Antonovka

by Soufriere

Chapter One: To the Frontier

As the sun dipped below the horizon and the branded moon shone its subtle reflected light over the land, the air had a bit of a bite to it, showing once and for all that Summer was gone for the time being, replaced by Fall, its infinitely more fickle cousin. Although really, what moonlight was there was mostly blocked by the numerous trees surrounding our ramshackle homestead, creating a multitude of shadows dancing to some ethereal tune with no rhythm or any real melody except for the wind itself. On nights like this, before or after supper, I’d gaze out the glass-less window and watch the spectacle, imagining myself in a duet with them.

After a few minutes, or maybe half an hour – I really have no idea; we didn’t have timepieces back in those days, just used the sun – I decided I’d had my fill of staring out the window for the evening and went to join the rest of my family in the dining room. Well, it was also our living area and just about everything else not bed-related since our cabin only had two rooms. Come the winter, it would double as the kitchen too. Over at the plain table, my father Gravenstein sat, worried as usual.

“What’s wrong, Pa?” I asked.

He shook his head and spoke like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. “It just ain’t working, Annie,” he said. He didn’t have to say what ‘it’ was; we all knew.

We had planted crops, plus an orchard with those special apple seeds I found during my first trip outside the homestead, but even magic-infused rainbow apples require time to produce something decent; it took until the next Fall before we could make anything useful from them. Regular orchards take over seven years to grow before they put out. The staple crops we had on hoof were just enough to get us through the winter if we rationed them carefully between the five of us.

In the distance, deep within the Everfree Forest, that cursed hell-wood just to our south, the Timberwolves let out their sinister howls. To the untrained ear it sounds mournful, but get into a tussle with them and you’ll learn quickly why you can’t trust your ears. It had been a few months since I first encountered them and scared them off. Who knew they hated the sound of metal on metal? After that, a lone one showed up from time to time thinking it could scare us or eat us; a few clanks of some utensil on the tin sheet put a stop to that, and they would avoid us for awhile.

Things were changing, though. In the beginning, we only had Timberwolves coming out of the forest once every two weeks or so, if that. But about a month ago, three showed up at once, except this time none of us had gone into the forest and provoked them. We still drove them off like always, but from that point, we had to deal with them almost every day. They were getting bolder too. It felt like it took more and more noise each time to make them leave. Plus, a few days earlier, we saw a strange creature on the far edge of our field that looked like a lion but not exactly, as well as a starry outline that came and went.

Still, we persevered. After all, we had our duty. Celestia herself personally granted us this land.

---

I need to take a little detour here and tell you what Canterlot was like back in those days. Obviously it wasn’t as built-up as it is today. That’s because the population of Equestria as a whole was less than today. More importantly, Canterlot itself was much smaller – the government undertook some major terraforming initiatives a little over a century ago to make more of Equus Mountain habitable. What land there was, mostly a small strip along either side of the Royal Mile, had long been a playground for the Nobility to build their fancy mansions behind the low brick buildings housing the businesses they controlled. The architecture is completely different today as well, not only because of urbanization, but because the Nobility have always had this habit of simply demolishing their old houses and frontage buildings every few decades or so to rebuild in whatever style is popular or whimsical at the time. The whole kaboodle is still fancy as a gold-apple, honestly, but you really can’t expect anything less living so close to the celestial princesses.

They say the only thing better than living near the palace is living in it. I disagree on both counts, but I’ll get to that later.

Canterlot was then encompassed by a series of walls; only the outermost and palace barriers still exist today. In between those was an “Inner Wall” that served to mark the city proper, first built in the decades following the Nightmare War. Only Unicorns, specifically those deemed sufficiently Noble, could live inside. Earth-ponies lived on the outskirts in one of a few districts: a separately walled strip of land along the main path into the city for the wealthy and ennobled, and then various areas outside the walls on the slopes for the grunt workers. There were far fewer Pegasi around back then as Celestia would not succeed in bringing the Chiefdom of Cloudsdale under her suzerainty (that’s “control” by another name, sorry if some of the words I use are too big for you, young’un) for another fifty years.

When my family and I arrived at the Old Outer Gate, since demolished along with about half the Earth-pony Annex to make way for Canterlot’s rail terminal and a much less fancy but more functional gate, we got some questioning glances from the royal guards due to all of us looking like we’d been wandering the world for five years… which we had, but they let us in anyway. They didn’t really have much of a choice; it was the depth of Winter and they didn’t want to dawdle outside any more than we did.

