New Providence
March of the Marauder
By Tundara
It was many years ago now that they arrived, three stars falling out of the night trailing thick smoke and smelling of burnt metal and tears. I was curious, and I was concerned. Worry that I had failed to take care of my sister’s stars in her absence ate at my belly, making me antsy and irascible.
So I took wing and made my way to where the stars had fallen, and there I saw them for the first and only time.
Giants.
Metal giants.
They towered above the trees, a trio of mighty goliaths unlike anything I’d seen before or since. Dozens of hooves tall, wearing painted armour of brown and green that blended in with the forest, I could feel power radiating of the strange creatures. At first I thought to approach and speak with them, perhaps greet them to Equestria, ask them from whence they came, and so-on.
Before I could, a dragon emerged from her cave challenging the intruders with a typical roar.
The giants seemed unfazed by the dragoness, and why should they have been? Each alone was far larger than even the wyrm. But it was not their size that gave them such confidence, but their magic.
Fire, thunder, and lightning blazed from the giants, stabbing from their arms and chests at the dragoness and striking her down within moments. I stood appalled at the giants ferocity and brutality—the dragoness was hardly recognizable after the onslaught—and I will admit, I was also frightened.
Not for myself, but for my little ponies.
For days I watched the giants, resolved to confront them if they made to leave the mountain on which they’d appeared. But they did not. On the fifth day, when I returned to the spot from which I taken to watching the giants, I found a strange creature waiting for me.
Sharing the giants shape, but much, much smaller, the stranger explained that the giants were the protectors for his people. They’d been traveling in a great Exodus, cast out from their home with many of their kind, but had become lost and separated from the rest of their herd. So long as his kind were left alone, the giants would bother noone.
I confess I felt sorry for the creature. There was a great weariness about his eyes, and a haunted look of one who’d seen true evil and wished he could forget. A look I used to see in my mirror when I would brush my mane each morning. I granted him and his herd my blessing to settle in the mountains on which they’d found themselves under the condition that the giants not harm my ponies.
He simply nodded, spoke briefly to the giants, and they marched deep into the valley.
I returned to Canterlot with a relieved heart.
It has been two and a half centuries since I encountered the giants, and true to the strangers word, they haven’t been seen since.
~Celestia’s Journal
High up in the Thunderhorn Mountains, north-west the rolling badlands and the buffalo tribes sat New Providence. It was a moderate sized town set in the crook of a long mountain valley with a population a little over a couple thousand. The homes were tall and well furnished with thatched roofs, stone walls, and green-shuttered windows. Wide boulevards and gardens created a homely, sprawling atmosphere, especially in the early afternoon as the sun slanted her rays through the boughs of the old pines and firs. Rather than flowers, vegetable grew in the gardens, with a few tilled fields on the town’s far side.
Anyone that would pass by the valley would think nothing of the town, one of a dozen such mountain communities, if they could spot it at all.
Utterly indistinguishable.
Plain.
Normal.
Uninteresting.
All one had to do was enter the town and they’d know this was an odd place. The first thing that would greet them would be the statue of Kerensky proudly standing in the town square. A tall, bipedal creature, Kerensky gazed skyward, cast-iron finger pointing towards the spot where the sun would rise on the winter solstice. He was only identified by the blocky script printed on a brass plaque at the statue’s base.
To the residents of New Providence, the statue wasn’t all that unusual. Not because they were used to seeing it every day. Rather, because all the inhabitants save a very few were members of the same, all-but-unknown race; humans. Not that visitors to the town would spot any of the humans. Nothing could move up the winding valley to the town without being spotted. In such cases, the humans retreated into their homes, New Providence turning seemingly into a ghost town with only the few pony families that lived in the lower edge of town to care to the visitors needs. Even then, such care was just long enough to all-but shove the visitors back out of the valley.
It wasn’t that New Providence was afraid of discovery, it’s location was clearly indicated on all the national survey maps made by Equestrians over the last couple centuries.
It wasn’t even that the residents hated outsiders. They had an almost unhealthy obsession with the goings on in the rest of the world, their homes and window-sills covered in toys and knick-knacks that the pony families imported in their wagons.
No, it was because the town had a terrible secret, and worried that if the rest of Equestria discovered it, their idyllic, isolated life would end.
