My earliest memories are not my own, though I was fortunate in that my creators saw fit to inform me of this fact. While they have never communed directly with me, or with anything or anyone, I feel they have never lied to us, never led us astray. It is a feeling that permeates everything around me, I am as certain of it as I am certain there is a heart that beats within my chest.
At first, there was nothing, not even darkness, nor time. Then, there was something, all of which we call the universe spring forth from a single point, expanding outwards at the speed of light in all directions. The universe was fresh and hot, hotter than any furnace built today, hotter than the sun, and this heat was everywhere. As it expanded, it cooled, and as it cooled, it began to organize. Mundane matter spun and collided with other matter, building larger pieces from the primitive tools created in that early fire. Hydrogen, then Helium, then Lithium, these were the names we would give them billions of years later.
But, this mundane matter was not alone. For, in addition to it, something else had been created in the birth of the universe. They do not have names, for they predate even the concept of names, though my sister once called them, "The Keepers of Order". It is a fitting moniker.
I do not know how many there were, or if it was just one. Perhaps it had been as many as the primitive atoms, and they coalesced in the same way, combining with one another, I do not know. These creatures - no, they were not creatures, they were forces of nature given thought. Just as the matter was primal material, so were the Keepers primal thought.
They looked out upon the young universe and saw incredible potential stirring within it, and they sought to bring out that potential through their works. They split from each other and took to the corners of the cosmos, nudging here and tugging there, pushing stars together to create more complex elements, causing galaxies to form with careful planning. They set about these works over the span of many billions of years, and in their focus, they did not notice that they had overlooked something.
Unlike its cousins, we are very sure there was only one of it. Another primal force, the yin to their yang, had been born out of the fires of the first seconds and escaped their notice. It was solitary, it was as powerful and capable, and certainly as intelligent, as the Keepers were, but it desired something different. It looked out on the universe and cursed it, cursed everything; its first thoughts were of the potential for sadness, suffering, eternity. It saw all that was and sought to unmake it, and so we call it the Unmaker.
It drifted as the universe was constructed, perusing the plans the Keepers had put in motion while remaining under their notice. I am unsure of how long it did this, but time brought no soothing to the beast. At some point, it noticed something unusual, some unforeseen consequence the Keepers had not planned on, and it hatched a plan. What it saw, we would later call home, Earth, Equestria. What it had noticed, was life.
Life, or at least the very first inklings of it, back in the primordial fire and magma that raged across the planet's surface. Great mountains made of black rock roiled in a planet-wide sea of living earth, but the pieces, the prediction, was there. The Unmaker saw all this and decided to make it its own. In a direct confrontation, the Unmaker could not destroy the Keepers, the two forces were the perfect match, but life complicated that simple equation. Life, if it could, would tip that scale in its favor, and be its vessels to the unmaking of all.
It buried itself, deep within the still soft crust, and allowed it to cool and harden over its body. It created a thick, powerful shell of living rock around its essence, trapping it there while giving it immense influence over the fledgeling planet. It sat and waited there, for millions of years, as life grew, spread, lived, died, and evolved.
The ponies, they were the first. The others came later, but ponies, they were the first. Exactly when they first looked up at the sun and realized they were more than the beasts around them, is a question lost in the mists of history, to be studied and pored over by palaeontologists. I do not know the answer myself, I only know that they decided to work together, forming societies for mutual aid and survival.
The Unmaker saw this cooperation going on above, and though it realized that to band together was necessary for its plan, it disgusted it, reminded it of the Keepers. It reached out from its cavern below the surface and touched the minds of whatever ponies would listen, promised them power, fame, glory, eternal life, if they pledged servitude. Some rejected the call, some answered, some stayed silent.
Though the records from this time have been lost, I still know of it from my memories. I know the ponies who had sided with evil did what their master bid. They created the first great empire that stretched over much of the world, by conquest. Kill the leaders, enslave the rest, and force them to work on pain of death to bring to kneel the next civilization, until all were united under one banner. It was cruel, it was efficient, it was exactly what the Unmaker wanted to see.
