Lost Cities

by Cold in Gardez

First published 6th of May, 2013

North of Canterlot, in the far marches of the Equestrian lands near the Griffon tribes, there is a mountain that flies.

North of Canterlot, in the far marches of Equestria near the border with the Griffon tribes, there is a mountain that flies.

West of Canterlot, beyond the Galloping Mountains and a desert painted in the pastel hues of a faded rainbow, a tower sits at the edge of the world.

South of Canterlot, past the Everfree forest and the desolate badlands, a city of gardens waits to be born.

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The Lost Cities Challenge! Awesome authors who have taken it upon themselves to explore other abandoned places:

- The Land of Glass and Stone, by RazgrizS57
- The City that Breathes, by Pearple Prose
- Aletheia, by Foehn
- Far Kobresia, by Baal Bunny
- Keskiyönnon, by Bradel
- Unknown Architecture, by Not_A_Hat
- The Gentle People, by Bad Horse
- The Seal of Wax and Glass, by DuncanR

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Dramatic Reading by Illya Leonov: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4.

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Royal Canterlot Library interview for Lost Cities.

The Dream Palace of the Highborn

"It is in the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

West of Canterlot, beyond the Galloping mountains, beyond vast rolling plains filled with waving grass, beyond a desert painted with the pastel colors of a faded rainbow, beyond the last town and the last road and the last tree, the world comes to an end.

It ends on a high cliff overlooking the largest body of water known to any mortal race. This great ocean extends beyond the horizon, limitless and incomprehensible. The few pegasi who fly this far from the comfort of civilization say the air above it tastes alien, and the clouds that drift in from its shore mock their attempts to shape. It is a wild ocean, and cruel.

The unbroken cliffs extend to the left and right as far as the eye can see, and pegasus eyes can see quite far. The edge of the cliff is a knife that cuts the world in two. There is only one imperfection along its entire thousand-mile run.

It is a tower, and it is visible from dozens of miles away. The spire at its top appears first as travelers approach; the curve of the planet conceals the rest.

By the time travelers reach its base, the tower seems to reach the heavens. The flat earth that extends to the east and the flat ocean to the west only emphasize its unnatural height. Clouds break against its side and drift past, like bits of cotton caught on a bramble in the woods.

The tower’s walls are not perfectly regular. Three grooves, each the size of a city block, spiral up its length, lending the entire affair an organic feel that is utterly defeated by the tower’s monstrous size. At its circular base, the tower is hundreds of yards across; Celestia’s castle atop Canterlot Mountain could fit easily within its circumference. A slender but noticeable taper begins at about the height of the lowest clouds and ends miles above in a tip that was once as sharp as a needle before centuries of wind and neglect wore it down to a blunt and misshapen lump the size of a pony’s hoof.

A closer inspection of the walls reveals hairline gaps between massive blocks of granite. They are polished smooth, and even the long years alone with the wind and the ocean have done little to weather them. Salt stains the side of the tower facing the ocean a splotchy white that vaguely resembles the cloudy sky above.

The architects of the tower considered it their race’s greatest work, though not a single unicorn ever lifted a hoof in its construction. It was the seat of their power, the heart of an empire that extended no more than a dozen miles in any direction but held more wealth than the entire rest of the world combined. For a dozen centuries the White Queen ruled from the tower’s silver throne, and they believed, in their hubris, that the dream would last forever.

It did not. No unicorns remain in the Heartspire. The only souls here are ghosts.

But there are many of those.

The base of the tower is interrupted by three openings. They are not doors or gates, for they were never meant to close. The Heartspire was not intended as a defensive structure.

The first level of the tower is a vast open field. It held gardens once, filled with plants and animals from every biome in the world. Warding spells contained small patches of desert, swamp and tundra, all within a dozen feet of each other. All were beautiful, yes, but beauty was never their point.

This is power, the gardens said. We can bend nature to our will.

Little grows here now but weeds. It is dark on this level, and only plants adapted to the twilight places of the world thrive in the ruins. What little light remains leaks in from the openings and from faint flickering stars high above.

The stars once shone like miniature suns. Although they appear like pinpoints from the ground, each is a crystal globe three feet across. When they were new, they were so bright that any organic object that came within ten feet would burst into flames. One of these globes, by itself, could light an entire town at night.

Most of the globes are dead now. The few that retain a bit of their ancient magic appear ready to fail at any time.

It is an illusion. They will all live longer than the pony watching them far below.

Along the distant walls, wide ramps slowly wind their way up the tower to the levels above.

Most of the Heartspire is filled with residences. The smallest homes are near the bottom, though most of them would seem lavish by the standards of modern ponies. Higher up, after the spiraling ramps have circled the tower several times, the homes are as large as palaces, and still they grow larger, until each level of the tower can only hold one or two. But these homes are like castles, complete with their own walls and towers, built in mockery of the ponies living far from the Heartspire’s walls.

You build walls out of fear, the castles said. We build them for joy.

Almost no light naturally reaches these levels. Unlike the open fields below, there are no sunglobes to push back the darkness. Each home was expected to provide its own light, and in any case the unicorns living within them filled the tower with illusions of star-filled skies, perpetual sunsets, or whatever scene they desired. The tower had no real windows, which would have spoiled the featureless perfection of the walls.

The highest residence is virtually a city unto itself. The tower is narrower by this point, but it is still wide enough that the far side is lost in darkness. Hundreds of small outbuildings surround a central castle, and the rotted remnants of flags hang limp from its pinnacles in the still air of the tower.

Still the ramps lead higher. The Heartspire is not even half done.

The next level is as open as the first. The ramps end on a smooth plane of stone that stretches the entire width of the tower. Hundreds of yards above, a vaulted ceiling carved with images of stars and galaxies stares down at the emptiness.

In the center of this empty field rises a pedestal dozens of feet high. Stairs inlaid with every imaginable precious stone and metal lead up its side to a top just a few feet across.

There was a throne here once. It was crafted from silver and platinum, with a red velvet cushion said to be softer than the very clouds. During the Heartspire’s long reign, ninety-seven mares styling themselves the White Queen sat here and ruled the only part of the world that mattered.

At the top of the pedestal there is a twisted mass of ruined metal. Fragments weighing hundreds of pounds lie scattered across the floor for dozens of yards. The grey stone all around is riven with cracks and fissures.

