Prologue: History of the Lamia
The following is an excerpt from a history book that laid long forgotten, buried deep in the archives of Canterlot Castle. Very few copies still exist of this book, as it was one of the few printed that told the tale of Luna’s fall from grace before Celestia censored them, removing all accounts of her sister from the history books.
Printed on the pages of this book are details many thought lost to time, including the names and histories of races long thought extinct. Detailed below is the history of one race in particular, a race that, during the rule of Discord, became feared as a savage group of pony eaters. Detailed below is what little we, as ponies, know the history of the lamia, a race of half pony, half snake beings who were driven to extinction by Luna’s vengeance...
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In a time long before the rule of the Two Sisters, before even the reign of the Chaos Lord, Discord, there existed a race of ponies whose name was all but lost to the sands of time. These ponies were the lamia, or snake ponies, containing the head and forelegs of a pony, and the body of a snake.
In the early days of their existence it is said that despite being omnivorous beings, they had quite friendly relations with the ponies. The Pharaoh of their race, Pharaoh Seti I, was said to have been an exceptionally long-lived individual and had been on good terms with multiple generations of the three tribes’ leaders.
All four races traded openly, and all four races continued to thrive, but all that changed when the Wendigos appeared. Nopony is certain when it started, but jealousy started to form between the different tribes. That jealousy turned to anger, and that anger acted as a beacon, drawing in more and more wendigos. The drop in temperature caused by the arrival of the wendigos went largely ignored until the lamia trade caravans stopped returning from the pony lands.
Not wanting to assume the worst, Pharaoh Seti I sent scouts to investigate, and it was soon discovered that a shift in the climate had made it lethal for the cold-blooded lamia to travel through the ponies’ territory. Fearing for the safety of his people, Seti I cut off communication with the ponies, and eventually conceded all land outside of their homelands and sealed their borders in an attempt to stop the spread of eternal winter.
Not much is known about what happened to the lamia after that. The ice age ushered in by the arrival of the wendigos lasted several generations, and by the time the ponies escaped their icy grasp, the lamia had become nothing but legends passed down from parent to child. It wasn’t until years later when the ponies were exploring the borders of their newly claimed territory that they once again encountered the lamia.
A scouting party led by a Lieutenant Bucket, tasked with scouting the lands bordering what today is known as The Badlands, reported finding what he described as altars and monuments made entirely from the bones of creatures both sentient and non. When the messenger tasked with carrying his report returned, he found a scene straight from somepony’s worst nightmares. All that remained of his unit were bloody scraps of cloth and armor scattered around the clearing they had set up camp in, and at the center of the clearing stood a new monument constructed using the bones of ponies. The bones had been picked completely clean, and it didn’t take long for the messenger to realize that the monument was all that remained of his former squad.
The messenger fled the scene as fast as his wings could take him, returning to the newly constructed capital to deliver news of his units grisly fate. Horrified by the fate of the scouting party, the newly formed council of pony leaders ordered the formation of a larger combat ready unit to scour the area and find the despicable creatures responsible for the deaths of Bucket and his unit. It wasn’t until months later, when the unit returned with less than a quarter of its members, that they discovered the identity of the beings responsible. While the surviving soldiers told many different tales, each more outlandish than the last, they all agreed on one thing; the culprits were snake ponies.
While the council didn’t want to believe that such creatures could actually exist, it wasn’t until the well-respected and highly decorated General Persnickety recovered enough from her injuries to deliver her own report that they began to realize exactly what they were up against. Persnickety told of her second in command, Sergeant Major Strike, being grabbed by one of these vile beasts and swallowed whole, her muffled screams heard even as the snake ponies disappeared back into mountains. She told of how she attempted to follow the snakes into the mountains to save Strike, only to have one of the snakes ambush her in the pass. Taken by surprise, the snake managed to remove one of her forelegs, eating it right in front of her before leaving her bleeding in the pass for her squad to find.
Horrified by what they heard, the council decided to gather together their finest fighters in an attempt to strike back at the lamia. Before they were able to deploy their newly formed fighting force, however, somepony stumbled upon an ancient tomb buried deep within the caverns of Mount Canter. A tomb containing something ancient, something evil, something… chaotic.
The being who soon became known as Discord had, in ages past, been sealed deep within the heart of the mountain for crimes against nature itself. Upon his release, a wave of chaos spread across the land the ponies had dubbed Equestria, and soon they found themselves falling back to their capital city located in the center of the Everfree Forest.
