The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna; Or How Twilight Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Her Wings

by NoeCarrier

Wadi, Weni, Wedi

Port Pronto was an awful cauldron of mixed up life. Emboss had first smelled the place on the wind, and all at once a sensation of horrific dread came over him. Some deep-dwelling part of his psyche, inherited from his tarsier-like ancestors, squealed mute warnings of danger and death. It was the stink of abandoned mortuaries in the depths of tartarus, marinaded in excrement and used underwear. It stung the eyes and settled on his tongue and up his nose, coating them with a fine layer. There was no way that a city of living beings could smell this bad. An awful accident must have happened. Emboss had just been imagining some kind of disaster in a fishery, which was located next to a sewage farm and an abattoir, when the island had enveloped them.

Now, they sailed into Noble Isle's single wide bay, which looked like a great, slightly bent foreleg in white and green, with a massive cancerous tumor at the knee where the port itself beckoned. Eight rocky wharfs jutted some way out across the mouth of an artificial channel, which ate up the beach for about half a mile on either side. Dense jungle crowded up every available space, leaving only a narrow strip of sand. Flights of odd blue birds and more of the harmonious symbiote aviforms filled the sky, cawing and trilling. Gentle breezes assailed them from the fore, bringing physical washes of the stench onto them, but yet they kept moving forward, despite having no obvious motive power.

“We're in the harbour current now,” Astrapios said, sitting down on the foredeck and watching, apparently entirely unconcerned by the horrendous odour, whilst Emboss was busy considering how many ways he could remove his entire olfactory gland without killing himself. “There's a sort of big waterfall under the port, which draws from the bay. That's why they put the harbour here. Grates on the far side stop you going all the way, but there's a bottomless pit below the waterfall they use for waste disposal.”

“A bottomless pit?” Truth exclaimed, incredulously.

“Yeah, that's why it smells so sanitary!” Astrapios said, laughing.

There were, as promised, packs of golden retrievers. They milled around on the wharf sides, slipping gracefully between the goats and sheep who filled the inevitable roles of a dock. Emboss found himself staring at the lithe little creatures, who occasionally flashed him startling stares with their bizarre horizontal eyes that seemed lifeless and devoid of soul. They babbled in a mellifluous language full of grating, three part harmonies that turned speaker into speakee in a matter of moments. Emboss had always been a fond student of languages, at least as far as they applied to given names, but this one evaded him. Even from the ship he could hear it.

There seemed to be no reasonable structure of vowels, or many phrases repeated. He saw identical actions performed with accompanying completely different sounds, saw those narrow, fuzzy muzzles, always complete with neatly-plaited beards, speak at one second barking, guttural tones and beautiful, slithering golden words that felt as though they might have been spoken by angels. Unlike in Equestria, where basically every person who wanted to get by spoke Equuish, or a variant on the theme, and where the lingo of the state was basically just Equuish with lots of -iums, here it was a madhouse.

Emboss caught strains of the more recognizable Ald Gryphic, something he thought was a dead language, but a properly, well and truly dead language, not like Old Equuish or Old High Equuish, which were the shambling, shuffling corpses of languages, and which certain entities tended to forget was no longer the done thing. There was the zebric tongue too, curiously being spoken by the sheep, who were another fascinating sight in themselves.

There were far fewer of the fat, muscular creatures trotting about on the wharfs, usually hauling improbably large loads or sitting around twelve-hosed hookah pipes at the bottoms of gangplanks, sucking down great lungfuls of lavender smoke and grinning like a gryphon with a mouse. Most, like the goats, were shaven mercilessly close, though some boasted fuzzy coats. Equestrians were far less restricted, and it wasn't uncommon to see a few inches of fur on the rougher, less urban sorts back home.

As the Barely Eagle nosed up the channel and between the wharfs, more of the port proper came into view. Where the deep and fast moving furrow ended in a mammoth aggregation of half-moon grates, the city began, perched on top of a very solid looking embankment of smoothly worn stone bricks, dotted with mooring posts. The fronts of businesses that looked very much like those they'd seen on the wharfs in Port Dauphine, that is to say very seedy and vice-oriented, loomed up. For a moment it seemed like they would crash into the end, but just in time to quell Emboss' growing urge to stampede, another of the boat's automated systems kicked in and sent up a juddering rattle of iron, which was punctuated by a single weight sploosh.

