//------------------------------//
// The Last of the Time Stallions 
// Story: The Creation of Harmony 
// by Time Ponies are cool 
//------------------------------//

Chapter XXIII: The Last of the Time Stallions
Every time at once ago before at now forever...
The Master had been defeated by the Doctor in a coup to take the presidency of Gallopfrey and fled the planet in a small space pod, but he inadvertently entered the Medusa Cascade, a region in space full of openings, rips and cracks in space and time. A moment later he found himself falling, falling through darkness and light, through visions of the past, the present and the future, and through the time vortex, until finally he landed. He had fallen through a rift in space and time, an opening in the time vortex through which anything can pass in and out. The fall drained all of the Master's energy and he passed out from exhaustion, collapsing on the rocky ground. His last sight was a vast expanse of empty lifeless desert.
The Master woke to find himself in a tent and outside he saw a campfire and a pair of camels discussing what to do with their guest. As he listened in on their conversation, he sneaked around the tent, looking at the goods the camels had. He found one very interesting trinket: a perception filter, a device that allows the wearer to become unnoticeable, something that was not from Earth. The perception filter was designed like a necklace, so the Master put it around his neck and snuck out of the tent, passing right in front of the camels. The Master took some of the camels' food and water and flew off into the desert. 
After three days of wandering the desert, the Master ran out of food, and continued wandering parched and famished. On the fourth day, as he was on the verge of fatal dehydration, he found a range of red mountains. He flew over them and landed in the forest on the other side. He trekked through the forest until he found a village of zebras. He turned off his perception filter, entered into the village and asked for food and water. The villagers immediately tried to drive him away and some called for his execution. But the village shaman, who also was the leader, after seeing the pitiful decrepit state of the stranger, stopped the villagers, scolding them for their impious lack of hospitality, and welcomed the Master into his home. The shaman and his family cared for their guest and nursed him back to health. The Master stayed in the village for two days, during which time he discovered that the year was the five-hundred eightieth year since the liberation of Hoofrica, which was 443 B.E in the Celestial Calendar, and he was in the Northeastern Uruhu Forest in the kingdom of Hoofrica.
The Master left the village and followed the shaman's directions to the capital city of Rhinopolis, though the shaman warned him not to enter the city as it was too dangerous for any pony. He turned the perception filter on again and traveled down the Kuzaliwa River towards Rhinopolis. He entered the city undetected and from inside he created a disguise. He dyed his coat black and white, like a zebra's, fashioned his mane into a zebra's mane, tied his wings, and wore a red robe over his body. He then set off to forge a new identity for himself: Dogori. Dogori was a son from a noble family that resided by the Uzima River, but was annihilated by ponies. He was a graduate of Haki University and a favorite apprentice of the recently deceased most famous shaman in the Uruhu Forest. He was a captain in the Hoofrican army for ten years and earned dozens of medals and awards. He established the Barafu Creeks Water Distribution Company, which quickly dominated all of Rhinopolis' water supply. He even took a wife, a beautiful gazelle named Kuaminika. All this he accomplished through his clever deception and impeccable forgery. 
For one year, Dogori carried on with his plans in the city. He worked with some of the city's alchemists to create a potion which made the sound of his voice charming for all who drank it. He had high volumes of the potion made and he mixed it into the water of his Barafu Creeks company. With this, he gained a hypnotic grip on the city, with nearly every resident agreeing with every word that came out of his mouth. In the meantime, he took advantage of the weariness of the citizens over the war, which was nearing its hundredth year. He called for an end to the war, for the return of the thousands of soldiers, and for the Emperor, Nguvu II, to focus his concerns on the commoners, "the true rulers of Hoofrica." The city residents, as well as Hoofricans from the surrounding country side and the Uruhu forest, rallied behind Dogori in protest. Many times, Emperor Nguvu II threatened Dogori and demanded that he silence himself, but Dogori would not yield. While he was not busy maintaining his image in the city, Dogori returned to the place where he first arrived in the Great Northern Desert and had dealings with the camels, who possessed devices and materials that arrived through the rift. Using the goods he bought from the camels, he built a laser screwdriver and a set of temporal disablement mechanisms.