As the Annex was built along a single road on the side of Equus Mountain, there was little room for structures on the inner side of that path and no room on the outer side, so the locals built up. Simple, functional buildings, but I had never seen any so tall in my life. Of course, at that point in my life, the tallest structures I had seen aside from a few ancient spired Sun Citadels – not many of those around anymore – were the four-storey live-in businesses in Trottingham, which I considered the “big city”. Naïve.

Anyway, as I marvelled at the urban surroundings, Pa approached the Inner Gate, where he was immediately stopped by two Unicorn guards. He requested an audience with the Princess. Audacious, huh? Well, the guards certainly thought so, to the point that one of them decided to arrest the five of us and cart us off to the palace brig in a paddy-wagon.

Travelling down the Royal Mile in a wheeled cage is not a method of transport I’d recommend. Especially since the Unicorn Nobility, especially the foals, stood along the road and laughed at us poor folk with our dirt and filth and lack of fancy clothes. One threw a rotten tomato that hit Pa in the face. How he stayed stoic through that, I’ll never know.

When we reached the ornate Palace Gate, the guards began to talk amongst themselves.

“What have we here?” asked the palace guard, another Unicorn who looked nearly identical.

“Intruders,” the other replied. “They say they’re refugees and want an audience with the Princess,” he finished with a snorting chuckle.

“Really?” asked the palace guard, stifling a laugh.

“We are refugees!” Pa interjected. “And me an’ my family were hopin’ for an audience with the princess.”

The palace guard gave us an incredulous look. “Let me guess. Down on your luck. You heard Princess Celestia was kind and good and might help you, right? Well, whatever stories you heard are fiction. No one gets in to see the princess. She’s much too busy running this country to bother with peasants like you.”

As soon as he finished his sentence, he fired off a bolt of blue-tinted magic into the air which dissipated with a loud pop. The fancy Unicorns behind our cage applauded the spectacle. Then he continued. “You mudponies really have some nerve coming here. Your place is down working the fields so we can eat. Using magic burns a lot of calories. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Pa shook his head. “Nope. Can’t say I do. But I can tell ya I’ve prob’ly got more integrity in my hoof here than all y’all guards have put together.”

That just made the guard mad. He lowered his head and began to charge what I learned in hindsight was a powerful attack spell. He never smote us, though, because at that moment the palace gate opened from the inside and we were greeted by a being I believed at the time to be the most magnificent pony anyone would ever lay eyes on: Celestia herself, in full regal splendour. Of course, the shock of turning around and seeing the princess caused the guard to accidentally fire off his spell directly at Celestia; she easily deflected it. With a grave expression she began to address her guards.

“What is going on here?” she asked.

The guard of the Inner Gate stuttered an answer, “W-well, Your Majesty, these mudponie—”

Celestia cut him off. “You shall utter no slurs in my presence. I serve as ruler for all three pony races who reside in my realm. Each has a role in maintaining this world. Magic is worthless when faced with overwhelming numbers …or a populace unwilling to grow your food and quarry the stones for your barracks.”

“Y-yes, Your Majesty,” the guard replied, deflated. “Please allow me to start again. Uh, these five ponies claim to be refugees and wanted to…” he wanted to laugh but at this point held himself back, I’m sure because he knew what would happen if he stepped out of line again, “…request an audience with you.”

Celestia nodded slowly. “Bring them inside.”

They reluctantly wheeled our cage through the gate and, instead of veering off a side path to the dungeon, stayed on the dirt road flanked on either side by the elaborate and immaculately maintained grounds. Before we reached the final drawbridge to Canterlot Palace itself – the main castle bit hasn’t changed much if at all in centuries, though more auxiliary towers have appeared in the interim – Celestia turned to Pa, looked him square in the eye, and spoke directly to him in her calm motherly voice.

“Tell me. Where are you from?”

Pa needed a minute to process that. “Well,” he said, “me and my family here’s been wandering the Central Plain for over four years now trying to find a place to call home, but nowhere has worked out yet. Where’d we used to live? Hippus Valley, near Trottingham.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow at his answer. “Hippus Valley? Then you five are of a Clan ul de Tarpan, I assume?”

It was time for Pa’s eyes to go wide as dinner plates, as did the rest of us. We never assumed any pony outside the immediate area of the Valley would know about the ancient Clan system.

“We were,” Pa said. “My full name’s Gravenstein di Rosales di Malus. We got banished from the Valley by our brethren in Clan Kaolin.”

