Dark Times
The unicorn stallion stared morosely at the turgid clouds as he trudged wearily home along the muddy track. It looked like they were in for more rain. If they got too much more, their precious crops would rot in the fields, and the harvest ruined. Food stores were still far too inadequate to avoid severe rationing if that happened. The pegasi had promised to clear the skies days ago, but had yet to turn up. He could not blame them though – there were far too few of them left now to cope with the demands of an entire country, and that would be the situation for many years to come. You can’t destroy nine tenths of the pegasus population and expect them to maintain the same level of weather control that they exercised before the Great Catastrophe.
Of course the pegasi were not the only ones to lose members. Unicorns and earth ponies alike had been decimated by the unforeseen attack upon Equestria. It was that bitter reality that meant that the food shortages were not as bad as they could have been. It was a struggle for survival that saw even the older fillies and colts put to work to try to provide food and other essentials to the remaining population. The youngsters should be in school or at play, not putting in a full day’s work alongside the adults, but for now they were essential to their civilization’s recovery.
The stallion’s ear flicked in the direction of one older filly’s voice drifting from the direction of the apple orchard that he was passing, and he paused a moment to see who it was. He spotted Apple Bloom harvesting apples alongside her big sister, and even from here he could tell her cheerful demeanor. Despite having a prosthetic to replace one foreleg that had been lost as a result of the attack, she had scarcely been slowed down, and worked diligently and happily to maintain the orchards that had survived the blast that had shattered their home and killed old Granny Smith. She had defiantly told him once, “I've still got two strong hind legs to buck trees”, and that’s what she did, almost as well as her proud sister.
With a hint of a smile on his face, he continued his journey homewards, heading up the hill that had protected this orchard from the devastation that had been wreaked upon Ponyville. The Apple family had established the town, and it would not surprise him if they would remain the backbone of the community as it rebuilt itself. As he crested the hill, Ponyville came into sight. If you had visited the place before, you would not recognize it now. Gone were the town hall, the shops, and even the statues and manicured gardens. In fact no buildings had survived the massive magical blast that had vaporized Princess Twilight’s castle and sent out out an enormous shock-wave that flattened buildings and trees, killing so many innocent ponies. Now the town consisted of a few simple new houses that had been built out of the wreckage of the old, one of which he called home.
Of course, Twilight’s castle had hardly been the only target, or even the first. From the vantage point on top of the hill, you could get a great view of Canterlot… if it was still there. Now only the unceasing waterfall marked where it once was, pouring its water down the cliff onto the rubble of the once-magnificent castle and much of the city. It had been the victim of the first and most devastating of the magical blasts that had come without warning or mercy. None who lived in that city had survived, and only distant witnesses had seen the magic shield that had enveloped the entire city mere instants before it was hit. It had not been enough, and Princess Celestia had died that day. Sadly, it had been determined later that if she had put her full power behind protecting just herself, she almost certainly would have survived, but that was not her way. She had tried to save the ponies under her protection, but that had overstretched her capability and thus all had been lost.
The distant Crystal Empire had not been spared either. Apparently it was now a crater filled with the snow that had once been banished from that land by the power of the Crystal Heart. It had been weeks before somepony had been able to discover its fate, and there were no known survivors to tell if Princess Mi Amore Cadenza had defended her realm in the same manner as Canterlot had been.
The unicorn sighed, depressed as usual by the terrible waste of life and the destruction of so much of their civilisation. He resumed his trek into the village. He wanted to be home before sunset, but now that control of the sun had been wrested from the alicorns, there was no such thing as a firm timetable for sunsets and sunrises. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that the whims of their conquerors frequently outstripped their sense. It was not unknown for a day to last only a few hours, or for night not to come at all for weeks. In stark contrast to this day’s conditions, Equestria had nearly been baked to death back then, but that apparently did not matter much to their enemy. Of course, if you are a race of immortals, you can survive most things that others could not.
