Fait Jus
“I is al-kanterloter. I say kantensprak gud very. Al-harb is super bad.” Sundancer looked down on the old workbook, pushing the pages aside with her hooves as she tried her best to avoid staining the muzzle-scribed pages with her sweat. “What language is this, mom?”
The mare went up behind her, looking down at the writing. “Heh. Commander Hurricane's Canterlotian.”
“It looks like barely-legible scribbles in unicorn script mixed with transcriptions of Tarbian thrown in.”
The mare grinned. “It is.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It's a book. How'd it get published if it was barely legible?”
“Sundancer, it's been five years and I'm surprised you don't have a reading cutie mark.” The mare sighed. “Don't tell me you haven't read Wasted Souls yet. It has a cover with burned books on it, for heavens' sakes. I thought you'd be rushing to the scandal.”
“I was putting it off. I thought it was a novel.”
“It is.”
“Oh.” She put her hoof up against her chin. “So how did it get published?”
The mare sat and began to speak. “Well, at one point they were gonna turn Earth—sorry, Pegasopolis and Unicornia—into an actual part of whatever they were thinking they were gonna make. Ever since Platinum got her gold heart stuck on a pike, the unicorns and pegasi—”
“I know that much.”
The mare shrugged. “Well, I'll skip to the good part. Thanks to the unicorns, the pegasi had to assimilate us before setting up shop forever. That meant they'd have to give every literate pony citizenship.” She cleared her throat. “Everypony literate in Canterlotian, of course. Reading pictures isn't hard enough for them.”
Sundancer tilted her head with interest. “I think I can see where this is going.”
“The unicorns said 'okay', but they wanted them to teach us Canterlotian first. To make it fair. The unicorns don't like looking like bad ponies, you see.”
She looked down at the book. “So—”
“So you're holding their little literacy program.”
She grimaced. “So what happened?”
“Puddinghead started his little uprising.” She said the name with quite a bit of bitterness. “They all signed the Trottingham concord before it happened. This was gonna be a distribution center before they told me to burn all of it.”
“You didn't?”
She shook her head in mock disappointment. “What do you take me for?”
Sundancer nodded. “So, do you know Unicorn or Canterlotian?”
Her expression darkened a bit, and she looked away. “I might've been a collaborator, Sundancer, but I wasn't a traitor.”
“Oh.” She looked away herself.
“I was a smart collaborator. Of course I know Canterlotian.” The mare turned back and laughed. “Little bit of Upper Unicorn, too. Ich bin ein Bermaner. ”
Sundancer breathed a sigh of relief and glared at the mare. “Oh, come on.”
“Gotcha.”
She shook her head. “Where did you learn it?”
“I've got tons of documents here, Sundancer.” She waved her hoof about. “The Apricot-Sky Agreement was written in Unicorn and Canterlotian. No Tarbian there. Did you really think I didn't wanna know 'bout just how hard they bucked us up against the wall?”
Sundancer peered curiously. “Have you ever been to Canterlot, mom?”
“Most earth ponies don't.” Her tone was neutral.
“But you?”
“Once.” She paused for a second. “A year before you came around.”
Sundancer tilted her head. “What for?”
The mare sneered in contempt. “Showpony business. You've read the Trottingham concord. Everypony has. They got me up there and started calling me Regulatory Commissioner for the Foal Mountain Region. All a bunch of horseapples.” She shuddered slightly. “I had to clean up a body that rotted for two weeks. Two weeks. Frozen to all hell.”
“Foal Mountain?”
The mare shrugged. “That's what they call the Blood Spike nowadays.”
She nodded. “I see.”
They sat there for a while, as if in contemplation.
Suddenly, the mare spoke. “No earth ponies go to Canterlot nowadays.”
“The Trottingham concord granted equal access to the capital.”
“The Trottingham concord was rendered obsolete by Puddinghead's capitulation and replaced by the Integration Charter.” She grimaced. “That's what they're gonna tell you.”
“It isn't true?”
“Know your rights,” she said, walking over to one of the shelves, rifling through them to retrieve a roll of parchment. “And be careful with them. I'm sure they're collector's items nowadays.” She tossed the parchment to her.
She raised her hoof; the appendage granulated around the parchment as she unrolled it and began to read. “Collector's items?”
“Back when we got free copies of the thing, tons of us burned the horseapples outta them because they thought it took their rights away. We got a bunch of leaflets after Puddinghead capitulated, said they just wanted us to be slaves, so on, so forth.”
“That's not true. It refutes that on the first line.” She read aloud from the thing, her Canterlotian somewhat stilted. “'First and foremost: none of these provisions should be taken as contradictions of the Trottingham accord.'”
“Well, I managed to get my hands on a unicorn newspaper. Turns out a bunch of hippies got together and stuck that in there.”
“So why did they burn them?”
“Because nopony knew it was there.” She went to the shelves again and pulled out a tiny wad of paper, marked with varied forms of invective. “Guess where the leaflets came from.”