On the one-hundredth anniversary of the war, Graze 28th, 442 B.E., Dogori rallied the citizens of Hoofrica and gathered his largest group of protesters yet. He led them  to the gates of the Emperor's palace, but this time Nguvu II had lost his patience. The Emperor ordered his Royal Guard to arrest Dogori and sentence him to death, but when the guards laid their hooves on Dogori, his followers retaliated. They sent the guards back, and, in their fury, stormed the palace. No number of soldiers or guards could stop the assault of the masses. Soon the palace was taken, and Emperor Nguvu II was beheaded along with his wife and children. The rebels placed Dogori on the throne of Hoofrica and gave him absolute power. Dogori ruled benevolently, though he held off his promise of peace, until the Doctor arrived.
The Doctor decided to show his companion, Octavia, a cellist from 21st century Canterlot, the Great Hoofrican Revolution, a display of the force of will of the commoners against the face of tyranny, and brought her to Rhinopolis in the year 442 B.E. They wore perception filters to avoid Hoofrican hostility and together they watched from a very close view the leader of the revolution, Dogori, as he gave his victory speech to the citizens of Hoofrica. The Doctor was shocked to smell a familiar scent, hear a familiar tone of voice and see a familiar set of fierce eyes. He knew who Dogori was all too well. He was the Master.
The Doctor and Octavia immediately returned to the TARDIS and moved it into the Emperor's throne room, where they could confront the Master after he finished his speech. The Doctor took off his perception filter and burst out of the TARDIS doors into the throne room, but after a brief greeting, the Master took out a handful of temporal disablement mechanisms and threw them towards the TARDIS. The mechanisms, small metal balls with a single flashing green light, activated upon sensing the presence of a time machine and attached themselves to the TARDIS, which then immediately shut down, and with them attached to the TARDIS, the Doctor could not open the doors in any way.
The Master then ordered the Doctor to be held down as he tortured him with his laser screwdriver. The Master then left the Doctor be for a moment as he gloated in his victory, removed the temporal disablement mechanisms from the TARDIS and entered it. The TARDIS dematerialized and then a moment later rematerialized. The Master exited and showed the Doctor what he had done inside. The sight almost put the Doctor to tears. The Master had taken the TARDIS, cannibalized it and turned it into a paradox machine, a machine that could suspend the laws of time and allow a time paradox to occur. The Master then pointed his screwdriver at the console, which now glowed red rather than cyan, pushed a button and activated the machine.
Immediately, there came a quake that shook the whole world and beyond the Nyekundu Mountains, over the Great Northern Desert, a hole was torn open in the sky. The machine had ripped the rift in the desert open and through the tear came an army, an army the Master had created millions of years in the future. When the Master took the TARDIS, he went two million years into the future, when climate change was about to destroy a species known as the changelings. He took the last changelings on Earth, brought them to safety and bred and cloned them into a huge population. He mass produced advanced weaponry and cyber technology that takes a changeling's brain, strips away its free will and makes it completely obedient to its master. The Master took three billion changelings and fused the technology into them. Within a year of work, he had an army like nothing the Earth had ever seen in 443 B.E. As a final task, the Master turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine, allowing him to take his army into the past and change history, without any fear of altering fixed points in time. The price to pay for doing such to the TARDIS was the loss of its ability to travel to any time or place except the last that it went to: the Emperor's throne room in Hoofrica, 443 B.E.
The Master's three-billion strong army poured out into the Earth and immediately set to work following orders. With their superior technology and overwhelming numbers, the cyber changelings quickly and easily overpowered the other two kingdoms and all civilizations beyond the known world. Ponytopia and its king and queen, Dux II and Stella I, fell. Drakonia and its queen, Diemwnt, fell.  In one fell swoop, the Earth came unto the possession of the Master.
