• Published 10th May 2022
  • 1,195 Views, 135 Comments

Legends Never Die: The Beginning of Harmony - bookhorse125



The end is coming. Sunny Starscout has rejoined her friends, and together, they must find a way to save Equestria from itself - and all the warring creatures inside it.

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Prologue: The Fall of the Emperor

Thousands of moons ago…

You could almost feel the hopelessness in the air.

In front of her towered a creature of colossal size - though that may just be her mind playing tricks on her. He radiated fear, and her legs felt weak - she wanted to just stop, turn around and go home and never give him another thought. She would never complain again, just so long as she didn’t have to face him ever again.

“Don’t let him get to you.”

She turned to see her best friend standing behind her, looking like she was feeling the exact same thing.

“Don’t let them get to you, Gusty.”

Gusty gave a weak smile and turned back to face the massive blue ram in front of her. She tried to remind herself, he wasn’t any scarier than the Chimera, than her brother, than all the armies she had run from in the past month. Then she took a quick glance at his eyes and felt all her confidence disappear.

Nope! Definitely worse! He is definitely worse!

She felt her friend’s hoof on her shoulder, and the physical contact was enough to make her take a deep breath and calm down. Gusty glanced sideways at her commander. He caught her eye with a stone-cold expression, nothing like the cheerful, laughing stallion she had been talking to just a few moments ago. His gaze flitted between her and the ram in front of them, his massive curled horns glowing bright yellow and crackling with black lightning.

He gave a small, almost inconceivable nod.

Gusty lit up her horn, and the unicorns around her did the same thing, their nervousness melting away and being replaced with a courage that you only found when defending something you truly cared about.

“For Equestria!” she screamed with all her heart, her soul poured into those two simple words that carried so much meaning, and she heard the cry echoing up and down the lines. Gusty forced her legs to move, and soon she was running, all her fear turning into an undeniable rage and anger, anger at what this creature had done, anger that she had never done anything about it until now, anger at what this world could be - and the fact that it wasn’t.

In front of her, she saw Grogar laughing, as if he doubted that these petty little unicorns could do much against an all-powerful tyrannical dictator such as himself. He sent out a wave of magic that threw dozens of unicorns off their hooves and flung them back. Gusty threw up a shield just in time, but she was still thrown backwards a couple meters. Still, she remained on her feet, and when she lowered her shield and kept on charging, Grogar looked surprised, and a little amused.

She didn’t stop to think about that. The tip of her horn glowed white-hot, and a rope of pure white light grew out from the end of it. Gusty wrapped it around one of Grogar’s horns and pulled.

He wasn’t expecting that. He jerked forward a step and grunted with surprise, then shook his head from side to side in an attempt to throw her off. Gusty went along with it, flippin through the air and landing on his back. She tightened her rope and prepared for the worst.

Grogar roared and bucked, trying to throw her off. Gusty hung on - just barely - and dug her hooves into Grogar’s back to gain more balance. Whenever he almost threw her off, she would tug him in the other direction, disorienting him and making him furious.

All around them, the unicorns stopped and stared at this bizarre sight, then remembered that there was still the rest of Grogar’s army to be dealt with, and they quickly got busy.

“YEEEEE-HAW!” Gusty whooped, yanking on his horn. “How’d you like that, you oversized donkey!”

He stopped. “What?

She grinned, all the insults she had been longing to throw at his face bubbling up inside her. “Stupid goat! Mooney-eyed moron! Brain full of horse feathers! Complete and utter idiot!

Grogar stopped, his face contorted into a nasty snarl that Gusty was glad she couldn’t see. He roared and lit up his horns, sending out a massive blast that threw Gusty off his back and tossed both her and all the other unicorns away.

Even with his army decimated, Grogar was still much too powerful for them to take on their own.

“Gusty!” Her friend offered her a hoof, and she pulled her back up. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Gusty assured her, then winced. “No, really, I will be,” she added hurriedly, looking around them, her heart sinking. “Everypony else got it worse than I did.”

Her friend sighed and said, “We can’t take him. We - we have to retreat before somepony else gets hurt.”

“When we’re this close?” Gusty shook herself off and shoved down the pain. “I’m not giving up when I’m this close to defeating him and saving our home - our dreams, Maggie! Don’t you remember what we’re fighting for? We can’t just give that up!”

“I know,” she said, her voice breaking. “But you know we can’t do this alone.”

“Then we’ll hold off until help arrives,” Gusty said in a low voice. “But we aren’t giving up and going home with our tails between our legs.”

What help?” Maggie cried, her voice pleading. “Please, I know this is hard for you, but we can’t stay here-” She paused, turning her head this way and that as if she had something in her ears. “What’s that?”

Gusty frowned. “What’s what?” But she heard it now, too. A flapping sound that sounded distinctly like… wings?

She turned around to see a huge cloud coming their way - except that it wasn’t a cloud. It was a group of pegasi, coming down from Cloudsdale. She heard the sound of thundering hooves and turned to see a stampede of earth ponies running towards them. And from what she could see on all of their expressions, they were here to fight.

The sight seemed to inspire the unicorns, and they were back on their hooves, horns alight, and Grogar looked furious. He lifted his head and stretched out his neck, and that’s when Gusty caught a glimpse of something on his neck.

A cracked green bell, pulsing with light every time Grogar lit up his horns.

Like he was drawing power from it.