In the center, where the throne once rested, a silver scimitar has broken the pedestal and stands there embedded. A thin layer of frost has accumulated along the blade despite the constant stale warmth of the Heartspire. Otherwise it is perfect, undulled and unmarred by time.

History records precisely one visit by Luna and Celestia to the Heartspire.

To reach the higher levels of the tower, one must take a bit of a detour. There are no ramps leading up from the throne room. Only unicorns capable of teleporting can go any higher.

The walls are noticeably closer now, dozens instead of hundreds of yards apart. Unicorns who teleported directly to this level from the ground felt their ears pop, and sometimes they grew breathless and faint if they moved too quickly. It was a small price to pay for being closer to the stars.

The level has the feel of a ritual space. Marble basins filled with dust line the walls, and the stones are filled with elaborate carvings. Legions of ponies march in relief across the walls; earth ponies haul stone blocks across a featureless field broken only by the image of a low, incomplete tower. Unicorns stand among them, passing out food and drink, and using their magic to aid the earth ponies in placing the blocks.

The images are different on the next level.

The earth ponies are smaller, their features crude and animalistic. The sculptor has not bothered to give them cutie marks.

The unicorns no longer stand among them. They oversee them from raised platforms. Their features are refined and detailed, with complex armor and cutie marks. The sculptor has carved individual strands of hair in their manes.

The tower in the distance is higher.

There are no earth ponies on the next level. Heroic unicorns march across the walls, far larger than the real ponies who once stood here. Beneath their hooves, fading away into the background, the sculptor has etched what may be a sea of backs and manes and tails, toiling in obscurity. They bear up their highborn lords.

In the distance, the Heartspire stands tall and complete. The sculptor has carved rays like the sun's shining from its peak.

Part of the wall is damaged. Through a small gap barely larger than a pony’s head, the world stretches away to the distant, curved horizon. Clouds drift below the impromptu window.

For the first time, a scent other than dirt and stone fills the air. It drifts in from the opening.

It is ash.

The highest level is largely missing.

Only a few square yards of the floor remain. Some tremendous, violent force has opened the room to the sky, and half the walls are simply gone. The ceiling and spire above -- hundreds of tons of granite-- sway in time with the wind. Only the tower’s residual magic keeps the entire affair from collapsing.

A stone altar slumps in the center of the room. It has melted like a candle left too near a fire, and rivulets of solid rock flow across the floor. Its black, charred surface is speckled with bright points where crystals formed when minerals in the stone began to fuse.

The surviving walls are blackened, but they still tell a story. Rows of unicorns bear earth ponies in the air above them, carrying them up spiraling ramps, higher and higher, past gardens and homes and a throne and basins flowing with water. Higher and higher the unicorns bear their captives, until they reach a room with a stone altar.

The rest of the story is lost, along with the walls in which it was carved. Only the Heartspire’s ghosts know the rest.

Along with Celestia and Luna, who visited the Heartspire but once.

The Fortress City of the Clouds

"While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

North of Canterlot, in the far marches of the Equestrian lands near the border with the Griffon tribes, there is a mountain that flies.

It is not shaped like the mountains adhering to the rocky earth far below. It is not shaped like the easy geometric summits drawn in foal’s storybooks. It does not share their snow-capped peaks or bedrock roots. There are no veins of ore running through it like blood. It cannot be climbed.

But it is a mountain, nevertheless.

From below, Derecho appears as a massive stone hanging in the sky. It is vaguely diamond-shaped, with two tapered poles pointing toward the heaven and the earth. Here and there, visible as it slowly rotates, sharp angles and straight lines still hold their shape, but time and weather and the relentless hail of solar radiation have eroded much of the rest, transforming it into a landscape of runnels and abstract sculpture.

A wall a thousand feet high girdles the mountain like a belt around its middle. This wall has survived somewhat better than the rest of the structure, for the pegasi who created it used the densest, hardest clouds their magic could manufacture in its construction. Still, even these clouds were not meant to withstand the centuries, and they have begun to crumble, leaving the thousand-foot high wall significantly shorter in spots. The upper edge of the wall has suffered more than the lower, which remains almost perfect for its miles-long run.

Tiny spikes dot the wall at regular intervals. Pegasi who dare to fly closer may see these specks resolve into towers, placed there for the city’s defenders to rest and, if necessary, take shelter from the harsh weather of the north. Most have crumbled. A few seem untouched. Again, the towers hanging from the bottom of the wall have fared better than those above.

By itself, this wall would be counted among the largest cloud structures ever created. When it was still intact, its cubic volume was greater than the entire city of Cloudsdale.

Seen against the entirety of Derecho, of the mountain it rings, the wall is little more than a thin band. A white ribbon, once satin, now laced with holes and imperfections.

It is fair to assume that the first pegasi who dreamed of Derecho could not imagine the enormity their creation would become. Few records remain from Equestria prior to the Unification, and besides, pegasi were never renowned for their bookkeeping.

Deep inside Derecho, in the heart of the mountain, there remains a small compound, made of thick cloud walls with thin, high windows just wide enough for an arrow to pass through on its way out. Once, these windows stared out at the high airless reaches facing the Griffon tribes. From these windows, pegasi could see the sky and the ground and everything between. It is small, barely twenty paces across, with only three rooms.

From this tiny seed, the mountain was born.

Unlike most cloud cities, Derecho is not white. The pegasi who built it over the course of centuries packed its structure hard with water, turning it the color of a thunderstorm. Over time, the lighter clouds – the streets and houses and parks – dissolved and blew away, leaving only the city’s bones behind. Foundation clouds a mile deep still hold their form remarkably well, and give Derecho its characteristic diamond shape, like a pair of ziggurats joined at their base.

Derecho is so large that its two poles experience different weather. Wet air, driven by the wind into the upper half of the city, is forced further upward, causing it to cool. This forms clouds, which in turn form rain that runs down the city’s slopes in a constant stream that becomes a waterfall when it reaches the city wall. Mist perpetually shrouds the top of the city, turning Derecho’s peak into a nebulous dark shape more imagined than seen.

The underside of the city, by contrast, is dry. The mountain above intercepts the rain like the world’s most inefficient umbrella. The cloud walls and bricks have dried and turned brittle over the centuries, and they tear like paper.

When it was still inhabited, Derecho held station at the border between Equestria and the Griffon lands to the north. It did not drift with the winds, as it does today. It and its shadow were ever present.

To the earth ponies living below, Derecho was a mixed blessing. It kept away the griffons, as was its intention, but earth ponies as a rule prefer their mountains to stay on the ground.

