Chapter One
To SUNSPARKLE, respected Queen and Sole Ruler of the Settlement of PONYVILLE,
MAJESTY, Queen of the Fief of Dream Valley (through the Grace of the Rainbow), sincerely regrets that she is unable to assist you with regards to your request. Though the doctrine of Forced Relocation was once accepted by the Citizens of our noble Fief, she must inform you that it has long ago been Discontinued.
May the Rainbow of Light shine on your path.
Respectfully,
MAJESTY
Queen of Dream Valley
Protector of the Golden Horseshoes
Defender of the Realm
By order of High Queen and the Council of Princesses
By grace of the Rainbow
"Peace through Prosperity"
Sunsparkle sighed and pushed the parchment away, her hoof crumpling it as it ran abreast of the other letters. The names of the fiefs and rulers differed, but other than that they were very much the same, unique only in their differing styles of elegant calligraphy and the amount of flowery phrasing applied. The answer from Dreamquay had been five pages long, full of pomp and circumstance, but in the end it all boiled down to one word: NO.
"There's another letter for you."
Sunsparkle looked up to see a pony in the arched doorway of her study, gripping a rolled parchment in her mouth. The sunlight caught her purple and pink tresses, shining off them as she stood expectantly, waiting for a reply
"Thank you, Sweetberry," Sunsparkle said, accepting the missive.
Sweetberry nodded with a bored expression and half-closed eyes, then left with a flick of her curly tail.
Sunsparkle carefully set it on the worn, wooden desk and pulled loose the pale ribbon knotted around the paper. A white ribbon--it was from the North. She unrolled the scroll, not quite holding her breath as she read the untidy scrawl.
Dear Sunsparkle,
Thanks for the compliment, but I'm not a king; my correct title is prefect. In any case, I don't have the authority to send anyone anywhere. Even if I could, I wouldn't; that's not the way we do things in the Waylands. Sorry, you're going to have to look for unicorns and pegasi somewhere else. Better yet, why don't YOU move? You aren't far from Dreamquay, if I'm not mistaken.
By the way, I don't know that "queen" is the appropriate title for someone "ruling" less than a dozen ponies.
Signed,
Stormfront
The Waylands
"Survival through Independence"
PS What kind of name is "Ponyville"?
Sunsparkle reread the parchment, jealous of Stormfront, safe and isolated in the Waylands, not having to mind each word that fell from his mouth; no one in the wild Waylands understood royalty, or wanted it. It would have been easier if Ponyville were like that.
"Ponyville." Sunsparkle closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose with one purple hoof. "Thank you, Mother, for naming it Ponyville." Then she felt a flash of guilt mixed with anger; it was wrong to speak ill of the dead.
She stared out the open window, the crumbling arch of stone, feeling the wind sweep back her multi-colored mane as she watched yellow swallowtail butterflies dancing around the young, green maple leaves. It was funny. She had barely crossed the threshold of maturity, barely chosen her name and gained her adult colors and symbol, when it began. Sunsparkle, she had called herself, to signify independence from her mother, Star Shadow. But when her mother had sickened and died, she would have done anything to bring her back, to turn back the clock and just become Baby Star Shadow once more . . . just a little princess who could always count on Mommy to kiss the hurts away and make things right.
She had been merely a hedge princess, not a Princess princess, of course. The Princesses, with a capital P, were few in number (six to be exact, or five if you didn't count whichever one was currently acting as High Queen) and ruled over Ponyland as a whole. Subordinate to the High Queen and the jewel-symboled Princesses were the rulers of the various fiefs--usually queens, but the occasional king cropped up. (These were, after all, enlightened times.)
Thus Queen Majesty, Queen Oceandeep, and King Solaris ruled over their parcels of land under the watchful eyes of the High Queen and Royal Council. As had Queen Star Shadow. Once.
When Queen Star Shadow died, Sunsparkle had despaired, thinking that all was lost. The Queen--her mother!--dead, and her mother's subjects--now her subjects, and her barely an adult!--continued to sicken and die, just as the queen had . . . not from some witch's malice or a sorcerer's curse, but from a plague, a mere, mundane disease that wafted on every curling breeze, communicable and deadly. But perhaps it had gained some modicum of magic, for the unicorns were the first to topple, then the fragile pegasi, dropping from the sky, and finally the earthlings. Three-Day Drop, it was called, because the disease struck without warning, trapping its victims fevered nightmares for two days, followed by twenty-four hours of dull-eyed lethargy. Then death.
Raised to serve her subjects, Sunsparkle had pushed her grief aside, trying to herd her thoughts into order, trying to save her people. The port of Dreamquay and the more distant settlement of Dream Valley had always been cordial to the bustling citizens of tiny Ponyville (although it was no secret that they tended to snicker at the uninspired name as well as the main industry.) Sunsparkle remembered how--when she had been Baby Star Shadow--they had sent supplies and aid to help rebuild after a devastating earthquake. And a time even before that, when the river had flooded--Dreamquay had helped the smaller settlement sandbag and build up the banks.
Plagues, it turned out, were different. A plague with an incredibly high death rate did not inspire ponies to rush to your aid, but rather to rush away. This was particularly true when the fatalities were high amongst unicorns. Healers were usually unicorns, and even the most altruistic healer was reluctant to diagnose a disease in exchange for certain death.
Rather than aid, the panicked residents of Ponyville received harsh injunctions from the larger city-states. Do not approach us, they warned. You will not reach our borders alive. So the ponies of Ponyville stayed in their proud-spired castle and died together.
