To ken my tale, ye must understand that the Equestria into which I was born was a very different Realm than the one that ye now do know.
'Twas a smaller Realm. The Sisters' writ ran from the north end of the Vale of Avalon across to the Hollow Shades and thence to Fillydelphia. To the north was the Crystal Empire. Then down the coast of the Stormy Sea to the Gulf River; thence to the Motherwater, and up that valley to the Big Muddy, and up that river about half the way, until our borders marched with the Confederation of the Speaker-Ponies and eventually met the Crystal Empire again. What is now our southwest was in the grip of the cruel Coatl of Mexicolt, who had come north after the fall of the Heartspire; and the great plains were firmly in the hold of the nomadic Buffalo, while savage Griffons ruled the northwestern forests, raiding Pony settlements and quite frequently eating Ponies as well. The Sisters held less than one-sixth the lands they do today, and even within their borders there were many small Realms ruled by Deer and Dragons and Minotaurs; and besides that much was howling wilderness, tenanted but by beasts and barbarians and monsters.
Yet, 'twas also a larger Realm. Ye today may fly swiftly across the continent by steamboat and express train and high-soaring airship. In my breathing days only Pegasi, and those few very wealthy or very powerful non-Pegasi who could afford to hire Pegasus teamsters, could do thus. Most Ponies were limited to the speed of their hooves, or the sails of a cog or oars of a galley. It took days to travel between towns; weeks between cities; months between nations. The roads were few and poor. Every journey was an expedition, and wise Ponies traveled in large and well-armed companies, for between the cities and towns bandits and pirates fell upon lonely or careless wayfarers.
Most Ponies never traveled more than fifteen or so leagues from their birthplace. Those who did travel and came home again were hailed as heroes, and other Ponies hung on their every word at the taverns. Those who traveled often, the traders and riverponies and sailors and caravaneers; they were breeds apart from common Ponies regardless of Kind, and had their own strange customs. They were brave and often hard Ponies, for such one had to be in those times to live for long, on sea or river or road.
Most of us simply stayed in our towns and villages. Cities were walled, as were most towns and some villages. Steadings apart from villages, such as the roadside inns, were well-built and strong against attack. Where there were no walls, the Ponies would build strait and mazy ways into their villages, so that they might confuse and delay bandits. Those narrow, twisting trails that lead into Sunney Towne -- in our breathing days, we crafted them for just that cause. Later, of course, we fell into ... but that gets ahead of my tale.
As ye might imagine, we were very loyal to our homes. Ye today are citizens of Equestria, all subjects together of the Sisters; but in my time a Pony was first the citizen or burger or villager of her city or town or village; next of her province; only distantly to the Crown of Equestria as a whole. This was more than empty words; not uncommonly we might have to fight hoof-to-hoof against raiding thieves who would spoil us of the little we had -- and it was little by your day's measure! -- and if we lacked loyalty to our own, soon we would have naught at all.
Only the wealthiest traveled for pleasure, though it was not unknown for brave souls to join a pilgrimage to perform some mission; and if they came home again they would remember this as the great deed of their lives. Today ye think nothing of taking to the road and quitting one town to move to another; back in my time such was an act of great hope or despair. One did not know if one would live through the trek, or be welcomed with kind words or raised spears at journey's end.
And yet, I am the daughter of two Ponies who were born over fifty miles away, in Pie-Towne -- do you still have that place? I have seen recent maps, and ye do call it Nickerlite or South-Dunnich, I believe. Nickerlite seems to be close to where Pie-Towne was, and South-Dunnich a couple leagues south of it, into the hills; we had a Dounnitza there in my day, and there were Pies all through that region then, and after -- I knew a Harmonia PIe somewhat over two centuries ago, more toward your time, so I wonder ...
Yes, I have seen Pinkie Pie! I have sometimes crossed your bridge as an unseen vapor in the dead of night, braving the river-pull for that I might see new Ponies, and warm myself somewhat at the edges of your life-lights, and I have seen her. A pink zany, an amusing-Pony, who leads your festivals, is she not? Yes, and she looks very much like Harmonia, to the point that I have sometimes wondered if she were of her line ...?
Ye do not know? It makes no matter. There were things about Harmonia you would not have much liked, though she did help keep the river clear of pirates in her day, which is an action for which I cannot fault her. It is what she did after ... but never ye mind.