The earth ponies did not talk much with the pegasi back then, except to trade food for favorable weather. They did not know the pegasi called their fortress city Derecho. They did not know pegasi named their great cities after storms. Instead they gave it their own name, one spoken with both derision and awe, in honor of the weight of its shadow on their backs.

They called the city Eclipse.

The pegasi did not think much of the earth ponies below them. Most didn’t realize they were there at all.

Derecho’s construction took centuries. Swaths of Equestria’s northern territories turned to desert after the pegasi stole their clouds as building blocks. Some of those deserts are still there today.

At the height of its power, nearly half the souls of the pegasus race resided in Derecho. The Thunder Queen ruled from its highest spire. Cloudforming became a true art in Derecho’s halls, and today the Derecho style of sculpture remains the most widely imitated throughout the world. The largest library ever built by pegasi, containing over a thousand volumes, is said to have existed here.

As noted earlier, the pegasi were not known as bookkeepers.

History records two instances of Celestia visiting Derecho. The first, in the decades leading up to the Unification, was a diplomatic visit by her and Luna with the notionally equally ranked pegasus monarch at the time, Hurricane III. Her daughter, Hurricane IV, was the first of their line to rule the pegasi from the new unified capital, Everfree.

The second visit was centuries later, shortly after Nightmare Moon’s banishment, by which time Derecho was already derelict and abandoned. No accounts exist of this visit except for a single line in the Canterlot Sun Court’s daily proceedings, noting that the princess had departed for a short trip, and returned by sundown of the same day.

Modern sky maps do not show Derecho as a fixed point. Instead there is a line, showing its gradual course across the northern territories, with dots occasionally marking a date when the city was spotted at its new location. After the most recent date, the solid line becomes a dashed line, the product of the best guesses of pegasi forecasters for its wanderings.

Nopony calls Derecho home today. Pegasi sometimes visit to explore its depths or relive the glory days of their race. Most leave soon, realizing how little comfort glory is.

And Derecho, the Mountain that Flies, the Fortress City of the Clouds, continues on its silent way, a mass of bones and ghosts floating ever into the future.

The Garden Out of Time

"Then the Laudomia of the dead and that of the unborn are like the two bulbs of an hourglass which is not turned over; each passage between birth and death is a grain of sand that passes the neck, and there will be a last inhabitant of Laudomia born, a last grain to fall, which is now at the top of the pile, waiting."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

There is a river in a valley.

It flows slowly at the pinnacle of summer, after weeks of heat and evening storms that filled the valley with thunder but not much rain. Insects dart across its still surface, leaving behind trails of expanding circles, like a stone skipping endlessly upon the water. They fill the air with their buzz, a low ceaseless drone that combines with the heat to lull ponies into peaceful naps along the shore.

There are no ponies here today. They rarely venture this far south from the settled lands around Canterlot. Twenty centuries have passed since the Age of Migration ended, and only the most adventurous of ponies, those dedicated wanderers and wayward souls, bother to cross the wild badlands in search of their ancient ancestral homes.The few who do are pegasi, of course, and they have little appreciation for the valley and its treasures.

And so, like every other day, the river does its river thing, and the insects do theirs, and the wind teases them both, and the trees along the banks rise in stately majesty as far as the eye can see, until the sweeping wings of mountains lift from the forest floor a dozen miles away to take a jagged bite from the sky.

The forest is thick and choking with life. Sycamores and willows, those lovers of water, line the river banks. Further in, swamp oaks compete for space with ashes and the occasional maple. Their trunks are pillars, and they turn the dark world beneath the canopy into a cathedral, extending without depth into the distant shadows. The ground, where it can be seen beneath growths of wild roses, honeysuckle and countless wildflowers, is soft with the accumulation of last season’s leaves. They are brown and crunch beneath the hooves.

Between two nearby trees, a spider has crafted its web. The gossamer spiral is anchored at three points: one on each tree, and one on a curious stone tangled in their entwining roots.

The stone is the size of an apple.

It is shaped like a foal.

A few hundred yards away, there is a small ravine carved out by a thin stream that diverted from its path centuries ago when an elm collapsed in a storm. The tree has long since rotted away, but the stream never returned to its original flow. A deep pool fills the basin where the elm’s roots once dug.

A stone pillar juts from the surface of the pool. It is smooth and circular in cross-section, and its skin has been decorated with carvings of climbing vines. Real leaves now cover much of these designs, as though the forest had used them for a template in its own growth.

The top of the pillar is broken. Whatever it once supported is lost, as is much of the rest of Lith, the largest city ever to exist in Equestria.

The forest is not natural.

It pretends it is, and in another thousand years the last traces of earth pony presence may finally wear away, leaving nature to run its course. Or maybe not. The earth ponies’ presence, like everything about them, is durable. It does not blow away in the wind, or burn itself out like a candle. It endures. It is like stone.

So for today at least, the forest still bends to the will of its long-dead masters. The signs are small but visible to those who know where to look.

Amidst the random growth, a line of trees grows in a perfect row for a hundred yards. Every tree is the same – an osage orange, grown to monstrous proportions with the passage of centuries. Their trucks are riddled with thorns as long as a unicorn’s horn, and the branches above them are gravid with countless fruits.

Plants with no business in a forest fill the space around the trees. Wild maize and sunflowers crowd together in bright patches beneath holes in the canopy. Blueberries have taken over a marshy bit of land near a slow stream. They fill the air with their sweet scent.

Once the osage oranges were simple hedge trees, marking the boundary of a small farm on the city’s outskirts. They were smaller then, little more than shrubs. Time and the last command they received from their masters – Grow! – have turned them into giants. All except the last tree at the end of the row.

It is smaller than the others, as though it had not changed since it was a shrub. Its leaves do not blow in the wind. Its branches do not sway.

They are all made of stone.

Further up the valley, the first ruins begin to appear.

They are overgrown, and only their bones peek out from the roots of trees growing atop them. Here, a stone cornice carved with a leaflike frieze. There, a set of marble stairs lead down into packed earth. Fragments of broken stone litter the forest like fallen leaves.

The remains of a cobblestone road sometimes appear where rain has washed away dirt and detritus. The stones are fractured and discolored, and they no longer provide an easy path between the buildings. Better to walk alongside the road, and use it as a guide, than trust your ankles to its treacherous path. A row of tall, misshapen junipers marches alongside the stones, and once, before the forest grew above them, they may have provided the path with shade.