Then as suddenly as it had started, the nightmare of dying friends and fallen comrades ceased. Not because of an eleventh hour cure, but simply because everyone who had proved vulnerable to the disease . . . was dead.
From the once burgeoning town of Ponyville, eleven ponies remained.
After the bodies had been burned and the numbness had receded and their grief had been spent, they began to adjust. Ponies were great survivors. They closed off the suddenly extemporaneous and empty wings of the castle, drifting with ghosts and cobwebs, and moved closer to one another to ward off the loneliness of lost friends, family, and lovers. Previously almost strangers, they learned about each other, their various mannerisms, their strengths, their weaknesses, their little quirks that drove one another crazy. Turning their backs on the outsiders who had failed them, they pulled together, laughed together, wept together. Life, they found, was not so bad.
For her part, Sunsparkle tried to continue her mother's legacy. This proved harder than she expected . . . simply because no one seemed to want to listen to her. She was, after all, the youngest pony left. Cotton Candy was kind to her, Dash was protective, Minty looked vaguely amused when she tried to order them to do this or that. He usually did what she asked, but did so as though he was doing her a favor rather than obeying her. They loved her, they liked her, but they always saw her as "the young one", not the queen. It grated.
Only Kimono, in his quiet clarity, judged her by her merits rather than her age. But when she told him that she was going to save them, he tilted his head, regarded her with puzzled eyes, and said only, "Don't you know? It's too late for that."
She didn't understand what he meant. They had the castle for protection. They had more than enough grazing ground. They could live there indefinitely, building up the herd and gradually expanding back into the now-abandoned parts of the castle.
And that was exactly what they did, for all of sixteen years. Ponies age slowly, so no one grew old or frail. Sunsparkle herself, much to her discouragement, was still considered an extremely young adult by pony standards. But she was no longer the youngest of them, at least; Cotton Candy gave birth to a filly a few months after the survivors gathered together . The trauma and excitement of birth sparked interest in any pony community due to the fact that ponies very seldom conceived. (A necessary evil, perhaps, for such a long-lived species.)
But although everyone loudly congratulated Cotton Candy in public (and speculated who the father might be in private), the other ponies seemed rather . . . well, blasé about the whole thing. Sunsparkle was puzzled. This was their first step to rebuilding the herd. Why was everyone so nonchalant?
It was Granite, a diplomat of Dreamquay who finally clarified the matter for her. Granite was a grey Clydesdale, a massive, rippling stallion who stood a head taller than the inhabitants of Ponyville (who were generally slight and short for Standard Ponies), but he had friendly, intelligent eyes. Officially, he had stopped by Ponyville out of respect and courtesy, as diplomats often do when they pass through land that does not belong to their patron. Unofficially, he visited out of kindness, since eleven ponies in a castle do not a kingdom make.
"You've done very well here," Granite told Queen Sunsparkle as he stood in the Common Room. It had a friendly air to it; the floor was a patchwork rainbow of overstuffed pillows and the shelves lining the room were filled with knick-knacks.
"Yes, very well indeed," Sunsparkle repeated, mentally adding, considering no one would help us. But it was not Granite's fault that Dreamquay had not swooped to the rescue, so she smiled calmly at him, as her mother would have done.
"Have you ever thought about joining one of the larger settlements?" the Clydesdale asked conversationally, glancing around, being careful not to let his gaze linger on the fraying tapestries.
"No; why would we?" Sunsparkle replied, surprised. "We have everything we need here."
The Clydesdale's eyes returned to her. "Well, yes, you have everything you need now. But sooner or later you'll have to go somewhere else, you know." He didn't say it spitefully, but as though it were a simple fact.
"Why?" asked Sunsparkle.
Granite changed the subject. "How many ponies live here? Eleven?"
Shocked and offended that he would be so crass as to bring it up, Sunsparkle nevertheless maintained a calm and haughty demeanor. "Twelve, with the new foal."
"Twelve, yes." Granite raised an eyebrow, regarding her in thoughtful silence for a minute. Finally he said, "Did you hear about Moonridge's recent troubles, out east?"
"Yes," she answered, feeling more puzzled than ever, not seeing a connection. "They had a clash with some sort of monsters, didn't they?"
"Trolls. They were nearly overrun by trolls. True trolls, not one of the hybrid groups. The earth ponies held them off valiantly, but it was a unicorn, Sunstreak, who finished them off. He created a flare of light, I believe, and they turned to stone. Shrieking as they did so, I'm told." He paused significantly. "Unicorns are very useful ponies, Queen Sunsparkle." He looked at her to make sure she understood. "These are dangerous times."
He left the next morning, polite and formal and without mentioning trolls or unicorns again. But he left Sunsparkle something to think about.
She thought about her mother's reign, the disasters they had staved off, and how many times the unicorns had used their powers to protect Ponyville or attack some threat, leaping with their horns lowered, awash in golden waves of magic. And the pegasi--fragile and thin-boned compared to other ponies, but still able to break a leg with a smack of their wings, not to mention perfect for reconnaissance, soaring so high they barely left shadows as they rolled on invisible currents, sweeping at the clouds with their hooves.
But the eleven remaining ponies--twelve, with the addition of Cotton Candy's baby--were all earthlings. Any children they had would be earthlings as well, since foals were born exact duplicates of their same-gender parent. Sooner or later some ghoulie or ghosty or long-leggety beastie would gravitate towards them, and then what would happen? No unicorns. No pegasi. Earthlings were swift and strong, but against magic--and Ponyland brimmed with magic, good and evil--swiftness and strength would not be enough.
At last Sunsparkle saw what everyone else in Ponyville had already known; they were living on borrowed time.