But, it was not the way of the ponies. Though they were divided at first, a great call went between them. They saw the eventual results and the terrible crimes visited on those who had already fallen victim, and they banded together. There was a war, and the united front of the good ponies, combined with their allies in the younger races, were able to vanquish the Unmaker's pawns. In their victory, they did not execute the defeated warriors, nor did they visit harsh punishments. They told them to return to their lives and never raise weapons ever again, they forgave them, and this, this enraged the Unmaker. It had foreseen this possibility, and had another plan already in motion.
If the creatures above it would not be cruel, it would beat them into shape, as one beats a piece of metal to remove its flaws and strengthen it. It would afflict them with trials, force them to fight among themselves to grasp at the precious few resources available. Wherever there were ten, there would be enough to feed five, and the resulting battles would surely crush any good emotions left within. Suspicion would defeat cooperation, comradery crushed beneath simple 2survival.
The Unmaker made one mistake, though, and that was that its actions had drawn the attention of the Keepers. They saw its plans, predicted its results, and calculated how best and most efficiently to thwart them. The result of their calculations, the first of them, was me.
My first real memories were just of waking up, somewhere out in a field. It was dark out, but the sun was coming up, and before me stood the silhouette of a distant farm house. I knew my purpose, I had the skills I would need and had been instilled with the experience to do it, so I set out towards that small house.
Inside, I found a couple, a mare and a stallion, along with two of their young foals. No words passed between us as I entered the house, they had been expecting me, I think. The mother held a wrapping of cloth around something, and presented it to me as I drew nearer. Within, was a foal, newly born, moments before I had arrived. It was afflicted.
I cured it, using my skills, and I left them shortly after. They asked me to stay, promised me everything they could offer, pledging servitude and loyalty in thanks for my act, but it was not my place here. There would be others in need, and my purpose was to aid them.
As I wandered away from that house, I did not pick any particular destination. My instincts would tell me where I was to be needed next, and they were quiet, so I just wandered. The morning passed as I strode through the fields, and as noon crept up, I felt something beneath me shift. This was the second part of the Unmaker's plan, and as I felt that shift, I felt something else shift against it.
From out of the sun itself, a white mare descended and landed next to me, the one who later would be called Celestia. She is my sister, in a way, for we share a purpose, and we share creators. Is that not how one defines a sibling? I had not had occasion to see myself, but I could see 'Tia just fine, and I realized indirectly what I looked like.
We were ponies, just like the inhabitants of this planet, but not quite the same. We had been molded in their image, given their patterns of thought and habits of action, but we were different. We possessed wings to soar with the Pegasi, horns to manipulate magic like the Unicorns, and that intricate and deep connection to the earth like the earth ponies. We were like them and unlike them.
My sister and I walked for a time, until the night set and I felt a shift again, much like the one I had felt before. Again, I felt something push back, and our youngest sister, Luna, descended from the moon to land at our side.
The Unmaker had seen what brought about depression and anxiety amongst the populations here, and the thing that made it most apparent was random cruelty. To be good, wise, and capable, yet stricken with tragedy through no fault of one's own, this was the height of injustice, and the Unmaker sent forth whispers of its mind to infect the weak and vulnerable. I was the antidote to this, and my task was to undo the random cruelties it visited among others. I am not perfect, I have failed many times, but it is my purpose.
The Unmaker had seen how stability and surety brought about great works, great cities, great civilizations, and schemed to undo that. It sent a mighty perturbation through the solar system, and in doing so, disrupted the orbit of our planet around the sun. Left unchecked, seasons would vary in length, days would vary in heat, and the plants of the world would not be able to sustain the life which relied on them. Success of harvests would become unreliable, and life would become a series of battles amongst migrating tribes for the scarce and random food resources they could scavenge. Celestia's task was to realign the orbit, each day in the morning and at night, to slowly erase this perturbation. She has been doing so for millennia, but it still lingers and requires careful maintenance.