All the residents had grown up on the stories of where their kind had originated. Of the world known as Terra and the shining army that protected the golden jewel within the bounds of an ever-expanding empire. As bedtime stories they heard of Richard Cameron, so young and foolish, and Amaris the Usurper, who shot the emperor in the head and tried to steal a thousand worlds for himself. Before they fell asleep the children would beg and plead to hear about Aleksandr Kerensky and how he crushed the would-be-tyrant. Just as they drifted off their parents would whisper about the betrayal Aleksandr suffered and how he lead his soldiers into the Exodus, abandoning the empire he’d tried to save as it dissolved into unimaginable anarchy and bloodshed. Rarely did the children stay awake long enough to hear of how the ship that carried their ancestors got lost among the stars, the exact cause unknown or unrecorded, wandering aimlessly until discovering Equis, and founding their new home.
That was the terrible truth; they were descended from warriors. An order of knights whose chariots made entire worlds tremble.
The stories ignited the imaginations of the children.
Giant robots, wagons that could fly faster than sound, weapons capable of turning cities into glass plains; it was all too inconceivable and wonderful.
On their fifteenth birthday they were well prepared, waiting eagerly to be taken to the far end of the valley.
It was there, invisible from the town, that New Providence’s final secret was hidden behind a false mountain face; the three Overlord class dropships that had carried the first humans to Equis. From the air all that could be seen were a trio of ridges that protruded from the mountain into the valley, the ships camouflage perfected over the years to appear completely in tune with the rest of the valley.
Once troop carriers for the Star League’s army, the ships had long since been converted into a combination of engineering shop, hangers, and classrooms. Their many weapons had been removed and placed around the valley, hidden behind more false exteriors. In the same manner their engines and power-plants had been relocated deeper into the mountain where they provided power for New Providence. Only one of the ships had any hope of flying again. Even then, it would take months of constant work to undo centuries of decay to her structure.
Not that the residents of New Providence had any desire to leave their home.
Or rather, almost all of the residents.
“Come on, mom, it would just be a quick peek!” Samantha Cameron clapped her hands together, on her knees in the moderately sized kitchen of the ancestral Cameron household. She was a waifish girl, barely fourteen, with straight, straw-blond hair and small dark eyes that were neither blue nor green, but some point in-between. “They wouldn’t even know I’m there! I promise! I’d stay in the wagon, and if any strange pony came I’d hide in the closet.”
“No, Sam, and that’s final!” Sadie gave her daughter a scathing glare, banging her spoon on the rim of a bubbling pot for emphasis.
Samantha looked from her mother to the pot, crinkling her short, pointed nose.
“Mushroom soup again?”
“Would you prefer chickpea chilli?” Sadie smirked as she tasted the soup and her daughter stuck out her tongue before flopping onto her back.
A knock at the door ended any further pleading, a bluish-grey unicorn filly poking her head into the kitchen after a moment.
“Hey, Sam, want to play?” she asked, blowing a strand of dark lavender mane out of her eyes.
“Yeah… Sure… If it’s okay with you?” This last was said to Sadie.
She contemplated the question for a moment before nodding, her daughter out the door before she could shout, “Don’t go far! Dinner is almost ready!”
“We won’t!” Samantha answered, already racing through the garden and out into the woods. “Come on, Moonbeam, I’ll race ya.”
The pair made their way slowly down the simple dirt road that connected the town to the rest of Equestria. It was rarely used, saplings and grass growing down the center of the path. On the edge of town sat a low, stone barn where the pony families stored their wagons. It was for them that the road existed, and keeping it well maintained year-round wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list.
“So, what did she say?” Moonbeam asked as she slowed and then leaned up against the barn.
“What do you think?” Sam replied as she snatched up a stone and flung it at the base of a particularly old pine.
The stone ricocheted with a dull thunk before clattering off a mossy topped boulder.
“Well, there is always next year, right?” Moonbeam flopped down into the low grass and rolled onto her side.
“Yeah… I suppose.” Sam plopped down next to her friend, a hand absently reaching out to play with Moonbeam’s ear.
“H-Hey, stop that!” Laughed Moonbeam, trying to roll away, only to be tackled and both her ears attacked.
Between her own bouts of laughter, Sam said, “But you ponies are just so cute! How can we not skritch your wittle earses? Your like puppies.”
“I’m not a puppy!”
With a shove, Moonbeam pushed Sam from her back, jumping to her hooves and starting to race across the field. Gathering her feet, Sam gave chase. It was a game played and repeated many times, one that always held the same conclusion.
While Moonbeam was far faster in a sprint, Sam’s long, energy efficient strides gradually wore her friend down. Everytime Moonbeam slowed to gain her breath or rest, there was Sam, lopping along as if the last mile had been nothing more than a pleasant exercise. Around town the few ponies joked that the humans didn’t so much run as fall perpendicular to the ground. It certainly explained their almost endless endurance.
Or, as Moonbeam’s father once told her, ‘They are not the swiftest, nor the strongest, but I’ll be if they aren’t relentless.’