The princess nodded slowly. “Did they invoke the Shunning?”

“Eeyup,” Pa said simply. “We disagreed with the decision to cut off the Valley from the outside world, so they told us to take our chances in it.”

“I see,” Celestia replied. “You have told me what is most important, thus you have no need for an audience with me. That said, I would very much like to hear more first-hoof accounts of life in the Valley. Please come into the palace; you five will be my personal guests until I am able to devise an appropriate fate for you. And, Gravenstein, do introduce your family, if you would.”

“Uh, yes ma’am!” Pa said with a bit of a jump. “This here’s my wife, Margil. That bigger ruddy stallion’s my older son Manx Codlin. The tan boy is Nickajack. And this little green lady,” he gestured to me, “is Antonovka, or Annie for short. Our only daughter.”

Celestia lowered her head until she and I were practically snout to snout. “Greetings, Miss Antonovka,” she said. “You have quite the fortitude to have been able to endure so long as a refugee.”

“I dunno. I just did it,” I said. “Certainly wouldn’t ‘ve been able to without my family here.”

She smiled. “I appreciate your modesty.” Then she charged her long white horn with its golden aura, and the bars of our cage (and its roof) disintegrated, leaving us to be ferried by the guard in a regular flat-bed wagon. “This guard will escort you into my palace. I shall arrange accommodation for the five of you.”

And then she flew off to an upper balcony. I’ll never forget that first time seeing those wings in action.

We were given four separate rooms in the palace – one for Ma and Pa, plus one each for me and my brothers. I guess it was our stubbornness and pride in being of the land, but we often refused the fancier perks Celestia tried to give us – we could bathe ourselves, thank you. Once every few days when she had the time, Celestia would call Pa into her chambers for about half an hour to question him about our former Tarpanite brethren. Ma thought Celestia might have been doing more… dubious things as well, and she got more and more suspicious as time went on.

One day while I was washing my bonnet and bows, a palace guard – not the one who had harassed us at the gate; he had been demoted – came in saying Celestia wanted to speak to me. I wasn’t sure why, but a normal Earth-pony just a few years out of filly-hood doesn’t say no to the princess.

I found myself in Celestia’s personal antechamber. She was laying on a plush pink pillow upon an impossibly ornate rug, a fire softly crackling in the hearth behind her, as the Spring was slow in coming that year, so it was still chilly, especially considering Canterlot’s high elevation.

“You wanted to see me, princess?” I asked, even though we both knew the answer.

Celestia nodded. “Yes,” she replied simply. When I asked why not either of my brothers, she replied, “Your brothers have undeniable fortitude, which will doubtless help them throughout their lives, but that does not interest me. You do.”

“Why?” I asked. “I’m just an ex-Tarpanite refugee.”

At that, Celestia smirked. “I have been ruling this principality for, shall we say, a considerable amount of time…”

“More’n ten years?” I interrupted. “But, ya don’t look that old.”

“Well, more than ten years is certainly a truthful statement, so let us leave it at that for now,” she replied in that tone she uses that was at once trying to be sagely, stifling a laugh, and being a tad bit condescending. “Anyway, I believe my experience allows me to sense a pony’s potential, often before they themselves can. There is some spark deep within you which I have not seen in many years. That you have survived as a refugee for so long despite your diminutive size is proof enough of your tenacity, though perhaps that is a family trait. I believe you will accomplish great things in your life, and I hope to learn of them.”

I was shocked, nearly weak in the knees, at her words. All I could do was utter a dumbstruck “T-thanks, princess.”

She magicked open her chamber door and politely asked me to take my leave as she began her moon-raising ritual. I hadn’t gotten back to my room yet when I came face to face with Ma, who looked even angrier than usual.

“So,” Ma said with more than a bit of spite, “What’d the princess want with you?”

I shrugged. “She just wanted to talk to me,” I said. “Weren’t nothin’ more.”

Ma barked out a laugh. “Really. She isn’t ‘equal opportunity’? Y’know, I heard stories ‘bout how ponies on this mountain act. And they get away with it ‘cause they’re rich. You best stay away from the princess if you know what’s good for ya. Pa’s already falling under her spell.”

I tried my best not to look at my mother like she’d lost a few screws, even though I felt she clearly had, and muttered some sort of agreement that satisfied her as we went our separate ways to bed.