The anchor caught the boat and arrested it a few metres from the end of the dock. There were straining and pinging noises as the current continued to pull at them, but whatever the anchor had stuck fast on was very sturdy. Immediately, goats who had, unawares to Emboss, been following their progress along the dock now leapt up onto the deck from standing positions. There were thunks and bangs as they landed, merrily and industriously going about the task of mooring. They seemed to have an arrangement with the hippogryph, as Astrapios paid them only the mind of a boss surveying the work of employees.

The noise of the port was perhaps worse than the smell, in retrospect. Emboss had never heard such a din, not even in the shadier parts of Canterlot. Equestria's primary emigres were gryphons, who made a lot of odd cawing noises sometimes, especially if they got into fights, but were otherwise very quiet, or the zebras and minotaurs, who between them must have been having some ethnic whom-can-be-silent-and-mysterious-the-longest competition, as they rarely even spoke. If there was any truth to what Astrapios had said about Celestia organizing the diaspora of these goats and sheep, and Emboss had no trouble at all in believing it, for once he agreed with her decision.

There was an added bonus of pheromones in the air on the dock, which hadn't been detectable from further away over the high malice of rotting fish, decaying linen and who knew what else. Most of them were alien, passingly related to the many equine smells with which Emboss was familiar, but there were certainly ponies here. Many of them were in heat, or had been recently. He bit his lips to still the reflexive sensory gesture, mostly out of manners, but also out of pure fear. There was no telling what a mare from these parts would do to him if he showed even the slightest interest, but what he did know was what his wife would do, and it involved nearby sharp objects and his most treasured physical possessions.

“Pronto is a bit dangerous for equines,” Astrapios said, climbing up on the edge of the boat and perching himself there. “Especially the uninitiated. I would stay aboard if I were you.”

Without waiting for a reply, he jumped onto the dock. Behind Emboss, the twin shapes of the gryphon hens loomed, and they said very little as they followed their half-breed compatriot, every step and twist of their lithe frames in weirdly perfect synchrony. Their whole demeanor had changed. They weren't the sexually charged, totally in control figures of massive power they had been before. Now, a far more primal shadow stalked with them, mirroring their movements twice again. It took Emboss a beat to realize what was going on.

They were hungry.

*

“Something has just occurred to me,” Truth said, between mouthfuls of Emboss' fur, busy with grooming him as he did the same for her. “We left all of our maps and such in Port Dauphine.”

“Foal's knees!” he spat, shuffling for a little extra space in the cramped communal wash room, which was so crammed with endless bizarre accoutrements apparently related to the personal hygiene of gryphons, as well as a very stately gold-heaving bathtub, that it barely fitted two adult ponies inside. “At least we had what was in the day panniers. Lucky we were carrying the money, if nothing much else.”

“How much of the route can you recall?” Truth picked up a thankfully equine coat brush in her magic and started following the line of her nibbling along his withers. “I wonder if they take Equestrian coin?”

“Astrapios didn’t seem to mind it. Though I suppose he is partially Equestrian. First, we track inland via Gruntz and Wulfa, then to the capital, oh... what was it called...”

“Half-way up the slopes of that big mountain?”

“That's the one. Then, we go down. Gryphons dig deep themselves, but we have to find the heartland zebrics.”

“Dunya's grandsire, right?”

“Great-grandsire, actually. We find him, tell him the story.”

“What if we can't?”

“Then this whole thing will have been for nothing,” Emboss said, softly sighing as he enjoyed the mutual grooming session, which they'd needed to take after the grimy feel of the city had somehow invaded their very bones.

Truth nudged him and smiled coyly, setting down the brush.

“We are alone aboard now, you know...”

“Again? Is there something in the water on this ship?”

Emboss' question was lost in the feeling of what she did with her mouth next.

*

Mytheme was full of nottlygna. They crowded every available space, sitting on top of each other’s withers and curled up around one another, filling it with their smells, their laughter and their general merry spirit. The constant feeling that it might, at any moment, explode into an orgy, was very palpable. This was exactly how Luna liked it. This was what she privately referred to as terminalia, the feeling of being on the edge, an about-to-be state of mind. When stallions reared up and mounted, this was what they felt. It was transition, but not only transition, but the beautiful, wonderful, euphoric period of becoming something truly magical.