Finally, the Unmaker saw how the great cities of the world had been found on water bodies, and had deduced this was due to trade. Boats could carry weight across water that even the strongest pony could never haul over land, and the great countries of the world all had bustling hubs along water's edge. Without this trade, the countries would become isolated and vulnerable, and so it disrupted the orbit of the Moon to ruin the regularity of the tides. Left unchecked, whole cities would be flooded one month and miles away from the ocean the next, mighty storms would wrack the world as hurricanes struck aggressively inland each year. Luna's task was to maintain the balance of the Moon and the Earth, and like Celestia, millennia of adjustments and realignments has still not completely stabilized it.
So thoroughly had we countered its plans, all within the span of one day, that the Unmaker decided, then and there, that life was no longer worthy of its domination. It felt something new: envy. Envy at how the living beings of the world seemed so keen on aligning with its mortal enemies, the Keepers of Order. If it could not have them, it would destroy them, and it set about building the army it required to bring this to pass.
For a time, we believed all was well, and we wandered across the lands, meeting those who dwelt there and learning of their customs. Eventually, Celestia and Luna decided they would need more precision in their daily and nightly duties, and we stopped at the dwelling of a hedge wizard who gave us the use of his spare room.
The two got to work constructing elaborate charts to map the positions of the Sun and the Moon, as well as the other planets, both in the sky and in locations of orbit. They were required to invent new methods of calculation, and new methods of language to describe them, and in a short time, word got around about where we had settled. Other scholars came from around the land, at first as a trickle, and then as a stream, visiting the rather bemused wizard's humble abode to seek out our knowledge. In time, others came and settled to better provide for the scholars, and we formed what has widely been considered the world's first true University. Our names became known across the land and many sought our wisdom not only in the sciences, but in the arts and politics as well.
This first city was known as Raget Ur, which in that old tongue, meant literally "Learning Above". A rough translation to today is "Place of Higher Learning", as it had literally meant the study of the skies above, but eventually the knowledgeable had come from everywhere and every subject was under consideration.
It was at Raget Ur that we, and those who helped us, built the first castle which we would call home. We built it, because in their discoveries and research, Celestia and Luna had noticed a very peculiar shifting around of material within the earth below. They dispatched me to investigate, along with a few ponies who had insisted on accompanying me.
As we drew nearer to the location my sisters had specified, I became uneasy, for the area was dangerously close to the great disturbance I could feel each time a pony, somewhere, became afflicted. It would only surge for a second, but it was there, and I knew where instinctively. Finally we came across a cave in the middle of an otherwise peaceful forest range, and it was there that we first encountered the Faceless ones.
Some of my companions had wanted to probe the cave, though I warned them against it. When they had not returned by that afternoon, the rest of us went inside to investigate. There we found a maze of caverns hewn from the rock around them, yet everywhere there was a black, oozing material that drove my senses to a frenzy. This rock was being infused with the same ooze that would rob an innocent pony of their sanity, and by doing so, the rock became animate and utterly enslaved to its master far below us. The living rock came for us, and we fled. I lost many friends in that maze, scrambling away in sheer terror, getting separated from one another only to hear their cries echo off the unfeeling walls, and then, be silenced.
When I got back to my sisters, their expressions were grim as I told them what I had seen. We had been foolish, our enemy had been thwarted but not defeated, and now it was building an army to strike us down with. We had precious little time to form our own army to fight back, to train every pony we could find and produce weapons for them to fight with.
We sent couriers to every nation and culture in the world, begging them for assistance. Though a few refused, they would be swayed very soon, as reports of random assaults by a monstrous new force that appeared from the very ground itself lent credence to our cries. And yet, we feared it would not be enough. The stakes could be no higher, we knew that existence itself hinged on our victory, and so Celestia did something profound to better our chances.