A memory flashed in her head - Grogar standing over two ponies crouched on the floor, one standing protectively in front of the other. One of them looked like Gusty, and one of them looked like her brother. Grogar lifted his bell without a glimmer of remorse in his eyes and blasted it with magic. The bell’s ringing echoed in her ears, much louder than it must have been.

Gusty gasped. “Everypony!” she cried, her voice loud and clear. All the unicorns and pegasi and earth ponies paused as they turned to her. “Attack him all at once!” she instructed, lighting her horn and taking a step towards Grogar, looking into his eyes to let him know that she was unafraid. “I only need him down for a few moments.”

“You heard her!” Maggie yelled, charging the ram herself and inspiring everypony else to do the same.

Grogar constantly found himself under attack from unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies, working together so seamlessly that he couldn’t determine where they were, where they would be, or what their plan was. He roared and tried to shoot blasts at the ponies whenever they attacked him, but there were so many of them, too many of them, and he couldn’t keep up. All the ponies pulled back for a second before launching themselves back at the massive ram, fighting with everything they had.

They weren’t just fighting for then - they were fighting for the future. They were fighting for their dreams, for the future, for the world they wished they lived in. And they weren’t going to give that up.

Grogar paused, summoning all his energy into one massive blast, and Gusty saw her chance. She ran forward, her horn blazing as brightly as the sun, everypony stepping out of the way when she came barreling through, and Grogar faltered just a moment too long.

Gusty reached down inside her and summoned all her anger, her fear, her hope, her love, her resentment, every strong emotion she had ever felt in the past year, and poured it into her magic, sending a massive blast of energy straight at the arrogant ram’s face, blinding him and everypony in vicinity.

She hit his chest and leaped back off, flipping through the air and landing on her hooves in front of him.

Grogar recovered and snarled at her, “You pathetic little pony. As if somepony like you could defeat somepony as powerful as me! Even when you pour in everything you have, it still isn’t enough - and it never will be.” He lit up his horns, drawing power from his bell - but his bell wasn’t there.

He stopped. “What…” He tried again, growing more and more furious. “What did you do?” he roared, reaching up a protective hoof to his bell… but he only felt empty air.

“Looking for something?” Gusty asked innocently, holding up the cracked bell, the rusted object clunking dully. She held it above her head with her magic, taunting him with it, a satisfied smile coming to her face at the anger and sheer panic that made up the ram’s expression.

“Give it back!” he screeched, his voice cracking.

Gusty snickered. “Or what? Do another voice crack? Yeah, I don’t think so.” Her horn glowed brighter, illuminating the field with a bright white light, and Grogar took a nervous step back. “You want to rule over us all for eternity? You want to sit upon a throne so high that nopony can tear it down?”

She thought of what she wanted to do, the spell flashing through her mind, her horn glowing so bright that everypony looked away. She thought about her parents, murdered at the hoof of this vile creature. She thought of her brother, and how much he had lied to her, just for this insufferable goat. She thought of the world that was - and the world that could be. And she thought of her friends. The ponies she cared about more than anything.

They deserved a better world than this one - a safe, happy world. That world could not exist while Grogar was still on the throne.

Gusty fired, and her beam of light surrounded Grogar, dissolving him and whisking him away, up up up into the sky until it exploded against the night sky. Four stars appeared in the wake of the explosion, shaped just like Grogar’s arched back.

There was a moment of peace and calm… and then it seemed like all of Equestria erupted in cheers.

Gusty was hoisted onto shoulders and paraded into Canterlot, where there were streamers and confetti and balloons and cheering ponies and they carried her into the castle and set her down on Grogar’s throne, screaming her name, claiming that she was the greatest pony who had ever lived, begging her to tell them how she had managed to permanently defeat the worst villain they had ever witnessed, and she had no idea what to do about it.

Eventually, her friends shooed all the ponies away and shut the doors to the throne room, and she was alone.

“Well,” said Maggie, “that was… interesting.”

“I know, right?” Gusty laughed, the feel of the moment really sinking in now. They had done it, they had defeated Grogar, and now they could rebuild. Everything she had ever wanted was happening - though she glanced at the bell she had been carrying around everywhere, careful not to let it out of her sight. “But what do we do with this?”

“Someplace nopony can get it,” her commander said, relaxing now that he wasn’t commanding an army at that moment. “Someplace nopony would even think to look, and certainly not Grogar. We don’t want that thing falling into the wrong hooves.”

“Hm,” Gusty thought. She walked over to the window and looked out upon the joyous capital, all shouting in jubilation. Confetti still rained on the streets, and she sensed that the celebrations would go on into the night… and the next week… and perhaps the next month… and that she would be dragged out to join them, but she didn’t mind. These ponies needed something to celebrate after years of living under Grogar’s tyrannical rule.

She lifted her eyes and spotted a silhouette on the horizon - a tall, jagged peak jutting into the sky, outlined by the setting sun. “I think I have an idea.”

Her gaze shifted to the new constellation in the sky of a ram, and Gusty the Great sighed, feeling, for the first time in a while, that everything would - truly - be okay.

And so an evil villain has been defeated, she thought to herself. There may be more - in fact, there will probably be more. But whatever the future holds, as long as we’re in it together, I know we’re going to be okay.

Author's Note:

Cover art coming next week.

If you want to read more about my interpretation of the adventures of Gusty the Great, look for my fanfic The First Standoff, coming later this year. Hopefully, anyway.

Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thank you for reading!