//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Lost Among The Stars 
// by PostPony 
//------------------------------//


---Daring Do---


I was on break. I had recently returned to my home in Trottingham from a foray into the Forbidden Jungle beyond the desert mountains of the Badlands to the south. Naturally, Ahuizotl was there to contest me. In short, he was defeated and I had secured a number of preserved scrolls from ancient chroniclers from a very large and overgrown fortress. One of many that dotted the ever more exotic lands closer to the viciously hot equatorial zones.

As I relaxed in my home, I imagined what it would take to reach the southern hemisphere to explore what might as well be a whole new world. We would need a way to survive the heat. The steam walls of the ocean and the magma flats each seem impossible to overcome without a lot of protection. Perhaps a ship with strong enchant- My ponderings were interrupted by a knock on the door. Mildly irritated, I hopped off my chair and flew over my furniture to the front door.

I opened it to find a pale blue unicorn mare with a dull brown mane in a black dress. Not a nice dress but one that spoke of gloom. My emotions had gone completely south.

The mare spoke, “Hello Miss Do, I’ve come with some rather bad news. Your last grandparent, Pursuer Do, has recently passed away. I’m sorry to say that his funeral was held last week while you were off on one of your excursions.” I was probably giving the thousand yard stare by that point, more focused on the rush of memories than on any point in space. “I am also here to deliver a package as requested on his will. I hope you don’t let his passing get you down too much. I know that he wouldn’t want that.”

The unicorn levitated the package off of her back and onto the ground in front of me. Seeing no response forthcoming, the mare decided to make her leave and was soon back on the sidewalk heading elsewhere.





I was sitting on my couch with the package. The red fabric was dark with tears that were only barely drying up. My memories of my grandfather rolled through my mind. He was the one that had passed on the Do name to his daughter and onto me. It was rare that ponies kept names across generations unless they meant something. I was the latest in a long line of explorers going back as far as the history books. He had introduced me to real adventure and had taught me the do’s and don’ts of life in the wilderness. My mother was not really the explorer type though, but she had become a professor in archeology. Regardless, my grandad was gone, but there was still the package.

Curiosity was what I was taught to believe in, and before long the object wrapped in brown paper had my attention. I considered ignoring it but I knew that he wanted me to have it. So I ripped it open.

Inside was the regular fare as far as really old books went. I quickly discovered what made it so special. It was a journal of one of my ancestors, a stallion named Inquirer Do. I flipped through the pages and learned that he had lived during the unification of the pony tribes. What caught my attention though was a passage about a certain city.

He was a part of the vanguard of ponies that had gone south to find freedom from the everlasting winter, when he happened upon a city not on any map. From a distance he could tell that it had a regular mix of ponies so rarely seen in that era. But what had really made it different was the gathering. From the nearby hills, he could see a massive crowd gathered together, all standing in a perfect circle several ponies deep. At the center of the space described by the circle was a single dark blue unicorn. Even at such a distance, Inquirer could see the mane and tail of white striped with blue shining across the frozen city. Magic was flowing from the crowd into him as such a rate that it formed luminous, sinuous rivers of light through the air.

The pegasus suspected something foul was going on, something dark, even though he spotted none of the signs of dark magic. He watched for half an hour, recording what he could, when suddenly the city lit with a spherical light, as if a sun had suddenly appeared around it. It was so bright that his vision was permanently stained with the image for the rest of his life whenever he closed his eyes. In the next instant, it shrunk to nothing, creating a crack of thunder so loud and a pit so deep that the land surrounding the area leaped into action, trying to fill the void in the world as air, rock, and water from a half frozen streams attempted to mend the wound in the world.

By this point, I had nearly forgotten my grief, stunned by the passage. I knew that I had to investigate, to find this lost city. The obvious challenge was that I knew next to nothing about such magic, but I remembered that I was in fact friends with a certain princess that could probably help. Before I rushed into action to prepare for my next adventure, I finish the page. It spoke of Inquirer simply trying to investigate the place himself, the only thing he could find was a wooden sign. It bore a name that had long been past down in myth and legends across the world, and Daring knew it well, but had never suspected that it was real.

Tamarelantis.