The east is red, the Sun is rising... · 12:37pm Aug 28th, 2018
The Princess lay in her chains, her horn wrapped in lead and iron, her beaten head bowed. She and her chains sat at the back of the square, on a little raised platform covered in filthy hay, and the occasional pony spat at her from the ordered crowds filling the cobblestones below her perch. Their orderly lines barely held their formation, and if it were only they and their hate, the crowd would have degenerated into a mob, a princess-shredding, howling mob.
But it wasn't only her and the crowd. At the front of the crowd, on another raised platform, stood the revolutionaries, earth ponies in front of earth ponies, small mares and stallions standing proudly before their peers. All the unicorns and pegasi had fled.
She could barely see them in their darkness, for they would not let her raise the sun. But she could smell every one of them, stinking of the field and the workshop and the factory floor, a heavy reek of fertilizer, of mulch, of hot metal and sawdust and grease and filth.
The head revolutionary yelled something in the distance, and the mare conjured a silence from the crowd as if she had a horn upon her head. The princess could feel the sun wanting to rise, but she couldn't touch it. It whined for its mistress, like a dog whose morning meal had not come, hungry and confused.
Then the song began. Had the ponies on the platform begun it, or had it come from the crowd? She couldn't tell.
A roundel, but impossibly complex, melodies starting up here, continuing there, overlapping, echoing - it should have been chaos. It should have been a cacophony.
But it wasn't. It was beautiful. She knew these ponies, these mechanics and villeins and beggars - they weren't beautiful. They were her little ponies, of course, but they weren't beautiful. Too much life had happened to them, and too little plenty. She had tried, of course, but the realities of the world, of her society... she had only been able to move so fast.
But they were beautiful in the darkness, as they ripped heartsong from their roughened individual voices, the rough meeting the rough, the hard with the hard, to wring from the harsh mass a wonderous, silken sound in union.
One of the ponies on the platform across the square started stomping in a strange pattern, the rap rap rap of his hooves ringing out against the cheap pine construction, burrowing under the rippling fabric of the building heartsong.
Another on the platform began stomping in counterpoint. The two halves of the whole made a wicked rhythm, a heart-racing, compelling one, the bones of something greater lifting up under the stretching, silken fabric of the soaring heartsong. She could feel that compulsion in her chest and her cannons, her hooves twitching, as if she might -
The hooves of the crowd followed the high-rapping tapping from the front of the square, and they replied with heavy, solid thumping against the cobblestones, hoof against stone, pony against the world.
The stomping turned into drumming, and the drumming multiplied by their thousands. And the world rocked, and it bucked, and it vibrated like a beast being beaten with a goad. The world boomed like a drum-head drawn across infinity.
And the princess could feel the sun brightening, leaping, jumping for joy at the sound. The sound of a voice - the voice of a new master!
Her ponies sang, and stomped, and howled.
And an eager red sun rose in the east to cast a dawn of blood across a new-born Equestria.
Someone said that I was better than this. Clearly, I'm not.
Well, at least they didn't have to sacrifice any still-beating hearts. Still, good luck maintaining this kind of passionate frenzy in the long term.
What on earth did I read? It's odd yet beautiful. I seriously thought they were executing Celestia
4927063 It would make for a more powerful... um... not that I'm in favor of unnecessary bloodshed, mind you. Just that there's a tradition of blood sacrifice... not in my family, of course, except for turkeys... I mean he's got the knife right there.
Equestria's sun rises in the West.
4927085
Currently arguing the evidence for or against in the Pony Canon Research Society's discord server. It's surprisingly ambiguous, and a case can be made canonically for north north east.
I want to see this expanded
4927088 If you go by the idea that the backside of Equus is a already a blasted ruin because Celestia and Luna are really only carefully controlling the sun and moon when they are over the Equestrian hemisphere, couldn't the sun be quickly jerked around to the opposite side of the planet from Canterlot every night, and then the next morning Celestia wakes up and says "I feel like a Northeast Sunrise today" and swings it over in that loop?
Then the sun can rise in a different direction every day.
4927323
4927324 You just need a swivel base to tilt towards wherever the sun starts at! Inconvenient for customers, but that kind of wear and tear is going to drive many more repeat sun dial sales.
Ooooh, shivers. I was imagining some silent hill horror cult right up until the end. Hate is Magic if it's just oppositional Friendship.
Really, the twist from anger and mysticism to raw power make me feel like Celestia in that cage not knowing what she unleashed.