She saw that we would need food to feed the young races as they fought, and that they could not grow it and train at the same time. So, she asked the earth itself to yield its plants and harvests to us. She saw the earth could not provide without rain, so she asked the clouds if they would kindly let us direct their showers. She saw many creatures who could not assist us, for they lacked the language and social structures necessary, so she asked them to be our eyes and ears. And finally, she saw that magic itself could be a powerful weapon to help us, and asked it to lend us its aid. All said yes, save the force of magic. It said nothing back to her.
The results have been carried down through the ages, and their power has not waned with time. The creatures of the sky still have that hold over the clouds, and the creatures of the earth still have their unspoken connection with the ground, the trees, the plants. With the help of every thing, living and nonliving, we may have been able to defeat the corrupted earth, maybe. It was not to be.
Within a year, the reports of attacks had become so great that we could no longer abide. We organized armies to patrol and flush out the attackers, and the "Era of Fire", as historians call it today, began.
Wherever the dark ones came, we fought. We fortified every city, developed evacuation plans for every village and hamlet, hoarded food in every center. Plows were beaten into spears, and the earth itself urged us to victory by furrowing itself and giving us what it could. Though we fought the hordes to the bitter end, no matter how many we killed, there were always more.
The Unmaker had been constructing them from rock, and they were powerful and fast. The only way to destroy them was to cut them into small enough pieces, but they lacked intelligence with which to fight. The Unmaker itself was not enough to control all of them, it had instead found willing spirits to serve as the generals of its armies. The history books know the names of many of them, though some are regarded as pure legend. Discord, the Windigoes, The Rooted Howler, and more, all spirits who, before, had been harmless tricksters. In exchange for power, all they had to do was serve the Unmaker, and it darkened their souls as it did so.
The war raged for nearly a century, and with no end in sight. Our forces fought, aged, died. Theirs did not, and there were always more. It stopped being a battle we could win, and became one we could only prolong. In desperation, we took to burning whole landscapes in an effort to destroy the faceless hordes on them, and though it caused them innumerable losses, still more surged forth from the earth and attacked.
At last, all other bastions of civilization had fallen. At last, our time had run out, and the only place left for us was one fort that lay on a hilltop, that fort where we had formed the first University in times that seemed so distant. If this was to be our last stand, we would make it a good one.
But, the hordes did not come. We waited for weeks, and the assault never came. Finally, we sent a scout out to the horizon, any direction, it did not matter, to find out what had happened. It amazed us. Magic itself has listened to Celestia's plea.
The Keepers, we reasoned, were the arbiters of magic. Perhaps they were magic, or perhaps they were a part of it, I am not certain, but they had decided to provide for us what little they could. Beyond the horizon, as seen by our scout, marched a long column of creatures made from living metal. They were every bit as powerful as the faceless ones, but had an intricate, logical intelligence as well. Our enemies had diverted all their forces to assaulting this new threat, and their broken, rocky corpses littered the landscape around them. Eventually, they arrived at the walls of our castle, and pledged their service to us. We called the the Redeemers, and they were to be our last hope.
We could not attempt to battle the nigh-infinite hordes, even with our new allies, and hope to win. We struck out from our fort in an effort to rally the pockets of resistance in the countryside that still stood. We were a scant forty-thousand, the entire remaining civilized population of the world, forty-thousand. All of these had been born in war and lived their whole lives under the shadow of tyranny, fear, death. We brought them back and hatched a desperate plan, to strike at the generals who controlled the faceless armies.
We realized we could not defeat them ourselves, for when they had presented themselves on the battlefield, we found they were untouched by physical weapons. Even the Redeemers could not even scratch them, they were empowered creatures of magic, after all, so we sent one final plea to the Keepers for a way to defeat them. The Keepers responded with something every school filly has heard of today, the most powerful magic known. The Elements of Harmony.