The game, therefore, wasn’t so much if Sam could catch Moonbeam, rather how long it took.
Even in the mountains, with the mid-summer heat it wasn’t long at all before Sam was atop Moonbeam, her grin wide and showing off her unsettling teeth.
“Okay, okay, you got me!” Moonbeam wheezed as she collapsed into the shade of a alder.
“Well, of course,” Sam said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, grabbing onto a low branch so she could swing above her friend. Noticing the sun out of the corner of her eye, Sam sighed. “We should probably head back. Mom’s going to be mad enough as-is.”
When her friend didn’t respond, Sam glanced down to see Moonbeam’s ears twirling around like little, fuzzy, grey dishes.
“What—”
“Shh… someone’s coming,” Moonbeam hissed, pointing further down the road.
At once Sam dropped down into the grass, pressing her belly flat to the ground.
“Is it the Igneous family?”
Silence from Moonbeam for a few crucial seconds before, “I don’t think so.”
One of the pony families of New Providence, the Igneouses had taken their wagon the week before to the next town over. Given it was a three day journey each way, and typically another three days of trading, bartering, and making deals, they weren’t expected back until the weekend. Sam suppressed a curse, the trundling of wheels at last reaching her ears. Scooting back so she was deeper in the shade beneath the tree, Sam wondered if she had time to slip into the woods.
Avoiding detection was the first thing taught to the children of New Providence, right before hand-to-hand combat and finger painting. Often in that order.
Sam prayed to Celestia that whoever it was coming up the dusty road would just roll pass, or turn around.
At first it was a line of black armoured ponies that came into view. Six of them in three pairs, eyes sweeping the woods on either side of the road as they marched in perfect synchronicity. Then came an open top carriage or chariot, pulled by two more of the armoured ponies, with a final pair bringing up the rear.
Eyes widening, Sam recognised an honour-guard when she saw it. Curiosity biting at her belly, she lifted her head a little, the grass rustling just as she caught sight of a dark-blue regal pony sitting within the chariot. Several ears twisted towards her position, Sam dropping back down as the chariot rolled to a stop.
It was Princess Luna, it had to be. Sam recognised the princess from the papers brought back to town. She even had a soft plush doll of the princess—the only doll she still kept—that sat on her lesson desk where it could keep her company while she was taught mathematics and basic sciences.
Luna’s story was one that ignited the imaginations of most of New Providence’s youth; Celestia’s lost sister, fallen to greed and jealousy, returned and redeemed of her dark nature. The younger children still played the Sun and Moon game—though in secret since Tim Sheffield had had his nose broken. Like most of their games, it involved a lot of hitting each other with sticks or switches that were used in the place of swords. The pony foals rarely joined in the game, at times confused by the joy their human peers took in being so merciless and vile to each other, the rest of the time simply deciding it was better to do something else rather than attract the attention of a horde of pink, stick wielding, howling fiends.
Children were evil was the general consensus. One not argued by the adults.
Short whispers were exchanged among the guard and Luna, bringing Sam out of her thoughts.
“We know you are there. Come out of the grass, or are you bandits?”
The voice was unmistakably Luna’s, though Sam had never heard the princess even in a recording. Still, it was everything Sam imagined the princess’s voice to be; regal, with a hint of aloof superiority, and yet a gentleness to it.
Resigned to the game being up, Sam was about to stand, when Moonbeam beat her to it.
“I’m not a bandit!” Moonbeam exclaimed, hopping onto her hooves, indignation rolling off her in waves.
“Oh?” Luna asked, a slight laugh tumbling after the simple word. “Then why were you laying next to the road just so? And why does your friend stay hidden?”
“I… uh… I’m alone.”
Sam face-palmed at the weakness of her friend’s response. Still, she remained prone, hoping against hope that the ponies would believe the answer. They were very trusting, after-all.
Luna, it turned out, was not.
“I can see the blue of her coat through the grass, my little pony.” Sam could practically feel the hoof that was pointed in her direction.
Like all the children, Sam wore a simple blue tunic of fine cotton, imported by the pony families. Her tunic was light and airy, comfortable in the summers, warm in the spring and fall, and fairly durable. It was cinched about her waist using a simple rope belt—her mom had promised to get her a proper belt as soon as they had the bits, but it never materialised—with a pair of brown trousers to complete the outfit.
The downside, from all the youngsters point of view, was that it was rather easy to spot.
“Well… she’s… um… shy! Yeah, shy! And horribly disfigured. It’s really rather hideous. You wouldn’t want to see her, your highness. I’m used to her and she manages to creep me out sometimes.”
