• Published 1st May 2012
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A Brief History of Equestria - K9Thefirst1



A look at how Equestria formed from the Tribal States to the Unitary Diarchy State of today.

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The Winter War

The Winter War

In order to better understand the events of what would lead up to Hearth's Warming, it is important to understand the Windigos and how they work.

Going by how the traditional story tells it, many ponies believe the Windigos to be ethereal spirits that came from nowhere, much like ghosts in many horror stories, such as the Olden Pony or the Headless Horse. Unlike the aforementioned old ponies tales, Windigos are, or were, very real.

In reality, Windigos were large ectoplasmic, monoecious parasites. They sought out ponies in situations that are conductive to hatred, and laid their microscopic eggs on the coat of the host. When the eggs hatched, the larvae would burrow into the bloodstream where they would embed themselves into the walls of the cardiac chambers. The Windigo larvae would then fight for dominance, leaving one alive. The survivor would then begin to take over the host, transforming him or her into an adult Windigo, feeding off of the animosity and hatred of the host, until the larva has enough energy to force the host to undergo a metamorphosis, the latter process possibly taking place over the course of days, if not hours, after years of siphoning off of the host. Given the ectothermic nature of Windigos and there lifecycle, heat would be sucked in, reducing the ambient temperature of the surrounding temperature. To help the young grow, Windigo adults would work to keep the temperatures of the area down. From Star-Swirl's notes, zoologists suggest that Windigos had a long life cycle, such as a single Windigo generation could last as long as three or more pony generations. Given the generally shorter life spans of ponies, the full development from larva to adult Windigo was rare. However, the more hatred the host harbored in his or her heart, the faster the development, but it is estimated that as few as a couple Windigos and their larval young could conceivably freeze a region the size of the Manehattan River Valley with the amount of animosity the Pre-Warming ponies harbored, and given the events of the Winter War, could cover a much larger area with sufficient nourishment.

With everypony fleeing the River Valley in the hope of a fresh start, only to find that the other tribes had more-or-less followed them, tensions and tempers were already high. All that was needed for all out war was a single spark, one otherwise unimportant incident, to ignite the powder keg.

That spark came in the 0 BW, during an unusually warm winter, with the birth of Pansy's first foal. Even though many of her colleagues and her own father repeatedly inquired as to the identity of the father, Pansy kept mum, telling only Shield Skin, her closest friend from school. Everypony in the Junta did not think too much on it, as it was not unusual for a mare officer in the Junta to not think about the father of her foal beyond the night of conception for one reason or another. The common punch line implied that the prowess of the stallion in question was rather poor. However, Pansy had a very good reason for keeping the identity of her foal's father in the dark for as long as possible. Because the father was an Earth Pony named Trencher, whom had been her lover of ten years in spite of Pansy's father Hurricane's attempts to drive them apart. For the eleven months of the pregnancy, Pansy tried to hide her fear of the nature of her child's father being revealed, a fifty/fifty chance of the foal being born with or without wings.

In a series of letters between herself and Trencher (having somehow dragged Shield Skin into being the mailpony intermediary), Pansy pleads and begs for Trencher to abandon his farm and hide out in the hills the closer her due date arrived. But regardless of how much she tried, the farmer would not pull up the roots he laid 'just because [her] father [would] throw a hissy-fit.'

"I stood up to him once, and by thunder I will do it again if it means he will stop trying to keep us apart."

In the end, all of Pansy's fears came to pass, because her son Plow Blade was unmistakably an Earth Pony, meaning that the father was also an Earth Pony.

From Fire Brand's chronicles of The Winter War, Hearth's Warming and the events that led up to them, the scene in the maternity ward when Hurricane first saw his grandchild was described as:

"...silent as death. The Commander looked at the babe, and then to the Second, then again at the babe and again to the Second, taking in the sight. The brain that had divined the plans of diamond dogs and tyrants in moments struggling to conceptualize how a pegasus could birth an Earth Pony. And looking into his eyes, one could see the moment when it all clicked, and the Commander's face became a mix of horror, sorrow and fiery wrath.