One of the ruins is larger than the rest. It slumps in a heap of broken rock, and though it has collapsed upon itself, it is still as tall as some of the trees. The road leads up to the ruins and vanishes into them.

A pair of statues flank the end of the road at the foot of the ruins. Two earth ponies, both stallions, and wearing ornate metal armor that would have weighed hundreds of pounds, were it real. They do not appear to even notice the weight.

Whatever sculptor carved the statues was obsessed with realism. Every buckle in their armor, every lock of their mane, every hidden muscle beneath their stone skin, every eyelash, they have all been rendered perfectly. They look alive, for all that they are stone. The centuries of wind and rain have done nothing to weather away the fanatic detail in which they were rendered.

Beyond the collapsed ruin, another faded road slides through the forest as straight as an arrow. It ignores the trees whose roots have torn it apart, leaving stones scattered among the fallen leaves.

Far behind, the river can no longer be heard over the rustle of the trees in the wind.

Lith was the first city the ponies founded after their retreat from the north. It once held unicorns and pegasi as well as earth ponies, in the early golden days before the old hatreds reemerged.

The pegasi were the first to leave. The skies called to them, as they had in the old days, and within a few generations not a single pegasus remained in the garden city. For centuries, they made their homes in the clouds above Lith, and in a sense remained neighbors with their earth pony and unicorn cousins. But without a solid anchor they eventually drifted, as pegasi are wont to do, and in time they left to build new cities in the clouds.

When the unicorns left, they took nearly half the earth ponies of Lith with them. They promised a new homeland, built with magic and wonder, far to the west. The earth ponies who remained often wondered, in their final years, if they had erred in keeping to their roots. Centuries later, when tales of the Heartspire trickled back, as like an ashen river through a cinder door, they counted their blessings instead.

The ruins are closer together further into the forest, and not as ruined either. The roofs have collapsed from most, but their walls still stand, doors and windows looking both in and out at nature’s slow triumph.

There is nothing that resembles the remains of a farm here. Marble slabs, some overturned, some still level, form wide avenues between the ruins. What might have once been a fountain stands in the center of a wide open area. Its basin is filled with dirt and life now.

A lone pony sits near the fountain, staring at its climbing vines as if in contemplation. Her stone mane is frozen like a flag in the wind. Her abdomen is swollen, and an observer might be forgiven for assuming she was just starting to show the early stages of a first pregnancy.

She is either several months from becoming a mother, or a thousand years overdue, depending on your perspective.

Near the center of the city, the buildings are still complete. A few are seemingly pristine, as though they had not sat, empty and abandoned, for a dozen centuries or more. The trees and vines that grow around them do so respectfully, providing the walls with shelter and shade, rather than tearing them apart. The largest of the vines, the eldest, are grey and hard. They already sink into the fossil timelessness that engulfs the city.

Elaborate friezes decorate the high cornices. Earth ponies, carved marching in single file along the relief, carry with them the bounty of the fields. They carry their harvest along wide city street toward what can only be a palace, low and humble it may be compared with modern Canterlot. In the highest room of the palace, a pair of tall unicorns overlook the scene. Faint shapes that may have been wings are carved alongside them.

The earliest records of Celestia and Luna’s lives date from Lith’s golden era. They were not gods, then, or even rulers. For generations, they were simply the only non-earth ponies to live in the city, and by dint of that fact alone were the subject of curiosity and admiration. Even with the passage of centuries, they never presumed to challenge the authority of the Stone Queens over their people.

If there was a specific event that led the Sisters to depart Lith, it has been lost to time. What is known is that the greater part of the city, over a million souls, simply left one day, migrating north across the badlands toward the fabled Everfree plains.

In the highest of the ruins, situated atop a hill in the center of the city, a stone throne occupies the top tier of a pedestal. The court it presides over is filled with guards, all frozen at attention. Some have closed their eyes; others remain open, yet still unseeing.

Around the throne is gathered a family. The eldest, the matriarch, sits at its foot. A rough rock crown, easily weighing hundreds of pounds, is centered upon her forehead. Pressed up against her, all embracing, are a stallion and three foals. None have moved in a thousand years.

Only a few ponies remained in Lith after Celestia and Luna departed. They were not enough to fill such a huge city, and over the decades their numbers slowly dwindled. With each year, more and more accepted their fate. Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

And stone to stone.

The Last City of Ruins

"At least that is what Theodora's inhabitants believe, far from imagining that a forgotten fauna was stirring from its lethargy. Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of nonextinct species, the other fauna was coming back into the light from the library's basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and the drainpipes, perching at the sleepers' bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The Everfree Forest is close to Ponyville. So close that, even after stepping hoof into its verdant shadows, a pony can still hear the creak of windmills, the bang of doors, the shouts of foals. It is wild, untamed, and dangerous. It is filled with monsters.

Few ponies venture into its depths. Fewer return.

Even at its margins, where moss-laden oaks brood over the grass and flowers of the meadow, the forest exudes a sense of otherness. The line of trees demarks not just the boundary of the forest, but an end to the order ponies have struggled for centuries to impose upon the land. The plants within grow wild and free. The animals and monsters – two categories that blur the deeper one intrudes into the Everfree – obey only nature’s laws. The clouds above are shapeless and huge, a hundred or a thousand times the size of normal clouds.

All this, just past the first line of trees at the edge of the meadow outside Ponyville.

There are paths throughout the Everfree, though who created them is something of a mystery. They are far too large to be game trails, and they seem to require no maintenance. No grasses intrude upon them. No fallen trees lie across them. Ponies who stay upon the paths are generally safe from whatever lurks in the mists around them.

Sometimes the paths change. Nopony has ever seen it happen, but every few years a path will simply vanish. Gone; a memory. Centuries-old trees stand in their place.

Once, decades after the Banishment, a unicorn scholar spent a full year studying the paths. She placed scrying spells, wards, and charm circles on every path she could find, and she lived in a small hut in a large grove and did her best to hide from the slouching beasts that knocked on her walls at night. Against all expectation, she lived long enough to record several twists in the paths, and the conclusions she shared after escaping from the forest convinced her fellow scholars to find other subjects for their study.

The paths had not shifted. They never existed at all.