“Hey!” Sam snarled, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hideous, you say?” Sam heard the chariot creak, and then the clip of a shod hoof on a stone. “That is terrible. I have seen many scarred ponies. If you show yourself, my little pony, I promise not to be afraid.”
“You should stay back, Princess.” Sam could feel the panic in Moonbeam’s voice, her friend’s tail snapping back and forth in her anxiety.
“Well then, perhaps… Gotcha!”
Sam’s eyes went wide as she felt the familiar tug of telekinesis around her, attempting to drag her upright. The magic slipped and slid off her skin like she were covered in oil, leaving a tingling sensation that made Sam burst into laughter. It were as if a thousand feathers tickled her all at once, and though unpleasant, it didn’t hurt even as the laughter gained a note of fear and she squirmed in the grass. While Luna’s magic had no effect on Sam directly, it did grab ahold of her tunic and trousers, and through them, drag the hysterical teen upright. Almost at once the magic faltered and Sam plopped back onto the ground, arms flailing before she settled, gasping for breath, on her back.
“Sam…?” Moonbeam’s face appeared above her friend, worry pressing her brow together. “You okay?”
“I hate magic,” was all Sam said in reply, groaning as she sat up.
Luna stood a few short lengths away, her guards at her side, a look of deep surprise filling her blue eyes. There was not a trace of worry or concern in her posture at Sam’s appearance; wings resting easily along her back, mane and tail floating lazily in the breeze.
As for her guards, Sam could not claim the same. They’d lowered their heads, hooves scuffing at the ground, ready to charge at any moment with wings half extended for flight, if necessary.
“Well, now I see why Tia was so insistent that this be one of the villages I should visit,” Luna took a few steps forward, circling around Sam to get a better look at her. “What race are you? A cousin of the minotaur, perhaps? Maybe some odd breed of wingless dragon? That would explain your resistance to magic.”
Moonbeam giggled, covering her mouth with a hoof to hide her growing smirk.
Completing her circuit, Luna sat down. “You are from the town, yes? Or are you some monster that lives in the mountain caves, haunting the stories shared to little ponies at bedtime, and this your one true friend who looked past your different appearance?”
“Blech—No!” Sam and Moonbeam stuck out their tongues at the same time, sharing the same opinion on such sappy tales.
Opening her mouth to talk, Sam quickly snapped it shut again. She had no idea what to tell the princess. The laws of New Providence were very clear. Never talk to any outsider, for any reason. Ever. Period. Full-stop.
As usual, Moonbeam came to her rescue.
“She’s a human, Princess.”
“A human?” Luna tilted her head to the left then right in an almost bird-like motion. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard the name before.”
In short order the more obvious facts were drawn out of the pair. While Sam stayed silent, Moonbeam chatted animatedly.
Yes, Sam was from the town, and yes, there were more of her kind. No, they weren’t a threat to anypony. New Providence just wanted to be left alone. All the humans had the same reaction to magic being used on them. And so-on.
The conversation had started to encroach on some uncomfortable areas, namely where the humans had come from, when they were figuratively saved by the wispy shouts of their names reverberating from the mountaintops.
“Oh, no!” Sam yelped, jumping to her feet in a smooth motion, the guards, who’d started to relax at once on edge again. “We’re late, Moony! Mom is going to kill me.”
“Well, how about I give you a lift up to your home and explain I was the cause of your delay?” Luna gestured with a wing to her chariot.
Sam took a brief look at it, dark blue paint with purple trim shining in the lessening light, and shook her head.
“I show up with you and the Colonel will kill me, and I mean literally.” Sam gulped down a knot in her throat at the mental image of the Colonel glaring down at her. She’d see him truly angry at someone once, and that had given her nightmares for a week. The disappointment he could level in a single look was… crushing.
“Colonel? You have a fort nearby? I saw nothing of this on the maps.”
At once the blood drained from Sams face. She attempted to stammer a lie, deflect away from her poor words, but nothing suitable presented itself. To top matters off, she could hear her mother calling her name again, the source drawing nearer. Stay or run. Lie or say nothing. Sam didn’t know what to do, and Moonbeam just sat quiet, looking up at her friend with a quizzical little frown.
Trapped by indecision, and a pony that could move a planetary body, Sam was on the cusp of a decision, when Sadie rounded a bend in the road, stepping out from behind a large rock that served to obscure her approach, and the group of ponies from her. Sadie looked from the princess and guards, her mouth falling into a large ‘O’ of shock, eyes a pair of startled black orbs, to her daughter and Moonbeam sitting in the grass, then back at the princess.
“Welp, I’m toast,” Sam sighed, shrinking down behind Moonbeam as Sadie pressed her lips into a tight line and began to march down the road, hands balling into fists at her side.