It had been months before ponies had learned who had attacked them and why. After their assaults on the alicorns, the pegasi, and various other power bases, nothing had been seen or heard of their enemy. It had taken a team of dedicated ponies to discover the truth about their mysterious foe - the Kirin. Centuries ago, the Kirin had used their power to dominate all the races of the world. Once they had been a good and kindly race, but the centuries saw them gradually grow decadent and corrupt until such time as they perceived all other beings as their playthings. It was not until the rise of the first alicorns before their rule was challenged. While the Kirin were an inherently magical race, the alicorns were ascended beings, a powerful combination of the three pony races, a power that was exponentially greater than theirs. The Kirin had been soundly defeated and banished to a far eastern land where they faded into history, and then into legend.
However, they were immortal, and they were definitely not gone. Immortality breeds patience, and while there was no hope of making a comeback for the foreseeable future, they made their plans, gradually accumulated their power, and waited. No one suspected their intentions, for few even knew that they existed, and those believed that the Kirin’s time had long passed. That had been a gigantic misconception, and everypony had paid for that mistake. There was no making a counter-attack because Equestria’s strongest defenders had all been felled. While Applejack had survived, the other Harmony Bearers had been killed, rendering one of the kingdom’s most potent defences useless. The most aggressive and mobile of the pony races - the pegasi - had been particularly targeted. The timing of the attack had deliberately coincided with the Lightning Lantern festival which attracted pegasi from all over Equestria to Cloudsdale. The cloud city had been the target of yet another of the massive blasts, wiping out a large majority of the entire pegasus population. The weather factory, and indeed the entire city, had been vaporized. In one fell swoop, the Kirin had wiped out virtually all who could mount resistance to their power, and left the rest at the mercy of the wild elements.
The stallion passed the first of the rebuilt homes. Beside it and all the others, gardens had been planted. No pony could depend on food supplies anymore, and they all grew as much as they could. Potatoes and root vegetables were good for long term cool storage. Beans, peas and corn were common. More perishable foods were grown only when conditions looked like being amenable to their growth, which was pretty much a gamble nowadays. He waved a greeting to the mare tending her crops, and her unlikely assistant.
Ponies were not the only race that had been affected by the Kirin’s attack. With the pony population so diminished, the changeling race had found itself starving for lack of love to sustain them. Safe within their hidden hives, the majority of their kind had survived, and only their disguised love harvesters at the Kirin’s targets had been killed, leaving a large population that still needed feeding. After the attack, there were too few ponies left to surreptitiously gather love from them. In desperation, the hive queens had signed a treaty with the surviving ponies, and now changelings worked openly among them. It was a bargain that greatly benefited both because the ponies gained extra workers to help in the reconstruction, and the changelings had easy access to a greater amount of freely-given love. By now, their presence was taken for granted. While some still took on pony forms, many worked among the ponies untransformed. What had once been frightening was now commonplace.
The unicorn came up to a house much like all the others rebuilt from the town’s remains. This one was beside an oak tree that was both young and old because it was the remains of Ponyville’s former library. The mighty tree that had been felled by Tirek had sprouted new growth from its stump, proving itself indomitable by even the mightiest of forces. He started scraping off the clay and mud that had accumulated on his hooves when a soft neigh caught his attention. Lifting his head, he saw a blue-coated unicorn mare approaching from the opposite direction that he had come. He smiled at his wife, and nuzzled her affectionately when she arrived at their doorstep. They helped each other clean off their hooves and stepped inside.
With a weary sigh of relief, the unicorn released her disguise spell. Her blue coat darkened to violet, and her dark blue mane gained red and purple stripes. Then wings shimmered back into existence. Twilight Sparkle smiled as she stretched her wings, happy to be herself again.
For all their patience and planning, the Kirin had still made a mistake, and it was a big one. Perhaps they had rushed things because the balance of power had begun tipping away from them again. For a millenium, there had been just one alicorn to worry about, with a second safely out of their way until the Elements of Harmony had freed Luna. Then a third had appeared. When Twilight Sparkle had ascended to alicornhood to add a fourth, it is thought that the Kirin had perhaps panicked, seeing their long-held plans crumbling away. They had already adjusted their plans to take Princess Cadence into account, but they had been carelessly hasty in allowing for the newest alicorn. Thus they did not know her nearly as well as they should have.