While the Master was busy giving his army orders to conquer the Earth, the Doctor whispered to Octavia, who stood by his side completely unnoticed as she still wore her perception filter. He gave her instructions on what to do to stop the Master. With the Doctor in captivity under the Master, only Octavia could do anything to help. Slowly and reluctantly, Octavia obeyed the Doctor. She left the throne room, left the city and went out into the world as it was being decimated by the cyber changelings. 
The Master brought in a master zebra shaman and forced him to brew an aging elixir to make its victim age a thousand years. After the elixir was done, the Master forcefully poured it down the Doctor's throat and the Doctor withered and aged a whole millennium without regeneration. The Doctor was now decrepit, frail and weak, and the Master had him bound in chains and hung from the ceiling of the throne room, from the fresco depicting Queen Faust creating the world. The Master kept the Doctor there for a year, keeping him fed and watered just enough to stay alive. Throughout the year, the Master put his empire to work creating a fleet of space ships and an endless array nuclear missiles capable of waging war against the rest of the Cider Way Galaxy. By the year 441 B.E., three-hundred sixty-five days after he first opened the rift and unleashed his army, the Master was ready to spread his empire into the stars. But Octavia was there to stop him. 
Throughout the year, Octavia carried out the instructions the Doctor gave her. She set out to journey across the world and seek out four individuals who survived the Master's assault on the world: Tellus Custos, an earth pony and most successful farmer in Ponytopia, if not the world. Asifat Ramliyya, daughter of one of the camel tribe leaders, known as sheikhs, and a talented sorceress. Gwyn Adain, a little dragoness bearing blue fire, still a child at only fifty years old, and top of her class in her flight school. Mtandao Buibui, a warthog and one of the advisors of the late chief general of the Hoofrican armies.  
Half of Octavia's year was spent finding these four, and the other half was spent with the new team in the Great Northern Desert preparing to confront the Master. To protect the team from the countless cyber changelings all over the world, Asifat Ramliyya intensified the effects of Octavia's perception filter using her magical scepter in order to create a mobile bubble of invisibility that rendered them completely undetectable. Within this bubble, Octavia passed on the instructions to the others and they all worked together to prepare themselves and devise a plan of action to dethrone the Master. During this time, Octavia learned the amazing talents and abilities of each of the four individuals. Tellus Custos wore magical horseshoes that allowed him to feel and control the earth around him. He had used his ability to make his fields the most fertile and durable in the known world. Asifat Ramliyya owned a magical scepter that she discovered when she was a child deep in the desert, around the area where the Master's army first swarmed into the world. Gwyn Adain was an exceptional flyer and extremely agile. In her flight school, she had passed with ease through obstacle courses that Drakonia's most elite and expert flyers believed were nearly impossible to complete. Mtandao Buibui was a strategic genius, though he never held leadership as his status as a warthog prevented him from doing so. He was the mastermind behind many of Hoofrica's military victories and most of them were from odds that seemed hopeless for the Hoofrican army. 
Through the half year, Tellus learned new properties and powers held in his horseshoes. He worked to learn control the ground beneath his hooves at a much grander scale. He learned to move huge boulders, hills, and eventually, mountains. Asifat studied magic intensely and mastered every spell in all her books, and for the purpose of her mission, she especially focused on perfecting the sound amplification spell, which, if used to its full power, could take any noise and spread it such that it can be heard by every living being on its half of the planet. Gwyn practiced and trained in flight, improving her speed, agility, reflexes, form and technique, as well as studying the powers of blue fire. Mtandao labored endlessly over maps and ancient construction plans of Rhinopolis and the Emperor's palace, as well as calculating the team's advantages and disadvantages, in order to formulate a plan to retake Hoofrica and liberate the world from the Master. Octavia composed a piece for the cello, a piece with what she hoped were special properties, as the Doctor simply instructed her to compose with fervor and fit the music to the sound of Mtandao's plans. 
