//------------------------------// // Prologue 1: Canterlot Midnight // Story: When the Everfree Burns // by SpiritDutch //------------------------------// The light came on, rousing a tired pony. Celestia awoke in a room with walls made of cloud. Cloud... Celestia sensed she was deep within in the floating pegasus city of Cloudsdale. But why? Yes, the context of her habitation completely eluded her. Celestia hadn't spent a night outside of her quarters in Canterlot Castle for a century. Slowly though, a fascinating recollection dawned on her: It was a time of war. War! That jolted Celestia up in the bed. Her empire of Equestria had not been in a real proper war in centuries! Still she felt all the signs which, despite absent of them for said centuries, were as familiar as ever for the alicorn. Stress hormones. Fatigue and strain. A subtle tremble in her hooves. A burning feeling of purpose and resolve! "Is this a memory or... a premonition." Celestia whispered into the cloud room. She could not hear her own voice back, confirming to her that she was in dream of some sort. When she had laid her head down to sleep, it had been early spring of the year 999 SS, just a few months shy of the thousandth Summer Sun and the dawning of a new millenium. But when was this dream taking place, where she was in Cloudsdale and her body ached and trembled? Celestia hopped out of the bed, and her eyes were naturally drawn to the only other feature in the cloud room. It was a map- This was the focus of the dream, what Celestia was meant to pay attention to. The other details were superfluous, merely meant to prime her. Indeed as her eyes locked on it, everything else became hazy, indistinct, muted. It was a map of the continent of Equestria, her domain. But was it her Equestria? At first, Celestia saw the map and assumed it, and therefore the dream, were of the past. The map showed Equestria divided, fractured, split up between tiny endemically warring states- They had their flags, their armies, their capitals, and their leaders written neatly in the margins of the map. But as Celestia stepped closer, heart full of trepidation, she found a closer look disproved her assumption. Those were not the names of the warlords of Equestria's past, who Celestia had brought to heel those centuries ago. No, Celestia would have recognized those names, and remembered with nostalgic fondness the battles where she had vanquished the warlords to unify her Equestian empire. To Celestia's utter terror, she recognized very few of the names on the map. To her even greater terror, some of them she did recognize. With a gasp, Celestia's eyes snapped open. She lay in bed, head resting squarely on her pillow- Her bed in Canterlot this time, tucked safely in her sprawling castle complex. The dream... premonition... was over, and she was back in 999 SS. Celestia illuminated the dark bedroom with her magic from her horn. The richly decorated space, filled with history, baubles, and luxury, twinkled back. But Celestia was looking for one item in particular: Just as in the cloud room in the premonition, her bedroom had a map of Equestria on the wall. Unlike the dream, her map of Equestia and its overseas territories remained one solid color. "And I am its princess, its empress." Celestia reassured herself softly. She closed her eyes and tried to remember if her name had been on the map in the dream, but it eluded her. Maybe she had awoken too soon to notice. Please let it be so, she whispered to the silent room. If it was a premonition, a TRUE premonition, then it promised one of many possible futures. It had been sent to her so that she could work to avoid the dreadful fate of a divided warring Equestria. However it had also been sent to her BY someone. Premonitions did not pop out of the aether, even to semi-divine alicorns. Whoever had sent the premonition had their own reasons for doing so. Celestia had her suspicions. What had not changed between the dream and reality was a lingering feeling of fatigue Celestia felt. She was tired. The chaos the premonition promised clouded her heart with exhausted resignation as much as anything else. Were the toils never over?! How much pain would she endure, how much effort would she exert, at the mere hope of changing fate. Who knew if trying to change things would instead cause a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thus laying her head back down, Celestia did not feel much different than when she had done so at dusk, some hours previous- She was the badgered, miserable, and apathetic liege lord of an entire continent. Not even ominous signals of death could keep her energy up for that long. Tomorrow, she told herself. She could deal with the premonition, with all its myriad promise of betrayal and chaos, tomorrow. But the lights were still on elsewhere in the Canterlot Castle. Twilight Sparkle sat by the window in the castle library, looking across to the other wing where the princess's quarters were. The castle keep, silhouetted against the white light of the moon, looked eerie and still. Its towers and spires looked like so many talons reaching towards heaven. "Can't sleep, princess?" Twilight whispered. Her breath slightly frosted the cold window. She knew she shouldn't have been dwelling on Princess Celestia. She had repeatedly made resolutions to herself to focus only on her studies. Drama with the princess and the ceremonial duties as her student were to be entirely ignored. Twilight was satisfied that she mostly kept to her resolution. But in Canterlot, a city built from the ground up for the comfort and exaltation of the empress of Equestria, it was next to impossible to go a day without thinking about Celestia. Focus. Book. Studies. Twilight shook her head and turned her back to the cold window. She pulled her candle closer and flipped her book back open. She was on something