In any case, the story of Sunney Towne beginneth in Pie Towne, about ten years before my birth, and twenty-five before my death.
In the Year of Harmony Four Hundred and Seventy-Five, Pie Towne was a fair-sized town by our reckoning, with over two thousand Ponies dwelling there. Now, for some reason, the affliction which we called the Blank-Flank -- an illness which may be noted by the fact that those who suffer it never do show their Mark, not even when full-grown -- was unusually common in that place. The Blank-Flank ran in families, and the families who had branches of Blank-Flanks were the Hoofs, the Leafs, the Stars, the Gifts, the Neos -- and the Pies themselves, who were the founding family of Pie-Towne.
The Hoofs were one of the worst afflicted. Pretty Hoof, mine own great-grand-dame, was Blank-Flanked; she did wed Blanken Pie, who also had the Curse. When two Cursed do wed, their children will almost always bear the Curse. And indeed, their daughter ws Dainty Hoof, who was mine grand-dame; she did wed Greyneo, and their child was Grey Hoof, whom ye did meet at the stream crossing, though he was of course then less terrible.
Thou, Snips, wert asleep at the time. Oh, that was no nightmare. He was trying to draw thee to him, that he might devour thee.
I will wait while thou do again use my chamber-pot.
So a quarter-century before I did die, there were at Pie Towne four friends, and they were young Grey Hoof, then younger than ye twain, younger than I was when at my death. And his most special friends were Starshine, who ye have not met and will not meet, for it was her fortune to die full fifteen years before we others, so she did not become a Wraith; Three Leaf, whom ye did meet in the forest; and Mitta Gift, the youngest and sweetest of them, who was to become mine own mother.
And at that same time Pretty Hoof and Blanken Pie, distinguished elders of full fifty and more years each -- we lived shorter lives in that time -- did journey to the Foreverfree City, which today lies in ruins at the feet of the Castle of the Sisters, but then was a great city of over a hundred thousand Ponies, the seat of the Sisters and thus ruling-city of all the Realm. And there they made petition before Princess Celestia Herself, and did ask for lands to settle, that the Blank-Flanks might have their own town.
And generous Celestia did grant their plea, and gave them vacant lands in a valley that -- well, to make it plain, is the one in which is this hill and the cavern where we now do sit. And they did promise to name their village in Her honor, by token of that to express their gratitude to her for these lands. And Celestia was well-pleased by their promise.
Then did Dainty and Blanken return to Pie-Towne, and gathered their families and those of their friends and followers, and the next year an hundred Ponies did quit Pie-Towne, and travel with hired guards down the Muddy and Avalon, debarking roughly where is now Southern Ponyville, but was then the fortified port of Riverbridge. And with them came our four young friends, and here in what was then the northwestern part of the Forest Foreverfree did we raise our town, but a quarter-day's walk south of Riverbridge, where we and Celestia had figured should be safe.
So there they raised Sunney-Towne naming it thus to honor their promise to Princess Celestia.
I wish ye could have seen the place -- well, ye might see the illusion Grey Hoof does now cast, but that is but a pale shadow of what it once was. 'Twas never a large village -- at its height we had no more than two hundred Ponies -- but we made our walls the woods themselves, and our most Talented Lifeweavers, led by Wise Leaf who was Three Leaf's grand-dame -- she was no Blank-Flank, but she came to protect her daughter Silent Leaf, who was Wise Leaf's mother, for Silent Leaf was both Blank-Flanked and simple-minded, and might have come to harm if left lonesome -- they created the woods-maze that still surrounds our village, and which Three Leaf now does keep, that we might be warded against rough and brutal strangers.
'Twas small, but full of life, and 'twas warm and bright and happy. That is what I do mind of my young years -- always was I girded by love, always was I happy. Days now long gone ...
Now to explain this next part, I may make mine own father out to be a bad Pony, which he never was until his final madness and long Curse. No, 'twas quite the other case! -- he was full of Life and Light, so full that he must needs overflow, and mares were drawn to him and ...
... Grey Hoof was much-beloved.
He was always merry, and he made one merry when one met him, and in life this was a good and clean thing, of which the geas ye did feel from him yester-eve was but a dark shadow of his corruption. Three Leaf loved him, at first when he was but a colt and she a filly, and when he was still a young stallion -- somewhat younger than ye twain -- he lay with Three Leaf, and she grew big with foal.