There were many slang phrases for this, but they only captured a certain aspect of it. The concept had a multifaceted surface, but all boiled down to a kernel that embodied the passage state. The Hidden Delight was that figurative, though perhaps also literal, kernel. Luna liked to imagine that minds engaged in terminalia were, in some sense or other, touching and becoming one with her demesne. There was another demesne once. On the moon. Twilight will see it. Has seen it. She will see what you did and hate you.

Luna paused as she trotted down one of the port corridors, jarring to a halt as she tried to process the errant thought. It was as though a suitor had whispered it in her ear, just out of her peripheral vision. She closed her eyes and shook her head. It was just another errant burbling of the distant past. Her memories of the fight with Carnifex had been embellished in the recollection, some parts distorted as though for dramatic effect. She was sure of that at least, as when the memories had settled in they’d lost their mythic hue, becoming more staid and placid.

Spike had ceased his babbling and calmed down, returning toward that usual chatty, intelligent mood which Twilight Sparkle often wrote about. As Luna had predicted, he was busy forgetting about his time within the null-area. He was chewing on a chunk of basalt and being made a fuss of by the nottlygna foals, as well as his new nursemaid. The young ones were absolutely fascinated by the appearance of the dragon, let alone one that could talk, and Spike in return was very pleased at the attentions of a rapt audience. He was telling them the story of how he and Twilight Sparkle, though it was mostly him, had defeated the Sombre King and allowed the foundation of the Crystal Empire. Stubby black tails and little wings flipped and flapped idly as they listened.

“Did the Sombre King really keep them all in chains?” said one, a rather stocky specimen with bigger than normal ears and a burgundy scarf wrapped firmly around his neck.

“Yes, he did, the entire nation was under bondage,” Spike pontificated, placing his wrists together to illustrate the point. “But the Princesses put an end to that when they launched the Campaign of Northern Terrors, which disrupted the Sombre King, who was also called the Brigand-King of the North. Eventually, they managed to penetrate the High Weave Wall and gained access to the capital of the Empire itself, and then it was all over very quickly.”

“But how did they make new foals if they were in chains all the time?” the stocky nottlygna said, a look of puzzlement on his face.

“Uh.. well…” Spike said, gulping suddenly. “That’s probably a question for your dam or sire!”

“What’s a dam or sire?” said another one, who was lithe like a draught excluder made of black velvet, and of that young age when nottlyngas became quite androgynous.

Luna smiled pleasantly as she passed by, heading for the entry ramp. She elected to float for this portion, drawing her legs up tightly and mantling her wings, as though she was a leaf drifting on an ethereal current. This wasn’t usually the done thing, because it tended to remind everyone who saw it that they were dealing with an entity that was, all in all, very alien when compared to those whom they oversaw. The nottlygna didn't seem to mind on this occasion.

The lading procedures were going with a rapid, chaotic fury. The self-organizing nature of nottlygnas at work was evident; though no dockmasters or anything of the sort were present, chains of individuals had coalesced into long bands stretching out of the Welcome Hall, tossing along kit bags, crates, bottles of wine and an infinitude of needed things with little bumps of the withers, curls of the wings or wholesale mouth action. Others flew over their heads in long arcs, loaded up with panniers, who fought with yet others for space to access the yacht itself.

Yacht was probably something of an understatement. Mytheme had been designed for a purpose much like this one, though with a larger number of equines in mind, and in greater style. Between the four massive state lounges, forty grand bedrooms and ninety-nine assorted ballrooms, drawing rooms and dining halls, they would not lack for space. Nottlygna did not sleep alone in any case. Their insular nature and certain atavistic traits in their psychology, brought out in them in their creation, meant they favored the herd in all aspects of life.

Just as Luna settled by the access way that was seeing the most use, she felt a tug at the base of her spine. It was slight, only a gentle thing indeed, but very insistent. She set her hooves down on the immaculate rug floor, which was quickly being mashed into a muddy, gravel-pocked mess by the troupes passing over it, then turned her head.

