As a warning for this post, as the title may suggest this section delves into true horrors inspired in part by Cupcakes and Rainbow Factory. If you are aware of those stories then you know that they serve as adequate warnings for what is to come. If you are unaware of those stories, then you are not prepared for the horrors below.

If you intend to proceed regardless, the trigger warnings are Coercion, Torture, Body Horror, Death, and Murder.

Following the post on the original conflict, the three nations are at war. Peace talks have failed, expeditions lost, hope and supplies are reaching all time lows. All three nations are seeing a rise in casualties due to lack of supplies and a gradually lower quality of troops as younger and younger members are conscripted. Remember, casualties are not just those who have died, but those who are incapable of fighting due to injury. Those living casualties incur an ongoing cost for weeks, months, or years until they return to fighting strength, and some may never fully recover. Each nation was posed with the same problem:

How do we convert our casualties from liabilities into assets?

Each nation had their solution, all of them horrific.

Terrans

The Enigma Machine

A curious contraption built by one of their chief scientists gone mad with grief after his only son became a casualty, losing the use of his legs. The machine itself was a wonder of engineering, and it itself was not the horror, but rather the purpose it was used for, and the things it was used with.

The inventor presented the machine to the Terran Scientific Council for approval, and while they were impressed with the machine's ability to convert raw materials into manufactured goods, the outputs were wildly inconsistent, and so they were posed to reject it before he stopped them, proposing one last demonstration. The inventor had his own son enter the machine along with a small pile of raw materials, and what emerged was the first of the Terran super soldiers. His son emerged from the machine under his own power, able to walk for the first time in a year, and covered in an impenetrable armor of legendary quality that shifted like a second skin. He could move and fight like never before, and was still in control of his faculties.

The scientific council was quite impressed, and ordered more tests to be done. Even if the results were inconsistent, the ability to turn their wounded into armored killing machines was invaluable, even if these machines would never be able to be anything else afterwards.

Over the years, the quality of the casualties dropped, less pony went in, more machine came out, more horrors were committed by the machines on the battlefield until it was unsafe for even the Terrans to occupy the same front as the machine soldiers. Ruthless killing machines that would attack anything they saw. They were effective, but uncontrollable, they showed no mercy.

Pegasi

The Pegasus Device

Taken from Rainbow Factory with some slight alterations. The Pegasus Device as depicted in the original story converts pegasus ponies into the magical elixir needed to make rainbows. This elixir is also a potent drug for use on the battlefield, but that is only the effect the device has on impure pegasi, which were the first to be put through the device "for the good of the flock".

When a pure pegasus was finally put through the device, the first windigo appeared. A manifestation of the pegasi's pure weather elemental form. Not all pegasi would produce a windigo when processed, but they were attracted to conflict and thus would head straight to the battlefield when created. Uncontrollable, but suggestable, and ultimately the pegasi weren't too concerned with the ground freezing from up in the clouds, so collateral damage on their side was at a minimum.

This also provided some extra motivation for their generals to succeed, as any underperforming officers would also be selected for processing, believing that an additional windigo would be more useful to the flock than a failing leader.

Unicorns

The Arcane Nexus

In modern Equestria, a Nexus refers to when two or more unicorn ponies pool their magical energy together in order to cast a spell more powerful that either of them could cast individually. This was also the case in the ancient world. In the ancient world it was discovered though, that if a unicorn was killed while their magic was still pooled in the nexus, their magic and soul would remain connected to the nexus until the spell was completed.

This provided the unicorns with a way to harvest the souls of their wounded in order to charge powerful spells, which was useful enough to start, but the soul would be wasted at the end of the spell. So, deeper research was conducted into forming an unending spell that would pool the magic, and a way to syphon out energy from the unending spell to cast any number of powerful spells without freeing the souls at the end.

A solution was discovered, and a large runic structure built deep within the Unicorn capital city where it would be housed. What it lacked was a director, someone inside the spell that could control it, someone who would not succumb to the overwhelming power and refuse to take orders from without. The Empress selected her own daughter, Aurum, younger sister of Princess Platinum, to be the center of the Arcane Nexus. Aurum was taken, encased in amber, and sealed as the center of the Arcane Nexus. This deeply traumatized the young unicorn, but it was the initial sacrifice that broke her. 100 captives were made part of the spell and executed so that their souls would fuel the nexus. Aurum could not handle the weight of their suffering and disassociated, forming a split personality which called itself Nexus to handle everything else, which was even better than the Empress had imagined when selecting Aurum for this role.

Over the years, more and more were sacrificed to the Arcane Nexus to grow its power, yet despite all of it the horrors produced by the Enigma Machine and the Pegasus Device continued to push the front closer to the capital.

The End of the War

In a last desperate bid to end the war, Empress Arcana ordered all of her subjects into the throne room, and bound them all to the same spell before killing them. Without orders, the Arcane Nexus issued one final spell, and the entire continent was frozen solid to a height even the pegasi could not escape, and those who survived, quickly ran out of food as nothing could grow in the new harsh terrain, forcing them too to leave the continent they had fought so dearly for.

Many tried to escape the Empress's final order, boarding ships to sail away, and some succeeded, while others stand to this day frozen in the docks.

It is well that few know of these horrors, lest some think that they could replicate them and not be corrupted by the power they bring.