Bushkeeper

by Odd_Sarge

43 - Through Their Individuality

It was a story told a thousand times in a thousand different ways. It was immutable, unchangeable, decisive. It was the story of how the pony tribes came together to create their village. Tall Tale was its name, given to it by their Keeper. Once, they called him their Bushkeeper, for it truly fit the name of their residence. But their kingdom became so much more than that, and the Keeper was born anew.

Between the great waves of a vast sea, the towering peak of a mountain twice conquered, and the ridge between them and a ripe world, the ponies of Tall Tale rose to fight the great beasts that plagued the land of Equinis. Their warriors rose to fight the terrors of the Sky Gods, and the beasts returned to their masters with the thunderclaps of the powerful pegasus clan, the seemingly irreversible devastation left by the earth-shaping ponies, and the blinding intensity of each unicorns’ blow.

Tall Tale became the safe haven for the tribes, and the home of their Keeper.

For years, the Gods prodded deeply into discovering what had caused the once-distant tribes to unify. They knew of the Keeper, but could he have truly been so powerful as to cause this?

Eventually, the Keeper himself came to relinquish an answer. He told them the story told a thousand times. They told him that they’d heard it. He told them to wait. They were impatient, but allowed him to continue, all too eager to discover the secret to reconstructing their power.

With a name lost to time, the Keeper told them of the world beyond their own. They had known of this world, known that it required crossing the great sea of black that set the stage for every moon in Equinis, but not of the true machinations that the Keeper had brought from that world with him. He told them the stories of the earliest beginnings of that world, and how eventually the youngest minds had become the old, then been reborn, and how after endless amounts of moons that he had been born as the youngest mind. He told them the story of countless civilizations like the ponies’ own, and how those minds had come together to form their own kingdoms, and how each one faced its own kind of celestial affair with impunity. The Keeper came to the Sky Gods that day, and told them that this was how worlds were meant to be. Mortals would live, die, and overcome. No matter what came of their fight to keep the mortals suppressed and themselves in power, eventually it would be given to their rightful owners.

The Gods were angry, knowing that for the time the Keeper was correct; their power had been spread far and wide among the mortals. Yet, like the mortals they still viewed as foolish, they held onto a hope that the Keeper would be wrong. They asked him why a mortal like him had truly come before them that day, and he replied in a most strange manner. He told them that he was a God just as them, but one spread across a thousand minds. He was a seed, and just as a seed of grass gave birth to life, he had given the ponies their right to life.

God-given, he called it.

God-taken, they replied.

From their council the Keeper departed, back to the kingdom filled with the mortals that had given him the power to speak with them. They considered the Keeper’s words heavily, and were relentless in their waking fury. Disasters and beasts came to the sole kingdom of Equinis to destroy what pony-kind had built, but the vast union the Keeper had created was just as the Gods had feared. They drowned in their unfathomable anger, and the ponies came to meet each outburst with the soft touch of their communion. It seemed impossible to the Gods that with such a solidified union they were able to draw out the abilities each tribe had once relied on for themselves. Ever-still, they searched for the answer to reclaiming their power, ignorant of the fact that the Keeper had given it to them.

On the fateful day that their union shattered, the tribes separated once more. With their union more apart than ever, the Gods sought to end the mortals once and for all. But the Keeper's plan had worked, and across time, the remnants of their union remained.

And a thousand moons later, they celebrated it not as the creation of a kingdom, but as their day of Harmony.

Comments

[mustangdrew4]

Ok. That's a new way to describe the three tribes great migration. Gotta love hearths warming.