It was the velvet draught excluder foal, who now had the appearance of a little ferret which had just succeeded in extricating a delicious insect from a tree stump, resolute determination on soft features, sable eyes narrowed around a dappled black-on-slate muzzle. It spat out the tip of her tail, which made an disquiet throbbing sound as it folded back beneath spacetime where it belonged, having been rudely drawn out of its nest there and forced to behave like an actual tail, made of real hair. Luna smiled warmly, to settle any divine fears the scrap might have.

“Princess Luna,” he said, the lower notes in his lilting and slightly breathless voice betraying gender. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes,” she stated, simply, adopting a tone she hoped would imitate that of her sister, the one she used when teaching the multitude of her intellectual progeny.

“Spike the Dragon just said something that made me wonder.”

“What was that?”

“Where do we come from?”

“Why, small one, surely you know?” Luna said, laughing with confusion. “The act of lust--”

“Not that, I know all about that!” He shook his head and frowned. “Where do nottlygna come from, you know, at the beginning, in the first--”

--of your kind, but you will soon be joined by others,” the Selenite Princess spoke, in a voice of lilting, honeyed power, its gentle and persuasive motes dancing in the sapphire-pocked beams of near-blinding ultraviolet that penetrated the Court. “You seven will be the scions of a new race, another beginning for this nation.”

“Our foals are already ponies, your Majesty, even if they are not yet out of us and in the world, they were made of pony and pony, and will also be,” said one of the quiet shapes that lay nearly prostrate on the luxuriously padded flooring. “I think I speak for all of us when I say that I do not understand...”

“They are, but can also be more, if you will offer your ascent,” Selene Imperatrix said, lifting her head to look down on the speaker.

“You have it, for we are yours now and always--”

--telling me that I shouldn't mind about things like that!” the lithe foal whinnied. “So, where do we come from?”

Luna didn't have time to answer, as the lounge burst into a roaring rendition of Dark Skies Are Headed Here Tomorrow. She stared at the child, lost in the intensity of the memory that had just returned to her. Her gaze seemed to put him off, because he made a noise like a mouse being trodden on and half-fell, half-galloped, back to the safety of the herd. Luna's divine heart began to race. Assumptions and things which she had held as fact began to interfere with each other. Her internal train of thought collided with a mountain top, but the mountain was black as night and hewn from a single block of jet, full of dirty little secrets.

I made them, she managed to think. But not from the vacuum. They did not spring, fully formed and squeaking, from the void. I bent them! Made new shapes. Took ponies and made new ones. Why didn't I remember before now? There are holes! I see absence, irrational loops with missing parts where rationality should be. Are these my memories, or some false thing? What can I trust, what must be set aside? Who has meddled with my thoughts and made me so? What faith, then, am I to hold of all that is inside my head, and not merely these memories? Whose hoof is on the tiller? What creature, what force, what inglorious beast would dare to trick a God?

*

Twenty-five thousand tons of Imperial train, a lurid and bloody pink sausage of aerodynamically smooth crystal, slunk around the Helicon that brought it slithering up the inclines of Mount Avalon. All around the carriage was devastation. Fires raged through fields and gutted houses, taverns and the other aspects of the conurbation that was outside the city proper. That which was not on fire was flattened, ground into pieces like the refuse at the bottom of the Divine Artist's pestle. The track was littered with ruin, but the train had been designed to plow through drifts of snow a hundred metres deep, and cared little for even whole remnant granite and marble chunks, throwing them aside with ease.

Shining Armour and his wife stared in mute horror, jaws agape, unable to say a word to each other, right up until the train slipped into the grandly-mantled tunnel that carried the twin track around the mountain through the caldera wall, and all fell away into darkness. All at once, the spell was broken, and the praetorian guard began a wild cacophony of activity as they bustled into the imperial carriage, taking up their defensive and offensive positions in delayed form, all clanking armor and low grunts and the cocking-on-the-ground of withers crossbows.

Blue and white gas lights on the interior of the tunnel wall slipped by, occasionally throwing bright strobe flashes in through the windows to complement the cool orange glow of the luminite embedded in the carriage walls, neat brocades of the stuff in swirling patterns.