of a sabbatical from her research obligations at the Canterlot University. She had spent the last month flipping between fascinations, trying to find an inspiration for her next big project, or even her next degree. As much as she didn't want to admit it, the University, her escape from inane and frustrating expectations from the princess's government, had begun to tire her. She needed to find something new that sparked her interest, something she hadn't memorized backwards and forwards like most everything else; A veritable polymath of magic, Twilight Sparkle was a multidisciplinary reader. Books were her life. That brought her to the last, longest book of the night, the cap to a full day in the castle library. To Twilight's left were the piles of tomes she'd already finished. To her left was the pile of notes she'd made. In front of her was 'The History of Pony Metallurgy', an aged reference text. Twilight didn't have high hopes for the text, but it is where night night found her. Maybe she could work it into a literature review, for latter reference if she decided to write on a paper or conduct some experiments. "This wasn't what I was expecting." The tome was a mix of descriptions and illuminations of historical magical artifacts. "Ooh, the armor of the ancient unicorn warlords. That's neat I guess. I've been meaning to go back to classical history studies." Twilight said to herself, idly flipping through the pages. She hated to admit her mind was mostly still on Celestia. Did the princess think of her often? If Twilight came with questions about history, would Celestia be receptive or give her the cold shoulder? She fancied, vainly she knew, that Celestia was even then thinking of her, that the princess's restless night was on her account. Twilight yearn to be comforted that her mentor was as irked by the strained relationship as she was. Twilight flipped to a page with a beautifully drawn depiction of a helmet. Something about it drew her eye. "Magical cast iron." She read out idly. "Wait..." She shook her head and read it again. "Magical cast icon, question mark?" She sensed a mystery. As much as she thrived in rote learning, the boundaries of pony knowledge ever tantalized her. “Despite an influx of unicorns into smelting industry in the Early Classical era, magical cast iron did not become commonplace until the of Unification and Mid Classical eras. Some of the most iconic examples of their experimental techniques are the quasi-plate armors of knights in the War of the Nightmare Pretender. Classicists have questioned if the armors were indeed iron, or a steel alloy created hundreds of years before modern alloying techniques. The loss (destruction?) of all the armor examples, including the eponymous Nightmare Pretender's, makes the period one of the most mysterious from a historiographical standpoint.” “Illumination copied from painting by I. Valor of Dneighper Run, circa 800SS since lost. The Nightmare Pretender's Helm, or mimicry by a nightmare knight.” Twilight's worries about Princess Celestia melted away as she read the fascinating passage. One phrase in particular ensnared her interest. How, in all her years of studying magic and history, had she never heard of this 'Nightmare Pretender'? With a name like that you deserved a place in academic discourse if not common folk knowledge. Twilight flipped the page and scrutinized illumination the passage related to more closely. It was another depiction of the 'nightmare' armor, this time the whole set, modeled on a stern looking pale earth pony. The armor set was all a relatively spartan design, only six small pieces. The helmet looked like it ran from the bridge of a pony’s nose to the back of the neck, with several filigree-like points curling around the face. The four horseshoes covered every part of the hoof, but also had menacing spikes running up the front of each, almost to the ankle. The cuirass was large, built for a pony much larger than the model, but only protected the front of the breast with a loop running back around the neck, really only giving protection only against bad fashion. The cuirass had a crescent moon engraved on the front plate, presumably the crest of its wearer, that 'Nightmare Pretender'. "Such strong metal, for such skimpy armor. Whoever wore this didn't rely on it for stoping sword and arrow hits." Twilight reread the description. "Fascinating." The ornamental armor, clearly made for a pony of near Celestia's size, was evocative, as was the idea of its wearer. Pretender, as in a pretender to the throne? The throne in question Twilight’s thought of, at least in the times of Unification, was the throne of a united Equestria, a far-off goal for the classical ponies. Those were troubled and confused times before, as the text mentioned, the sun princess Celestia the First alighted on the earth to forge a new empire for ponykind. Was this mysterious pony, the Nightmare Pretender, a claimant to the throne of Equestria itself? "Nightmare..." Twilight mumbled to herself. She did not know very much about the more dangerous magical beasts, and especially not the elusive nightmares who skulked in mortal dreams. Those old dark creatures were stronger back in the days of divided Equestria. It was plausible one of them had challenged Princess Celestia for the throne. Yet somehow, the Nightmare Pretender was seemly forgotten except as a passing mention in a book about metallurgy. "I guess I might be asking Princess Celestia some questions after all." Twilight said to herself. Forget metallurgy. Forget the literature review. She was going to chase down the Nightmare Pretender lead and make her history professors sweat. But before she went to the princess, she was going to have to do some deep digging. Surely somewhere in the city of Canterlot was another more descriptive mention of it. “This warrants further investigation.”