - you can just take the shortcut to the desired infinity - or universe.

Finally, if you continue the process of folding dimensions into even higher dimensions, you hit reach the place where all possible universes - the entirety of the multiverse - are a single point in the 10th dimensions.

In short, you can't have a multiverse without 10 dimensions.

So ... what are your Eternals and would they really be able to incarnate in the lower 4th dimension and convincingly impersonate a being that must seem like how an ant looks to us?

If I were to make a suggestion, then I'd treat the Eternals as regular 4-dimensional beings that learned to travel and utilize the higher dimensions somehow. Otherwise they wouldn't even be able to imagine us as being alive.

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So the situation with free will is that I'm going with a model that free will = you are the originator of your own decisions, as opposed to an external mover being the determining factor of all your personal decisions.

This way, even in a universe that is static, free will is preserved.

I made the analogy with an example:
When we were in the year 2020, the entirety of 2021 was "the future" with many "possible paths" that we could not have foreseen. But the reason for this is because of the perspective of being stuck in the timeline. We can imagine what it is like not being stuck in the timeline by looking at 2021 from our current perspective. Now, we can all see that every single thing that happened in 2021 is a fixed event. What you chose to do is exactly what happened, and nothing can change that. We agreed that only one set of events happened in 2021. This makes it static. Despite this, free will existed during that year and everyone who made decisions did so of their own volition.

Now, extend this concept to the end of time. Eventually, the entire history of the timeline becomes a static object. That is how the Eternals see the universe they created. Yet free will is preserved, as the Eternals do not literally play the characters like puppets who have no volition.

As for the Eternals themselves, it's not anything like multi-dimensional beings. There is no multiverse. In fact, what we've made is explicitly incompatible with the concept of multiverse. I tried to explain it here, but I may need to clarify if it isn't obvious what's going on.

What you were describing with the talk of dimensions is still all the same place. Shifting from 2 dimensions to 3 still means everything that exists in the 2-dimensional plane is a part of what exists in the 3-dimensional space. Adding more dimensions doesn't create what we've built no matter how many you add. The Eternals do not exist in a different dimension -- they exist in a different realm.

The absolute best analogy I can give is the relationship between me and my characters being the same as the relationship between the Eternals and the people of their created universe. I, as a human being in our reality, am entirely in a separate realm of existence than the characters that I write. But if I wanted, I could do a self-insert into the story, where a representation of myself (or avatar) is incarnated and interacts with the characters. These characters may be very confused as to the nature of my avatar. But it would be utterly impossible for me to literally enter my story, as my story cannot contain the whole of me. I can make my characters aware of my existence, but my characters can search their entire universe and never actually find me.

The story analogy is so solid it should provide a clear understanding of the relationship between Eternals and their creations. What they have created is essentially a story with characters. Everything their characters experience is real -- to them and they are truly alive, from their perspective.

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So the situation with free will is that I'm going with a model that free will = you are the originator of your own decisions, as opposed to an external mover being the determining factor of all your personal decisions.

This way, even in a universe that is static, free will is preserved.

I see what you go for. If your Eternals have no power over the timeline of the universe, then free will can be said to exist.
Otherwise, self-determinism is merely an illusion because the Eternals can change every outcome by changing the past in a way that "free will" generates the desired results.

Personally I think it's a sad concept for all involved, since your characters are only characters of a story written by characters of your story. If that aspect of your story is revealed at any time, the reader's reaction could well be "So, none of this matters? Why should I invest myself in characters if everything they do ultimately achieves nothing ... apart from one Eternal looking at it and saying 'cool'. "
Which is why I think you should never reveal that bit of lore to the readers.

As for the Eternals themselves, it's not anything like multi-dimensional beings. There is no multiverse. In fact, what we've made is explicitly incompatible with the concept of multiverse. I tried to explain it here, but I may need to clarify if it isn't obvious what's going on.

If you have your Eternals living in the "Aether" and creating a universe, then you have a multiverse structure, regardless of you only envisioning one.
You even describe the Aether as multi-dimensional yourself. You describe the Eternals as timeless but they still act and create and thus follow causality. This either means they aren't timeless but merely immortal, or they follow causality differently, i.e. on another dimensional axis.

Oh, I just noticed that you wrote "multi-dimensional beings". I was talking about "higher-dimensional" beings. I guess there's the misunderstanding.

What you were describing with the talk of dimensions is still all the same place. Shifting from 2 dimensions to 3 still means everything that exists in the 2-dimensional plane is a part of what exists in the 3-dimensional space. Adding more dimensions doesn't create what we've built no matter how many you add. The Eternals do not exist in a different dimension -- they exist in a different realm.

