Paul Werner was a soldier back on Earth; a high-ranking officer, to be precise. He still maintains that occupation in Equestria, as a consequence of both the best and the worst events which brought him there in the first place. In the end, he knows for certain that he would never trade his current life now for the one he had. He felt it was tainted by the... circumstances surrounding it all.

He thought he was over it, and that he'd never have to face any elements of his past ever again. Paul was one-hundred percent right... in a sense. As he gradually found out, Equestria and the world it rests on has quite the lot of parallels to the Earth he left.

Especially one in particular, a mare who goes by the respective title and name of Generalfeldmarschall Aryanne S. Land

Awesome base Aryanne art done by Antamoanimisan-m, sourced to derpibooru. (Their tumblr is NSFW)

They say that Equestria was a paradise. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wanna believe it. There sure ain’t one in this piece of the ‘Verse. Maybe we coulda built one if it weren’t for the damned Confederation. Those bastards wanted every planet in the system under their hoof and wouldn’t take no for an answer. The outer planets fought ’em, and we lost.

It’s tough to get by these days with Confederation lawkeepers looking for an excuse to crack down, bandits and thieves crawling everywhere the Confederation’s not, and the Jesters prowling around the edges of civilized space. Honest work’s hard to come by, and honest folk are twice as rare. Still, a mare has to make a livin’ somehow. So that’s what I do.

Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying.
– Rainbow Dash, Captain of Tranquility

Celestia is just a dream of a fair and reasonable government. MLP is just a cartoon and Canterlot isn’t a real place. But the fandom is very real......
Everyday gigabytes of data are poured onto the net. It really is the 'all of everything' needed to build a world of MLP and not just Faust's version either. It has all the happy short stories, the tales, the clips and finally, the DarkFics.
So what would happen if all that data about Twilight Sparkle started to think? Like the primordial soup that formed life from the elements? That’s right Bronies, Twilight is seven feet tall with a twenty foot wingspan and is filled with all the hope and despair that’s been poured out over the years of fandom. And worse still, you can’t shoot her, or even touch her, because she's a ghost that runs around the server halls of the world, flashing from one country to another in the blink of an eye.
She loves knowledge, she loves her friends and she likes to organise things, 'just so'. And in her eyes, our world and our lives look chaotic and messy. Prepare to be organised!
Audio Book; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jlJX6pWD_c

Twelve thousand years ago, humanity was driven into a war with an unknown enemy. Fire rained from the heavens and the sky turned dark as the sun dimmed. Acid poured from the clouds and a plague was unleashed upon mankind: A virus that caused men to turn on one another. A disease that forced man to fall to his knees and beg for mercy. A pathogen that ravaged man’s civilization.

And when humanity lost all chances of reconciliation, all hope of keeping their loved ones safe, they pulled the plug, three hundred souls left Earth while sacrificing their only home to the angel of the enemy.

In the twelve millennia since the Great War, all traces of humanity have been wiped from the surface of the Earth. In man’s rightful place now are a multitude of sapient species. For twelve thousand years, these animals have lived in peace and harmony, man reduced to nothing more than but a myth, a folk tale, a legend.

But word has spread across the countryside. Word of forgotten beasts that still walk the western wastelands. Creatures able to bend the world to their will without the help of magic. Creatures said to be older than time itself.

Teen for language, and dark moments. Character tags will be added as the story progresses

This story is a sequel to The Dusk Guard Saga: Rise

"Viking ZX has pride in the fact that he can throw his readers into a ride." —PCaRG
"... an exhilarating romp that leaves you guessing half the time and keeps you thrilled throughout." —PaulAsaran
"... you’ll enjoy this one." —City of Doors

Blade Sunchaser is a griffon on the run.

Seven days ago she was the bodyguard of two of the wealthiest railroad magnates in Equestria. One day after that she was in a jail cell.

She didn’t stay there for long. She’s got a job to do, a job with a payoff bigger than any she’s ever earned before. All she needs to do is track down two stolen bits of crystal and bring them back to her employer. Stolen bits last seen being taken north, past Equestria’s furthest borders, into the lawless wasteland known as the Ocean of Endless Ice. A haven of ice dredgers, criminals, and pirates ripe with violence, danger, and dark secrets. But for this kind of payoff, the danger is nothing. She’ll face anything, go anywhere, and do whatever it takes to see her mission through.

Even start a war ...