Now he would have wed her, but Three Leaf's birth had been shameful. For Silent Leaf was simple, and knew not the ways of stallions, but was herself wanton. So Silent Leaf had gotten with foal by an unknown sire, and Three Leaf came of that siring. And unkind Ponies, of whose number alas included Pretty Hoof and Dainty Hoof, from what I have heard, said that as Silent Leaf had been wanton, so too must be Three Leaf, and they prevailed on Grey Hoof not to betroth her. for they said that the child might not be his.
So he did not, and when he did not, Three Leaf in her pride would not deny the calumny, though in truth she had never known any other Pony thus. She separated herself from him, and their friendship was long sundered. And Three Leaf bore Gladstone, who grew up tainted by bastardy, and ever since Gladstone has been wrathful, for he feels he must prove himself a worthy son of his sire. The more so because Gladstone, though he will deny it, is no Blank Flank like the others; he was wont to scrape off his Mark at intervals; and since the Curse must do so every day.
That is something else about Blank-Flank, and a reason why Pretty Hoof and Blanken Pie's plan was flawed. Not all children of Blank-Flanks are themselves Blank-Flanks. Ye have noticed that I am not, and nor is Gladstone. Blank-Flank doth not always run true. This will be important to my tale.
Grey Hoof had long loved Starshine, who was by all accounts wondrous beautiful, though I never knew of certain for she died when I was less than one year old. Starshine came of a family of good repute, and was herself a good maiden, by all I have ever heard. Mine own grand-dam Dainty Hoof did encourage the match, and so Grey Hoof wed Starshine, and their daughter was Starlet -- whom ye may meet, if ye be unlucky. But Starshine was sickly, and she never did recover from Starlet's birth, and Grey Hoof had no more children by her.
To explain what happened next, I must needs tell ye something of the way things wended in the wider world.
The very year we did found Sunney Towne, the Last Emperor of the North did ascend to the Crystal Throne. He was Prince Crimson Quartz, but the world would know him by his reign-name Sombros, as the sages called him, or King Sombra, as he would be named more commonly.
At first, much good was hoped from him, for he had been a friend of Equestria, and of Princess Luna in particular, when he had been young. Indeed, he had dwelt a time at Dounitza near Pie-Towne, with his sister Princess Iolite the Kind, and his leman and follower, the Loyal Lady Tourmaline, as she was known to all. They had all been driven from power by the oppressions of their cruel elder brother, Prince Morion the Black who had seized the throne.
Princess Luna had helped save him from Morion, and had wanted to lead an army north to overthrow the tyrant, but her Sister forbade, and Crimson had instead fought in the army of his other brother Aventurine and in a great battle Crimson and Tourmaline slew Morion. Aventurine was enthroned for a time, until he fell ill and died, and then Crimson became Emperor, as I have just related.
For a while now, the North had been growing colder and the lands of the Crystal Empire harder places in which to live, and the crops failed: though the Crystal City itself was kept warm by the radiance of the Crystal Heart. And the cold winds blew down as far as Equestria, and our own crops began to fail.
So hunger stalked the land, and swarms of refugees came south from the Crystal Empire, both from famine and the cruelties of Morion while he was North-King. And these refugees ate up more food, and the poorest Ponies greatly suffered, and hard and masterless Ponies took to the roads and became beggars and bandits, robbing their fellows. Thus things grew worse in Equestria as well.
In the histories this is called the Century of Disaster, because things had begun to go badly around the Year of Harmony 400, and they would get worse until they reached their climax in the Year of Harmony 500. With famine and banditry came plague and pestilence, and many old illnesses got worse, and new ones appeared to afflict us, including the terrible and contagious Mark-Pox, which caused false Marks to appear all over the victim's body, and impel her to a frenzy of motion, until her body burned out from the strain and she perished.
I see that you are familiar with this. It broke out in Ponyville? Well it was, then, that the herbalist Zecora was able to contain it, for it is one of the worst plagues that ever was,
The cold got worse, and the Sisters did discover that it was the work of the oldest enemy of Equestria, the one which had first attacked our foremothers and driven them from the Old Homeland of the Three Tribes. It was the Windigoes, united under a terrible Queen of uncanny intellect and fell might, who were allying with the Frost Giants and the Lady of the Ice to bring about the Final Winter that would cover up the whole world in eternal ice.
