Princess Twilight had her plan hours before she saw the Lotus Blossom tree. The tree simply crystalised her thoughts, turned them from protean mires of hope and worry and what-ifs into a granite-paved path ahead. Before the tree, she knew what she had to do. After the tree, she believed it.
Twilight was in the Oxfjord Library again. She had burned through all essential princess-related activities before lunchtime, refused further visitors and delayed her appointments, left Ponyville just after midday, and arrived in Canterlot via Twilyport shortly after three. She would stay in the library until 2am, return to Ponyville by 4am, sleep for four hours and do the whole thing again tomorrow. Everything else—sleep, friends, food that wasn’t vending machine ramen—could wait until she knew the solution to Big Problem No. 1.
The problem was more widely known as the Brewing Equestrian Civil War, but the term Big Problem No. 1 caused less involuntary twitching and shame spirals whenever Twilight thought about it (which was currently dozens of times per minute), so she preferred the latter designation. Or better yet, BPN1.
Twilight was here to re-read, to re-think and to re-search. Equestria hadn’t had a true civil war in a millenium. ‘Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’ was a truth that had laid low leaders of far grander domains than her own. Twilight vowed that if she failed, it would not be born of sloth or ignorance.
Besides, the books, notes and self-imposed exile let her temporarily forget the business with Rainbow Dash and Golden Retriever, which, to her tremendous guilt, seemed to weigh on Twilight’s mind as heavily as BPN1.
Twilight could remember most of the names and dates, but knew this was far too important to trust to old memories. Still, she chose to read about the Battle of Pasty Post in 198 OE first, because it was the best-case scenario for an active civil war and it added levity to a place where there was very little levity to be found. The night before the battle, the opposing armies of House Daisybutter and House Twinklestar steeled themselves for the coming battle by getting really, really drunk. On the morn, House Daisybutter woke up an hour late and marched the the battlefield without taking their armor; House Twinklestar marched in the wrong direction entirely and nearly invaded an alehouse. By the time they had found their armor and the right battlefield respectively, a wild storm came from Griffhala, and after being thoroughly soaked and chilled they gave up, went home, and negotiated a peace treaty. They then did the exact same thing the next year, except their battle was prevented by a stampede of hormone-crazed bunny rabbits. This was taken as an omen of sorts, and the second peace treaty stuck.
As the bovine philosopher Maisey-Boo the Perverse once said, ‘History repeats itself, first as farce, and then as even bigger farce.’
Twilight read an account of the Hoofington Strife of 1344 OE, and that had no such humor inherent. The Hoofington Strife was neither particularly vicious nor particularly grand, not thunder or hail but a dreary, overcast time that stretched on longer than it had any real right to. Two demesnes had erupted into war over the rights to a river between them. A few pitched battles exploded between them and produced a dull, horrible stream of wounded soldiers and cold bodies, but most of the war stayed as skirmishes, riots in border towns, raids that were more robbery than assault. Neither party dared to cease all industry, conscript the peasantry and ride to war, so the tension simmered year after year until there was so much anger, such bitterness, such hate between the opposing villages and townships that a strange cold crept in long before wintertime and twisted shapes wrapped themselves around the clouds above and the two sides very hastily beat their spears into hoes, sent offerings of good tidings and arranged a few dozen intermarriages a day until the strange creatures left for the aether.
Depressingly, she could have switched ‘Hoofington Strife of 1344OE’ for any number of conflicts and the description would have been identical. Bloody battles, full of brutalities muted only by the long passage of time and the dull footnote they were given in the historical parchments, quickly waning into a series of skirmishes and petty banditry, only fading away when outside circumstances forced unity. Windigoes once or twice—usually after court wizards had meddled with mind-magic to whip their own forces into a frenzy—but it could have been dragon raids, or bandit encroachment, or a national war, or a third demesne reuniting them via conquest, or Discord’s molten bunny-jackals, or sudden mountains.
Twilight took a piece of parchment, and under the heading ‘Category One Conflicts,’ wrote down the names and dates of the important ones, listed their pertinent characteristics, noted their resolutions, and referenced academic papers that examined them in greater depth and explored how they might have been prevented or ended sooner.
