100 years ago, the Shadow fell…

Once, they say, Equestria was a fair land. Ruled over by two benevolent alicorn princesses, Celestia and Luna, the ponies were happy and prosperous. If the old tales are true, the sisters guided their subjects for untold centuries in the paths of harmony and peace. Then Izrador came.

Nopony alive could tell you where he came from. The Order of the Shadow tells us that he descended to this world for his own inscrutable reasons, desiring to mold it to his grand and incomprehensible designs. They say he sealed the world of Equus away from those beyond that none of his jealous rivals might interfere with his great plan. According to them, Izrador has always been the ruler here, and anything else is just delusional propaganda by doomed malcontents. What with literacy and most storytelling being outlawed and all, most fillies and colts don't grow up hearing anything different.

Don't tell anypony I told you this, but some of the older storytellers mention a different version of events, supposedly passed down from the princesses themselves. They say Izrador fought a war with the other great spirits of the universe, gods many call them. He lost, and was cast down to our fair world in ruin, meant to be sealed away beyond all means to escape deep beneath the earth. According to this version, he used the last fragments of his power to corrupt his own prison, cutting Equus off from the rest of the universe and stranding himself here with us.

The princesses, the story goes, felt the newcomer's arrival and the world's cutoff from the cosmos. They ventured out to confront this new being and find out its intentions. Izrador, weakened badly, fled from them, hiding himself in the deepest and most hostile parts of the far north. Eventually, unable to find him, the duo resolved to leave the newcomer be as long as he merely hid himself away and work to restore the connection between our world and the others. This was a mistake for which they would pay dearly.

For hundreds of years, Izrador recovered what strength he still possessed, slowly reaching out to touch the minds of those closest to his frozen haunt. Some tribes began to whisper of a spirit, a creature they dubbed the Shadow in the North. From time to time, the royal alicorns attempted to find or contact this creature, but always he eluded them as only a shadow knows how.

After centuries of waiting, the dark god found his opportunity for revenge in the form of a clan of outcast minotaurs. Exiled from their warm homelands for unspeakable crimes committed in a species civil war, they dwindled as frostbite and starvation claimed their toll. When a spirit entered the dreams of their shaman to promise them survival, power, and revenge if they served, and a frozen grave if they did not, it was an easy choice to make. In time, these exiles became the first orcs: a race that's been our bane for as long as anypony remembers.

Skip forward a hundred years or so. The princesses started getting an inkling that something was wrong up north, and not being fools, connected it to the shadowy creature lurking there for so long. Investigating, they found an army under construction, surviving in underground lairs in places no creature was supposed to be living. To make matters worse, demonic spirits, wendigoes, soared freely among the creatures, feasting on their hate. Izrador finally confronted the duo openly. They say the battle shook the earth and flattened forests. Shocked at the power that he had been concealing and unable to defeat him in open combat with an army at his back, they fled back to Equestria.

This prematurely revealed the dark god's hand, and he launched his invasion immediately, gambling on surprise and the ponies' passive culture. Yeah, hard to believe, I know, but hear me out. Ponies in those days were so unused to violence they might as well have been pacifists. Most hadn't ever handled a weapon in their lives, much less gone to war. The orcs were outnumbered and less organized than Izrador had planned, but they hit Equestria like an avalanche. Thousands of ponies were butchered in brutal massacres by an enemy they hadn't known existed before substantial opposition appeared. The first war took five years, and it didn't end until the princesses themselves led their armies to battle and broke the Shadow's forces. Even then, evicting the enemy's remnants from Equestria took a decade and a half of campaigning. In the north, the Izrador and what was left of his army holed up, the ponies in no position to attack them.

After the war, the princesses founded military forces to combat against the Shadow's return while they continued their efforts to penetrate the veil enveloping Equus. Celestia founded the Order of the Day, Luna the Order of the Night. The size of the Royal Guard was more than quadrupled from prewar figures. The northern provinces of Equestria were reorganized into the Crystal Kingdom, a militarized barrier state with the ongoing mission to protect the rest of the nation in the future. A famed war hero was named ruler of the new nation.

What? Get to the point? You're right, this is taking too long. Can't be seen.

Centuries passed. Skirmishes, raids, and occasional campaigns defined the period. Celestia and Luna became less and less involved in Equestria's day-to-day affairs as the land grew, focusing instead on studies into the depths of archaic magic. Izrador's second major invasion occurred nine hundred years after the first. Apocalyptic in scale, the war that followed lasted three decades, almost destroying the Crystal Kingdom in the process. Unlike the last campaign, neither Celestia nor Luna took to the field, both leaving the running of the war mostly to their generals. In the end, the entirety of the Orders of Night and Day combined to face the enemy at the kingdom's capital. The siege ended when the orc hordes lost cohesion after a prolonged assassination campaign against their leaders by the Order of the Night. The main army was subsequently able to drive them away the enemy.

