Of Luna and Ponyland

                               Of Luna and Ponyland!

                                  By "T.E.R."  

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When most beings think of Equestria they think of only one half of it, the half called "Escurara", though few would call it that these days. The more obscure part is known as Ponyland.  The two parts of Equestria are as different as the domains of the two Royal Sisters.

Escurara is home to cities that are older than the sisters themselves, it is settled (comparatively), as many unicorns, has only a few notable magical objects, has few non-pony residents, is relatively safe and carefree compared to other powerful nations, does not require a Guardian, knows Princess Luna for raising the moon at night and little else.

Ponyland has ancient temples and a city or two that are older than the sister's mentor (a deity, 19,000 years old), largely unsettled by ponies, has very few unicorns, has many powerful and well-known magical objects, such as the Golden Horseshoes, the Flashstone, the Golden Rose, and the Sunstone, is mostly settled by non-ponies (Mostly elves but also: Scree, Blarks, Trolls, Tadswamp's, Golem's, Goblins, Bushwoolies, Anthophila (Bees), Troggles, Karkinos, Flutterponies, Jhipon-Nixies (Seaponies), Gnomes,  Breezeies, Piggs, Gizmonks, Dell Dwellers,  Grundles, and more), was once threatened by horrifying evils, needed a guardian or hero badly, AND knows Princess Luna as their greatest warrior, Equestria's greatest lawmaker, a brilliant fighter of crime, and most of all the Great Protector of Ponyland!

128 years after the original defeat of Discord… A giant mindless Gollem called "Met" was created by a mortally wounded Golem named Rava "Emet" Eliyahu, a scholar who was an old and dear friend of both the Royal Sisters...  

The Gollem immediately went about its mission to destroy a great dam and flood the golem tunnels.  All efforts to stop "Met" failed and the Golem's went into hiding underground to be with their families. They knen that if the dam broke they would be crushed by the force of the water, smashed against the walls of their underground tunnels and large rooms, or be flattened by a cave-in. Rava had taken away all their safeguards by lost magic learned during his last project, he was looking for an old and rare kind of magic stone on a nearly-bare above-ground canyon wall rear the Golem when he fall.
On the last day before his terrible night-time fall Rava looked thru the many new safeguards to make sure they were good enough. The old ones were starting to crack due to water leaking. His people had asked him to do this (many of the new safeguards were magical or used magic to close openings faster than could be done by hand), their leaders wanted to to do a test of the safeguards in 2 days.  
The small Kingdoms of Ponyland and their rulers feared that if the Golem's fell then that would mean that the giant Gollem "Met" would then attack the rest of Ponylands inhabitants. Also its genocidal success might cause another wave of deaths from the magic using Fiends that continuously threatened the land.

The most powerful beings in Ponyland at the time either refused to intervene or could not because of limitations on their power, therefore a delegation of them went to the two princesses and asked for their aid and defeating the menace. After some debate the princesses agreed to directly confront the menace Gollem, partly because they hoped to free their friend the Scholar from whatever madness had overtaken him so he could die in peace.

Though they had been forbidden from using the Elements of Harmony in Golem territory the two sisters still had to try to stop the giant creature of stone. The 2 sisters being forbidden to use the Elements within those specific cultural and political borders was due to a previous underground experiment. The experiment had both nearly resulted in the burning of a beloved treasure trove of Golem knowledge and the caused the roof of the Cavern of Grieving to partly cave-in. These incidents were due to the difficulty in controlling the rainbow beam of energy that the Elements projected beyond a certain number of yards, plus the princess's emotional states were not ideal either.

Fortunately their giant opponent did not end up being too much trouble, for unknown to most of their subjects the two sisters were far more than simply winged unicorns: they were both un-worshiped Goddess's!

With the aid of some of the same magical fighting techniques they used against Discord during their first battle with him, the two God's destroyed Met the Gollem, prevented it from destroying the old stone dam overlooking the Golem's underground dwellings. Among the Scholar's dying words was the declaration that his fatal fall had not been an accident but was caused by a strange being with purple horns and a long fat nose. In spite of the peaceful and painless death of their friend the two ponies were both saddened by the loss and worried… It took a lot of magical energy to affect a Golem's mental state. One had to be a truly powerful wielder of either black or chaos magic in order to do it.

The delegation from the rulers presented them an extraordinary deal: Ponyland would become first a protectorate of, then a part of Equestria in exchange for both a powerful warrior to protect the land from the reemerging collection of black magic users, witches, and demons that threatened the land and a powerful being who would be an arbitrator between the kingdoms. Powerful beings like the Flutterponies, gnomes, Seaponies, Gnomes, and the Princess ponies (who were the immortal guardians of one half of the planet's magical energy) were skeptical that there was a warrior in Equestria strong enough to fight the terrifying magical threats involved. Princess Luna, having grown bored of being simply a lawmaker, night-sky designer, occasional crimefighter, and problem solver during the "Night-Court", asked for and received the task.