On Graze 28th, 441 B.E., the day the Master was ready to launch his war machine into the galaxy, Mtandao Buibui finished devising the plan and so the team began. Octavia, Tellus Custos, Asifat Ramliyya, Gwyn Adain and Mtandao Buibui left the Great Northern Desert and, with Tellus' control of the earth, climbed to the highest peak of the Nyekundu Mountains. They brought with them Asifat's scepter, a cello, a few sheets of music and a huge sail-like sheet of cloth. On the peak, Octavia took out her finished composition and began playing it on her cello. Asifat used her scepter and spell to amplify the sound of Octavia's music over the entire known world. Moments later, parasprites began gathering around the peak, and then, after a few minutes, there was a great swarm, the largest the world had ever seen. All were entranced by Octavia's music.
Tellus Custos leaped off of the peak and dove underground. Using his horseshoes, he formed a tunnel leading to a spot directly below the Emperor's palace in Rhinopolis. He felt his way through the ground beneath Hoofrica and traveled completely undetected to fulfill his part of the mission.
Gwyn Adain took off from the peak and flew at top speed towards Rhinopolis. She timed her take-off with Octavia's music such that as she flew, the music commanded the parasprites to fly the same way. Gwyn flew with a wall of parasprites protecting her. Just at the right time predicted by Mtandao, a mass of cyber changelings gathered to attack Gwyn, but the parasprites ate the changelings' metal parts, rendering them completely powerless. Gwyn was then able to easily fly by them, dodging all the flying bodies in her way. The same thing happened continually as she flew to fulfill her part of the mission.
Tellus Custos arrived to the spot beneath Rhinopolis that Mtandao instructed him to go to and firmly planted his hooves into the ground beneath him. He focused his mind, feeling the vibrations of the earth around him to create a mental image of the entire city. Then, with all his strength, focus and effort, he moved the palace above him. The earth shook as the Emperor's palace was detached from the city and raised into the air, carrying Tellus with it, where the Master's armies of Hoofrican foot soldiers could not reach.
Gwyn Adain arrived at the palace floating in the air, with the parasprites protecting her from aerial attacks. In the final movement of Octavia's piece, the parasprites formed into a sphere around the palace, keeping it cut off from all interference from the outside world. Gwyn then flew into the palace. With her small size, a size only twice that of an average pegasus, and nimbleness, she could traverse through the halls and rooms of the palace without even touching any walls or the floors. She made her way towards the throne room. When she entered the room, the Master was there with his wife Kuaminika looking out the window with his laser screwdriver in his right hoof. Gwyn flew at the Master, kicked the screwdriver out of his hand and snatched it in mid-air before quickly flying away. Her maneuvers were so fast, the Master had no time at all to react. Gwyn was perfectly timed to finish just as Octavia finished playing her piece and the parasprites were commanded to return to their places of origin.
Asifat Ramliyya, now done with the amplification spell, used her scepter to summon a sandstorm from the Great Northern Desert. While Asifat was busy with the storm, Mtandao and Octavia prepared the cloth sheet to catch the winds. They held it aloft and when the sandstorm reached them, they grasped Asifat's hooves and all three rode the storm towards the floating palace. Once the palace was within view, Asifat cast a teleportation spell and moved them all to the throne room.
After taking the laser screwdriver, Gwyn Adain set off to use her blue fire to create a sphere of ice around the throne room to delay the cyber changelings when they arrive to protect the Master and the paradox machine. Octavia, Asifat Ramliyya and Mtandao Buibui stood in the throne room facing the Master and Kuaminika blocking the way to the TARDIS and a pair of rhino guards, who both were still too afraid of the Master to betray him, yet also too uncertain about their prospects of victory if they acted against the three. Above was the aged Doctor hanging from the ceiling. Mtandao whispered into Asifat's ear and Asifat cast a spell to break the chain holding the Doctor up. The Doctor fell from the ceiling and landed on the Master, who collapsed under the weight, while Kuaminika quickly leaped out of the way. The two guards took the opportunity to abandon the Master. They dropped their spears and fled from the room.