“There must have been an accident,” Cadence said, limply. “In the liftgas stores, or of some magical nature.”

“We would have felt a magical incident,” Shining Armor said, sitting back in his seat, body aching somewhat from the stress position he'd been holding as he stared, transfixed on the vista of destruction. “We set down one nasty for another!”

“We shall help. There will not be a mouth in the city unfed, a flank uncovered in the rain, nor foal abandoned for want of a dam,” Cadence said, chill determination mixing with the shock.

“Let us see what we can do, and what will be politik to do, for all we know now is that we know nothing, and Celestia may – will – have her own plans.”

“The train is not an unobvious sight, especially on the last approach. It concerns me that she has sent no greeting party, or else come out to meet us herself, especially with this, whatever it is, going on.”

“We have come unannounced, and with not even an inkling of our visit. Likely, she is in her tower, plotting the rescue of her people.”

“Maybe she will have devolved the task to your sister,” Cadence said, hopefully. “Or otherwise employed her in it. Sky knows, she has not had a chance to flourish.” She unmantled her wings carefully and fluttered the tips. “It would be so nice to see her work again. She changed somewhere along the way. Not the little filly for whom I cared. Sad, you know? Depressed in mood and distant too.”

“Let us see, Cadence,” Shining Armour muttered. “Let us see.”

*

Twilight glided over the wadi, straining the air through her nose. Lush vegetation and big, flat stretches of shallow water provided many scent clues, but none of them were equine, let alone that belonging to Whom. Having spent hours with her in the sphere, it would be an obvious track. Giant white birds, which she vaguely recognized from her biological studies, fled in disarray as she passed overhead. Looming Bezoar palms, pregnant with their heavy purple dates, flashed past as she went lower, searching for visual clues as well.

On a bank, she found what she was looking for at last. Little dances of hoof prints impressed into the mud, a familiar scent pocked with floral overtones that was undoubtedly Whom and, if that was somehow not enough, a single outrageously pink feather, drifting on the gently lapping surface of the wadi's water. There was a gaggle of flies and other small creatures around it, as though this bizarre interloper to their normal world was a real sight. Pink swan incident, she thought, gurgling with laughter at her own joke as she looped around the traces of Whom a few times, looking for leads.

It was clearly not within Whom's abilities to fly for very long, as might befit a creature raised in one third of Equestria's gravity. Twilight soon found evidence of great lolloping strides up and nearby falls out of the sky. They pointed out of the wadi in a counterintuitive direction, which she surmised was North based on the position of the sun. Depressions in the sand followed by spaces and lots of scrabbling hoofprints showed her the way.

After about half a kilometre, the wadi faded away. The green blush of fecundity only spread as far as the water would go. The firmer earth with patches of mud turned into the wickedly hot sand that typified the desert. It was here that Whom seemed to have given up on the idea of flying at all, for the last, oversized crash had a lot of belly marks, flowing into a single meandering track of hoofprints.

Twilight flapped her wings and ascended, clearing ground level in moments. Whom could not have gotten very far by hoof, and in such an open and unbroken landscape it would only be a matter of a little altitude. Anxiety rushed up in her as her height increased, a sort of cloying fear that is found in little foals who have heard a strange noise and are unable to do anything else but open the door or tread down the stairs to see what is there, knowing that it must be awful but incapable of other actions.

She had read many stories that took place in the desert, and some knowledge had distilled by that avenue, but she had also devoured tomes on surviving there. They all placed great importance on the idea of keeping a slow pace and sheltering one's head and body from the sun's merciless rays. Whom might have had the appearance of an immortal alicorn Princess, Deus Equine, but was as feeble and capable of harm as a babe, or any other living being. Galloping through the desert would be fatal for her in short order, if it had not been so already.

Not only would Twilight likely never find her, not even her corpse for passage into whatever rituals might be applied to a creature like Whom, and she had many ideas on what those might entail, but Twilight would never get back her beloved panniers, nor the materials they contained. With the Selenite Principality destroyed, or at least rendered inaccessible for the time being, the source of the fragile floral ingredient she had secured there was gone. Without Whom she would also need to fight a Giant Squid and, though she might just be able to ask, would prefer not to have to get to the moon again.