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A week later after fine tuning her ability to use the Elements without the aid of her sister Luna went with 30 of the best night and day guards to shut down a rumored meeting of group of strange magic using witches in her ist mission as "Protecter of Ponyland".

She gained the above ability due to an accident at the private coronation of both princesses. They were both in front of the unbelievably powerful magic gem known as the "Heart of Ponyland". Luna was thinking deeply about their duties and roles, when she leaned too far forward and hit her horn lightly against the large diamond by accident. This made a 2nd link to the Elements, other then the one Sister's shared, allowed her to use the Elements without a 2nd bearer needed.

Upon arriving at the suspected location and time of the meeting Luna and the guards silently observed a gathering involving the telling of past miscreants.

The assembled beings called themselves the "Hydorchaos" Witch-Clan, they said this as part of what was later learned to be a longtime ritual during meetings, one of retelling their oral history.
They claimed to have been created by Discord as part of a plan to bring him back in case a powerful being managed to defeat him and seal him away. However, due to the nature of both chaos energy and magic the plan hadn't worked and now the witches had no intention of even trying to free Discord. They did however name drop him a lot. A few seconds after the meeting was over Luna and the rest of the guards stepped out of the shadows. Then after Princess Luna said a short speech, she and the guards charged at the clan…

However, all of its members save one, teleported away into the night. The remaining witch was the most powerful of the lot. She was the clan's founder and the first witch created by Discord and her name was Alexis the Tiamat. By the time the ensuing battle was over three days, 4 hours and 15 minutes had passed, and only five of the original 30 Royal Guards were left alive.

By the end of the epic battle Luna had been stabbed and cut half a dozen times by magic blades designed to hurt and kill gods... the battle was one of the three longest Luna ever participated in... Luna finally destroyed Alexis by teleporting both of them onto the coast and summoning a giant tidal wave. The wave contained the combined kinetic and potential energy of every single wave that had ever existed, and this only knocked the witch out cold.

Luna immediately followed up with a blast from the Elements of Harmony, the rainbow colored beam lifted up, encircled and crushed the unconscious witch to death. Then the ball-like covering contained the huge explosion that followed. Luna felt the thrill of battle for the first time but she also realized that bloodlust would inevitably lead to tragedy so she tried to restrain herself. With the aid of both powerful magic and the Elements themselves Luna was able to make sure that her enjoyment of battle did not get out of hand.

A short time after the battle was over Luna did two things: First, she assembled the very best of Equestria's warriors (regardless, if there were ponies or not) and over time she turned them into a special multipurpose division of the Royal Guard she dubed the "Night-Guard". The goal of this new specialist unit was to deal with situations the regular guard was useless at dealing with.

The guards worked in teams of 2-7 and each team had a different task, some dealt with the gang related crime, others oversell local search and rescue operations, some did reconnaissance on individuals who presented a threat to the nation's security (the fiends, potential traitors, arms dealers, spies, professional assassins, and others), and others with varying degrees of success at first, but things got better later on (outside of their intelligence division, it was too focused on the ever-increasing numbers of the Dragon kingdom's army and did not focus on other threats as much due to both mindset and sub-cultural issues). They were also there to make sure that if something happened to Luna, the nation would be in good appendages.

2nd, after she had recovered from her wounds Luna went to work. She had two separate layers of battle armor magically created and then transformed into a summonable form of liquid metal. The princes of the night also created a special outfit that had had once been made of 5 layers of clothing: the first was a comfort layer, than there was a layer of Hydra skin, in the middle a layer of Dragon scales, next was a layer of Hydra skin, and finally touching her own fur and skin was another comfort layer. With the aid of magical energy siphoned directly from the Heart of Ponyland the layers were compacted, stretched impossibly thin, and became one layer of clothing.  

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40 years later, the "Princess of Hiding Darkness" went into the Armory of Confiscated Weapons on the night after she and her sister's first encounter (of many) with the Demon Ram known as Grogar the Greggur (meaning Grand-Necromancer), seeking an auxiliary weapon to use against those who were either sealed it from or immune to the Elements of Harmony. There she removed one elder blade and its scabbard from a wall-mounted a place of honor. The weapon was a magical sword taken from the first demon she had ever smited (it had already gone up in a rainbow implosion as did all dying demons). Thus Luna gained a sword made of wrought iron. She used this blade for one third of her career as a fiend slayer.

Nearly two centuries later the sword was destroyed in battle with a a very powerful black magic using goblin named Malcarge the Melter, who liked turning small buildings into lava with the occupants still inside, with the rights spell he could also shatter the bones of his victims while they were still alive. He had been tricked into reading on black magic spell by a demon and because black magic always extract a price from the spellcaster unless they are demon, the poor Troll (formerly called Dasnax-vab, the name meaning "Honorable Blacksmith") was turned into a powerful spellcaster without empathy and assumed a misshapen appearance.