"The commander did not shout, as we had expected from experience when he was angered, but rather he spoke in a chillingly soft voice. I for one would have preferred he bellowed. He demanded of the Second as to the identity of the father of the foal. And I shall never forget her response. A look of resignation, and then spiteful determination came over her face, and she matched her father's calm tone with her own, all while cuddling the sleeping babe to her chest, lest it fall through the clouds.

"'All right. So the secret is out now then. Fine. Trencher. Plow Blade's father's name is Trencher. I'm sure you remember him. You punched him in the face ten years ago for taking care of me when I was hurt on duty and could not return to Celestine. I love him Father, and he loves me, and the foal I hold shows. Congratulations Father, the race you so despise is now a part of our family tree. Unless you would kill an innocent foal that carries Mother's blood in his veins, as well as mine.'

"The Commander seemed conflicted be what his daughter told him, and said nothing as he marched out of the ward."

Even though Pansy was over thirty years old at the time, a soldier in her own right and his own Second in Command, Pansy was still Hurricane's only child by his first great love General Wind Whistler, and one of the few of his children who he had spent any time with, and had spent the most time with her through her fillyhood besides. So while on one hoof the resulting reaction was clearly foalish, on the other it is understandable as a father coming to grips with a startling and unforeseen revelation from a beloved child.

In what must be the most impressive case of selective hearing in pony history, Hurricane ignored Pansy's confession of being in love with an Earth Pony, and concocted in his own mind a horror story of his precious little filly being held against her will as a filthy Earth Pony Stallion raped her, defenseless without her loving father to protect her, and abandoning her, leaving her to fend for herself and the bastard love-child, unable to face the shame of telling her father, for fear of losing his love for her.

A rather fanciful and ridiculous view of the reality, to put it nicely, but for whatever reason that was the conclusion Hurricane made, and it was with the anger forged by this that Hurricane demanded the Hyracotherium Republic to hand over the farmer Trencher to the Celestine Junta to face justice. Naturally, the Republic denied the demand. Hurricane sent the demand again with the ultimatum of war.

And again, the Republic refused to give in to the commander's demands. For generations the story was told that Puddinghead added an additional insult in the refusal, but it was disregarded as hearsay for the sake of a good story. At least, until two-hundred years ago when the original copy was uncovered. On the bottom of the document, in Puddinghead's distinctive hoofwriting (just below her signature even), is the phrase "Once you go Earth, you always want girth," with an obscene sketch that is always edited out in reproductions, hence why it has never been publicly displayed. Within the hour of the rebuttal, the Celestine Junta declared war.

In Unicornia, Princess Platinum was still trying to salvage her plans when word of war came to her castle. Within minutes, Platinum sent a letter to the Republic that Unicornia would come to their aid. Clover the Clever recollects the event.

"I entered the Princess' chambers to talk with her on the wisdom of her actions. After all, while the Royal Army was stronger than it had in centuries, it was still scattered and in the process of organizing, and an open war with any nation could prove disastrous. But the Princess was much troubled, pacing the chambers back and forth, her mane unkempt and an unnatural glint in her eyes, and she kept muttering about how 'the plan is yet salvageable' over and over again. I ashamedly admit that after taking in the sight I tried to make flight, the Princess enveloped me in her levitation grip, forcing my face within an inch of her own.

"'THE LINE OF ÆTHELRIC STILL STANDS! I CAN FIX THIS!' she said, at the top of her voice, so loud that my ears rang.

"It was clear as day that the Missed Destiny Madness had taken her at the unexpected turn of events, and so to prevent an uprising I barricaded the Princess into her room for her own safety, and endeavored to do my best to wage a war, something Star-Swirl had neglected to teach me."

Unlike the Lake Trot Crisis, where each side had a cleanly laid out set of battle lines, the Winter War was a sloppy affair, with confusion and mayhem in every quarter, and the forces of Unicornia (that of the Royal Army and the Mercenary Forces of the Nobility) were divided as to who should be fought, with the Royal Army fighting the Junta alongside the Republic, and the mercenaries fighting the Republic alongside the Junta, or both sides, or every other army in the name of plunder. Within hours the three sides stalled in their respective advances, and by the end of the first twenty-four hours had dug in, turning whole fields into networks of trenches within a No Mare's Land covered with ever thickening layers of ice and snow.