So the Sisters did go forth, and journeyed into the Frozen Waste, north of even the Crystal Empire, and they they did battle with the Frost Giants and Windigoes and the frightful great Children of the the Lady, and somewhere in the Uttermost North they found the Windigo Queen and defeated her. The Sisters then imprisoned her in a shell of Imperial Crystal, and cast the crystal into the South where her minions could not free her. And there she would fume in impotent wrath for more than a millennium.
But the Sisters learned something important in their quest. They found out that King Sombra had secretly allied with the Windigo Queen against Equestria. And so the Crystal Empire, which was the greatest ally of Equestria, stood revealed as her secret enemy. And this was all Sombra's fault: for he was ruling now as a tyrant, oppressing the ancient families of the Crystal Unicorns and turning on the Derechean Pegasi who had guarded the Empire for millennia. Those citizens who remained were increasingly become slaves, subjected to Sombra's terrible mind control magicks.
Plagues -- with which we now realized Sombra may have had some connection, for he was a master of fell sciences thought lost since the Age of Wonders, swept the land. Those touched us even in our little village of Sunney Towne, far to the south, for they spread with the marching armies and streaming refugees, and indeed every casual traveler.
I had mentioned that Starshine was grown sickly. She became so ill that she could no longer be a good wife to Grey Hoof, or take care of little Starlet -- and she was already carrying her second foal. Her best friend from her young fillyhood was Mitta Gift -- she who was to become mine own mother -- and Mitta was a great help to Starshine, helping her keep house and tend Starlet. And it was Starshine herself who suggested that Grey Hoof take a second wife, in the Morgan-way, and that this wife should be the Mitta -- for she had seen that Grey Hoof and Mitta admired one another, and she wanted to be sure that Grey Hoof would have somepony to love him, when she herself was gone. So Grey Hoof wed Mitta also along Starshine. And soon Mitta was also with foal -- mine own self in her womb.
Yes, Starshine was, by all I have heard of her, simply that good a mare. I have often wished I might have known her. Perhaps when I am at last released, I shall.
And perhaps I shall then know her second child too, though I do not know what might happen to such a little mite, after the end of its short time in the mortal world. For a short time was all it had.
For in the Year of Harmony Four Hundred and Eighty Five -- a year very important to me though I remember it not well at all -- the Sweating Sickness struck Sunney Towne. And Ponies died, and died, and died.
Starshine was afflicted, but thanks to the care of brave Mitta, who despite my weight within her tended her through the worst of it, she did not then die. But Starshine fell very ill, and she lost her foal stillborn. Then Starshine's spirit and health were alike broken beyond repair. And as I was being born, on Hearth's Warming Eve; Starshine was dying; and before I had lived a month upon the Earth, Starshine was gone.
My father's mind was shaken, for Starshine had been the great love of his life. And he blamed the world outside, for it had been from that source that the Sweating Sickness had come. And from that time on, he became less and less friendly to strangers from beyond Sunney Towne, trying against all reason to keep out plagues to come.
Meanwhile, outside our little village, great armies were massing both south and north of the marches with the North-Realm. Sombra had twisted the Crystal Heart, and its fell radiance twisted in the night sky, a banner of evil raised in the north, its power turned against the Sisters, so that they would be weakened in approaching it. And plague upon plague came south with the hordes of refugees. The war had not yet begun in open truth, but all Ponies who were not small fillies like unto myself knew it was coming, and that it would be calamitous when it came, perhaps enough to wreck both Realms for ever and ever.
The Moon Princess hoped she could fend off the final horror. She was the High Lady of War, but she had always loved the Crystal Empire, and her heart sank at the thought of having to turn her own strength and wit against the Ponies of the North. Crimson Quartz had once been her friend; could he not be turned from his terrible course? So she journeyed north, on a mission of peace.
When I knew her later, she never told me plain what passed between her and Crimson Quartz who had been, but who was now wholly Sombra. Only hints ... and I will not speak them, for I have had mine own thoughts on that matter, I have had a millennium and more to ponder upon what must have gone wrong, and some of my surmises have been very dark. She did say once that she had hoped to still find love in his heart, but that she now found only hate; that Sombra had "fallen into Shadow."
She had departed for the north to the cheers of thousands of hopeful Ponies; she came back quietly, a new darkness in her eyes. And after that, there was nothing to do but make war.
