> Breathe
>  by Wind-Song
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1 - Second Chances
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

My name is Stella Farsight, a fifteen year old pegasus of Dimlight, one of the six pseudo-suburban districts that make up the grand city of New Progress on the water planet of Elysia.  However, to tell this story properly, I need to take you back just a little over seven hundred years and more than thirty lightyears away to where this tale really begins.

In an entirely different star system on the planet of Equus, a desperate fight was waged in the vicinity of the land of Equestria between two factions, Vigilant and Defiant, over one of the planet’s most overlooked resources.  For seven long years, the war raged.  The eerie green light of the arcane bombs lit up the night as their concussive blasts rocked the planet to its foundation.  Far above the air, the gunfire of orbital warships flashed like distant lightning.  Thousands of massive craft fell from space like a fiery rain as their enormous forms broke apart on reentry into Equus’ atmosphere.

Elysian historians have widely agreed that casualties of that Great War were measured not in thousands, but millions.  None, not even the innocent, were spared from the horrors of the bloodbath that drove the pony species to near extinction.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, even a consistent manner of death couldn’t be counted on in a world full of magical weapons.  A cruel variety of maladies, both physical and arcane, plagued any soul unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire as the two factions pitted themselves against one another in a seeming effort to discover who could terrify the world the most with ever-increasingly barbaric weapons.  In spite of all of these terrors, however, the slaughter of the innocents wasn’t the worst of the Great War’s injustices.  Not even close.

In the decade or so leading up to the Great War, the Equestrian Holdings Company, or EHC, based in the city of Progress, was the sole producer of the world’s much sought after gem supply.  Now, it is worth noting that Equestria was the only place on Equus where gems of magical grade actively grew in the planet’s upper crust.  After being harvested from one of the nation’s mines, they were sent off to one of the EHC’s many refineries to be faceted and prepared for sale to the public and government organizations alike as magical energy supplies for everything from disposable hoof polishers to warships.

True to its name, the EHC megacorporation was based in Equestria and held title to every last gem mine in the country.  The company’s constituents were, of course, adamant in their claims that these properties had been acquired fairly and with the full and unwavering cooperation of their willing owners.  Even the tiniest hint or suggestion that compulsion or duress were involved in the monopolization of Equestria’s mining resources was shot down with a vehemence which frightened even the toughest of the land’s legal advisors.

As the commencement of the hitherto unexpected war grew nearer, the world was, unsurprisingly, caught off-guard by an announcement from the EHC that, due to a supply shortage, gem production must cease until further notice.

The population was inevitably stunned as they watched the cost of the remaining EHC stock skyrocket.  This grim pronouncement meant that any pony who worked for companies that produced gem-powered products were now effectively jobless.  This, of course, left retailers with no recourse but to lay off employees as the ensuing panic left their shelves empty and businesses unable to remain open.

As the entire Equine economy came to a crashing halt, the EHC’s detractors in other nations outside of Equestria contemplated a potential ulterior motive for the decision to halt production: An artificial gem supply shortage to drive stocks to astronomical levels and essentially make what remained of EHC’s inventory invaluable would be a surefire way to secure their place in Equestrian history and guarantee their hold of the gem supply monopoly.  After that, what would prevent the EHC from buying every other industry right out from under their desperate owners and becoming a world superpower?

To this day, nopony truly knows if the gem shortage was feigned or if, for some unknown reason, Equestria’s soils had really stopped producing gems.  In the end, however, it didn’t matter.  As tempers rose, a resistance to the EHC sprang up in the eastern portion of the world amongst several nations who surreptitiously began to unite their powers and resources.  At first, the novelty of such a coalition was nothing more than an amusing topic to the westerners under the EHC’s protection and it went largely unthought of for nearly three months.  That’s when the first bombs detonated over the city of Progress.

The city’s hitherto unneeded energy shield ruptured like a burst bubble under the indiscriminate onslaught of the Defiant nations of Equus, destroying the EHC’s primary headquarters and effectively vaporizing any pony within a full block of the shield generator apparatus.

