The Cult of Piggsicorn is a mystery to many and, in some ways, with good reason. The Cult's sources of intelligence were once continentally efficient and utterly deadly. Secretive and ruthless, they silenced any creature who spoke their name without their leave. But since the end of the Second Raptor War, a crackdown was carried out on radical or fanatical groups pursuing malevolent goals or activities. The Cult of Piggsicorn were one of the most dangerous in this regard until their most prominent members started being hunted down by ponies unknown (Believed to be the Eternal Knights, their methods match, but this is slightly anomalous. There are only three Eternal Knights and reports are certain the hunt was carried out by a group of no less than five)
Regardless, despite the Cult's fall from power long ago, ponies who know of them still fear to speak of them.
I have been given information and leave to spread it.
I just hope somepony has my back or I might find a knife buried in it one of these days.
So, onto the history.

One of Equestria’s oldest and most widely feared legends, Styhollow is a place of terror and dread, a name passed on the mouth of many a pony during this particular season.
Styhollow is unsuspecting enough. A small valley on the nearest reaches of the Wendigo Woods where a town once stood overlooked by a manse upon the hill, built during the early reign of Celestia and Luna. But visitors from Canterlot would always return home without real reason to recall their visit with anything more than puzzlement. A word that visitors always shared when describing the place was ‘eerie’.
Documented from Lady Corseta Curvely of Briefly Manor.

“The place is like no other place I’ve seen. Once you trot into the valley, the colour almost...diminishes. As if the sun doesn’t touch it. The grass grows scant but the mud around your hooves grows thick and wet. Rain is a constant thing, as is fog.
The locals...I wouldn’t call them welcoming, I encountered no violence or insults thrown my way. I encountered very little actually. They seemed to regard visitors with little more than dismal suspicion. They certainly don’t roll out any red carpets or even a rug. The places that lent visitors rooms were ramshackle old blocks of creaky wood and cobwebs. The food served is meagre and not a smile to be seen.
Yet one of my greatest confusion is its commerce. Styhollow is meant to be a farming town. Yet the place seems ill-suited for growing crops, I certainly didn’t see any ripe fruit or vegetables anywhere around.
And yet, for all their lack of good food, there were an awful lot of ponies who looked more than a little fat.
In fact, that’s my other great confusion. The ponies there...I’ve never seen anypony who looks like them. I don’t like to be personal but I don’t recall ponies who collectively looked so...ugly. And the smell of them!
I was taught by my parents that farmers were to be respected and admired for the hard work they do to feed Equestria but I just can’t stress this enough. These ponies were simply vile company.”

Corseta was at Styhollow on a diplomatic stay but the owner of the manse was not at home.
She, among all the recorded visitors to Styhollow, was lucky to come and go without witnessing the horrors that lurked within the town.

According to a log found by investigators several years later, Styhollow was visited by a stallion who called himself Marsh Mudlark. Marsh Mudlark was an eccentric writer, raised in the outskirts and living in Canterlot at the time. If his log is anything to go by, he had an ego on him and had views on racial theory that one is cautious to describe in the modern day, considering the log isn’t all that old.
He began describing the locals as such...

The ponies of Styhollow are an unsightly bunch. Ugly is the right word for them honestly. They walk with a bizarre gait of tiny, clumsy steps, almost a plod, yet are quite capable of running at high-speeds at the drop of a hat. Their muzzles are turned-up and flattened and their lips pulled upwards, exposing their lower jaw, some of their teeth appearing far sharper than those of normal ponies. Their eyes are tiny and deep-set, their eyes poking wide and facing out diagonally. Rolls of fat make their bellies nearly trail along the ground, bulges under their neck and loose jowls causing them to rarely raise their heads high. Their skin is tight but worn, their fur scant but bristly. Their stench is appalling, one wouldn’t be faulted for suggesting they rolled in dung but I don’t even think the faeces of the average pony smells as strong. In conversation, they grunt and snort loudly, snuffling nervously and squealing under duress. In manner, they are crude, surly and suspicious. In summary, one is hardly surprised Styhollow lacks for visitors.

His investigations into such theories took him here. He was certain that the notorious hideousness of the ponies of Styhollow was caused by miscegenation.
When he could, he met the owner of Styhollow Manse, Lord Swinian Scrofer. The first lord of Styhollow, Pugnacious Scrofer, had been an eccentric explorer and a collector of oddities who had vanished in the Trottish Isles.