Against the yellow, buttery dun colouration of the forever-flowing desert, the errant moon mare's coat worked in her favour yet again. Almost exactly twelve kilometres from the edge of the wadi, Twilight laid eyes on a little conglomeration of black and white around a ferociously pink blob. She impelled herself closer and closer, pulling into her mind spells that would condense water from the air, what little moisture there was, as well as those which would attend to hyperthermia, sunburn and a number of other maladies that she imagined might have befallen Whom. Without the limitations of the vacuum, and an atmosphere to dispense with the excess thaumic heat, there would be little restriction on what she could cast.

The unknown qualities of the black and white parts of the vision she beheld focused more properly as she approached. They were distorted and bent about by the rising heat, shimmering and shifting. The moment that she caught glimpses of a stocky figure, tall and bipedal, she immediately added to her collection of passive and beneficial spells with those of a more fighty nature. There would be no electroplating magic this time. Collapsing walls of telekinetic pressure would compress organics, crushing ribcages and puncturing organs with bone splinters. If they had so much as displaced one hair of that pink coat or put one ridiculous eyelash out of place, they would cease to exist.

When Twilight was a kilometre away, she realized that the three were not diamond dogs, but a minotaur and two ponies, a mare and a stallion. They were lying immotile in the sand, legs at strange angles. Whom was sat in the middle of them in the shade of one of Twilight's emergency umbrellas, sides weighed down with panniers, facing away.

“Whom!” she bellowed, as soon as she was within earshot.

“Twilight!” the moon mare squeaked, dropping the gourd of water she was drinking from and spinning around.

“Are you okay?” Twilight said, landing on the sand with a little more ferocity that was really required and immediately breaking into a run without missing a step. “What happened here?”

“I don't know!” Whom whinnied, suddenly curling up and receding into herself as she seemed to notice the situation again. “We were just talking and then suddenly they... they...”

“Heatstroke?” Twilight pulled into a quick loop of Whom, glancing back and forth at the bodies, none of whom showed any signs of life. “Maybe we can help them, hang on.”

Twilight stopped beside the pale white mare, whose eyes were rolled up in her head. Her jaw bit into the sand, filling her mouth with it, as though she had fallen with it open and not made any efforts since then. She grasped her by the withers, shaking her roughly and sensing through the thaumokinetic feedback for a pulse. There was none. Her body was very hot, too hot in fact, but that was to be expected. Her chest was still, and she did not breathe. Twilight suddenly sniffed something odd around her. It was like lamp oil that had been poured all over a compost heap, mixed with the acrid notes of bile. Her instincts pricked up and her ears flared back.

“Changelings!” she gasped, recoiling. “Recently fed, but a little too much.”

“Oh, those bug things that attacked Canterlot?” Whom said, drawing the umbrella closer with twinges of her magic, gripping so tightly the wooden stem crunched. “I read about them in a magazine...”

“Whom, what were you talking about with them when they died?”

“I was just so excited to meet them,” she choked out, through sudden keening sobs. “I told them everything, how we got here, how much I was looking forward to seeing Equestria, how they were the first normal ponies I'd ever met, then the big one started coughing and making this most horrid sound and they all fell down!”

“Love overdose!” Twilight said, laughing and shaking her head. “We hypothesized about it after the whole changeling coup attempt fiasco, but I never thought I'd see it actually happen!”

“You mean... I did this?” Whom looked mortified, as if she had just told her about her kitten strangling hobby.

“You totally nailed these guys!”

Whom started to cry in the most dramatic way she had ever seen, and she had witnessed innumerable high-order Rarity meltdowns. Her throat suddenly felt quite tight, and she winced.

“Gosh, I'm really sorry, Whom,” Twilight said, trying not to make eye contact, instead pretending like she was surveying the dead changelings. “There was nothing you could have done about it, honestly, if they're hungry they won't stop eating, even if it kills them. Bit of a design flaw, really.”

The moon mare just kept sobbing, falling down into the sand. Eventually, Twilight had to curl up alongside her to maintain the protective shade, making cooing noises and stroking the back of her mane with her nose. It was all that she could do.