The next morning, after breakfast, Celestia called all five of us into her chambers. She led us out onto the massive balcony that looked over what seemed like half of Equestria. She turned to Pa, much to Ma’s disgust, leading him to the edge as she spoke.

“My realm is a large one. With the exception of the Cloudsdale Chiefdom to the north,” she gestured to the mass of clouds and rainbows in the distance, “everything you can see from this balcony is Equestria. After centuries of stasis or decline, this country’s population is finally beginning to grow again, and I believe a time will come… when, I know not… that Equestria will be fully connected not just by wagon trails, but formal roads once again. Perhaps even modes of transportation we cannot yet imagine. In order for that to happen, it is necessary for more settlement in the heart of this land.”

She turned her attention to the southeast, where a river running down from Mount Equus meandered through a giant forest, splitting it in two. The north side of the river had low rolling hills punctuating its bottom-lands, its trees a bright green. South of the river, everything seemed bigger and much darker; I noticed some sort of faint purple haze over the canopy. I was immediately curious about it, but Celestia’s voice jogged me out of my thoughts.

“Gravenstein, I shall issue letters patent to the Celestial Court to confer upon you a proprietary charter for a measure of land on the north side of the River Cavalo, where you and your family will be able to live your lives as you see fit.” she decreed.

“What about the south side of the river?” I asked without thinking.

“We do not speak of what lies beyond the south bank of the Cavalo,” replied Celestia bluntly. “It is in your interest to expunge such thoughts from your mind. Now, since you have declined my offer of a home in the Annex…”

Pa interrupted. “We never wanted special treatment, though we’re mighty happy with your hospitality through the winter, Your Majesty.”

Celestia cleared her throat to continue, “…the road ahead, literally and figuratively, will be a difficult one. But I have faith that through your efforts, you will establish a bulwark in Equestria’s forgotten heart that can, in time, become a domicile about which anyone could be proud.”

At that point, one of her many little pony minions with a scroll or three popped out of nowhere to bug Celestia and she quickly but guiltily ushered us out of her chambers. Not long after that, we had our official pieces of parchment giving us, by Celestia’s grace, rights to the land we would settle, and I quote: forever.

We weren’t about to give that up without a fight.

Comments

[Ice Star]

The depth of the lore is already very impressive. Though, the names of Granny Smith's (or Antonovka's) family appear to come from a variety of languages, so I'm having a hard time understanding which culture they are meant to represent when their names appear to be a hodgepodge of Russian, Spanish, and French yet their culture sounds very Scots-Irish, just going by what is presented thus far.

[Soufriere]

10010905
I'm glad to answer this one. "Hodgepodge", perhaps, but I did my research. I daresay you're thinking too hard.

The names of the 250-years-ago Apple Family (Clan Malus Rosales) are all apple cultivars that existed no later than ~1820. "Antonovka" is a Russian variety of apple that looks almost identical to a Granny Smith but is attested at least as early as the mid-1700s. Some other apple names are taken from Colonial America, pre-Victorian England, pre-Revolution France, etc. There simply weren't as many apple cultivars back then, especially not ones that would work as names for ponies. Honestly, I'm proud of myself for managing to find as many fitting names as I did. It wasn't easy. I didn't care so much about the linguistic origin of the names but rather if the names worked for the individual characters.

The "culture", so to speak, is a combination of the Amish (for the Tarpanites who kicked the Apple Family out of their homeland, think Pinkie's family -- in fact it was literally their clan who did it), and "Borderer" -- i.e. those who come from either side of the English-Scots border (same people who originally Euro-settled the Appalachians, where AJ's accent is meant to come from) -- for the Apples themselves. So in that sense you're not wrong.

Of course the Moon Cultists all take their "Order Names" from the various moons of Saturn. And yes, I use the alternate spelling for "Iapetus" as a nod to Arthur C Clarke's works.

I also took care in showing the speech differences between characters of different eras -- i.e. Celestia and Luna never use contractions (I don't care that they do in canon). Other characters from the period also speak with few to no contractions. The Moon Cultists are somewhere in between because their speech pattern starts as an acquired put-on. Annie meanwhile speaks in full dialect but her future (present) self is much more eloquent because, y'know, old.

There are several OC's in this story, mostly Moon Cultists, who I really took a liking to as I wrote them -- Callisto. Ruby also impressed me with what she could do beyond Donitz's original fangame. Annie/Granny apparently has the gravitas to order around Discord and I look forward to expanding on that soon. I didn't realize until after I wrote this story just how much potential I still have to unpack if I want.