Book II of The Dusk Guard Saga
Epic Fantasy
Equestrian Map of the Ocean of Endless Ice
Official Series Timeline at [url=https://www.fimfiction.net/group/204855/the-dusk-guard-saga/thread/127607/the-dusk-guard-saga-timeline]TDG Group Forums
Can be found on TV Tropes at The Dusk Guard Saga’s page (Page outdated)
Cover art by Midnight Sonare
Alpha and Beta read by Siers, Raptra, and Jorlem.
If you encounter what you think are typos in the story, PM them rather than clogging the comments feed with them.

Author’s note: From time to time you may encounter a hotlink in the text. These hotlinks are background themes and can be clicked or passed over at your own choice. It is recommended that for maximum enjoyment beforehand, make sure that your volume settings on YouTube are at a comfortable level and make use of Ctrl+Shft+Clicking or the middle mouse button to open the song in a new tab, where it will play automatically without your involvement.

Or just don’t click on them until later. They are an entirely optional experience, and can be passed over without incident.

This story is a sequel to Project Sunflower: Harmony

In every tale, there are unseen details. Small stories, often going unnoticed. This is a collection of those stories that relate to Project Sunflower: Harmony.

It isn't recommended to read these stories without reading the main story. Without the context provided in Project Sunflower: Harmony, it isn't likely that these chapters will make much sense.

Every chapter will have an author's note detailing where it fits in the main storyline. These chapters are intended to be optional to read, and are intended to add some depth and color to the main story.

Cover art by Genbulein

Dragons. Big. Selfish. Treasure mongers. No other creature in Equestria is as selfish as they. The spend their entire centuries long lives building and hoarding huge stockpiles of treasures, which they guard fiercely and frighteningly. Many are the treasure hunters who've attempted to cash in on the goldmine that is a dragons hoard. They almost always regret it.

One dragon is actually really strange about it, however. Oh, he has a hoard, which he guards just as fiercely as any other. But! But, he actually has the capacity to trust certain ponies and other creatures enough to let them gaze upon his most precious of treasures. This isn't the most surprising thing, however, despite its seeming impossibility. No. The most surprising thing is just what treasures his hoard contains...

Cover image by Wildheart Wolfsong, used in a dramatic reading by Dr. Wolf.

Can now be read in Spanish here. thanks to Spaniard Kiwi.

Echo is a high ranking changeling officer. The Canterlot invasion was going perfectly, and her battalion had personally defeated the Elements of Harmony. Suddenly, she finds herself far flung from Canterlot, crashing into the Everfree forest. Now she is faced with a difficult reality - her hive, the only family she's ever known, no longer exists, and she must adapt to life as a pony. What she finds out about herself, though, will surprise her.

Rated Teen for occasional suggestiveness and language, tagged gore for brief violence, particularly in later chapters.

Dark because later chapters get pretty ... well, dark.

---

Addendum 5/29/2018

This story is now, as of this addendum, five years old. It is getting more attention as I put out new chapters on the sequel.

I recognize that this story has problems, and that some of them by their nature carry over to the sequel; please remember that when I started writing this, I was not yet even old enough to legally drink in the US. A lot has happened and a lot has changed, and there are many things about this story I regret including, but which it is now too late to change. Some of those things I have simply done my best to ignore and make irrelevant, but some of them are errors from a 19 year old me that will haunt me until the sequel is finished.

In short, please be gentle.

Cancelled, re-write in progress. Please check it out at this link.

____

Ladies and Gentlemen, Fillies and Gentlecolts, I bring you the sequel to Adaptation. I don't know how well it'll go over, but you all seemed to want it, so I figured I'd give it a try.

In this volume, Echo has settled in to her life in Ponyville and has just begun to become accustomed to the strange ways in which ponies behave. While their social norms may be confounding to her, she is satisfied with her life. That is, until Scootaloo comes home from school one day shaken, and Echo finds that not everypony in Ponyville is as understanding and accepting of who she is as she thought they were. What has caused the normally kind ponies in this town to become so suddenly xenophobic?

Tagged gore for possible mild violence.

The first trotters, exploring the Long Trot, had found no trace of modern pony away from Prime. Certainly, there were some stone tools, fossilized remains of hearths in the depths of caves, and even a few equine bones. But there was no great gallop forward: no cave paintings, no burial mounds, no cities, no technology. The spark of Harmony must have been lit behind millions of protopony brows on a million worlds, just as on Equestria Prime, but it hadn't caught anywhere else.

There were equinoids out there, descendants of lost cousins of pony-kind, but ponies knew they would never encounter another creature that was anything as smart as they were. Never something that could speak Equuish, for example.

The only thing wrong with this generally accepted picture was that it was totally incorrect.