“'The unicorn horn-dogs have heaped upon us a final betrayal of the most bucked-up type. It is a ugly disgrace upon our families and our homes. This so-called charter of Integration is a horseapples thing and is against our dear Chancellor Puddinghead's belief.'” She looked closely, running her hoof over the markings. “It's machine-printed.” She looked up. “The embargo was lifted last year. This leaflet is three years old.”
“And nopony writes like that. It looks like somepony who took a course in literary Tarbian and got a book called Five Hundred Tarbian Words Your Teacher Won't Teach You.”
Her eyes ran over the paper again, reading its entirety; it went on in detail. “Why would anyone believe it, then?”
“It's signed Baltimare Resistance Movement. Nopony in Baltimare speaks Tarbian. Hardly anypony here spoke enough Canterlotian to read it for themselves. Everypony thought they were a bunch of educated refugee buzzards who sympathized with us.”
“So it could've been a coincidence. Maybe they didn't read it right.”
She shrugged. “If you believe that, I've got powdered unicorn horn to sell.”
They both sighed.
Sundancer around looked for another book, as she always did.
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Very interesting world building, but I want public discovery/something to happen! DO EEET! I-if it's alright with you, that is...
So Unicorn is German? Das is gut.
I'm very confused about which races Canterlotian and Tarbian belong to... When I think Canterlot, I think unicorns, but clearly they have Unicorn. I'm getting the sense that earth ponies have Tarbian, so that leaves Canterlotian for the pegasi? But... Commander Hurricane is apparently not fluent in Canterlotian, and pegasus occupation of Canterlot seems a bit odd anyway...
1219700
Based on what we see in the Hearth's Warming Eve episode, though, it's the earth ponies who would be speaking German, while the unicorns are more Anglo-Saxon.
1221265 Nien! Der Unikorn mas sprechen zie Deutsch!
... I don't speak German....
1220544
Turba is Arabic for 'soil', so you'd be correct about Tarbian.
As an exercise to understand the linguistic situation I'm attempting to convey, however, I might note that the British, French and Germans, despite all being predominantly Caucasian, have different languages; I might also note that a great portion of the world agrees on using English, despite it being a British invention, and that it has been warped and changed about in so many ways by the people that speak it that it no longer 'belongs' to any group of people.
1219700
I'd imagine Upper Unicorn is German and Lower Unicorn is French.
1224236 Mm, I figured it might have just been a little simpler here: three races, three languages and all. I still wonder what the pegasi speak. Since the Apricot-Sky Agreement was written using only Unicorn and Canterlotian, I think it's safe to say that Tarbian isn't their first language. However, their leader isn't fluent in Canterlotian, so that likely isn't their first language either. Does this mean they speak Unicorn? What the heck is Canterlotian, then? A local dialect of one of the other languages that's spoken just in and around Canterlot?
Oh... but wait... The pegasi were going to assimilate earth ponies literate in Canterlotian, so perhaps Canterlotian is what's spoken by the pegasi, and Commander Hurricane's just an idiot?...
1224279
I'd imagine 'Commander Hurricane's Canterlotian' is bitter slang, in the same way that one might say that Agent Orange is a debt that Uncle Sam owes to veterans of the Vietnam War. The implication I'm trying to put across is that they printed the books wrong on purpose to 'prove' that the earth ponies were too incompetent for self-government.
I would imagine Canterlotian to be the equivalent of English, but given that the closest equivalence I imagine Canterlot to have to any real city is Jerusalem, that might be a bit off. Think of it as a generic lingua franca.
I'm enjoying the world-building and the darker background you're giving for the history of inter-racial pony conflict, but I have to admit I'm getting anxious for more plot progression. How did we get from Sundancer -- the mixed-race atrocity and shut-in -- to Celestia, beloved ruler of the realm? The story isn't marked AU, so I'm guessing that's still how things end up. Perhaps saving everyone's ass from Discord the first time has something to do with it? Also, when and how does Luna enter into things? And does the pointed mention of sweat near the start of this chapter mean that Starlight Twinkle's sacrifice is continuing to bring the sun ever closer to their world?
The questions, they buuurn.
They burn because you've done such a good job of setting an interesting stage for your story. Just... start moving toward the answers soonish, okay? Pretty please? 
I like this story a lot. (Princess Celestia is one of my favorite characters.) And I hope that it is still alive, because I want to know what happens next. Please keep up the awesome work.
Of all the things I've read on this site, I like this the most and hope to see it continue.
Hello from 2017, interesting story premise, and as unlikely as it probably is seeing as it has been 5 years since this was started, I would really like to see more or at the very least have somepony else pick up where you left off and continue this tribute to a forgotten era.
8589818
Looking back, I do think this is a heartwarming premise. Maybe one day I'll write it as an adult.
8604919
That would be great, I wish you luck on your endeavour. Currently reading a dystopian 3-part series of essentially fan-novels by the author airstream. Basic premise is that the main 6 are puppets to a primordial goddess of order incarnate known as Celestia. Twilight dislikes learning of her pawn status and fights back.
This was very nice while it lasted.