She stopped a moment before filing that piece of parchment away, and under the heading wrote a subtitle: ‘Second-best case outcome in event of BPN1.’
The next set of conflicts were less like a sudden forest fire and more like a snowball rolling down a hill. The warring factions never had the time or resources to mount a full assault, or the ruler could not unite all of his nobles in time, or the attacks were only ever meant to be retaliation for some offence, real or imagined, by the opposing party.
These conflicts never had the grand battles, but their effects were more insidious still. Fear was ruled a substitute for conquest. Mercenary companies took the place of conscripted armies, and after the money ran dry they went to ground, looting farms for food and taking peasants for sport. There was no concept of ‘honor in warfare,’ the lines between scouting and banditry blurred, terror and bloodshed became ends rather than means. Outsiders were shunned, more than usual.
Such wars were blights, even after truces were drawn and concessions were made, the villages and the ponies and the noble families never really recovered. The loathing and anger remained, simmering beneath the surface, ever eager to find an outlet. There were parts of Southern Equestria that still hadn’t recovered from the Forty-Years War. When one side conquered another after a war, the results were truly horrific, and Twilight was glad for the distance that the old, dry narratives provided. Entire towns were erased from existence, and the winners seemed to take sadistic pleasure in such erasures.
These were ‘Category Two Conflicts.’
Category Three Conflicts came in two varieties: rolling conquests where a strongmare would take over weaker, neighboring states, absorb their wealth and armies, and continue to expand until they met an implacable foe, retreated to quell internal strife, or otherwise lost momentum. They were bloody from sheer size alone. The law of the land would be the strongpony’s spear. Only one such ‘empire’ would need to arise for modern Equestria to change forever. More than one noble had the land and funds to tempt such dreams. They could go from minor lords to controlling more land and ponies than the Royal Pony Sisters.
The second variety was well-known to the Northeastern Griffons: the Flustercluck. Four neighboring demesnes all trying to fight each other at once. Pitched battles over strategically-worthless breweries. Succession crises turning capital cities into wine-drenched assassination fests. One fiefdom conquering a demesne, only to be taken over by a different demesne. A bar-fight between nobles turning into a war and then into sixteen wars over twelve decades. Times when Equestria avoided foreign invasion simply because belligerent neighbors peered over the fences and thought they’d rather not get involved.
Whatever the exact variety, a Category Three Conflict would mean unpredictable, irrevocable, devastating change. Equestria would be unrecognisable.
A Category Four Conflict was currently a purely hypothetical concept. A wide-scale war that escalated indefinitely until it consumed all of Equestria. Massive magical weapons would start as threats, then tactical displays, and then full-scale strategic use. Modern communications and logistics would allow armies to travel further and faster than ever before, and prevent refugees from escaping. A modern army, equipped with mages and weaponry devised with natural philosophy in mind could attack a poorly-defended town at noon and leave everypony dead before dinner. Every mare, stallion and foal would be involved in the war effort. Every village would become a police state.
There was no good end to a Category Four Conflict. At the better end, a few scarred victors would rule a ruin. At the worse end, ash and dust.
As the hours turned to nights and Doctor Princess Twilight continued her schedule of reading, referencing, and meticulous note-taking, depressing patterns revealed themselves, ones she had not seen when she was first taught these histories.
Ponies turned insular in times of war, viciously distrustful of outsiders. Griffons and zebras experienced their share of xenophobia, but the donkeys had the worst of it: pogroms and witch hunts were distressingly common in old times. They would be blamed for anything, for bad crops, plagues, faulty intelligence. When a noble needed money and land to raise his army, the donkey landowners would be rounded up, driven off, and worse, the spoils divided among the pony gentry. When popular sentiment turned sour, the nobles would whip their subjects into a frenzy about poisoned wells and Asinine conspiracies. These attacks only began to fade away after Nighmare Moon’s banishment, and overt attacks disappeared less than a century ago. Three-hundred years ago the region of Arborlysium—where the Apple clan originally hailed from, among others—experienced such a brutal pogrom that donkeys referred to it even now as The Great Misery.