And it was the weather that would prove to be the first clue as to what was going on back in the River Valley, as the same inexplicable wintery weather also chocked the land. In the course of hours, the territory controlled by all three tribes was covered in feet of snow, and archaeological evidence and first-hoof accounts suggest the temperatures dropped from about fifty degrees down to the negative sixties. In the course of a day, the new land had been covered in the same proportional amount of snow that had chocked the Manehattan River Valley, a process that had taken some thirty or more years, in a region that was much much smaller than the new settlements. Much debate and many theories have come to pass concerning on how this could happen amongst scholars. The modern consensus is that the animosity generated by Hurricane's racism and disregard of Hyracotherium sovereignty, the resultant war, on top of the already tense atmosphere, produced an environment conductive to the hyper-development of Windigos, producing a rapid and extreme version of the deep freeze of the River Valley.

Given the above, we cannot accurately plot out the movements of the Founders during the two days of fighting. All we know is that Hurricane and his Chiefs-of-Staff managed to abduct Trencher, and Smart Cookie was taken captive too (the consensus being that she had managed to get to Trencher's homestead minutes before Hurricane, and tried to get him to leave). Pansy and her foal had been placed under house arrest in all but name and managed to escape but dispatching her guards (the only record of the incident comes from a letter by Pansy herself 'I told them to let me go. They said no. I took exception to that'), and Clover, managing to turn into a surprisingly competent military commander for one so young and inexperienced, plotted out the most likely place Hurricane could go given the weather conditions, and Private Pansy (whom she met along the way, wielding two swords and bearing Plow Blade in a jury-rigged papoose from a bloodied bandage and stitching needles). As Clover later recalled, she felt that if Hurricane could be stopped before doing anything permanent, then the fighting just might stop.

With Clover's attention to detail and Pansy's knowledge of both the terrain and her father's likely actions, the two mares soon came across the cavern that Hurricane and his troops had taken shelter in with their captives. When they arrived, they found Smart Cookie tied up as set at one side of the cave, and trencher held down by Hurricane, who was about to stab him.

"Pansy cried out to her father so suddenly and with such volume that it caught everypony off guard, which in turn saved Trencher's life. Although his daughter's voice did not stop the Commander's motion, it did in fact altered his aim, sending a killing stroke into his chest into a much more treatable wound in the leg. Seeing her lover so harmed, Pansy held the foal to me and charged her father, demanding that I help the young stallion. I knew some healing magic, but with my own reserves I knew that Trencher would bleed out before I could close the wound. Praying that his wounds were not as serious as they seemed, I left the foal with his father and ran for Secretary Cookie, in hopes that she might know first aid. Even as made the inquiry as to her proficiency, Smart Cookie was running to Trencher and pulling out a wad of cloth, needles and some thread.

"'Something one learns on the farm,' she told me as she looked Trencher's wound over, 'is how to patch oneself up in lieu of a doctor.'

"She asked me if I knew any unicorn magic that might help, and when I said I did, but I was not very powerful, she said that it would be enough and began to instruct me on how to staunch the bleeding, and asked that I do what I could while she sewed up the wound. It was remarkable really. We had only known each other for only a few minutes, and already we seemed to have been in sync. Smart Cookie, with a bedside manner I can only describe as maternal, kept Trencher awake by asking him questions, about what he saw in Pansy that made all of this worth it. I will not repeat what he said, as it is private, but I will say it was very sweet.

"Smart Cookie also inquired as to what had happened with Star-Swirl the Bearded. Evidently he knew her when she was in school, and I was very happy to hear that the Earth Ponies had such fond feelings towards my mentor.

"It was during an instance where Smart Cookie talked with Trencher that I managed to look towards Pansy and the Commander. I freely admit to not having much in the way of a martial education, but looking back it becomes apparent that Hurricane was fighting purely on the defensive: only blocking, and any strikes were intended to exhaust the opponent. As to Pansy, while tears were streaming down her face, I cannot say for certain one way or the other if she was genuinely trying to kill her father.