Comments

[NoeCarrier]

5296162

Yeah, DRAMA were in one of the earlier chapters. I think they're pretty fun.

They're Changelings. Traveling from the south to the north, across several thousand kilometres of desert. They're in search of Boundless Joy, the northern hive that's decided to try for symbiosis with other species. It's more attractive than the situation in the south, on the tip of the Equestrian continent.

[Hilord17]

I'm just here to say that the Title reminded me of the Final chapter's Title of DanganRonpa :3

[disgunbegood]

5311738 What map are you using for this story? I'd assumed the deserts were south of Equestria with a huge frozen wasteland to the north. Unless ths desert is on the other side of the planet and the Equestrian continent extends so far south that it loops back over the southern pole.

The increased update speed between chapter is also quite nice.

[NoeCarrier]

5312794

A few chapters ago there was a handy sequence with a view from space. The Equestrian continent is very big, and far longer than it is wide. The nation itself exists in a green band just above the equator, with a graduated progresson toward the north pole of various biomes of a decidedly frosty nature. South, over the line of the equator, is a gigantic desert, far more immense than anything on Earth. On the very southern tip, there is an undiscovered region somewhat similar in climate to South Africa or Argentina, which is the ancestral home of Diamond Dogs, and the current home of most changelings (don't tell the diamond dogs).

The hive of changelings known as Boundless Joy migrated north three decades hence, eventually mounting a rather terminal assault on Equestria. This was quite in opposition to the general ethics and codes of conduct for changelings, as was their migration. Following the capitulation of those forces, Boundless Joy became a sort of vassal to the Equestrian Crown. They've achieved an open synergy, a harmonious, but individual, symbiosis of cultures. Rumors abound and percolate back south, and Boundless Joy has attracted defections from those seeking a different way of life.

This is all mostly part of the background fluff. Changelings aren't really in this one. I'm glad you appreciate the weekly update schedule. Long may it continue.

[NoeCarrier]

5312794

To answer your original question: I set out using the same map as is in the show. The theme is still largely the same. Ice in the north, deserts in the south, gryphons to the east. I just expanded it, pruned out stuff I didn't like and filled in the blanks. So, gone are all most of those flat Anglosphere placename puns, as is anything even faintly themed on regions of the US. Some might say that this takes away from the original payload of the show, deteriment its particular charms, but that is why this is AU.

[Urist Tokmekfamthut]

That chapter title made me groan. Good show, sir!

[ClockworkMage]

5311738 Or it would have been more attractive, were it not for the serious threat of adorable pink death.

[djthomp]

Wow, kind of sound like there really might be something in the water on the ship.

Brigand-King of the North, I like that.

Luna smiled pleasantly as she passed by, heading for the entry ramp. She elected to float for this portion, drawing her legs up tightly and mantling her wings, as though she was a leaf drifting on an ethereal current. This wasn’t usually the done thing, because it tended to remind everyone who saw it that they were dealing with an entity that was, all in all, very alien when compared to those whom they oversaw. The nottlygna didn't seem to mind on this occasion.

You know, suddenly I'm wondering how pony Celestia and Luna (and Twilight, and possibly even Cadance) really are under their flesh. Celestia has been feeling a bit alien herself for portions of the story.

Selene Imperatrix? Neat.

I also have to wonder how much Cadance and Shining showing up might just have thrown a cog into Celestia's works. She seems perfectly (and pretty strangely still) happy to allow Canterlot to burn itself and it's citizens to the ground in an orgy of drunken destruction, but the Princess and Prince of the Crystal Empire throwing themselves into the mix (potentially fatally given how things have been going) might seriously screw things up.

Those poor changelings, but at least they died doing what they lived for. Shame they didn't get to Boundless Joy, I'm fairly curious about that place myself.

[Sunny]

5337821

The story seems to be going with the alicorns are very much not pony anymore, so much as Deific Beings of Greater Harmony or something similarly flowery and eldritch, yet keeping to a familiar form and one also less liable to induce gibbering terror in their subjects.

Hence things like 'Twilight can be utterly disintegrated and it is but a minor inconvenience' and 'Luna only does physics because it is what is expected of her'

[Fox]

5339316 You mean Celestia. As far as I've seen, Luna still lets gravity have its fun.