Poison joke is the best known example of the Everfree’s diverse, enchanting, exotic, and often downright lethal assortment of plants. It is not, despite the name, related to poison ivy or poison oak; it is more closely related to the tropical hibiscus, though strongly (and, apparently, magically) modified to survive in the dim gloom that fills the forest. On clear autumn nights, when the moon is full, the blossoms take on a faint silver glow that persists even when the flowers are moved into shadows or indoors.

Nopony has ever died from poison joke intoxication. Several ponies have died from the indirect effects of intoxication: pegasi whose wings fail mid-flight, or ponies unable to escape from the Everfree’s many predators because the bones in their legs have suddenly turned soft as moss.

A full catalogue of the Everfree’s flora has never been completed. Some of the more unusual known plants include spiderbrambles, whose thousands of blossoms are living, fully functioning spiders, capable of spinning webs and capturing insects. They are generally shy and do not bite ponies except in self defense. They are not edible and make poor gifts, according to florists.

In the swampy areas of the forest, what appear to be blueberries grow in thick clusters near fallen logs. Animal corpses, or simply bones, are often found around them, sometimes with the remains of berries still in their mouths. Roots have grown all through them, piercing them, drinking them.

They are not blueberries.

None of these plants are considered particularly dangerous by scholars of the Everfree. Those lie further in.

A variety of predators call the Everfree home.

Deep gouges scour the trunks of most of the larger trees in the forest. The wounds lie in rows, usually of three or four, and cut deep enough into the bark to draw out weeping flows of sap. They form shining amber runnels that buzz with flies and ants, drawn by their sweet scent and taste.

The slashes are one way manticores mark their territory. The acrid stench of their urine is another, used by males to warn each other away from potential conflicts. Female manticores are more sociable and their territories often overlap, except when game becomes scarce.

Once a year, a few weeks before the Spring equinox, manticores will swarm. The territorial animosity they display the rest of the year fades, and for a single night they gather by the thousands, crowding the air with their flight and bending the trees with their weight. They appear like a million monstrous bats, wheeling among the stars in some ancient dance that defies meaning or reason. They gather not to mate, or to fight, or for any purpose, it seems. By the time the sun rises, they are gone.

Not far from one of the paths, a pair of trees have fallen together into a spindly copse, their branches grasping at the canopy above as though to climb back up, or perhaps pull their still-standing neighbors down. The space between their trunks is crowded with twigs and leaves and vines, far more than could ever have belonged to these two trees alone. The mound of vegetation swells out, a cancerous mass, pregnant with secrets.

When building their dens, timberwolves often seek such fallen trees. It is not clear why they do so – certainly not protection, as timberwolves have no natural predators aside from fire. They pile their dens high with any green thing they can find, and spend the night time hours inside.

It is hard for the few ponies who venture this deep into the Everfree, who see timberwolf dens and manticore swarms, to remember that this was once the heart of a kingdom. That the very steps they now walk were trod by the Sisters at the height of their power, when all the world bowed to the Celestial Thrones. It was the golden age of ponies, and Everfree City was their jewel.

But gold is also the color of autumn and sunsets. It is the color of ending.

At its widest point, the Everfree forest is nearly fifty kilometers across. It is the largest free-standing forest in Equestria, and every year it grows.

The new growth is generally harmless, more like a normal woods than the unnatural darkness that inhabits the Everfree’s heart. Where it grows near towns such as Ponyville it is chopped back with little difficulty. The forest and the ponies around it have, after nearly a thousand years, reached homeostasis. They live as wary neighbors, and sleep with daggers beneath their pillows. They have made peace with the forest, like villagers living beneath a volcano, confident it will erupt some other day.

There is a river that runs the length of the forest. Ruins dot its banks; isolated at first, then growing in size the nearer one travels to its source. Marble and granite columns lie half-sunk in the boggy woods, overrun with vines until they appear like trees themselves. They are picturesque and unthreatening, and aside from the occasional serpent, the river is a relatively safe path into the forest depths. Were it not for a series of waterfalls and rapids, one could venture almost to the old palace itself on a boat.

The city’s bones rest closer to surface here in the heart of the forest. Wide stone walkways, now crumbling, lead straight up to the river’s edge. Broken walls, their empty windows like the eyes of a skull, stand alone and forlorn amidst the ruins.

It was a beautiful city, once; a dream of marble and towers and gods. Vast squares filled with fountains and sculptures that existed for no reason but the joy they brought to ponies who passed them by. The largest fountain was more than fifty feet high, layered like a wedding cake, and decorated with free-standing statues of pegasi, unicorns and earth ponies all dancing in unison. High above, atop the fountain’s highest level, a pair of winged unicorns gyred around a common center, each touching a wingtip to the other.

Little remains of the fountain today. The noble statues are heaps of rubble. Only a few pieces – a leg, a head, a wing – are even vaguely recognizable. The flat flagstones all around are buckled and torn. More trees stand here than statues, now.

Up ahead, barely visible through the perpetual mists, a few high towers still live. They are broken, toothless and hollow, but they have not fallen yet. Some other fate awaits them.

The ruins open into a broad plaza, seemingly untouched by time or the forest all around. Dark stones, cut into pristine squares, create a vast plane upon which not even grass or mold has dared to grow. By day the obsidian shines like black glass in the sun; at night, the moonlight penetrates deep into the rock, far deeper than the stones are thick, and transforms the dim emptiness beneath ponies’ hooves into a gaping space filled with stars and nebulae and galaxies.

A simple metal sculpture stands in the center of the square: a silver crescent rises from a stone pedestal carved with a thousand pinpoint stars. It has not dulled or tarnished with time, and glimmers as bright as the day it was forged. On humid days, which are common here in the forest, a layer of frost sometimes grows along the metal, regardless of how warm the sun shines.

The Plaza of the Moon was one of the wonders of the ancient world, though few ponies at the time would have said so. They saw it only during the day, when it was plain, and simple, and featurelessly black. They rarely visited at night, when its full majesty was on display.

Less than a mile away from the Plaza of the Moon, another vast square still stands within the jungle’s growth. Blocks of brilliant marble, enough marble to build a mountain, are laid out side by side like soldiers standing in a row. The level stones once shone bright as the noon sky.

Once, a great sundial held court in the Plaza of the Sun. Crafted from gold and platinum, its style stood higher than ten ponies, and the sweep of its dial was nearly as large as Luna’s entire court. The gold inlay was polished smooth by countless ponies who brushed their hooves against it, reverently whispering prayers to the god it honored. On any given day, a half-a-million souls crossed the plaza and admired, if only in passing, the unveiled beauty reflected on its face.