With the Crystal Kingdom in ruins and plagues left behind by the Shadow running rampant, Equestria declined. Orcs raid resumed sooner and in greater strength than after the prior war. Preoccupied with recouping their own losses and rebuilding, the Crystal Kingdom tightened its patrols to include only the most important routes and communities, leaving only local militia and occasional members of the Orders to defend those ponies who had settled beyond. Slowly but surely, more and more outlying towns were destroyed, Izrador's territory expanded. Cults of the Shadow wormed their way into the remaining frontier communities when the saw that their leaders couldn't or wouldn't defend them. Throughout it all, Celestia and Luna grew, if anything, more distant. They were convinced that if they could bring down the barrier surrounding our world, Izrador himself could be destroyed and that all else was a temporary solution, at best.

If the princesses were so distant, how did they pass down this tale? I'll get to that.

During this time, Celestia decided that breaching the barrier might require additional alicorn assistance. Lacking any other members of her kind beyond her sister, she created an academy for gifted unicorns, seeking an ideal aid. After years of searching and training numerous apprentices, she finally found what she was searching for in a unicorn called Twilight Sparkle. A magical prodigy from a young age, more than two decades of Celestia's tutelage eventually enabled Twilight to transcend her mortal form and become an alicorn, whereupon she was dubbed princess and made equal to the two royal siblings.

Now, this is just a theory mind you, but I think this is where the roots of the end came from. Luna had just witnessed her sister elevate a subject to an equal within what to her was a very short time. She had many servants, an order sworn to her, and as many assistants as she could want, but no students. Now the dynamic between her sister and herself had been disrupted by a third alicorn. To make matters worse, Luna had had only cursory involvement in Twilight's training, while Celestia had been very close. Twilight was almost unconditionally loyal to Celestia, meaning that whenever the sisters disagreed, Celestia always had an extra vote. No longer was compromise necessary. This is just so much guesswork, though.

Anyway, the beginning of the end came with the loss of Sombra. A well-known war leader of the Crystal Kingdom, descended from the line of the original ruler, he was famed for taking the fight to the enemy. After one too many expeditions into the north to eliminate orcs, he vanished. You may know him as the Dark General, leader of Izrador's armies. How he got that way nopony knows, but at the time he was just thought dead. It was another blow to an already weakened nation.

A handful of years after Sombra vanished, the orcs struck anew in full force. This time, they already seemed to know every defense, every strategy, every weak point before a battle began. They poured over the Crystal Kingdom, finally annihilating it after so many generations of trying. Then they moved on to Equestria proper.

It's important to remember that while the periphery of the nation had been suffering badly, the interior had existed in comparative luxury. Little violence, long lifespans, plenty of food, and few enemies. Is it any wonder they had grown soft? The campaign was swift and merciless, with most resistance falling to the Shadow's army in weeks. The enemy's numbers seemed endless, and many feared the end had come.

With the Dark General closing in on Canterlot, the princesses were finally forced to cast aside their long isolation and openly lead their Orders again. Princess Twilight left the city to oversee defenses along the nation's western flank, while the sisters remained in the city to plan its defense.

When at last the enemy arrived at Canterlot, the ponies inside made ready for a long siege. The royal siblings themselves donned their ancient armor and prepared to lead the defense personally. They flew out to thunderous cheers from their subjects. And yet, before they had so much as touched the enemy, Princess Luna ran Princess Celestia through from behind, horn piercing her heart. That was the signal. The Order of the Night turned on its comrades en mass, killing hundreds of defenders and throwing the city gates wide open. With Luna at their head, Izrador's forces sacked Canterlot within a single day.

From there, the task was easy. Luna and Sombra had little difficulty in subduing the scattered remnants of Equestria's armies, knowing as they did their every leader and move. Princess Twilight managed only to escape with some vestiges of the Order of the Day, the Royal Guard, militia fighters, and even some honorable members of the Order of the Night. She was somehow able to control the Everfree Forest making it into the last fortress of resistance. They say she hides there to this day, trying now only to keep the light from dying out entirely.

As for Luna, she was crowned the Nightmare Queen of a reforged Canterlot. Equestria is hers to rule. Sombra holds the Crystal Kingdom. And above them all lies Izrador and his Order of the Shadow, the church that governs us all. Orcs occupy our lands. Our people are enslaved. The Shadow rules, and our world is his.