• Published 10th Aug 2012
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Luna and the Tree Ponies - McPoodle



A tale of Luna's foalhood, and of the pair of visitors who changed her family's lives forever.

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Part 1

Betwixt Silver and Gold 3:

Luna and the Tree Ponies


This is a little story that little Luna tells herself to remember the time when she found the tree ponies.


- Part 1 -

Little Luna lived in the big tall castle on the sea-cliff in the Land of Neurth, with her Mommy and her Daddy and her big sister Tia. At one end of the land was the Sun, and at the other end was the Moon. They never moved, so Luna and her family would go to one side of the castle when they wanted to be awake, and later go to the other side when they wanted to sleep.

All around the castle were volcanoes, and flaming plains, and negative energy zones, and a spot in the sky that made you taste broccoli whenever you looked at it, and all kinds of other nastiness which you couldn’t even see from the windows, or so Daddy said—he never let Luna go out there. Manticores and basilisks and chimeras roamed the plains, and got into frequent and noisy fights with each other. There were also two gangs of ghosts riding ghost alicorns that kept fighting the exact same fight in the same spot day after day; Luna knew it was bedtime when the big rock fell on them.

Daddy said that there were towns out there, somewhere, of law-abiding creatures. Someday he would find them, and on that day the family would go join them, and Daddy would be accepted as their king, the King of Neurth. Luna didn’t want to leave the castle, as it was the only safe place that she had ever known. The castle was bright and cheery; if somewhat empty after Last Megan had gone away.

It was kinda hard to remember Last Megan, as she went away so very long ago. She was an odd sort of creature, the only one of her kind that Luna had ever seen, apart from pictures on tapestries and ancient scrolls (and the ghosts, but they were hard to see). Tia called her an “ancient”, which was rather silly, as she was so very young and alive when she went away. Luna called her a Tree Pony, because she stood up high on her hind legs like Luna did when she pretended to be a tree, and because she had a short and bright red mane (but no tail), just like a tree in the autumn. Tia and Last Megan used to run and laugh and play and talk for hours and hours. This made Luna jealous, because Tia never had time for her. And Last Megan must have known this, because she went away so Luna could have all the time she wanted with her sister. But now Tia was sad all the time.


One day, Luna decided she was going to bring Last Megan back. She decided that she had had enough time with Tia, and now she wanted her to be happy again. So she went down into the basement and wished for her to return. She wished, because Luna was an alicorn and alicorns could make things happen by wishing, or so Mommy always said. And she went to the basement, because she found that her magic was always better when she was next to the little boarded-over spot at the bottom of the basement. That spot was also where the weird dreams came from, and the voice that was both awful and soothing at the same time, but that was worth putting up with for just one wish. But Last Megan didn’t come back. Luna was disappointed, but not too disappointed—Daddy had told her that he needed most of the wishing power to keep the castle safe, and Luna knew that even Tia would not give up the safety of the castle to get Last Megan back.

So Luna came up to her Daddy one day while he was looking out at the crazy landscape with his always-sad eyes, and asked him where Tree Ponies came from. And after she explained to him what a Tree Pony was, he answered her in a very long story, full of big complicated words like he always liked to use. Luna was too polite to tell him that she really didn’t know half of what he was saying, but the part she did understand went something like this:

Long, long ago, the Ancients...alright, ‘Tree Ponies’, came out of the Earth and fled from a great and nasty evil called The Taxes. And as they were running from The Taxes, they found Neurth, which was a nice place with no Taxes to be found. And to make sure they would never ever be found, the Tree Ponies put a big ball around Neurth, the Sun and the Moon, so nobody outside the ball could see them. And on the inside of the ball, they painted the stars that they remembered from when they lived inside the Earth.

Neurth was different from any other place in the universe, because it alone had wishing magic. And the Tree Ponies used this new-found magic to make their dreams come true, and a few of their nightmares, and they made every magical creature in the land, including us. And they used more and more magic, until one day they discovered that they had made the world so magical that only magical creatures could live there. And so the Tree Ponies, who weren’t magical, all got sick and they had to go away. First the ones that used all the magic and eventually even the ones who didn’t use magic, like Last Megan. But long before they left, they picked the alicorns as the wisest of their creations, and they named me as the next king. And as the Tree Ponies went away, Neurth got crazier and crazier, until it got the way it is today.


Luna thanked her Daddy for that rather confusing speech, and then went down to the basement. Her Mommy always told her that she could solve any problem through thinking, and so she sat down there and thought all the way until she was called upstairs for dinnertime. And in her bed that night on the Moon side of the castle she thought some more.

She decided that Neurth needed Tree Ponies just as much as Tia did, and if they had to go away because there was too much magic, then it should be alright to come back now, because Mommy and Daddy had much less magic than they did a couple of birthdays ago, and they were much grayer, which definitely meant there was less magic. So if there was less magic, then Tree Ponies wouldn’t get sick anymore, so all Luna had to do was to find where they went and get them to come back.

But where did they go?


The next morning, Luna woke up bright and cheerful, because she knew where to find the tree ponies! She went out to the courtyard, found a spot of bare earth, and started digging with her horn. After awhile, she came up with a digging wish, and the hole started getting a lot deeper, but even after three or four forevers, she failed to find a single Tree Pony, not even a little bitty one. It didn’t make any sense! If Tree Ponies came from the Earth, and trees came from the earth, why couldn’t she find Tree Ponies in the earth? That story of Daddy’s began to sound a little funny, now. I mean, there aren’t any stars in this earth, so where did the Tree Ponies get the stars to put on the inside of their big ball?

Luna looked up at the part of the sky near the Moon. She imagined the round ball of Neurth, with the Sun floating to one side and the Moon on the opposite side, and the big ball around all three with stars painted on the inside. And outside the ball...

That was it! That was where the Tree Ponies went, to the outside of the big ball, Luna was sure of it! The moment she figured this out, Luna raced back into the castle, passing a listless Tia heading the other way.

“Don’t walk into the hole, Tia!” Luna told her sister.

“What?” Tia replied dully, not even turning her head.

*THUD!*


Luna went down to the very bottom of the basement, and stood on the rickety boards. She took a deep breath, reached out with her mind and pulled every available bit of magic into herself, and wished she could go to the outside of the big ball that surrounded everything she had ever seen or heard about in her entire life. And with a “poof!” she disappeared.