Just a warning: What you are about to read will rock you to your core, because it will seem fantastic and strange and possibly insane but I can assure you from personal experience that it is absolutely true.
The humans are returning.
I know what you're probably thinking. "Humans? Those thundermonkeys from that comic book series?" To which I can only reply that Dark Horse comics have forever polluted the original mythology of humanity and actually it doesn't matter because real humans are and were far more powerful than even I suspected and I don't know how they think about us. Only that we are doomed. Completely doomed.
I'm not sure what we're doomed into, mind. It could be complete destruction of our society, or an incredible improvement and golden age. I'm using doom in the sense that it's unavoidable, not that it's necessarily bad. Or good.
See, this is the part where a lot of professors would just put my paper down because I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but the thing is for a conspiracy to work, it has to have a lot of ponies on a lot of levels all doing something in secret. No, this isn't a conspiracy. There are no secret humans manipulating the laws, there's no ancient society of illumanti defacing old ruins to hide the truth. This is just an ingrained denial into our culture, the ability to look at the evidence and scoff at its blatant fakeness. And for a while, even I thought humans were just some weird world-wide myth, but that didn't stop me from investigating the ancient thundermonkey lore.
Just to be clear though: they're actually apes. Or possibly some kind of walrus seal thing. I'm still unsure.
But that's not important. What they are doesn't matter. What matters is what they did. The comics say they constructed great devices that were immune to magic, but the truth is so much more; they made technology without magic. They learned about how reality worked so much that they were able to forge... almost anything! Great boats made of metal, ships that could go to the moon in days, a vast communication network, bricks that talked, intelligent beings made of steel... oh, but more than that. More than that. They made magic itself.
Well, I say made. I don't know, maybe it existed before humans, but that's not the point. The point, the point is, they established the world's magical field, without which magic as it exists today would just be impractical. Don't believe me? Fair enough, the idea of anything living back then is pretty bizarre. But I can give you evidence, real proof, even exact locations!
When the crystal empire was lost about a thousand years ago, the world's leylines were altered. But even before that, the leylines of the world were changed when the princesses took the Elements of Harmony from the tree of Harmony. It wasn't until the Crystal empire returned, though, that leading thaumatoligists noticed the change. Which makes sense, since back then magic was still not as much of a science as it is now, only really being studied by the nobility, and they probably thought that all the changes were because of Discord or Sombra or whatnot. But now, now that the tree's repaired AND! And it's generated a second thaumic node in the form of Twilight Sparkle's whatever it's called palace, the leylines of the world are almost like they used to be!
Of course, that's all just magibabble. What really matters is this: There is a central node. There is a core to magic. And that core was made by humans.
I first encountered the core when, well, when I was being mind controlled by the changelings. The think is a large black cylinder, with the barest of markings and small seems, made out of a strange translucent material. It was inert and at the time I didn't actually care; all I wanted to was stop princess Cadance from getting to her wedding and be the best bridesmaid I could be. Changeling mind control is actually kind of... cleansing, but not in a good way. But that's not important, the point is the core of magic is located deep inside the crystal mines of Canterlot. Not that I knew that at the time, of course, because of how the leylines were structured. But when the Crystal Empire node reactivated shortly after that and all the scholars were in an uproar about the leylines shifting, I decided to read the reports.
Oh, then Twilight ascended. I used to know her--well, know of her before she became princess. We were in the same classes at Celestia's school, but she wasn't social back then... actually, that might be the reason she ascended so late in life. Not enough friends, and if she's the princess of friendship the important thing is that she ascended using the ELEMENTS OF HARMONY. Which meant, logically, the elements had to channel the entirety of the leyline network, which meant she wasn't just using powerful spells to defeat all the evils.
I kept my eye on them then, those shiney powerful artifacts that channeled all of magic at once. I was still belaboring under the delusion that somehow Celestia was using the leylines of the world to hide human cities or something, I'm not sure what I was thinking, but it paid off. It paid off spectacularly when Twilight put the Elements back in the tree and the leylines shifted again. And I of course updated the leyline-maps before any of the experts noticed because I was near the source, and I tracked town the emeatting spot in the Canterlot mines because hey, I was going to blow this conspiracy wide open!
Stupid, stupid stupid STUPID.
It was still mostly inactive, thank whatever deity there is, but I knew where it was and made a beeline and you know what I saw? I camped out for a week before I figured out what was happening; there was a stack of lights embedded in the thing, the lowest ones all on, and something like every three days another one would suddenly flip on. It took me a while to realize it was a... marker of progress, of energy it was generating. Now that the leylines had been shifted back, there was more magic for it to generate!
But it was slow. It took around three days for a single light to turn on, and there were something like a hundred lights? I did some math, decided I'd be back in a few years, and pursued other avenues of research, because I was a stupid lazy foal who thought "Hey, you know what, I'll be a hero by finding out the truth!" And then Tirek. I don't need to tell about him.
What's really important is Twilight's palace. It multiplies the magic in the leylines exponentially!
I didn't realize this at first, but once I heard about it I thought back to that strange object in the crystal mines. The lights were moving faster now, three lighting up one day, four the next, five the day after that... like the idiot I was I grinned brightly and sat down to wait. This would prove humans were real somehow, I thought, this would throw wide Celestia's secrets!
And then, at last, it woke up.
And sang.
Images, images in my head, of the humans--Humans!--all in their cities, all in their lives. The night sky, so different from what I was used to seeing, a moon with different craters, stars all but unrecognizable. And for a moment I thought I could never be so happy.
Then...
No pony should have to see what I saw. I don't know if it was a war, or if it was a plague, I don't know if it was a meteor or, or aliens. I saw fire, strange forms chasing down children, buildings turned into skeletons, the trees all collapsed, humans fighting, surviving... Their world was ending, but they didn't give up.
Then I saw old humans, planning something. The construction of the Crystal Empire, of the crystal mines, of the tree of harmony, and other sites around the world, all beacons of civilization in this world torn apart. And then, they activated it and I saw humans using magic. Oh, it was crude, but it was powerful, they fought back the monsters--I don't know how to describe the things--and then, as one, they used all the magic of the world, all the magic they had just made, and...
I'm not sure if they transported it somewhere, or... or what. The sky changed, no sun, no moon. And the monsters all stopped.
But... well, without a sun, they couldn't grow plants, and... I think there was a generation or two of suffering. So they made a new sun and moon, setting them spinning around our world, but by that point they were almost gone, and the magic they had was just... nearly tapped. So they entered an enchanted sleep, turning into stone statues.
See, I knew about the statues. I didn't realize they were human, though, I didn't realize that they weren't just sculpted out of tribute. And I didn't realize that the human's souls remained undamaged, even if the statues were just smashed to bits or pulverized. The humans were all sleeping, but now... now the core of magic was completely ready. I saw an image of the statues waking, of the humans taking their places again, and of the sky changing back to how it was.
They want to take this world back. They don't know about, about unicorns, or about pegasi or minotaurs or griffons or chimera or hydras and I don't think they'll give a second thought. After all, to them we're as strange as the monsters that tore them apart. They're ancient, they're desperate, they're vengeful... they did leave us a warning, but it's not going to stop them. When they get here, we need to surrender. We need to completely give up. We need to hope they thing of us as just animals that mutated over the years. They might--might--be willing to see us as people. I don't know. I don't know anything about them. I thought I did, but I don't.
We're doomed.