***

2018: The arrival on Earth of Equestria, a magical land populated by ponies. They bring gifts, including the ponification potion, a serum that transforms human beings into "Newfoals". At first, nothing is suspected.

2019: After unrest, concerns about the Newfoals and their growing divergence from their original human personalities, and other issues that have sparked violence across the world, the Barrier, a large wall of magic that destroys all humans and human-made objects it touches, begins expanding outward from its origin point in CERN. War is declared by humanity on the ponies for this deliberate attack. They are aided in this by sane ponies, largely led by the PHL, founded by Lyra Heartstrings.

2023: The year that war ended.

But before all that, there was an age of giants and legends, an age of heroes and monsters… an age that has yet to tell all of its stories…

***

Boston. The end of the war…

King William V of Great Britain stood upon a balcony overlooking the city of Boston, or what was left of it (which was scant little). He felt a surprising sense of… calm.

It was over. The war had been won. Impossibly - incredibly - they had survived.

The Tyrant was dead.

He couldn’t quite believe it really. There had been a long time - almost too long a time - where it had felt like the war could end only in death or ponification, where those who wanted to avoid one had to choose the other, and those who wanted neither were living on borrowed time. He’d known men who’d seen nothing at the end of the road, who had rode the road to the road’s ending for fear of there being nothing beyond, who’d destroyed themselves rather than let the world do it for them.

He’d also seen broken men, men who’d made choices to hurt other people, and they had survived longer than they had had any right to.

He sighed, looking down at the iPad mini in his hand, the speech he had been in the process of typing still on there, the cursor blinking at him.

“Trouble writing the speech, your Majesty?” a familiar voice asked. William turned, a smile on his face, as he found himself facing True Quill, a young PHL journalist he’d met at Christmas last year.

“A little,” he admitted. “How are you, True Quill?”

The blue mare shrugged. “I’ve… been better. The war might be over, but so much has been lost…”

“You’re telling me,” William said with a wry, somewhat humourless chuckle. “I’ve seen some of the worst of it.”

True Quill blanched. “I’m… sorry, your Majesty. That was thoughtless.”

“It’s alright,” William said quietly. “Under the circumstances, there were far worse things you could have said.”

He turned to look back out of the balcony, a wistful expression on his face, and True Quill came up to join him.

“You know… when all this war business started, all those years ago… I don’t think anyone could have foreseen where it would have taken us,” he said quietly.

“Maybe not,” True Quill agreed. “But then again, where has it taken us? The world’s a bigger place than it was… but it’s smaller too. There’s been so much death, so many people lost…”

“And yet in the last two months, we’ve had more hope than we could have thought to have in two years,” William replied quietly. “You know, at one point the entire world thought like Maxi Yarrow, that we’d hit the end and all that was left was a glorious last hurrah?”

True Quill frowned. “I know that name, I think.”

“Indeed?” William said, smirking. “I wonder - do you know some of the stories I heard from Harry over the years? Some of the insane things I’ve heard him tell me about?”

“I’ve heard some stories,” True Quill admitted. “Rumours about things like the Fairport Incident, the chase across the dying wastes, Imperial Creed, Yarrow… I even heard about the EHS, though not much more than rumours.”

“I heard a little about them, and more besides,” William said with a sigh. “You ever thought of writing about these things? Making sure it doesn’t all get forgotten?”

“I don’t know where I’d start, your Highness,” True Quill admitted. “There are always going to be a lot of untold stories in this world.”

“Perhaps,” William agreed. He turned back to face her. “Let’s start tonight, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see what we can do.”

True Quill raised an eyebrow. “Tonight? Don’t you have a speech to write?”

William shrugged. “I never write my speeches, really. Somehow, winging it seems to work for me.” He grinned, and walked over to his makeshift desk, tapping the icon to start a new document on his google docs app. “Come on - let’s make a start.”

“Alright,” True Quill agreed. “Where shall we start?”

William looked up at her, then blinked, before frowning slightly.

“The beginning,” he said quietly. “Just after Balmoral. Poor Harry… he took it even worse than our father did, even worse than me…”

***

Buckingham Palace. July 3rd, 2019.

In a room in what some might have called the moral heart of Britain, a red-headed man was watching the most heart-wrenching thing he could possibly imagine.

“You think you can come into MY palace, MY country, and destroy the will of MY people! I may be old and decrepit, but I. WILL. NOT. STAND FOR THIS INSULT!”

“Potion the bitch!”

“I think not. Say goodbye to the world, and may God Almighty show you the mercy I withhold!”

Click. Rewind.

“You think you can come into MY palace, MY country, and destroy the will of MY people! I may be old and decrepit, but I. WILL. NOT. STAND FOR THIS INSULT!”

Click. Rewind.

"I. WILL. NOT. STAND FOR THIS INSULT!”

"You shouldn't torture yourself, son."

Prince Harry of Britain clicked the pause button on the recording and turned to see his father, now King Charles III of Britain, staring sadly at him. The older man looked quietly maudlin, his grey, thinning hair and wrinkled face looking ten years older than he had a few weeks ago. He was stood in the doorway of the small room, arms folded. He looked weary and heavy-hearted, and it was a harsh reminder for Harry that yes, he had lost his Grandmother, but his father had lost his mother, someone he had known for all of his seventy years, and a loss Harry was all too familiar with.

"There was nothing you could have done to save her," Charles continued, stepping into Harry's room, his expression dour but nonetheless resolute. "We must be thankful that she died with her humanity intact, instead of becoming one of Celestia's... puppets."

Harry turned away from his father with a miserable sigh.

"I should have defended her myself," he said quietly, looking at the image of his grandmother, the expression on her face defiant and resolute to the last. "With a gun, with my body, with my very life if I had to. She shouldn't have had to die at the hands of those... bastard lunatics."

"She didn't," Charles replied, sighing as he stared at his mother's visage on the screen with an unreadable expression halfway between sorrow and pride. "She died at her own, speaking words to comfort and inspire her subjects, just as she knew she should." He smiled a grim smile. "As far as deaths go, I think Mother would have been more than satisfied with it. Some are already calling it 'the Balmoral address', or so I've been told."

"She should have died in her sleep, peacefully, surrounded by her family," Harry said angrily, resisting the urge to smash the television. "Those bastard ponies and their potion. I knew it was all trouble, I always did."

"Perhaps," Charles said amicably. "But there are those among ponies who don't agree with what's been done by their… leader."

He sounded somewhat disgusted when he said leader, and Harry noted that he refused to say 'Queen': Charles had respect for that title and what it entailed after all, and it was more than apparent to anyone paying attention that Celestia did not.

"I don't care what they don't agree on," the young Prince said, and his father sighed unhappily. "Fat lot of good they've done. Where were they when Celestia's PER puppets did this? Where were they when this ponification nonsense started in the first place? Why are they even here at all...?"

"Son," Charles said firmly, a stern look upon his face. "Like it or not, the ponies are here to stay, both those who are our enemies, and those who are our friends."

"Father," Harry said, his voice as determined and resolute as his father's had ever been, "for what they've done, for what they've allowed to happen - to us, to this country, to the world - no pony is my friend."

***

Author's Notes:

Welcome to Once More Unto The Breach: a story of unsung heroes and unremembered villains. A story of grey and grey morality, of men and women (and ponies) pushed to their limits, and of the desperate struggle to survive long enough to see a new world dawn.

Hope you'll enjoy the ride, because it's about to get crazy...