The great sundial is shattered, now. The fluted golden beam whose shadow marked the hours lies in fragments all around. Some great heat has rendered them to slag, and they slump on the broken marble like runnels of wax from a candle. The graceful dial has been uprooted and twisted into a mockery of the order it once spoke.

The level stones are ruined, now. Wrecks of marble, pieces weighing hundreds of tons each, are scattered like toys in every direction. The square is sunken and warped. Countless bones lie in its cracks and crevices, a once-living mortar that binds the fragments together in death.

The teeming millions are fled, now. They have left the city to its shadows.

The sisters are gone, now.

Only the forest remains.

Far in the distance, just barely visible from the heart of the Everfree, proud Canterlot juts from the edge of a mountain. It is filled with flowing water, families, and life. It is a dream made real.

The ponies who live there believe it will last forever.

Fabled Cities: The Ice and What It Holds

North of Canterlot, past the floating fortress of Derecho, past the border with the Griffon tribes, past fabled Dream Valley, one finds a world of ghosts.

Many of these spirits are much reduced from their mortal estate. They are little more than sparks of light that flit between the trees, around and behind the tall, straight trunks of black pines with snow-laden boughs. During the winter nights, which are quite long this far north, these spirits flicker and dance, tiny motes alive one moment, gone the next, leaving only the evaporated shadows of their passing to draw travelers further into the wood, away from the safety of the path, eager for just another glimpse of these irresistible lights.

Beneath the mounds of snow, away from the trails, one sometimes finds travelers' frozen bones, curled in slumber. The empty hollows of their eyes are filled, when one starts to glance away, with a strange, half-imagined glow.

Other ghosts remember their forms. At night in these woods, a black shape sometimes races across the sky. It is only noticed when it obscures the stars with its wheeling passage, its black wings outstretched, reaching from horizon to horizon, enfolding between them the entirety of the night.

It is good that this spirit is too dark to see except in occlusion. They say that to view its form, to see it spiraling above you, illuminated perhaps by the diaphanous glow of the aurora, is to be marked with an evil omen. That ponies who see it thus will see it every night thereafter, no matter how far they run from this forest, this endless boreal forest, and that it will gyre above them ever more, invisible to all others, until in panic, maddened, the victim runs from a cliff or dives into the ocean.

That is probably an old mare's tale. All the same, travelers passing through these woods keep their eyes downcast at night.

The forest is not endless, though it can seem that way. Eventually the trees grow smaller, their trunks thinner, their crowns bent lower to the ground under the weight of the snow. Finally the trees stop, and before the traveler is only a vast plane of ice, stretching infinitely forward. In the distance, rising above the blinding glare, there is a rough line across the sky that may be a range of mountains.

This is the White Ocean, a glacier that covers nearly one-quarter of the entire continent. Beneath it, mountains rise and recline, their peaks never coming within a mile of the surface.

At the margin of the forest and the glacier, an old wood post bears a beaten sign. How it can still exist, after so many thousand years alone with the wind and snow, no pony can say. Magic, perhaps. The words this sign once bore are gone, blasted away by a thousand years of ice, but in the subtle tracery of the wood one can discern a shape: an arrow, pointing north.

It points toward Windhome, the first city.

There are many legends about Windhome. Most center around the Windigoes, the insane spirits that gallop across the sky, sowing hatred, reaping discord. The Hearthwarming legends teach of the disputes between the three pony tribes, before the Princesses came to bind them. The legends teach of pegasi warriors and their pride, of unicorn nobles and their dreams of power, of stubborn earth ponies who worked the land.

All of them lived in Windhome. It was the only city ponies knew then, and when the long winter brought by the Windigoes began, they fought against leaving, until the cold grew so bitter that the unicorns' spells failed, and the pegasi's thick coats froze through, and even the stones beneath the earth ponies' hooves cracked and became like frost. And so they left, and eventually they found peace and unity far to the south in Dream Valley.

But that is a tale for another time. Behind, at the foot of those mountains rising in the distance, proud Windhome was left empty and derelict. The Windigoes raged on and on in the sky, and the snow fell, never melting. Inch by inch, year by year, it filled the streets and boulevards, it filled the sewers below, compacting into ice and crawling up the gutters, up the houses to their broken windows, into homes and bakeries and citadels. The ice penetrated everything, and anything it could not penetrate it crushed, until all the city was entombed except the highest towers and the slender minarets around whose spires pegasi once flew. And the years passed and more snow fell, until even these towers surrendered, and nothing remained of Windhome except a windswept plane of unbroken ice, as far as the eye could see.

How long this state lasted, none can say. With the city locked in ice, there was nothing left to measure time. Perhaps a decade, perhaps a century. Perhaps far, far longer.

Eventually, the Windigoes grew tired of their triumph, and they fled upon the wind for other lands. Their kind have never been seen since. Perhaps they never existed. Perhaps they, like so much of Windhome, were simply a legend or myth.

Whatever the reason, the vast glacier that, even today, dominates this part of the world ceased to grow. The summer sun, which rose above the horizon and circled the sky for six months of the year, began to warm the highest layers of ice, those entombing Windhome's mightiest spires and minarets. And on the longest day of summer, when the sun rose highest in the sky, the ice cracked a few inches beneath the surface, and it began to slide away, down the gentle slope of the mountains, across the glacier's vastness, toward the distant sea. Within this sheet of ice traveled the highest stone from the highest minaret, sliced clean from its sisters.

In time – years later – this sheet of ice reached the ocean and floated upon it. The brackish water melted the ice, and all that remained was that high stone, that tiny fragment of Windhome, which sank quickly into the depths.

The next year, another sheet of ice arrived at the ocean, containing the next highest stone from Windhome's highest pinnacle. It too melted, and this stone too sank through the black waters, finally coming to rest atop its long-lost sibling.

And so it went that every year thereafter, another sheet of ice flowed down the mountain, thinner than a foal's hoof, bringing with it another fragment of Windhome. Through chance or magic or fate these pieces sank onto each other, until over the centuries the cleaving glaciers sliced ancient Windhome apart and brought it here, to this cold coast, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the shards of Windhome sank, and the city itself was reborn.