"As the fight wore on, I could see Hurricane's body growing a host of ice crystals upon his coat, and on the cave floor I saw a trail of frost everywhere he stepped. I could recall these details as important, something from my mentor's teachings on Beastiology, but before I could nail down the exact lesson, two surprise appearances distracted me.

The first was Princess Platinum. To this day I know not how she not only found this place, but how she got out of the castle.

[Editor's Note: From other records, stone masons had to replace the entire exterior wall of the Princess' chambers, which was approximately three stories above the ground.]

"Out of the blue she charged into the fray and, the look of the Missed Destiny Madness in her eyes, demanded that the Commander stop the violence. At least, that was her intent. In actuality she had a few choice, and highly unladylike words that I dare not repeat. No sooner had those words escaped her lips than the Earth Pony Chancellor entered the cave, a most horrifying glint in her eyes and a bloodied knife in her teeth. Smart Cookie demanded to know what she was doing at the cave, and the Chancellor replied that, and I quote, 'the Lich-Queen's Stallion-Slave shall die tonight, for it has munched the wee men, and 'napped my good li'l Cookie.' She then charged at the Princess and the Commander.

"However, in the span of a few seconds, both were dispatched by bucks the Commander gave them to the face. Fortunately they were not killed, merely rendered unconscious, which by the fact that Hurricane apologized to them for it, I believe was his intent. I will freely admit that such control of his fighting prowess was impressive. But it was still unspeakably barbaric and not worth any girlish fantasizing. As Pansy once again charged her father, I took the time to notice that both the Princess and the Chancellor were surrounded by pools of frost that had not been there before, and icicles hung down from their noses, and yet they did not shiver"

From Clover's personal recollections of the incident in the cave, all three of the leaders showed signs of intermediate Windigo infection: trailing paths of frost where ever they tread, ice matting down their coats and icicles hanging from their bodies.

"The cavern was then filled with a soft by chilling sound, a disembodied whinny not possibly made by any living pony coming from the mouth of the cave. Smart Cookie heard it as well, wanting to know what it was even as she finished stitching up Trencher's thigh. Turning to the source, I saw the shape of what seemed like a pony, and yet was nothing like one. For one thing it was far too large, and its body tapered off at the waist into a trail of smokey, transparent ectoplasm. Its small eyes glowed with an unnatural light, and looked upon the world with a disgusted countenance. I then noted how the very air of the cave grew impossibly colder still, and that the mouth of the cave began to be closed off with a sheet of ice.

"Then it all clicked. The unnaturally long and cold winter, the rapid freezing of this whole new land, and how it all seemed to tie in with how much anger, hatred and animosity ponies felt. It was something Star-Swirl taught me early in my education, of a beast that fed off of the hatred of ponies, and in turn turned the world around them as cold as their hearts, and how sometimes a pony could hate so much, they too become one of their number, and in turn fed upon the hate of their fellow pony.

"Windigos. Everything that had transpired since before I was born could in one way or another be linked to that creature standing in the cave, watching us like a noble would an insect.

"However, only Smart Cookie, Trencher and I deemed the sight of that monster as worthy of attention, as the father and daughter continued to duel. However, the Commander evidently grew weary of the fight with his daughter, and thus dashed from her, making way towards us. Or Rather, to Trencher. But at the last second Pansy was once again standing between her lover and her father, this time locking her father's blade between her own.

"Hurricane then demanded how Pansy could possibly stand to tolerate the stallion between Smart Cookie and I, and what drove her to defy him. Even if I could not recollect memories as though I still lived them, I doubt I would forget the words that came from her mouth.

"'Because he is to me, what mother was to you.'

"By the look in his eye, and how two tiny icicles fell from his face, I could tell the phrase meant something special to the Commander, and even as I write this I wish I could have met the obviously very special mare that carried Pansy into the world, that she would have such an effect on the stallion, years after her death. The Windigo clearly felt it too, as it made a whinny that I felt sounded concerned. 'That's right,' I thought to myself, 'cower before the love of lovers you sack of shriveled hearts!'

