> Lost Paradise
>  by Undome Tinwe
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Most Old of Anyone Ever Seen
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a story the dragons tell about their homeland.

According to their old myths, passed down from generation to generation, the mountains they live in are formed from the remains of an ancient dragon. It is said its greed was so great that it grew to cover an entire continent with its wingspan, so that it could claim a hoard larger than any dragon could imagine. And dragons could imagine a lot when it came to treasure.

Even the oldest of their kind do not remember when this story came about, and none of them really believe it, anyways. After all, if a dragon really did exist with that much greed in its heart, then why did other nations still possess gold and gems and other precious things, when this massive behemoth would have taken them all?

But still, if you squint when looking at a map of their territories, you can kind of, maybe see that the volcanoes of the Infernal Path do resemble a spine, each vertebrae a pulsing, fiery mountain. And maybe the Dextral and Sinister Hills that spread out from the center of the Path could sorta be interpreted as wings. And yes, Mount Deathpeak at the end of the Path towers above all the others, etc, etc.

And no one really knows how large a dragon can grow.

A few pony scholars have tried to study this legend some more, but even the dragons they asked informed them that they were simply looking too much into things. Trying to find shapes in things was more of a silly pony thing— dragons had better things to do, like grow their hoard.

Further questioning usually resulted in the same point being punctuated with dragonfire, which tended to end all lines of inquiry rather soundly.





There is a story the ponies tell about their homeland.

Not Equestria— everyone knows Equestria didn't come to be until after the Great Winter. And not even the lands of the Three Tribes, where they settled after leaving their ancestral home.

No, according to those old books that get taught in school, ponies used to think that they came from some beautiful valley that was nothing short of a verdant Paradise. Every sort of fruit or flower or vegetable a pony could ever want grew in abundance, covering the land in vibrant colors and fed from a pristine spring that sparkled even at night.

The weather was always nice, the stars were beautiful and more numerous in the sky, and ponies even lived longer in this perfect place.

It was the kind of thing dreamt up by those who wanted to escape the realities of Winter, according to modern scholars. A place where nopony went hungry sounded pretty good when famine was nipping at your heels, after all, and even the few academic investigations had failed to find anything to substantiate the fantasy.

The reality is, there's no historical or geological evidence of any sort of valley with such varied flora having existed in Equestria or any of the lands claimed by the Three Tribes. Not to mention, even today there are no botanical methods capable of maintaining such a varied and diverse ecosystem without the expenditure of massive amounts of magic.

Really, the only interesting point left for the researchers to explore is what ultimately happened to this perfect place. None of the recorded myths survived with their endings intact, and the second-oldest tales already had ponies wandering all across the world in exile.

Still, there's hope among the historians that one day some new archeological site will uncover the rest of the myths, and that the textbooks can at least be updated with a satisfying ending.





There is a story the alicorns do not tell about their homeland.

One does not tell the story out of sadness. In her long life, she has learned not to dwell on the past, and to look forward instead. It is a perspective that has allowed her to survive a thousand years of banishment, the many mistakes she's made in her rule and in her life, and the destruction of that beautiful valley where she grew up.

Equestria is a wonderful nation now, and she's done what she can to eliminate any vestigial collective memories from the dreams of her ponies about a better place. Misery does not deserve company, after all, and so she mourns alone.

The other does not tell the story out of shame.

There was a time when she was convinced that this was necessary. Equestria needed a strong leader, and it was important that her follies be wiped from all the records to bolster that image. She could only ever be seen as the perfect princess, for the sake of the nation. It was all for the greater good.

Of course, she understands now what truly drove her. The same thing that had driven her from the beginning.

Pride.

It was pride that had led her to seek out glory beyond the valley. And it was pride that led her to feed the dragon's greed in pursuit of the greatest treasure of all.

For before he lost himself completely to greed, laying waste to Paradise and being slain in kind, he had taken something far greater than any gem or artifact that existed in the world, from a place so far above that even the alicorns could not reach.

And when the two sisters braved the fiery landscape created by his corpse, made the perilous journey through geysers of molten rock and thermals of smoke and sulfur, they returned to the ruins of a beautiful, verdant home within that dragon's heart. And at the center of that once-vibrant valley now reduced to ash, they found the treasure that one of them had sought, and was now the burden they both had to bear.

On that day, long lost and purged from history, until only memories remained in the form of stories unfinished, Celestia and Luna received their cutie marks.