Beneath the waves, now, far beneath the waves, Windhome's highest spire digs into the mud. And atop it grows a tower, upside-down, like the rest of the city. And it may be, if this odd miracle continues long enough, that eventually the inching glaciers will deliver every piece of Windhome to the ocean, and the basest stone will be exalted, and the sewers will twist like riddles amongst the kelp, and between the weak shafts of the sun tiny sparks of light will dance, as like will-o-wisps in the forest, and all the ghosts of this city, the first city, will find at last their graves.

And someday ponies will visit these watery inverted corridors. They will swim here, and teach their foals of the sorrow to which pride gives birth.

Fabled Cities: The Driftwood Emperor

East of Canterlot, past the Foal Mountain’s icy slopes, past the Hollow Shades, past the verdant farmlands north of Fillydelphia, one finds the Endless Ocean.

It is not, strictly speaking, endless. It is only two thousand miles across, but when the first ponies reached this shore, refugees from the fall of Dream Valley, they had never seen such an expanse of water. It stretched across the horizon, still warm even in the depth of winter, and in its rolling waves they felt the ocean’s inexorable strength, its vastness. They fled from its creeping tides, from the stinging salt spray and the soft sucking sand beneath their hooves. They found other places to build their cities.

Today, ponies no longer fear the ocean. They tread its beaches and fly kites in the constant shore breeze. Foals play in the sand, building castles and watching the waves devour them. They gather seashells and driftwood and imagine they are treasures.

They were treasures, once.

The ocean’s waters are turbid and opaque. A pony who stands in the waves cannot even see as far as her hooves; the foam and silt conceal them. The water hides all it touches.

Sometimes, ponies will keep swimming, long after the bottom has dropped out beneath their legs. A few hundred yards offshore, the tips of the waves obscure all but the tallest trees back on land. Ponies who swim this far can no longer hear the shouts of foals on the beach. They hear only the churning waves and the cry of gulls overhead.

Some swim further out, a mile now, and only a faint smudge on the horizon remains of the rest of the world, visible when the bobbing waves reach their crest.

Ponies are not renowned as swimmers. Their hooves make for poor paddles, and although their lungs are deep and their endurance endless, they cannot swim forever. Eventually they will sink, and leave behind the air and the land, the sun and the stars, the wind and the light, and they will plunge into the depths. The water around them darkens rapidly. If they look up, they see the surface world fade and disappear, and the sun is a single solitary star flickering between the waves, here and gone, here and gone, and lost.

They are blind in the land of night. The water presses all around them, crushing them with darkness, and they can no longer tell down from up or sense the depths into which they are falling. Nothing remains but the black ocean.

And if they live long enough, as they near the ocean floor, they may see a faint glow tracing the crevices and canyons beneath them. They may see points of light dancing just beyond the reach of their hooves.

Aquastria is the last city of the seaponies, but it is thousands of miles away, off the west coast of Equestria. Out here, offshore to the east, there are no cities anymore. The largest empire to ever exist, sprawling across thousands of leagues beneath the waves, is gone. Only fragments remain, scattered here and there along the ocean bottom or cast like driftwood upon the beaches far away.

Ponies who come here now, who sink to these depths, have found the heart of that lost empire. The lights they see, shimmering all beneath them, are the edges of the Starlight Trench.

Legends tell of the Tide Queen, the second-to-last ruler of the Starlight Trench and the millions of seaponies who lived within its coral mazes. Hers was a long line, stretching back thousands of years, before terrestrial ponies ceased their migrations and built the first cities on land. Her rule was gentle, the pace of life slow. The seaponies were content, and they lived in harmony with the other races of the deep -- the mermares, the whales, the kelpie, and more.

The queen and her court lived in an enormous palace crafted from mother of pearl, thinner than an eggshell, clear as glass, pregnant with all the colors of the ocean. The castle stretched for miles along the Starlight Trench. Entire cities grew within it, floating amidst forests of kelp and the rocky salt pillars that suspended its high ceilings.

Where once this palace filled the Starlight Trench, only a vast and empty canyon remains. Far below, embedded in the silt, one might find thin shards of nacre, curved like the shell of an egg, so brittle they break at the barest touch. They are all that remain of the palace, and soon even they will be gone, ground into sand or consumed by the snails and worms that crawl through the muck.

Legends tell of the Tide Queen’s four children -- three daughters and a son.

In her final years, the queen set a challenge for her daughters: whoever could secure the greatest boon for their people in the course of a year would receive the coral crown. The other children must bow to her and acknowledge her as their sovereign.

The eldest daughter, a siren pony whose scales shone like pearls, set out to live amongst the whales. She swam with them for a full year, crossing the ocean from pole to pole, and from them she learned to sing. Her voice filled the waters of the Starlight Trench when she returned, and the Coral Court wept to hear her. In the land of night, no artwork had such a reach as song, and this she taught to her people.

The second daughter, a lionfish pony whose mane was a dozen striped ray fins, swam to the shore. She called up to the pegasi spiraling above, and for a year she lived bobbing on the surface, speaking with them, learning of their world and sharing hers. She brought back to the Coral Court tales of far-off cities made of rock, of ponies like gods who controlled the stars. She was the first ambassador of the seaponies to the walking world, and she laid the first stone in the bridge between the land and the ocean.

The third daughter, a sailfish pony who swam like lightning, sought out the sharks and marlins. She found the fastest fish in all the seas, and she joined their races. For a full year she raced, and when she returned she brought back the spirit of friendly competition. She gathered all the peoples of the seas and founded the first great games to test their skill and strength and to crown a champion.

And so the daughters appeared before their mother the queen and bowed to hear, ready for their coronation. Each was confident that their gift would win them the crown.

And then the son arrived.

He was a barracuda pony, smaller than his sisters, narrow in body and snout, with tiny fins and a wide jaw filled with needles. For the past year he had lived with the mermares, the carnivores who dwelled in uneasy peace with the seaponies. The mermares saw in him a will to power; he saw in them a means to an end. And during the year while his sisters built new friendships and treasures for their people, he plotted. He made pacts, and when his family had at last assembled to select a new queen, he arrived with his army.

The seaponies had never known a king, and the son decided he would not be the first. Instead he styled himself emperor, not merely of the seaponies but of all the ocean. He blinded his sisters, slew his mother, and took her crown for himself.

Scattered throughout the Starlight Trench are broken statues. There are thousands of them, half-buried in the mud, and there must be thousands more sunk or shattered into pieces too small to discern. In some parts, where the undersea currents are strong enough to sweep away the silt and mud, the statues cobble the floor of the trench, a long road through the darkness, beginning in nothing, ending nowhere.