Under Discord’s chaotic rule, the lamia thrived. With the ponies busy running and hiding from Discord’s Chaos Creatures the lamia began flooding into pony territory, sacking entire towns and using any ponies they could get their hooves on to fuel their dark, depraved rituals.
This continued for almost a century before the two sisters, Celestia and Luna Solaris, appeared. Blessed with the traits of all three pony races and wielding extremely powerful relics of pure harmonic magic, Celestia and Luna managed to push Discord back, eventually sealing him in a stone prison during their final confrontation.
With Discord defeated, and both Equestria and the ponies that lived there now free from his tyrannical rule, the sisters were soon chosen to rule side by side in place of the Equestrian Council. Once in power, it didn’t take long at all for the sisters to agree that with Discord now out of the way, the lamia were a threat that needed to be dealt with.
Luna, the younger of the sisters, was tasked with forming some sort of defense against the lamia. With the pony races united in ways they had never been before, it didn’t take long for her to bring together a fighting force more than capable of pushing them out of pony lands. And push them out they did. In just a few shorts years Luna led multiple successful campaigns against the lamia, chasing them out of Equestria and into the mountains they called home.
It was during one of these campaigns that Luna made a shocking discovery, a fourth race of pony. This new race of pony, calling themselves thestral, were extremely similar, yet vastly different, than any of the other races of pony. With wings of leather, and a taste for the flesh of others, relations with the thestral were quite rocky at first, however, a shared enemy in the lamia soon found the thestral working with the ponies. With their skill and experience hunting lamia, Luna welcomed the thestral among her ranks with open hooves, and they soon became the main troop of Luna’s hunting squads.
With this new race of ponies, along with the addition of a spell developed by Luna to track the very magic that gave the lamia life, it wasn’t long before the ponies were knocking on the doors to the capital city of the lamia. When they finally breached the walls of the city, the ponies were both appalled and amazed at what they saw. It was a city of bone, buried deep within the mountains. Every single building, from the corner market vendors to the palace at the heart of the city, appeared to be constructed almost exclusively of bone.
Upon seeing the remains of her ponies, of her subjects, put on display as some twisted sort of decoration Luna flew into a rage. Together with her forces, she marched straight to the palace, slaughtering any lamia they saw along the way. With their magic and superior numbers giving them an advantage they reached the palace in a few short hours, and by the time her sister had lowered the sun for the day, the Pharaoh laid dead at the hooves of Luna.
With their leader dead, the lamia crumbled under Luna’s forces, and it wasn’t long before they fled the city. Not wanting the lamia to regroup and launch a counter-attack, Luna followed them deeper into the mountains. Using her spell to track them, they followed the lamia deeper and deeper, finally cornering them in a strange ancient ruin.
Luna followed the trail deep into the ruins, noting that the design of them was unlike any building she had ever seen. The ponies with her reported that the large, black, arcing halls with glowing green gems in the walls were nothing like any of the designs they had seen in any lamia city, its ragged appearance giving the impression that it had been abandoned for centuries.
When Luna finally reached the end of the trail, she was puzzled to find that it stopped in a seemingly empty room. Upon closer inspection, she found that the room contained a plethora of hooks that appeared to have held something until fairly recently, but the design of the hooks left little clue as to what. With the trail having gone cold, Luna begrudgingly withdrew her troops and returned to Equestria.
Centuries passed, and while the lamia were neither seen nor heard from again, Celestia couldn’t help but feel that her sister didn’t leave the Badlands unscathed. Luna became more and more restless as they years passed, spending all of her time either locked in her room working on her spellcraft or in the barracks working on her swordplay.
Celestia had had enough when she heard that Luna had struck one of their subjects in anger, but on her way to confront her sister about the issue, she was ambushed. What she had thought was a group of her loyal subjects roaming through the halls had instead been a group of lamia in disguise, and by the time the guards could react they had delivered a near-fatal blow to the Princess of the Sun.
Upon hearing of her sister’s attack, Luna flew into a rage. Gathering her troops, she hunted down and slaughtered the would-be assassins without mercy. With the lamia once again located, Luna was able to attune her tracking spell to their altered magical signature and start the hunt once more.
Abandoning her throne in pursuit of vengeance, Luna carved a bloody trail through the countryside. Using her tracking spell, she hunted down and killed every lamia within Equestrian borders. Stallions, mares, even the foals… none were safe from her wrath. It’s reported that she combined her dream walking abilities with her dark magic to enter the minds of her better-hidden victims, killing them in their sleep. It was during this bloody campaign that she earned many of her nicknames, including her most prominent; The Nightmare.
