They had disembarked from the airship at docks that Cress had never seen seen used in his lifetime, though he could see his factory from there. It struck him that the airship's speed meant that Rose probably didn't even have his letter yet. He hoped she was asleep, and wasn't waiting for his return.
Maybe she was looking up at where the airships were coming and going, and gawking at the large steamer that lay at rest. Looking up at him without knowing.
The docks were tall, rusted, and unstable. Still, they held the steamer fast, and Cress had little time to worry before he and his comrades were pounding up the gangplanks to the steamer, hundreds of ponies doing the same around him.
The steamer was choked with soldiers, regular Guards and conscripts shoved together and fighting for space. A lieutenant led his group to an enormous hall, filled with bunks; they settled in, joining what seemed like a hundred other ponies, and waited.
Before long, the floor beneath them rumbled as the engines spun up, and the everything shuddered as the steamer eased off and headed for open sea. Cress wasn't able to get the top decks and they had no windows, and he massively regretted not being able to see Baltimare recede into the horizon.
Two days into the boring and cramped journey, sick of eating sailor's slop, the door opened and finally somepony who was not a crewmember walked out.
"I will tell you about Loyalty's Triumph," the Colonel announced loudly without preamble, walking into the hall in his full gilted uniform.
One of the Lieutenants greeted him, saluting, "You mean to give the briefing, sir? I will get the folder."
"No," the Colonel shook his head, "a story."
Cress sat up in his bunk, suddenly very interested in the Colone's presence, his comrades doing the same.
"The Colonies were at war with the Mainland, centuries before our Central Government. It was fought with technologies you couldn't understand, for reasons lost to time - but Loyalty, steadfast, will never change."
The Heavens had beheld a thousand wars and a thousand thousand dead exchanged between the Mainland and the Colonies. Conflict between Equestria and Eas, the Equestrian Union and the Free Colonies, the Tri-Confederation and the Empire. The names are too numerous to know, but death has forever crossed the Eastern Ocean, paying no heed to why. As in all things, this incalcuable suffering is but a tiny facet to the tale of Equestria.
Yet Loyalty's Triumph is important, for we are about to add another page to its storied history. A great techno-fortress was razed there by the Pegasus Dominion. The first waves of the Fourth Disaster to reach a shore hit here. The Sik's Armada was shattered on the rocks before the Nightmare's Second Coming.
It was but three hundred years ago that it took the name of the ancient Element.
The greatest Magic Cult in memory built an edifice to their powers on the lee shore of the archipeligo. Bitter and fearful ponies raised ceaceless praise to their powers, as the process of a thousand years reached its end. As the magic faded from the rest of our kind, drained by the Unicorn Empire's foundries, or perhaps by the will of the Heavens, the Magic Cult grew strong. The followers of the Old Ways, they called themselves. We can look back on such a name and smile.
Yet it was no idle threat to the security of Equestria. The Colonies were the Cult's plaything. In this they achieved lasting memory, as the Cults and magic worship are still strong in our time in the inhabitants of these distant shores. The Colonies had a fell purpose three hundred years ago. As still another war between the common ponies and the unicorns flamed, the names of their decade-long countries lost to time, the Magic Cult doomed magic in Equestria forever. It is purest irony that they should do so.
The Tree of Harmony was very real in those days. Certainly every one of you were told the story of that Tree in your youngest days; you could scarcely be called ponies of Equestria otherwise. The Living Sun and the Falling Moon banished the God of Chaos with all Six Elements, gifted by the Tree to restore the balance. God of not, wielding all six Elements at once is something the purest and most accomplished of ponies today would die instantly even attempting.
The Magic Cult stole the Tree, after a thousand years resting beneath the Old Castle. A thousand died fighting to the chamber of the Tree, a third of the Castle Guard betraying their fellows after years without a hint of treachery. A hundred fools were blown into the dust of creation, but they were desperate, and the Cult uprooted the Tree and stole it away to the Colonies across the Eastern Ocean. What magic still lived in the earth of Equestria died after that, living on only the peerage of the Unicorns in our days. Nations uncounted had passed even in their days, but the Tree had always been there, the sire of the holy Elements themselves. The entirety of Equestria's soldiers of a hundred kingdoms and empires, ten million ponies, pursued the Cultists.
Warships that were larger than anything seen in our days, dwarfing the wreckage of anything still rusting on our shores, were rent apart and smashed against the foreign shores. Storms that spat upon nature roared over the fleet, crackling with energies that drove common ponies to their knees and unicorns over the side in agony. As is the nature of ponies, the fleet endured the tempest through excruciating suffering. On the the seventh day, the remnants came ashore at a great natural harbor, marching out in the shadow of the great mountain that once towered there.
The assault was violent beyond imagining. The ponies of a hundred realms ground up against arcane horrors, abominations and twisted things created by the fickle power that choked the air around them. Yet these ponies had technologies beyond imagining, and magic was met with technology in decline even in those days, but nevertheless incomprehensibly powerful. What survived from the fleet was enough to raze the great mountain to nothing, even as warships were sucked into the depths, smashed apart by shards of the mountain hurled by ponies glowing with sickening power.