"Even as I thought this, Hurricane looked beyond his daughter, and to the weakened body of Trencher, and the foal that slept on his chest. And with great reluctance and personal willpower, Hurricane relented, and eased his sword away from his daughter, and to the ground with a quiet ring.

"The next thing I knew was Light, and a comforting, all embracing Warmth. The likes of which I had not felt before, nor since."

Fortunately, while Hate is food for Windigos, Love and Friendship are both poisons. As the Dream Valley ponies show, basic well-regard for one's fellows not only keeps away adult Windigos, but also fends off their artificially induced chill, and it was this that saved everypony in that cave, as well as everypony else outside.

And as Clover the Clever and the rest of the founders, and more importantly the Windigos, realized, the power of Friendship and Love could be weaponized against that which seeks to destroy it. The extinction of a species is usually regarded as a tragedy and with anger. However, nopony yet has come forth with sentiments towards the Windigos that was intended to be taken seriously.

But it was not just this surprising turn of fortune that defeated the Windigos. Outside, regardless of the turn of events inside the cave, the power of the Windigos would have been broken that night. Because the scattered and intermingled armies of the tribes, stuck in their trenches by the weather, manages, against all odds, to form a friendly armistice.

As the story goes, somewhere in the massive tracts of land that had become a battlefield, one of the soldiers of the Celestine Junta decided to break up the monotony by singing march songs, most famously Blood Upon the Aerials. Soldiers of the other tribes were within earshot, and returned with songs of their own. Eventually the singing spread throughout the territory, and more and more songs were discovered to have been known to the soldiers in the trenches of the other sides. By midnight, a few brave soldiers tentatively braved the No Mare's Land, meeting with their opposites from the other armies. Within an hour large gatherings of ponies of all three tribes, and at least one game of unknown sport being played amongst the troops.

By dawn, the three armies had managed to work out an uneasy truce, the ponies in charge of their respective armies agreed to end the fighting until their Heads of State, who had gone missing in the massive confusion, were found again. Though from letters and journals that have survived it becomes clear that most of the rank and file would have gladly ended the fighting if their respective leaders sent the orders. It is from this incident, and not the famous cave, that the traditions of singing songs and playing games on Hearth's Warming began.

Even after only a few hours of peace and goodwill against all odds or reason, the food for the Windigos was weakened enough for warmth to return to the land, and by nine in the morning the next day, much of the snow had melted, and the air temperature rose to levels it had been days earlier.

When Clover came too, the Windigo was gone, and the ice at the front of the cave was vaporized. Platinum and Puddinghead were awake, but nopony was in any condition to leave just yet. And so for the rest of the day, everypony who did not know each other already got acquainted, and most importantly, Hurricane, Pansy and Trencher worked on their relationships, and by noon the two stallions (or rather, the elder towards the young) held respect for each other, and by nightfall, they were cordial, if not friends, with the Commander finally seeing Plow Blade as his grandson and not as the spawn of an Earth Pony. Having the hatred being used to feed a soul-devouring abomination no doubt helped change Hurricane's attitude.

The farmer would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, but he and Hurricane would in time be good sports about it, even making light of it in their greetings to each other.

Meanwhile, Platinum managed to recover from her 'momentary lapse in good judgment' swiftly, with Clover filling her in on what she missed over the previous few days.

The next day, the eight ponies were well enough to leave the cave. While the plays and traditional story suggest that everypony were now life-long friends for life, that was not truely the case. That would come later, but at that time to much had happened to be forgiven and forgotten over the course of a day. However, as they left, Hurricane, Platinum, Clover and Smart Cookie were already discussing the possibilities of pulling together in light of the damages the wars and extreme weather caused, mingling the three tribes into something more than the parts alone. These idle chats would lead to much debate later on, but for the moment the three Tribe leaders were more than willing to abandon claims to the new land they had mutually discovered, and instead share it.

As they debated on what to call the 'whatever-this-is,' Clover the Clever and Smart Cookie simultaneously suggested a name derived from the name Star-Swirl called Ponykind.

Equestria.

And that is how Equestria, came to be.