I was not talking about spatial dimensions (like the 4-dimensional objects like a tesseract or hypercubes).
The model I described is firmly rooted in cartesian spacetime - 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time.
All higher dimensions just describe everything that can ever be.
You can imagine it like a coordinate system for the multiverse.
With 3 coordinates (length, width, height) you can describe every location in the entire universe.
With a 4th coordinate (time) you can describe the whole universe from the beginning to the end of time.
With a 5th coordinate (timeline) you can describe every timeline and so on. I get headaches after imagining the 6th dimension so I'll stop there. Besides, I see that's not what you were going for.

The way you approach it is more like the Eternals are a bunch of guys playing a cosmic game of Autochess with the final score changing after every move.
That's fine, too, but I don't get how it helps your story. In a way the Eternals as they are now just cheapen the rich universe you created for no purpose I can see.

Personally I think it's a sad concept for all involved, since your characters are only characters of a story written by characters of your story.

Except that's not the purpose of their lives. The purpose of your ability to freely choose an action is not so that your own personal goals are always reached. That's not even how real life works. The characters in the story all have the freedom to make personal decisions, but their efforts produce results in about exactly the same way as they do in our reality -- which is to say, sometimes things work out and sometimes things don't, but in the end, it is all for the best.

In other words, the Equinox intervenes only to the degree that pony decisions don't result in the ultimate failure of their own race. He does this because he truly cares for them, like a parent. Like the lore document says, he was able to see all possible paths they could take and only one led to success. This is the path he occasionally made interventions to preserve.

Think again to Flurry and Whammy. Does Whammy manipulate Flurry? Force her to do what he wants? His subtle thoughts and feedback on Flurry's choices never force her to choose one thing or another, but he acts more like her conscience, helping create situations where Flurry's own choices ultimately lead to a better place, even if it temporarily leads to hardships.

So it's not really 'sad' because Equinox loves his ponies and wants them to succeed. The free will means that the fine details of the path they are on is still determined by their own decisions. It is only in key critical areas he intervenes.

no power over the timeline of the universe

Well, the way it works is they set up the initial conditions and natural laws, then placed people in the universe who have the ability to choose how things go. I'm not really sure what "power over the timeline" means, but they ultimately have absolute power over everything. That doesn't mean power is exercised however.

you have a multiverse structure, regardless of you only envisioning one.
You even describe the Aether as multi-dimensional yourself.

To clarify, Realspace, where our story takes place, is one universe and one instance. There are no branches of it. The Aether is a different story, as that is a realm of endless possibilities. These are beyond the scope of the saga because every story has to draw scope boundaries somewhere.

a bunch of guys playing a cosmic game of Autochess

No more than Greek mythology represented in a story such as Clash of the Titans. Though we take it to a fair bit more detail than they do and dispense with silly notions such as the 'gods' living off the prayers of the mortals in order to have power.

The Eternals are there to create an allegory, which is to say that we, as authors, in a very literal sense create life in the characters we write. And what we do with these characters is a reflection of our own character as creators. It allows us to illustrate principles such as good resulting from bad and the love of an author for the people he has created. It also introduces philosophical thoughts such as the idea that even we seem to be participating in a story in our reality, and induces a sense of wonder to contemplate what form our story might take if seen from a perspective outside our own timeline. All while providing a vast and complex story for our ponies to participate in, showing that even though things go very badly for them in many places, that ultimately, there is hope that things will still be okay for them in the end. The drama and mystery and intrigue come from discovering the details of how all of this plays out in the actual books.

Ultimately, at least with the Eternal named Equinox, his direct interventions in the lives of his ponies is always very subtle. Almost never does he shift the course the ponies take through incarnated avatars interacting with ponies directly like Flurry. That is pretty much a unique situation with her that we felt works well in her life story.

The primary thing Equinox gave his ponies was built into their nature.
Two things, specifically:
1- Alicorns, which are born when the genetics of all three tribes are represented evenly in a foal
2- Harmony, which is the force produced when virtuous ponies of all three tribes are in cooperation with one another

Each of these has a specific purpose ultimately. Harmony exists to defeat the Wendigo. Alicorns exist to defeat the Alcora. Without both of these, ponykind is lost.

Equinox also provided the ethical foundation for his ponies, which is one of the keys to producing Harmony.

So this is the idea behind the Eternals, specifically Equinox, and his involvement in the story. It is not merely that ponies randomly self-exist and have their adventures. That just doesn't work. All of this was built to show the journey from humble beginnings to survive an extremely overwhelming onslaught of opposition in the form of two titans warring throughout the galaxy, who would have under normal circumstances destroyed them, to ultimately arrive victorious at the end of the saga.