Three days later, Luna received a very unusual birthday present: a far more powerful magic sword composed mostly of wrought iron that had been blessed by every kind of priest and mystic teacher imaginable as well as by an entire Pantheon of deities (only one of whom was still active on the planet's surface) with a special core of a marble-sized but still very powerful fragment of rainbow energy that was fired by the Elements of Harmony, and finally had been dipped in left over Ichor in order to make the sword all but indestructible. An unexpected side effect of the Ichor is that the sword will often change width during battle mostly at random, though there does seems to be a certain set limit as to how big the sword will get without its owner needing a particular size. Although Princess Luna would have preferred a plainer scabbard (one more in keeping with her recently gained reputation as the Ponie's Princess, due to her spending far more time with her subjects in public and in person because she enjoys socializing with them and could publicly be humbled by the powers she wielded) playing it was instead made of crystal, the kind that grew up around the Heart of Ponyland.

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It was around this time that the arbitrator that pony land has long waited for arrived in the form of the "ruler of all-kingdoms", Princess Tiffany Majesty. With the aid of her well-informed husband (Steve Aguanno) Princess Majesty serves as the final arbitrator, peacemaker, and negotiator for all issues that deal with at least three of the many small kingdoms that existed within Ponyland. She held court for many years in Dream Castle, and she is considered by Griffin historians to be slightly more powerful than Starswirl the Bearded in terms of raw power. For a little over 6000 years she was considered to be the most powerful unicorn alive, and she specializes in offensive and defensive elemental magic, preferring to use various kinds of lightning spells when lethal force is required.  


Princess Luna's most difficult battle was her five-day one against Goglumbal the Last Arch-demon. Goglumbal had been the only high-ranking officer left behind when the portal to its home dimension had been completely and permanently closed after a failed demon invasion two or three centuries before Luna was born.


During the incredibly difficult battle between Princess Luna and the arch demon, entire mountain range had been destroyed and more than one very large crater was left in bare rock.


Luna fought against the chaos witchs, demons and black magic users for centuries, by the time of the second half of the 6000th year of her life, the Princess of the Night had reduced the chaos witch's down to only five members from the original 23. Two of the witches turned out to be very incompetent; all five fled for their lives and went into hiding. They would not return for 950 years. Over the next 300 years, she captured three demons (Arabus, Grogar, and Tirek) and sent them to Tartarus after discovering that all three had found ways to survive the usual methods of using the Elements. She carefully devised strategies for killing 2 of them (in case they ever escaped which 2 did 8 hundred and 70 years later, Grogar have gotten away I had barely managed to get inside the limits of Tambelon before it vanished for 500 years before reappearing on the night of the lunar month of Samhain, 20, 6786), and then turned her attention to the remaining witches, to use the Elements of Harmony to create a special kind of projectile that when fired would cause a being of pure chaos energy to be affected just like a mortal would make their body to totally disintegrate a minute or two afterwards.

At this point in time Princess Luna had become an accomplished artist when it came to the night sky, was internationally renowned for both the technical brilliance of the laws she crafted and their beauty and eloquence, see it taken down every crime organization in Equestria outside of 1/3 of Manehattan's street gangs, and a few other minor ones, at her sister's request she had turned the Pegasus military into an elite flying team and an efficient weather control organization, she had at least one major diplomatic triumph with her long-term allies and dear friends the Seaponies, and outside of a few demons, Chaos Witch's, a few low powered black magic users, and at least one or two Dragon raiding parties she had rid Ponyland of every single enemy it had... the ones that she was aware of anyway...

In spite of all these incredible accomplishments most ponies today only remember Luna as a raiser of the moon, and as the sinister entity Nightmare Moon. However, both the few ponies and the other inhabitants of Ponyland remember her as a great lawmaker and crimefighter, but they mostly remember her as the slayer of the most terrifying magical threats imaginable!

Every other species outside of ponies have heard this those tales as well and still remember them, even if they believe that most of the tales are exaggerated...

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In time, perhaps her greatest legacy would be that she inspired her spiritual descendants, who were told of them by the Moocick (the word is really spelled "Mooncick"… the "N" is missing due to his family's respect for Luna in her absence. Mooncick" is his role/job in Gnome society not his name) after their 1st quest was done.  In her absence a rotating group would slay the four only demons Luna was unable to kill in battle herself, they also defeated other menaces, survived encounters with powerful magical objects and retrieve them for Princess Celestia, and in the end they would finish the job Luna set out to do and finally bring permanent peace to Ponyland...

Their enemies and allies simply called them "the Little Ponies" due to an old song, but they called themselves the "G1ers"… for they were the First Generation of ponies to try to settle in Ponyland in nearly a century. You see, in spite of Luna's best efforts, that half of Equestria had developed a reputation for being a truly dangerous place, that reputation would fade only after the "G1ers" left of the land they once called home, it would be 20 years afterwards for a true permanent the pony/elf colony to be built.