The Sisters struck straight at the Crystal City; Princess Luna told me once that they chose this course both to spare the provinces of the North-Realm devastation, and because they feared what Sombra might summon if given the time of a long war. She said once that Sombra was building a Device that could ... well, that is neither here nor there. The fact is that they struck straight, and caught Sombra by surprise, and managed to force Sombra to a duel before they needs must fight his legions, and thus did not slaughter the Ponies of the North.
And things went wrong, for when they defeated Sombra, or while they were fighting Sombra -- I never knew which, for Princess Luna was never clear on this point -- both Sombra and the Crystal City were sucked into another plane of existence; some sort of Shadow Limbo. And so it remained, until two years ago when the city -- and Sombra -- came back. And the younger Princesses, and Shining Armor and Spike the Dragon, did defeat the Tyrant of the North.
I do read your newspapers. 'Tis one of my main diversions, here in mine own Limbo.
Well, ye might think that our troubles in Equestria were now over, but in fact they were but begun. With the vanishing of the Crystal Heart, lost along with the Crystal City, one of the main checks on the Windigoes had also vanished. The Frozen Waste began creeping southward, the Great Children of the Ice crushing evertything north of the Crystal Mountains, whose heights, empowered by the Earth-currents, their great icy bulks could not yet cross. The Windigo Queen was gone, and for that reason alone their attack was badly-teamed and fuddled; had it not been for the Sisters' earlier deed in imprisoning her, Princess Luna thought the Frozen Waste might have overrun all that had been the Crystal Empire, as far south as Manehattan.
But the world grew colder -- it was what Princess Luna called a "Little Ice Age," which she said the scientists of the Age of Wonders, armed with their antediluvian lore, had found to be much more common than the greater ones. Again there were crop failures, dearths of food, even local famines. This was the case in Equestria, where the Princesses labored mightily to rush grain to the affected provinces. It was far worse north of the old border.
With the Crystal City gone, the remaining provinces of the Crystal Empire flailed about all willy-nilly, like unto a snake whose head hath been hewn from its body. Governors declared themselves Emperors, and fought their fellows who had done in like wise. They formed armies and then lacked the gold and bread to sustain them, so they disbanded them and the masterless soldiers formed bands of brigands and pillaged their own provinces, or those of their neighbors. Ponies -- many Ponies, died of want and cold.
Diseases bred and spread through populations weakened by one cause or another or many. Some were ones we had always had with us; some ones that had only appeared in the reign of Sombra, and may have been the products of his biomantic art. It did not matter. Diseases need no evil mind to direct them; once they afflict a land, they will spread and slay Ponies irregardless of their births or loyalties. Luna told me more than once that this was why the Age of Wonders had forbidden "biological warfare," and I can see why they would do so.
The chaos up north spilled over into Equestria. The warring Governors threatened Equestrian lands. The swarms of brigands knew no borders; they raided south when ever they did see the chance for spoils. And plagues, of course, know no borders.
The Princesses had no choice but to act, lest our own lands be laid waste. Princess Celestia led the effort within Equestria to bring succor to the suffering and put down brigandage; and Princess Luna led an army north to pacify the warring Governors and help them organize their own relief.
Princess Luna told me later that what she saw up north was truly terrible: far worse than anything that was happening in Equestria. Whole villages frozen to death by freak winds from the Frozen Wastes, winds of course bought by the Windigoes. Other villages where every Pony was dead, felled by one or another plague, the corpses simply lying about unburied where they had dropped. Whole districts in which the hunger was so bad that mothers had eaten their own foals, and starving mobs attacked her very armed companies, so desperate for food that they would fling themselves on ranks of leveled spears for hope of a mouthful.
"It was like unto the Cataclysm," she said once. "It was like the Cataclysm come again, and sometimes I thought that all Ponykind must perish, and the Night Shadows squirm amongst our ruins. Can the forces of Evil be so much mightier than those of Good? Can Hate and Enmity so master Love and Friendship?"
I was never sure what she meant by that but I did my best to bring her comfort. For she said those words with such sadness, 'twould almost break one's heart to hear her. I told her that I was and always would be her friend, and that she must not despair.
And at that I remember she smiled and said "Thou shall have at least the better part of a century in you, Ruby, maybe more, unless thou doth fall in battle against the foe, and that is the most I do get from any of my friends. And I promise thee -- thou shalt live in my memory when thou art long dust. Which is the most I may give any of my friends. But thankee, Ruby Gift, for thou hast truly cheered me -- I am glad that thou art mine own true friend."
