The Age of the Alicorns is believed by many to be a myth. There has been almost no evidence found that points to the world once being ruled by the all powerful race. Only the existence of Luna and myself have given historians and theorists any indication that such an era might have existed. We have been asked many a time if such a time ever was. Our reply is always the same. "We do not know. The only Alicorns we had ever met that were older than us were our parents, and they never mentioned ruling the world."
I dislike lying to my little ponies.
Unlike other empires, ours did not fall to a greater force, illness or corruption from within. The Alicorns of that era chose to end their reign themselves. Some may think it crazy to end one's own empire, but what they did was believed to be the best choice, at the time. It has now come time to tell what I know, so let us start at the beginning.
It all started during the very early years of ponykind. We had just recently stopped living as nomadic herds and begun building permanent structures upon the land. Life was simple back then. All of that changed however when IT came. I have only other name I found connected with this being of great power was the Visitor. Named for the fact that it visited this world from beyond. It is unknown as to why the Visitor appeared. Did our magic, even in it's infantile state, draw it to our world; or was it simply lonely and in need of friends? I did not know, but what I did know was that, within years of it's appearance, ponies everywhere flourished. What was once small pockets of settlements, strewn across the land, grew to become the most advanced civilization of that era. Great technological advancements were made that have not been seen to this day.
Our civilization was not the only thing that grew, the ponies themselves did as well. Unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth Ponies; they had long ago set aside their differences to reach the heights they could not reach by themselves. A new race had been born, one that combined the abilities of all three pony races: the Alicorn. The majestic race of beings that eventually became the only type of pony to exist.
We did not stop there. The knowledge to control every aspect of our world laid at our hooves, and so we took it. We could control when and what weather would be like in any area of any size, we could terraform the ground into any shape we desired, we could even control the sun and moon, if we wished to. The age of the Alicorns came to be. Fortunately, we were not selfish with our power. We not only kept the balance of the world in check, we secretly became guardians to the non-pony races. We silently helped other races, pushing them to better themselves without even knowing it was us assisting them.
We were this world's light, and with the Visitor to guide us, we could bring this planet to a level of harmony never thought possible. Unfortunately, it did not come to pass. For, the greater the light shines, the bigger the shadow becomes.
They came out of the darkness from a place that is now called Tartarus. Monsters of the land that once hunted ponies--before the arrival of the Visitor--returned, and in great numbers. We thought them all but gone. However, they had simply gone into hiding.
At first it was easy to defend ourselves against them, only having a few casualties here or there. It all changed when our own kind turned against us. There is no knowledge as to why we were betrayed; it could have been that some tried to control these creatures, like we did everything else, but instead became corrupted themselves. Another theory is that some Alicorns just wanted to watch the world burn, and this was their chance.
War. War on a scale that our race had not seen in hundreds of years encompassed the land, and eventually, the world. My story is already long enough, so I will spare all who listen the details I uncovered about this timeframe. We, the guardians of the light, finally won the war after many years of fighting and death. Needless to say, the cost was great. Many dead, the landscape ruined, even the sun and moon could no longer move on their own. We could rebuild, and, besides the celestial orbs, we could fix the damage that had been brought to this world in time. And so we began; we made land fertile again, we moved the sun and moon when it needed to change from day into night and night into day, we even returned to guiding the non-pony civilizations that had been lucky enough to survive the war; but, during this, the Alicorns and the Visitor came to realize something: we had developed far too quickly. Things and concepts that would take centuries to learn, we did it in decades. We left all other nations in the dust in our quest to empower ourselves. We thought ourselves benevolent gods, yet we had almost destroyed this world.
We were not ready to be granted the Visitors gifts. It had come too early in our species’ development, and while we are grateful for It's involvement with our growth, it seems that it was the wrong move at the wrong time. So we came up with a solution, one that both our leaders and the Visitor agreed to. We would disassemble our own empire and restart from a much lower level, without the Visitor.
We destroyed all of our technology and erased all of our records. cities and towns were flattened, some ruins were left to the elements, a few of them still exists today, but there is no concrete proof that Alicorns built them. Lastly, we needed to change ourselves, back into the forms our ancestors once had. The majority of the population pick one out of the three races that predated Alicorns. Surprisingly, a small group decided to become something different, now-a-days, we call them bat ponies, or Thestrals, if one wanted to be politically correct. Others were not so keen on their choice, but given that they were ponies that had once sided with dark forces, we did not go against their wishes. It was thought that it would separate us more from the traitors. The final stage was separation and memory manipulation. Earth Ponies, Pegasi and Unicorns were separated into three tribes, each for their own race. The three races were once at odds with each other, now they must be once again. The memory manipulation made many wary. Some even took to the stars before they permanently lost their ability to do so. The others, however, agreed that it must be done in order to truly restart. Memories were sealed and new ones were put in their place, removing anything relating to our Alicorn past.
Even with the restart of ponykind, we could not just leave them without some form of protection measurements in place, and there was still the problem with the sun and moon. Thus, a very small group of ponies remained as Alicorns, to watch over our kind in secret. My grandparents were among the first generation of watchers; my parents, the second. In time it would be my father who secretly taught unicorns how to move the sun and my mother who did the same with the moon. They did this to gauge the power of the unicorns, and because, at the time, Luna and I were too young to take over for them. We did take over guardianship not to long before Discord showed up, and when we did, Luna and I made a decision. We would no longer watch from a distance. We would instead stand by our ponies. That is how Luna and I became Princesses of Equestria. Together we would bring true harmony to our ponies and maybe even the rest of the world.
I was not alive when the Visitor was here, but I had hoped that one day it would return and together with the races of this world we could enter a brighter future for all.
I never expected what we got instead.