The effects on magic and science were equally unhappy. There was a popular theory among the educated, dinner-party classes that conflicts increased the rate of technological progress, that leaders gave engineers and thaumaturges their backing to give them any kind of edge, that the necessity of war became the mother of all sorts of inventions.
Twilight had long known this theory to be incorrect, but oh how it was incorrect! Applied sciences accelerated during warfare, this was true. After all, every researcher turned away from their esoteric hobby-horses and towards theories of not-getting-stabbed. The collected knowledge in their minds, in the minds of their apprentices, in the thousands of pages on their bookshelves were all deployed for practical purposes.
But they had not discovered a new method of farming knowledge, they were merely eating their seed corn. Applied technologies were constructed from their pool of knowledge, and those pools became stagnant. Basic research withered. Those ‘esoteric hobby-horses’ that their patrons chided them for pursuing and rewarded them for pursuing were the questions that made the current batch of technologies, both physical and thaumaturgical, possible.
In fact, under any reasonable estimate of scientific and philosophical progress—the Alfalfa-Oghma Continuum, Side Winder’s Backwards Space-Time Consideration Chart, Star Swirl’s Minor Slood Assemblage, Night Quill’s Implacably Advancing Guesstimate—learning slowed down immeasurably not just during war but for years afterwards. Intellectuals could no longer correspond with scholars in other states. Foals were taught how to fight, not how to read. Libraries and towers were pulled down and burned. All literature was checked for steganographic messages or subversive sentiments, and destroyed along with its authors if it didn’t pass muster.
Twilight now realised that many ‘dark ages’ and ‘dead centuries,’ said to be times of tragic backwardness after previously amazing progress, were simply lulls occurring after long periods of war had exhausted the basic research, and scholars struggled to rebuild the infrastructure of monasteries, libraries, and lairs. Likewise, ‘golden ages’ were times when relative peace had allowed trade, arts, and scientific progress to continue unmolested.
By the time that these considerations were rolling around inside Twilight’s mind, she was already working on the next set of problems. Diplomatic solutions. Potential aggressors. Probabilities of conflicts type one through four. Possible casualty totals. Evacuation routes. Blood pacts. Proportionate retribution schemes. Targeted dissuasion.
Nothing came of it, not yet. Every solution was too weak, and would risk total warfare, or too drastic, and involve deeds that made her stomach uneasy, and her chest ache for simpler times.
She flicked through Steel Thaumocracies: Long-Lasting Conflicts In Old Equestria by Happy Days, an account of the Forty-Years War she had already read. Not the worst conflict in Equestrian history, nor the cleanest. In the middle of the book, there were copies of engravings and drawings made at the time.
There was an engraving of a town called Lotus Blossom, a town allied with the Dragonlily Thanes, after it was conquered by the Earl of Foxglove’s forces. Many of the townsfolk were accused of banditry and espionage.
The engraving showed a tree, a grand, sprawling oak, more than two-hundred years old and tended to with love by generations of ponies. Thirty ponies dangled from the branches.
Eight of them had no cutie-marks.
Twilight made her mind up.
Later that night she returned to Ponyville with her folders of notes neatly in order and an oddly tranquil smile on her face. Ponyville looked a thousand miles from warfare. It bustled and buzzed with barter and building and carpentry and merchantry and all the trade that comes with interesting times and bags of money. The smell of lilacs and broom and the evening batch of bear-claws from Sugarcube Corner hung in the air, following Twilight even as she walked into the library. Spike’s giant, adolescent form lounged in a reading chair.
“Hey Twi,” he said, glancing up from a Daring Do book, “good day at the other library?”
“Yes, thanks,” she replied. “Very productive.”
“Good to hear. I was gonna make some dinner for me and Golden, see if I can still rule the kitchen when I’m seven-feet tall, you hungry?”
“Actually, Spike, don’t worry,” said Doctor Princess Twilight Sparkle, her oddly tranquil smile still lingering on her lips. “I’m going to order a take-out.”