Above all this, however, were ponies not unlike you all, fighting and dying in the collapsing shadow of the mountain. They came ashore and into the city that ringed the harbor, the vast majority common ponies. Certainly they had war-machines more advanced than anything in our days, but in the factories and apartments, it was the common ponies who pressed forward against every instinct, fighting through both cultists and the terrible magic in the air that stirred something wrong within them.
Their bravery could do nothing when the first assault waves succeeded in breaking through to the rubble of the mountain. There they found the Tree, shining with a light that burnt the eyes, having been hidden away in a cave before the battle. It had survived an entire mountain falling upon it, and around it the Magic Cult rallied, empowered and utterly fanatical. Yet the cultists and abominations could still die - the most damning thing was the Tree. The Tree seemed to fight by itself, waves of power ripping apart war-machines and ponies, swatting aside firepower and turning back the Equestrian unicorns present in agony. The common ponies retreated, their will finally broken as their bodies piled up around the Tree in terrible numbers, and they called in the power of the fleet. Yet the Tree endured, and it was as shells and rockets and energies forgotten roared and crashed around that Tree that someone reported the pony at the center, bound to the Tree by arcane chains, glowing with a light like of a Living Sun.
It was blasphemy beyond compare, and that is when the Element of Loyalty arrived, sent by Dominion, its owners at the time. The Bearer of Loyalty strode off of its ship unhindered by the magic, and wasted no time. The battle between the Tree and Loyalty cannot be described. The common ponies that survived could only speak of a light and noise that drove them into the ground, writhing and straining to put their heads deeper into the dirt, feeling like their heads would split open. The only unicorns that survived were the ones that fled. The fleet said it was light so bright they could not look at it, that the crews begged their captains to flee from the horrible wrongness that churned in them. Everyone present spoke of that, the consuming knowledge in them that what was happening was wrong, the Tree and the Element of Loyalty fighting.
Know this: the bearer of Loyalty of this time was one of its greatest. The bearer should have in all rights died very quickly in the battle with the Tree, but magic seared and crackled, a new drive stirred in the breast of every Equestrian present. It was duty to their homeland and their comrades, crossing over race or politics, sending them up and into the maelstrom. Those who could not go on spoke of staring straight into the light of the battle with hatred and not a shred of self preservation. It was Loyalty. In its greatest hour, every pony in the rubble or in the fleet leapt up and was united, and in that moment, Loyalty triumphed. The pony shackled to the Tree was dissolved into the stuff of creation, the cultists and abominations killed. The magic lingered, but the threat of the foul goals the Magic Cult had for the Tree had been destroyed. The bearer of Loyalty died an hour after the battle, smiling its triumph, and the Element was carried back to Equestria in glory. Thus the harbor, one of the largest cities in the Free Colonies, was left in ruin and forever known as Loyalty's Triumph.
The hall was silent. The Colonel opened his eyes, and smiled. "Don't think this is what you're going to fight, ponies. Everything is lesser in our days, perhaps for better. I hope."
"What happened to the Tree, sir?" somepony spoke up.
"It was left behind. They couldn't move it even after a few days, and they were being attacked all the while by remnants and sympathizers of the Magic Cult. They left, vowing to return and uproot it, until it was realized that the tree had been the source of what magic remained in the soil of Equestria. Equestrians never returned for the Tree. Technology has never surpassed those days anyway, so we couldn't now."
"Then why are we going to Loyalty's Triumph, sir?" another pony asked. "I assume that's where we're going?"
"We will secure and patrol the city. There are already thirty thousand Equestrians there, doing much the same."
The Colonel refused further questions, and left. The hall was filled with uneasy ponies that night.
It was a week in when the clouds began to boil up on the horizon, and every pony who'd heard the Colonel was terrified of them. Their ship was larger than anything they'd seen, but if the story was to be believed...
They could see it, the waves smashing against themselves and closing. It almost seemed like the storm was coming for them, rather than they to it, not that it would matter. The Colonel had made it quite clear that the Central Government would spare nothing for the mission that had put them here.
With all eyes in front, no one noticed the smaller ship coming up fast to the stern until it was practically parallel with theirs. It was a greater sight than the storm, furnished in pink and gold and covered in banners, coiling thick black smoke into the sky, its pounding engines audible from two hundred feet of metal decks away. Script and text of an unknown language was inscribed on every exposed surface. Ponies were visible on the deck, swathed in pink.
"The Element of Laughter!" the Colonel called from the top deck above them, and there was a murmur through all that heard him. "Captain, we must keep up with that ship! It will not wait for us!"
Their ship shuddered and groaned alarmingly with the effort, but they managed to keep up. All eyes were glued to the stern of the Element of Laughter, and then to everywhere else as they went through the storm; it was falling away from the Element, the waves settling down and clouds rolling into wisps, and the blue sky hung above them. An arrow pierced the gloom.
There was a hundred whispered explanations of it, pessimism being the most common, but Cress like one above all others.
"Magic doesn't attack its own."
They arrived safely at Loyalty's Triumph, passing by a decayed techno-fortress at its edge, sharp white edges and powered down weapons and banners that still held the color of a passed nation. A battered fleet and a massive city greeted them, and they disembarked at dawn into the clamor of a million voices and constant gunshots.