Having cleared out all the lamia in Equestria, Luna pushed into the borders of neighboring nations to hunt them. Despite multiple summons from her sister to return to Equestria, Luna continued her bloody campaign. Months later, having mostly recovered from the attempt on her life, Celestia was preparing to leave Everfree to fetch her sister. However, the morning she was prepared to leave, her sister’s moon refused to make way for her sun.
Fearing the worst she gathered a group of her best guards and prepared to leave in search of her sister, although before Celestia could leave, an alicorn mare appeared in the throne room. Claiming to be the sister of Celestia, the mare, identifying herself as Nightmare Moon, denounced her title of Princess of the Moon and declared herself Queen of the night, and the sole ruler of Equestria. Not wanting to believe what she was hearing, Celestia tried to talk her sister down, claiming that this wasn’t really her speaking, that the lamia had done something to her to cause this.
The Everfree Castle erupted in chaos when Celestia’s attempts to talk were rebuked, and Nightmare attacked without warning. In a moment of desperation, Celestia turned the Elements of Harmony on Nightmare, attempting to cleanse her sister of whatever dark curse she had been afflicted with. Unable to channel their full power through a single host, however, the Elements instead latched onto Nightmare’s connection to the moon and used it to seal her within the celestial body she controlled.
With Luna gone her guard disbanded soon after, and it wasn’t long before the lamia were once again forgotten, an entire race lost to the sands of time…
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In the centuries that followed, the lamia were never seen again. Today they exist only as myth, with only creatures matching their descriptions being mentioned in old fairy tales. By order of the princess, all historical mentions of them buried deep in the archives where nopony would think to look. The few ponies that have discovered texts telling of their existence question if the tale of death and violence is the full story, but the only beings alive today that could answer that question refuse to acknowledge that they actually existed. With the lamia ponies being extinct there is no way of learning if the story told in the history books is the truth or not, because as they say…
History is written by the victors…
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yay
Changelings.
For a race of shapeshifting monstrousities who have mastered infiltration, espionage, and assassination (character and otherwise) they are not all that subtle.
Pretty sure that the canon spelling is windigo, but since that is apparently also an acceptable spelling of the Algonquian mythological being, it seems fair to assume the door swings both ways and that wendigo is fine for the MLP mythology.
Carry on! Or change it, as you prefer!
So... clearly defining the snekpones as not being a pony race?
You mention that the lamia traded with, and implied a good relationship with ponies up until the windigoes.
At what point did they suddenly start mutilating and eating ponies?
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It’s a change that occurred when they were separated from the ponies by the magical ice age brought on by the Wendigos. There wasn’t much info given on what exactly happened on the lamia side of things, as this history book was written from a ponies perspective. Bits and pieces of the truth will leak through as the story progresses! ;)
Word repetition.
"led"
Interesting opening, I'll give it a try since I like comedy.
History is written by the victors... unless it isn’t. Sometimes the losers write history too. And they tend to lie ALOT. We have plenty of examples of rulers who claimed victories in locations where archaeology proved they’d had their rumps handed to them.
Any-who, I find it kinda doubtful Celly would wipe out a species without due cause. I mean, hell, this is the idiot who decided to randomly reform Discord, the most powerful enemy in Equestria, for a totally obtuse and undefined reason. She’s too nice for her own good. Couldn’t even stop the Bugpony Queen. So lame. Saitama would’ve squished Chryssi in an instant!
This act needs to have a really long and erotic description... for historical accuracy! Totally for that. >_________________>
lol, vore
This is QUITE a nicely laid out exposition!
Rather a good opening. You've well established why the ponies would fear the lamia, and given a strongly implied reason for Moonbutt's descent into madness.
Figured I'd check out your snek story after seeing you mention working on it several times in Meep's Discord channel, and so far am quite glad I did. Let's see where the remaining current chapters go.
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Awesome! I'm glad you enjoyed it so far!
this luna probably killed the children too.
even when I haven't gotten my answer yet to a question I think I asked already, I'm pretty much interessted and just needed to finally start reading it.
I kind of hope for a romance in this story too, or if this story is about her/him getting used to the life in equestria first and them accepting the main char, then I hope there is going to be a sequel and one of the already existing chartacters or a shy partner (that is actually rare in those stories), will be her/his partner.
As usual Luna is the one who went full berserk mode