Concepts and Creations – Histories: The Great Divide · 6:41pm Aug 25th, 2019
And we’re back to the series where I reveal stories that I’ve always wanted to write, but likely never will. I’m bringing out another story originally planned for my Histories series, except this one was much larger in scale. The Great Divide was originally planned as a trilogy (I do like my trilogies), and I’m sure you can guess by the art above what it would have covered. Alas, the art isn’t exactly accurate, because this one is also set in the No Heroes universe, and things didn’t quite go as canon dictates.
So, Book I. Set right before the whole “Nightmare Moon” thing, it shows an Equestria thoroughly divided in two based on individual ponies’ loyalty to the princesses. Some favor Luna, others favor Celestia. The princesses themselves have come to be at odds: Celestia, ever the diplomat and pacifist, insists on taking a soft approach to everything in Equestria. Smaller problems will solve themselves, and bigger problems can be dealt with through careful communication, appeasement, and an absolute non-aggressive stance. Luna knows better: there are threats to Equestria’s well-being that pleasantries and parties and tea will not resolve, and they are already at the doorstep. This isn’t Luna being paranoid: she has direct evidence of other races trying to whittle down and make the country easier to conquer, not least of which include the changelings.
The political struggle between the sisters comes to a head when they both petition the government with opposing policies, one for a smaller military presence and the other for a stronger one. Celestia, being the more charismatic one, wins the argument, and Equestria begins a path of semi-disarmament. Luna, realizing how incredibly bad things are about to get, decides “to hell with that” and begins building her own army in secret in order to protect Equestria.
Here’s where things get devilish. It turns out that the ongoing divide in Equestria has been orchestrated by its own citizenry. A band of power-hungry individuals have been manipulating the political situation, making sure that the two sides of the argument grow less and less interested in collaboration. It is they who convince Luna to start building her army, and they who convince Celestia that the army isn’t needed.
Eventually Luna’s army is fully battle-ready while Equestria itself is practically defenseless against overt threats that Celestia still believes aren’t as serious as Luna does. By this point Celestia and Luna are very much at odds, to the point they barely speak to one another, as intended. It is now that the conspirators strike: they inform Celestia of Luna’s army, but trick her into believing Luna intends to use it in a coup rather than Equestria’s protection. At this point the rift between the sisters is so wide and so many doubts have been planted in Celestia’s head that she ends up believing everything she is fed. Thus does Celestia gather the Elements of Harmony and send Luna to the moon, without Luna having a chance to defend herself or even know the attack is coming. There was never a Nightmare Moon, there was no final battle to stop Eternal Night: there was only a young, paranoid Celestia manipulated by the overambitious into making a terrible mistake.
Immediately, the same advisors who tricked Celestia into removing her sister from the chess board go to Luna’s armies and declare that Celestia murdered her sister in cold blood. The armies promptly rebel, putting these advisors at the top of their new government, with Princess Luna as their martyred mascot. Celestia, quickly realizing what she has done and for whom, can only prepare for war.
Book II would be set some 75 years later, with the war between the Celestians and the Lunarians (names I picked just now purely for the sake of differentiation) ongoing and as bloody as ever. The Lunarians have a distinct advantage, having started with a fully functional and battle-ready army while the Celestians had to rebuild one practically from scratch after Celestia’s previous disarmament. Even so, the war has at this point entered something of a stalemate, with neither side able to make ground.
Enter the Hive of Mantis. The very changelings that Luna had predicted decades ago were looking for a chance to take over Equestria seize their opportunity after a major battle leaves both sides greatly weakened. King Mantis, Chrysalis’s 6x Great Grandfather, has been gradually shifting the policies of his hive from espionage and subterfuge to outright aggression and conquest. Major leaders in all levels of pony society for both the Celestians and the Lunarians reveal themselves as changeling spies, leading to mass chaos and confusion; the Hive has no problem walking in and taking over huge swathes of pony territory.
Book II is far more straightforward than its predecessor, being an outright chronicling of the war effort from the perspective of the ponies. It is, for the most part, a fighting retreat north, the ponies steadily losing more and more ground as the changeling menace marches inexorably forward. The book ends with a last ditch battle near the Frozen North, the ponies at last managing to halt the changeling advance through a Pyrrhic victory.
Book III, once again set decades after the last book, begins with a grim situation. The invasion of the changelings has failed to bring the Lunarians and the Celestians together, and so each group fights the war on two fronts. Although the changelings are stretched thin, the natural love they are able to garner from their “pony colonies” or “herds” allow them to more than enough strength to deal with any pony attempts at a counterattack, and every year they gain just a little more ground.
Celestia, realizing that ponydom is doomed if something doesn’t change soon, devises a desperate plan. She has trained a few small, specialized units who are tasked with infiltrating the Changeling lines, finding the imprisoned colonies/herds, arming them, and staging an insurrection. The story was to largely follow the works of a handful of these agents as they struggled against overwhelming odds to achieve their mission. The ponies would prove successful, escaping their captors and mounting a war effort behind Changeling lines. This would be at roughly the same time that King Mantis dies due to health complications, leaving his far less capable daughter to rule the Hive.
Hardly the strategic and tactical mind of her father, Mantis’s daughter badly bungles the reaction to the pony rebellions, splitting up her already stretched-thin armies, which allows the ponies to finally mount a successful counteroffensive. Even with this, however, the Changelings’ position is far too good for them to go down easily. The story concludes with a final free-for-all battle between the Celestians, the Lunarians, and the Changelings. The Changelings suffer a catastrophic defeat when the Lunarians miraculously decide to work together with the Celestians to deliver a final blow, but then the Lunarians go right back to fighting the Celestians... only to lose.
This is pretty much where the trilogy ends, at least contextually. The war continues for a little while afterwards, but that final battle was the turning point that would see the Changelings soon driven out of Equestria at last and the Lunarians defeated and repatriated into Celestia’s kingdom. Celestia would go on to create the myth of Nightmare Moon in hopes of lessening Luna’s villainy in the eyes of her subjects, aware of the prophecy of her return but not believing in it.
Obviously, I’m greatly summarizing everything that happens in this trilogy. The purpose of the series was purely historical on my part, as I wanted to nail down exactly what happened between Celestia and Luna in the No Heroes universe. The Great Divide itself is frequently mentioned throughout my stories set in that universe and I still consider it 100% canon, but I just don’t see me ever finding the time to write that much material for it. Which is too bad, because it could have made for an interesting war epic.
An aside: One of the regular references that often finds its way into my No Heroes stories is the subtle loyalty of ponies towards a specific princess. I consider every pony to have this little divide within them, and it can be seen in their oaths. For example, my OC Fine Crime always swears his oaths to Luna: “By Luna’s stars!”, “Dear, Sweet Luna,” “Oh, for Luna’s sake!”, and so on. He would never make an oath to Celestia or, for that matter, Cadance, because they are not “his” princess. Other ponies are the same way: Pinkie, for example, would swear to Celestia, and a Crystal Empire pony would swear to Cadance. (Twilight has yet to become an alicorn in the No Heroes series, so no oaths to her.) This idea was inspired entirely by my thoughts on The Great Divide.
Did you perhaps mean “Concepts and Creations”?
Also this sounds epic.
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*shifty eyes* A mistake? What mistake? What are you talking about? I see no mistake. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
This would have been neat, but again, there's the issue of who to follow as the protagonist, especially for the third book. Also, the whole concept is a tad generic compared to the stories you did and up writing.