With the Master down, Asifat cast a healing and aging spell on the Doctor. The Doctor returned to his original age and his healthy condition was restored. The Master, then cowered before the Doctor, because he knew what his nemesis would do now that he had the upper hand. The Doctor took the Master in his hooves, embraced him and said that he forgave him. Gwyn returned to the throne room and Tellus also, walked into the throne room, though with great difficulty as he still was concentrating on keeping the palace aloft. Outside, three billion cyber changelings were melting away the shield of ice. Gwyn had with her the Master's laser screwdriver and she handed it to the Doctor, who entered the TARDIS, pointed the screwdriver at the paradox machine, pressed a button and destroyed it.
Suddenly there came a great wind and the Earth quaked as time began to reverse its course. The Doctor, Octavia, Asifat, Mtandao, and Gwyn braced themselves against the turmoil. Above the palace, the sky moved in reverse. The Sun set in the east and rose from the West three-hundred sixty five times. When the team looked up, the palace was on the ground in Rhinopolis. Time had reversed to the moment when the Master activated the paradox machine. Outside was a bustling city with a happy populace. With time reversed, everyone forgot everything that happened in the year that never was, except for those in the eye of the storm, in the throne room: the Doctor, Octavia, Tellus, Asifat, Gwyn, Mtandao and Kuaminika. For all the Hoofricans outside, it was as if nothing had happened.
While the team was reuniting and rejoicing in their victory, the Master took the opportunity to escape and flee Rhinopolis. However, Kuaminika took one of the spears dropped by the guards and hurled it at her husband. The spear struck through one of the Master's hearts. The Doctor saw this and quickly galloped to the Master to tend to him. He pulled the spear out of the Master and held him in his hooves, getting blood on his coat. He begged the Master to regenerate, but he refused. The Master took one deep final breath and died. Now, the Doctor was truly the last remaining relic of Gallopfrey, the last of the Time Stallions.
The Doctor took the Master's body and his team into the TARDIS and they all left the palace, leaving Kuaminika alone with one final set of instructions from the Doctor. They went to the desert and prepared a pyre. The Doctor placed the Master on the pyre and lit it aflame. The other five watched as the Doctor stood before the tall fire that consumed the Master's body.
Back in Hoofrica, the rebels found themselves leaderless and the revolution quickly fell apart. Nguvu II's niece ascended to the throne as Empress Haki III. She was a just and fair ruler and had a long healthy reign. Though the revolution was a failure, it was remembered as it was an event like nothing else in the history of the kingdom of Hoofrica. And more importantly for the Doctor, a set of names was recorded in history, the names of the individuals responsible for the death of Dogori. Kuaminika provided these names, just as the Doctor instructed her: an earth pony called Tellus Custos, a camel called Asifat Ramliyya, a child dragoness called Gwyn Adain, a traitorous warthog called Mtandao Buibui, and a pair of strangers from the stars, whose names she said she did not know. 
All seemed to have ended cleanly, but one detail escaped the Doctor, a detail that drifted in the air. A tuft of hair from the Master's mane escaped the funeral pyre and floated away on the hot wind. The tuft was carried into the Uruhu Forest, where it landed before the door into the hut of a zebra shaman loyal to Dogori. The day before the revolution, Dogori gave his zebra disciples a set of instructions should he be killed: They were to take any piece of his body, anything that carried his DNA, and, when the time was right, create a potion to restore a full living being from a part of his body. The zebra shaman discovered the tuft of hair and recognized the scent as that of Dogori. He kept the hair and it was valued possession of his family as he and his descendants waited until "the time was right." In the year 42 B.E., one of that shaman's descendants, Rundo Ndizi, saw a comet with a red tail and a black and white head. He saw this as a comet with a resemblance to Dogori, a zebra who wore a red robe, and interpreted it to mean that the time had come to resurrect the great leader. He created a potion to bring life back from a small piece of a living being and dropped the tuft of hair his family kept for centuries into the potion. The chemicals of the potion and the DNA in the hair interacted, and in a great explosion of light, electricity and smoke, the Time Stallion known as the Master returned.