As one of the co-rulers of Equestria, Celestia almost inevitably would be found at Canterlot. The same would be true of Luna, but as the Lightning Lantern Festival was primarily held in the evening, it attracted the Princess of the Night to Cloudsdale to join in the celebrations. That left but one alicorn to defend Canterlot, eliminating the possibility of the sisters combining their power to successfully ward off an attack. Just as Celestia had tried to defend Canterlot, Luna had tried to protect Cloudsdale, with similar results. Princess Cadence rarely found the opportunity to leave her Crystal Empire palace, so it was just as easy to be sure of her location. Twilight Sparkle’s tree-like palace on the outskirts of Ponyville had seemed like an equally obvious target, and indeed it housed almost everything that she held dear. However, while it had bedrooms aplenty, a kitchen, a magnificent lounge room, and all the other things that a palace needed, it was not really a home.
The Golden Oaks Library had been home. When the stump had first started sprouting, Twilight had been ecstatic. She had spent considerable time and magic enhancing and speeding up its growth. When her work day was done, she typically spent a couple of hours each evening toiling away at regrowing the best home that she had ever known since becoming an adult, so when the Kirin had attacked, Twilight Sparkle simply had not been in the palace. Of course the power behind the attack was enough to destroy everything in the vicinity, just as it had Canterlot. The big difference and the Kirin’s critical mistakes were twofold. Firstly, Twilight was not at ground zero as had been the other alicorns. Second of all, while not as skilled as the more experienced Celestia or Luna, because she was the avatar of the Element of Harmony that was Magic, she had vaster raw power that she could tap in a crisis. On that day, Twilight had sensed the oncoming attack, and had thrown up a shield much like the other alicorns. However, hers not only had more power, but it was off to the side of the palace. While the edifice had been obliterated, the worst of the attack had been deflected rather than absorbed. Enough destructive energy had nevertheless gotten through the shield to flatten the township, and many ponies died that day, but even more were saved. And unbeknown to the Kirin, alicorn princess Twilight Sparkle lived!
In the following days, Twilight pieced together enough to determine that she and her fellow alicorns had been the primary targets, and she decided that she would not disabuse their enemy of the notion that they had succeeded in eliminating them all. She took on the disguise of an ordinary unicorn mare to continue her work undercover; the chaos and breakdown in communication throughout Equestria enabling her to carry this off. The truth was quickly drowned in misinformation, and any supposed sightings were put down to myth and wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Twilight slowly built up a new secret network to coordinate efforts to rebuild Equestria. While she did have sufficient power to regain control of the sun, that would have tipped off the Kirin, and she was far from ready to take them on as yet, and probably not for many years to come. In the meantime though, she found solace and comfort in the embrace of a unicorn stallion, eventually falling in love and getting married.
Twilight nuzzled and kissed her husband once more before they both turned towards the bedroom. When they entered, a changeling looked up from the book that she was reading, and smiled. She absorbed the ambient love of the two ponies, energizing her and giving her satisfaction in completing another day’s work. She quietly stepped aside so that the ponies could look at her charge. The tiny foal slept contentedly in her crib while her parents smiled proudly at their daughter. Perhaps she sensed their presence because her eyes opened and regarded them, a smile curling her lips. A soft glow of her horn seemed to exert a minute tug on the two, urging them nearer, and her wings fluttered in growing excitement. Mommy and Daddy were home, and all was right with her world.
Against the odds and all expectations, Twilight had given birth to an alicorn foal. They had taken this as an omen that alicorns were returning to Equestria, and like the Kirin, alicorns were immortal. They would plan and gather their power for however long it took, and one day they would avenge their family, their friends, and their brethren. The Time of the Alicorn would come again, and on that day, the Kirin would be no more.
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