She said that a month before I died, and yet did not truly die. So in this we were both wrong. Such does the world make of the plans of Ponies, even of Alicorn Princesses.
But I get well ahead of my tale.
As ye may well imagine, I knew little of such great and terrible events, living as I did in my little half-hidden Sunney Towne, built on a dead-end spur of the main river roads south toward the Palomino and the Gulf. There were few travelers, and as things got worse outside our woody walls, we became less and less friendly toward them.
I knew only that I was safe and loved by my parents, and though I quarreled at times with mine own half-sister Starlet, I thought we loved one another as well. And most of the time, I think we did; for what she did to me in the end still seems to me to have been from a moment of fear, rather than any deep hatred. Of course she missed her mother Starshine: she had been four years old when Starshine had died; full well old enough to remember her.
There were also Three Leaf and Gladstone. As my father grew older, and the elders of Sunney Towne enfeebled, he became more and more important in running the village. He was the organizer of celebrations, and such featured large in our rustic life, and so he was a very important Pony indeed. He was still under the dainty hoof of his mother -- my grand-dam Dainty Hoof, who was something of a scold to him, and the one he always wanted to please, for all that she was kind and loving to Starlet and mine own little-fillyish self. Dainty Hoof was the undisputed leader of Sunney Towne, but Ponies marked that Grey Hoof's power was waxing, while hers could not but wane as she aged.
Wise Leaf had died in the Sweating-Sickness, tending to the afflicted to her last; and her grand-daughter Three Leaf was now our healer and herbalist and life-weaver. She was but in her twenties then -- she was quite beautiful in her wild way, and there were some who wanted to wed her, despite her bastard burden. Three Leaf spurned them all, claiming loyalty to her son Gladstone. But even I, a little filly, could see how her eyes followed my father, when she thought he was not looking -- and I wondered if yet another Morgan-Marriage would ensue.
For my mother in truth loved Three Leaf as well. My mother, as ye have seen, is a good Pony, and she was even a better Pony in her breathing days, when she was not tormented by the lusts of the damned. She and Three Leaf had been very close friends when they were young fillies, and though they had grown somewhat estranged when Grey Hoof spurned Three Leaf, and more so when he took my mother to wife, Mitta was always kind to Three Leaf, and made a point of being kind to Gladstone. Mitta would not have opposed the match: remember, she had been in a Morgan-Marriage until Starshine died; and Three Leaf was exactly the sort of close friend who is normally the other mare in such a union.
The block lay with Dainty Hoof, who scorned Three Leaf for her wanton mother and bastard birth and bastard child; and even though it was now well known that Three Leaf had never loved any but Grey Hoof, Dainty Hoof still chose to regard the healer as a whore, rather than admit that she had ever judged wrongly. I myself did love Dainty Hoof, my doting grand-dame, but looking back on it I now see that Dainty Hoof treated Three Leaf very cruel. And she was not at all kind to Gladstone either, for all that Gladstone was as much her grand-child as Starlet or mine own self.
As a small filly I saw but did not ken these deeper currents, save in that they sometimes raised storm-waves to disturb the placid pond of my foalhood. Most of mine own youth was happy. I would tag after my mother or play with the other children of Sunney Towne, and when my father's time permitted he would take us for picnics, my mother and Starlet, and we would eat and drink and laugh together, and I saw true joy in the eyes of my parents, and they loved each other, and their love warmed us all.
At times, Three Leaf and Gladstone might be there, though only when Dainty Hoof did not know it, and we would all try to be friends, though Three Leaf and my father would only look the one at the other when they thought the other did not notice. Mine own mother encouraged such meetings, which is why I think she was hoping for a Morgan-marriage, a union of our two households that would finally heal the breach between them.
I might have grown up happy in Sunney Towne to marehood, and in time accepted the courtship of one of the colts with whom I childishly had played, and mine own self become a happy wife and mother, watching and helping Sunney Towne grow from isolated village to town in truth rather than mere name, in the end becoming a grandmother and elder, honored by the now thousands of Ponies around me, as part of the great center of civilization that radiated outward from the City Foreverfree, where the Sisters ruled togther in Love and Friendship and Harmony. But that, of course, was not to be. For the wider world was to again impinge on Sunney Towne.