This story is a sequel to The Book of the Arrival
As Equestria recovers from what has been termed the Second Eastern Rebellion, Princess Twilight Sparkle shares the letters written between herself and her rebellious former student. The Zephyrites, followers of the prophet Warm Zephyr, nearly succeeded in purifying their land of all non-ponies. Within these letters lies the reason five hundred ponies fled the land of Equestria. And a question is debated which will define the future of Equestria: what is the true meaning of Friendship?
Chapters (3)
Is it wrong that I'm disappointed Twilight isn't exchanging letters with Fluttershy's brother. Lord knows he needs a friend, considering everyone seems to hate him...
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Wow, I completely forgot Fluttershy's brother was also named Zephyr! And here I thought I was being clever naming my antagonist after G5's pegasus hometown...
If it's any consolation, I'm sure the Princess of Friendship's influence would have reached him in this timeline. After all, with all the Friendship that was shared with the creatures outside Equestria, some definitely would have made its way to him!
That was a good story. I wonder how much of the rebellion is really Discords fault and how much is simply crazy ponies doing crazy things.
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That's the fun part about dealing with Discord, you never can be sure what exactly he's up to! There may be another sequel at some point that expands on his role, but for now all we have is unreliable narration from our favorite Lord of Chaos.
And so two questions remain - who appeared in Celestia and Luna's form (if it was not truly them) and by what means did they remove the Zephyrites from Equestria's reach? No, wait, third question - why? And for that matter, what of the ones who sought to return?
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Read on to find out!
Huh, forgot to read this part! And I hadn't considered him as a culprit... perhaps because, like Twilight, I thought he might have learned something over the years. But I guess that what he learns might not be so predictable...
I do still wonder why Warm Zephyr in particular was picked - did she have pre-existing tendencies which Twilight missed? (Certainly, what Discord either missed or chose to ignore was that selecting a population specifically for racism could backfire.)
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Well, as we've seen in Discordant Harmony, he can't learn too much without running the risk of disappearing! I think he'll always have to spread some amount of chaos, he is the spirit of disharmony after all.
I really wanted to treat Discord as equivalent to his counterpart in Star Trek, Q. He has incredible power, and uses it to the annoyance of ponies/humans, but his end goal is to expand their perspective. I think it can be argued that Discord's actions in the show were taken with the foreknowledge of what the end result would be, and they really were intended to help the ponies he was annoying. (With the possible exception of The Cutie Re-Mark, but who knows what he was going for in that episode.). I think Discord might be the true god of the MLP universe, and the other characters only have their powers because he allows it. And his main motivation might be to see what ponies do when left to their own devices, with minimal involvement from him!
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Ties into the events of G5 pretty well so far, doesn't it?
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Hmm... well, that's certainly one take. If that's the case, though, you might wonder if he's playing a very long game indeed...
Howdy, hi~!
Okay, so this is definitely an interesting twist. Firstly, I do love that there was already that hint of zealotry in Zephyr right from the start. How she regarded Twilight and communicated with her definitely already had a lot of rather problematic traits to it. The Discord angle is definitely intriguing as well. I have mixed feelings since on one hand I prefer the idea of her coming to these rather terrible conclusions on her own, but on the other, it does play rather well on Discord's nature.
Anyways, still enjoyed this greatly. Thanks for the read~!
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Hey, thanks, glad to hear you liked it!
Adding Discord was kind of an afterthought. When I started this story I wanted to keep the driving force behind Zephyr's actions open-ended, but I decided to add him after I heard a rumor that the Gen 5 ponies would visit Canterlot at some point. One convoluted train of thought later, I decided the only way a Canterlot visit would fit with the story as I had it would be if the Zephyrites went to another dimension. The good news is, now there's additional armor to keep this story canon-friendly no matter what direction Gen 5 goes!
I think there's still room for Zephyr to come to the conclusions on her own. I'm thinking back to The Return of Harmony, where Discord didn't instruct Rainbow Dash to abandon the hunt for the Elements, but gave her a choice. It seems to me like Discord's nature is to present information that could be interpreted in different ways depending on your outlook. And my opinion, and the likely subject of any further Zephyrite story, is that Zephyr's outlook is derived from her place of birth and the ponies that live there.
At some point, I'd love to cover what happened in those months between the book's discovery and the start of the uprising. I did promise myself I'd finish my Fallout Equestria sidefic before starting another story, but once that's done I'd love to return to the horribly racist world of Warm Zephyr!