The unexpected vehemence of the rebellion caught the EHC’s commanders off guard, but in spite of this first defeat, they rallied quickly and rebuffed the Defiant attack with an equally vigorous one of their own.  In so doing, the EHC, along with those who backed them, became the faction of Vigilant.

For seven long years the war raged unrelentingly both on the ground and above it.  In this time, the pony races made an art of the cruelty they exercised on one another.  When only a tenth part of the once populus species of ponies remained and the Defiant readied themselves to unleash a weapon of unspeakable terror upon the land, the world itself decided it had had enough and rebelled.

It is often said that there was a third unnamed faction in the war.  As the last of the great warships fell from orbit and the armies of the opposing forces stood less than a mile apart, there came a dull, disastrous quaking that had nothing to do with the falling bombs.  It was only at this point, as the fire and brimstone began to burst forth from the mountains bordering Equestria, that the commanders of the two factions realized they had gone too far.

As the planet lay dying, the faction leaders called a ceasefire and forged a pact of peace in an effort to save the world from destruction.  However, the constant tremors ran far deeper than the gaping craters left by the bombs.  The damage Vigilant and Defiant had wreaked ran into the very marrow of the land, corrupting and defiling something far more fundamental than mundane rock and stone.

In the end, only two thousand of our kind made it off of Equus in the mere three dozen Omni-Class transport vessels that remained.  The transporters carried the last of our ancestors to their only hope of survival: The sole remaining interstellar-capable ship, the EHC-owned liner, SkyReacher.

Twelf faction commanders, six from Defiant and six from Vigilant, watched through the observation ports of the SkyReacher as all that was left of ponykind, save for the few who had made it aboard the liner, burned alive in the oceans of lava that engulfed the world a hundred miles below.  It was said that the very atmosphere glowed red with heat and that an aura of unmistakable wrath and anger emanated from the planet itself.

Even from their great height the faction leaders could still feel the concussive blasts made by the massive eruptions that shook Equus to its core.  As they saw the horrors their greed had wrought, their remorse overwhelmed their will to live and, as one, they stepped through the ship’s waste port and into empty space, leaving their remaining kin to wander the cosmos in search of a kinder home.

So it was that the journey to Elysia began.  Crammed onto a vessel built to hold just half the payload with which it had been entrusted, the first five years of the voyage were miserable.  Due to limited resources, hygiene was difficult to maintain and the SkyReacher’s on-board manufactories were constantly at risk of overload.  Needless to say, it came as a great relief when, in the sixth year of the voyage, the ship’s research team at last discovered a habitable planet...forty years and nine parsecs away.  Many ponies would not live to see the surface of their destination planet as more than a hazy image on a telescope projector and those who wished desperately day in and day out for their journey to be at an end.

It was with great jubilation that in the forty-fifth year since they had left the surface of Equus, eight-hundred bedraggled ponies finally came into orbit above Elysia in the battered SkyReacher.  Seven days of orbital observation were all that the desperate ponies would allow themselves before jettisoning the landing craft and entering the blue, virgin atmosphere of the water planet.

As these wayward equines plummeted downward in their flimsy landers, they caught their first glimpse of the three small islands which constituted the planet’s only significant land masses.  It was in this moment, as the landers shook and rattled and the air around them grew red with the heat of entry, that some of the ancient magic of the ponies which hadn’t been seen in millenia flared to life, and they broke into song, each and every one.

As the stale air of nearly half a century hissed out from the landers’ bleed valves and the hatches finally swung open, I won’t claim to know whether or not there were tears, but if I had to hazard a guess, these survivors must have wept with a joy not seen either before or since.  It was at this moment that they gave the planet its name and christened the three lush green islands of Longshore, Excelsior, and Innova.

And that’s how my ancestors came to live on Elysia.  After dismantling what they could of the SkyReacher, they began to build anew a world of peace and harmony where every contribution benefited everypony else and the bonds of friendship grew only stronger with time.  At least, that’s how one would hope the story would go.