What Came After
After Sapphire’s victory, life in the Northlands continued much as it always had, though now without as great a threat from dragons or from war. For four centuries, the peace between the three pony races held before falling apart. However, as Discord had predicted, ponykind was able to find a new home in the south.
After the long-awaited Jarlmoot, Jarl Stormcloud was finally named High King of Horizon, and ushered in a new era of prosperity for the earth ponies. Unfortunately, he still kept to the racist policies he’d stood for, and much of Horizon’s non-earth population fled to other lands. However, never again did Stormcloud raise a weapon against another pony, returning to the Greymanes in his later life and devoting himself to the Way of the Voice.
Out of respect, it wasn’t until after Stormcloud’s death that Zest launched her revolution and established the Earth Pony Confederacy. She’d been right in thinking that earth ponies were tired of the old monarchy, and she met little resistance as she overthrew the old system, executing Horizon’s nobles with a new invention of hers, the guillotine. Only Jarl Radiance the Fair escaped her purges.
After Sapphire’s sacrifice, Steadfast ended up spending quite a bit of time in Seclusion, where he tried to establish a northern branch of the Companions. It never took hold, but it soon became a lesser goal in his mind. Radiance and he grew very fond of each other, and were married just before Zest’s revolution forced them to flee Seclusion and go into hiding.
Together they worked to found a secret society that would help guide Horizon in the right direction now that an utterly insane pony had taken over. Their descendants were eventually able to infiltrate the Confederacy’s government and place themselves close to the Chancellery. As Zest’s descendants became increasingly more unstable leaders, Radiance’s and Steadfast’s tried to rein them in. It was Zest’s distant descendent Chancellor Puddinghead that helped discover Equestria, but didn’t do so without Smart Cookie, a distant descendent of Radiance and Steadfast.
Mephalda the Meek returned to her secluded mountain valley, emerging only to visit with her friends and check on Sapphire. As pegasi fled from Horizon she welcomed them into her home, and her family became the leaders of the small town that grew up. As the windigos slowly crept southward, the Featherrest Isles were swallowed up, and the Pegasari Dominion made an attack on the southern nations, stopped only because Mephalda’s descendants offered up the mountain valley for them to live in.
Commander Typhoon did his part to try to defuse the anti-unicorn and anti-earth pony sentiments in his nation, but it wasn’t enough. The Dominion had lost a war and the soldier-race of pegasi took it very poorly. Still, he was able to keep control of the nation out of the hooves of more radical pegasi, and brought prosperity to the Featherrest Isles.
His descendants served as High Commanders for many generations, even up to the invasion into the southern nations. The quick thinking of Commander Monsoon averted the crisis when she agreed to move into the secluded mountain valley Mephalda had once lived in, naming it Peleponysia. In thanks for the gift of land, the Peleponysian Commanders always made sure a descendent of Mephalda served with them, all the way up to Private Pansy who served beneath Commander Hurricane and helped discover Equestria.
Silver Cuirass served as the last Emperor of the Unicorn Empire. After his death, his only child, Gilded Armor, took his place, and served as Unicornica’s first queen. Though the counts protested at first, they eventually accepted the mare on the throne, due to the prosperity she brought their land during her rule. Her descendants ruled the land fairly, even though they were forced to move the nation’s capital several times to escape the advancing ice, first retreating to Saddlegrad, and then to Kvatch. It was her distant descendant, Princess Platinum, who attended the peace conference at Splitten, which the earth ponies renamed Solidarity after being forced to move there to escape the oncoming winter. She also discovered Equestria, but not without another pony to help her.
Mystic returned to the College of Winterhorn, eventually becoming the college’s arch-mage, and worked to restore the magical institution to its former glory. It was all for naught, however, as the College eventually fell into the ocean and was consumed completely. She was broken up by the event, and was no longer to cast even the simplest spells. Broken inside, she moved to Unicornica. The destruction of the College of Winterhorn affected her so deeply that her descendants were also unable to do all but the most mundane magic, until Clover the Clever, who Star-Swirl took under his wing and trained before she became an assistant to Princess Platinum and helped discover Equestria.
Star-Swirl later became known as Star-Swirl the Bearded, the greatest wizard of all time. Through his research on time and aging spells, he was able to live an incredibly long life, dying at the age of 418. He never left the Northlands, dying just a few short years before the exodus into Equestria. He never was able to complete the spell he’d started for Sapphire, but kept the unfinished portion anyway, in case one day somepony else was able to complete his work.