The local legend was that Pugnacious’s widow, Verinence, during her period of mourning, had been met by her brother, Stagnantine, who had brought a family friend from his time serving as an expeditionary officer in the Badlands Resistance. This friend was a priest who spoke of a mighty deity that overshadowed all and would plunge the world in a sea of blood and bile, collected from the ‘Markless’, non-believers and that those who were ‘Marked’, accepted into this cult, would be spared and glut themselves on feasts of Markless flesh for all eternity.
The deity took the form of a ‘Great Sow’. Their creed was disturbing to say the least. The priest seemed under the impression that the more depraved, sadistic and filthy one’s lifestyle, the more holy you were.
The priest, Swinian claimed, advised Verinence to copulate with Stagnantine in a strange ritual to produce a son ‘born with the mark’. She gave birth to many, many foals, all roughly at the same time. Yet Verinence felt little if any pain. And the foals were unlike normal ponies. Small, furrowed heads, large pot-bellies that dragged along the ground and shrunken hooves split into four heads, like trotters.
As the foals grew, they were bred together.
Clearly, quite contrary to Marsh Mudlark’s theories, the ponies of Styhollow had become this way through inbreeding.

Swinian boasted that his marked bloodline had remained pure this way and that over time, the belief in this deity and its ‘marks’ had spread across the town completely. The townsfolk mated family with family and willingly altered their bodies to appear like their lord and master and the pigs they worshipped as a sign of devotion.
But when his father, Gammon, died, his mother was left a widow (At twelve) without an heir.
This mare, Jam-Bon, had not been well treated by her family and sought to find life outside Styhollow. Visiting the nearby village of Tuberly, she befriended and grew close to a young sailor named Raleigh. Despite her senile parents’ venomous disapproval, she and Raleigh began courting.

It was then that Styhollow was subject to a series of attacks committed by a monster of immeasurable size and strength. A great demonic hog, it’s said, running on four-hooves, wild as Tartarus with tusks and teeth that turned pony bodies into unrecognisable messes of blood, bones and entrails. No fewer than two-hundred citizens of Styhollow had died before they took action. Jam-Bon’s mother, Lady Sowerberry, decreed that the attacks were sent by the deity, offended by her daughter leaving the family and tainting their bloodline. She roused a mob to burn Tuberly to the ground and retrieve her daughter. Raleigh was tortured to death and Jam-Bon was offered up to the beast, covered in the blood and guts of her deceased lover to lure the creature out. It came at night and dragged the mare off to a den beneath the valley. At dawn, the creature was gone.
Jam-Bon lay dead, her face contorted with sheer agony and despair, her womb ripped open.
Before her corpse, however, was a squalling infant. A colt.

Sowerberry declared the child the bringer of purity. A child whose superior bloodline would mark any child born of him no matter how impure their mother.
Marsh Mudlark’s writing becomes more and more bleak. Horrified yet strangely fascinated by what he’d been told, he partook in a ritual at Styhollow Manse, involving activities best not put on paper.
Marsh Mudlark returned to Equestria and became a recluse in Canterlot until a public scare involving missing young mares, including his own sister and niece, was linked to him, the Royal Guard interrupting his own unclean ritual.

He was committed and spent the rest of his years rambling about the Great Sow until he was visited by Styhollow’s next investigator, Midnight Blade, acting freelance, masquerading as ‘Inspector Dusk Shine’, one of the founding members of EQUIS (Equestri's Unified Intelligence Service). His logs have provided great insight into the aftermath of the civil war, the lawlessness of the contested zones and those responsible for their conditions.
He mentions...

“To be perfectly honest, the whole thing sounded so weird and distasteful that I thought this was all just a publicity stunt. But Mr Mudlark’s words were proven true when the guards found him...well...parts of him...thrown around in his cell barely two days after I’d spoken to him. That was how I knew that not only did this Cult exist but they were here, in Canterlot, watching us. And they had to be stopped.”

So it was that ‘Dusk Shine’ journeyed to this insidious town to seek out and, if possible, destroy the threat this cult and its deity possessed towards Equestria.

6208883
Sounds very intereesting. THey can hide but they can't run, the Eternal Knights will find them eventually. Dusk Shine, nice undercover name for Midnight.

I don't know what you're referencing, but I'm intrigued by the mysteries of Styhollow. Man, what is up with cults and killing their own children.. Ah well, at least Dusk Shine will come to save the day, unless this story is grimdark.

6208918
Well, its based off Shadow Over Innsmouth. I'm getting interested in Lovecraftian Horror. But the Cult of Piggsicorn is hardly as subtle.
It starts off grimdark but Equestria's there to cast the rainbow, as it were.

6208887
Actually, Dusk Shine is the fan-name for male Twilight Sparkle.
I thought it was a nice reference.

6208993
Indeed it is. I knew that name was familar to me.

6208991

Glad to hear that. I've never read all of Lovecraft's stories, I'll go check it out

6208883 Sounds to me that the Otherworld claimed residence in Styhollow.

6225721
I'm kind of taking reference from that genre as well.

6226603 My money's on party members # 4 & 5 being expys of Pyramid Head.

THE PYRAMID TWINS!