The statues are all the same: a barracuda pony, his lips twisted in a sneer of cold command, his stone eyes judging the empty wasteland all around.

Some statues are more or less untouched, as though they escaped whatever force had broken their kin. Along their bases are inscribed faded lines in an ancient script, so old and debased that no ponies today, not even other seaponies, can decipher it. Whatever wisdom they once contained is lost.

Not a single inscription is fully intact. Even on the few unbroken statues, those otherwise unblemished, a single word has been obliterated. It is chiselled out, or smashed, or scored, and not in one statue out of the thousands littering the Starlight Trench can this word be read. It has been erased from history.

Aside from the worms and snails and crabs, the statues are the only inhabitants of the Starlight Trench. All the rest is water, and darkness, and dancing points of light, drifting just out of reach.

The Waters of Myinnkyun's Harbor

Author's Notes:

A bit of context to help with this lost city.

Myinnkyun was the location of horizon's recent Writeoff entry, The Last Dreams of Pony Island. It was an outstanding story, told in a series of poems, describing a mysterious murder and the final days of a tiny pony outpost, thousands of miles from Canterlot. This Lost Cities entry is written in homage to it.

The waters of Myinnkyun’s harbor are deep and clear. A pony standing upon the rickety wooden dock feels as though they walk across a high bridge that spans an immense gulf. Even at noon, the burning tropical sun cannot plumb the harbor’s depths – sight fades past a few yards, past the dock’s pilings, past the schools of silver fish that flicker and flee in the space of a breath. All else vanishes in an emerald fog.

The waters are filled with every manner of lost thing. Cargo dropped by careless stevedores. Driftwood carried by the tides. The rotting remains of the schooner Venture, sunk in a summer hurricane. An ivory pen, flung by the mayor in a fit of pique. Rotting scraps of thatch housing. Crabs who poke at all these things, and make within them homes.

There are bones in here as well. Two colonies’ worth of bones. Two hundred lives, brought here by fate and fortune, by dreams of warm sand and clear skies, by the allure of salt water and the heady promise that here, on this shore, they will find what eluded them in all their other ports.

Hope makes ponies invincible. It is what gave them the strength to conquer the world.

But here, in Myinnkyun’s sheltered harbor, encompassed on the east and west by tall cliffs that curl around the port like a mother’s arms, nothing remains that resembles hope. There are only shattered houses, broken and leaning against each other for support, and a long picket wall that once protected the colony from the endless jungle beyond. Now it is gap-toothed and ruined, piled high with sand and beach sedge, and with every passing year another piece of it falls and is swallowed by the dunes, and soon only the crabs will remember it exists as they knock against its buried timbers with their claws, making burrows, putting it at last to some better use than its creators.

Can a town dream?

A town breathes and grows. Towns live and die. A town’s ponies can dream, and what is a town? It is not a spot of earth or collection of buildings or a point on a map; a town is its ponies. And it must be agreed that the whole can do all the same things as its parts.

So Myinnkyun slumbers in the tropical sun, and if its ponies still dream in their watery cradle, then Myinnkyun must dream as well.

There is a great house on a hill in Myinnkyun, looking out over the waters of the bay. It is porticoed and gabled, and along the roof is a walkway from which the house’s master sometimes stood and watched the sea, as though she were a captain, her house a ship, and this walkway a crow’s nest. From here Peridot watched the storms, and kept careful count of the boats laden with her treasure as they pulled into port.

The front door has fallen off its hinges, and the beach has crept inside. The floorboards have gone gray and dry. Sand sieves between them in dark lines that run the length of the room. The walls, made up in plaster and board by ponies too stubborn to adapt to the tropical weather, have long since rotted away, and only decaying beams remain to support the upper floors.

There is a set of stairs leading higher. They are weak, and only a foal or pegasus can use them anymore.

The Customs House was the largest building in Myinnkyun. It stood guard at the end of the docks, ready to intercept cargo as it came ashore and claim the crown’s share of tax. The mayor lived on the second floor, and the guard kept their barracks in a long row house to the side, and it was here that ponies made their final stand.

The Customs House is cinders now. Black stumps protrude from the gray sand, discoloring it with their shedding ash. Years of storms have swept the rest away.

Sometimes the wind carries away the sand, revealing bits of trash amidst the ruin: a guard’s spearhead, a minotaur’s nose ring, a foal’s coral rattle. Scraps of paper that somehow survived the fire, filled with ledger lines accounting Myinnkyun’s profits.

In time the winds return, and sand consumes these things again.

Beyond the fragmentary wall, beyond a hundred yards of bare sand, the jungle rises like a wave. It washes from the mountains in the distant island’s heart, lapping here at the edge of pony civilization. The shadows are verdant and thick within.

To the ponies of Myinnkyun, the jungle was the wellspring of all their fears. Its shadows held every manner of secret and nightmare, monsters that lurked beneath their windowsills and scratched at their doors. They thought, in their folly, that the jungle held their doom. They barricaded themselves against its darkness, and gave free reign to the darkness in their hearts.

Now, the jungle echoes with distant thunder. Drums pound out a rhythm in the night, and the orange light of a thousand bonfires paints the clouds with false evening glow. Laughter, songs, howls all spill out from the native revelry.

And Pony Island belongs once more to the first people.

In Peridot’s home, on the second floor, a bed still sits neatly made.

The sheets are crusted with salt blown in from the bay. They are frozen in place, and Peridot, who slept on the floor at the foot of her own bed, would smile to see them so preserved.

The window beside the bed is open. Not broken – open. And on the windowsill are rough gouges where a pony’s hoof has scraped. A single rosy feather, the same color as the dawn, is still lodged in the window’s track, where a careless pegasus lost it in his hurried haste.

In the waters of Myinnkyun’s bay, two hundred souls lie dreaming. They dream of love, and friendship, and the hope that brought them to this distant shore.

They who are dead no longer dream of fear. They have forgotten the murder, and why anypony would ever want to kill.. The warm water cradles them, and their dreams are the ocean, and slowly they join with it. They are at peace.

Peridot, and Littlemoth, and Dawn Patrol, and Moonstruck, and all the other ponies of Myinnkyun, who bound their fates together in life, now reside together here, at the bottom of this vast bay. And when all of life’s dreams lay before them as a feast, they do not bother to remember the last days of Pony Island, for

there is nothing else
which could matter less