'Almost everything about "The Rime of the Shadow-Clad Stallion" is shrouded in myth, which is the one and only fact every Equestrian literary scholar and classicist who has written about it can agree on. [....] The seventy-eight line poem first appeared in a posthumous collection of Flourish Prose's complete works, slotted neatly between "The Life Idyllic" and "Let Lovers Lie", two poems which are certainly his, as numerous documents concerning their performance at the Roanan royal court will attest. One would assume that, given the linguistic, tonal, and stylistic disparity between the dark and brooding little Rime, written in the northern style, and the two sunny and romantic odes surrounding it, questions about its authenticity would have arisen almost immediately. However, it was written off as an experiment by a master of verse. Just a ludibrium, a triviality, scribbled for a quick coin and a laugh or two. It took a full three decades before ponies began to question its appearance in Prose's canon. This happened after all the major ponies who had a hoof in the compilation passed away. [....] They left behind for all the generations to come this grand riddle: just where this curious little artifact came from. Was it truly written by Flourish Prose? Or has his name been appended to another pony's poem that floated through the upper circle of Roanan aristocracy?
'Unfortunately, due to the messy, expensive, and sometimes nonexistent nature of copyright at the time, as well as the lucrative market for plagiarized and fraudulent works, following any kind of paper trail back to the definitive author is a foal's errand. Only the text itself, its style and linguistic quirks, can with any veracity be used to reveal its author. And that's assuming the text has survived largely intact from the hoof of its original author, which centuries of scholars have debated. Nonetheless, some things about its author can be guessed at. His or her characteristics can be filled in, until we arrive at a somewhat accurate representation, to be further narrowed down with each incremental detail. We can assume they have a familiarity with the north, nearer to the earth pony territories. In fact, the author may actually be an earth pony, which would neatly explain the anonymity: what snobbish unicorn would admit an earth pony to the literary circles of yesteryear? We all remember the first Hearth's Warming Eve. We can also assume the author is older than Flourish Prose, or deliberately mimicking an antiquated dialect. [....] Many claimants have been put forward by a thousand years' worth of scholarly research, all of them unsatisfactory in one way or another: Quilland Ink, a popular alternative to Flourish Prose, wrote strictly in the vernacular, yet some of the language in the Rime is antiquated even by his standards, and a detailed linguistic analysis of his dialect suggests he wouldn't rhyme "wood" with "rood" - which would have been pronounced with an elongated vowel, rendering it "rude" - and if anypony was a stickler for strict rhyme, even to the point of pain, it was him. [....] The list goes on and on, but none of the contenders offers definitive proof. For my part, I had consigned the poem's authorship to the shelf of life's great mysteries.
'Until, that is, I had a revelation the next year, while reading an obscure book dating from long before Flourish Prose. It was a travel account of the author's journey to distant lands, which he would later compile into a far better-known compendium of all his journeys across the world. There, in a passage excised from the later work, I read: "In that cavern, the shadow-bright darkness wrapped around us and our lonely lantern." I found the proof I had sought in that one compound oxymoron that both the Rime and the travel account had in common: "shadow-bright". Only one source had made the connection before, and he blithely wrote it off as the author emulating an archaic saying long since fallen into disuse. But the more I delved into it, the less sense it made. By all accounts, the phrase hadn't existed before that book. The author seemingly made it up, based on his own personal philosophy of the divine light in all things, even the darkness. And suddenly, everything made complete sense. I had cracked the mystery. The author stepped forward, out of the pages of history, to reveal himself at last. And what book brought this revelation to me, solving one of the greatest mysteries in the history of literature?
'"A Journey to Maretania," by the most estimable magi in the history of the world, Starswirl the Bearded and his apprentice, Clover the Clever. [....] Consider the facts: we know Starswirl traveled all across the world, even to the northern earth pony lands. We know he was open to adopting new styles and was well-versed in literature, including the northern style of writing. We know he traveled to Roan long before Flourish Prose was born. We know he met with a frosty reception by the king, and had some of his personal effects seized in retaliation for his anti-authoritarian ideas. It is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that the poem either circulated or was rediscovered by the aristocracy, stripped of the author's name, or deliberately concealed to hide it from the pro-monarchy censors at the Stationer's Office. [....] My thesis is that we hold in our hooves a long lost work by the greatest polymath of all time, or his equally learned protege. Everything about it, when viewed in the correct light, points to Starswirl the Bearded or Clover the Clever as the writer, be it linguistic, stylistic, historic, or content-wise. [....] Starswirl was a scholar, inventor, magician, philosopher, and lover of knowledge and learning. Perhaps he was more than that, but unfortunately we may never know. All the more reason to treasure what we do have.
'"The Rime of the Shadow-Clad Stallion" is, sadly, a tale untold. This atmospheric, sinister poem sets the stage, evoking an ancient and distant land full of untamed, primeval forest, with air so thick and alive with magic the reader can practically taste it. It transports them back in time and casts a gloomy shadow over them as the eponymous stallion gallops through the moonlit forest, its tetrameter practically demanding that they accompany him on his wild ride by reading every line in a mimic of his relentless gallop. It ends on the tantalizing hint of a story yet to come, its meter breaking apart into a two long, unwieldy, misshapen lines. The reader, having been trained by the past seventy-six lines, cannot help but read the final two in that same breakneck pace. But the confusion of meter and line length disorients them, knocks them out of step with the stallion. Leaves them uneasy and unsettled, imploring them to read on. [....] Everything about these seventy-eight lines declares they are just the prologue to a greater work. Were there unwritten lines that would have followed? Were there written lines that entropy has made unwritten? Or does the tale still exist somewhere, quietly collecting dust in a pile of unsorted papers? [....] What wonders sprang from the quill of Starswirl? We may never know all of them. But, through this thesis, I hope to open our minds to the possibility that they can be discovered again.'
-Twilight Sparkle's introduction to her thesis, presented to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns
The Rime of the Shadow-Clad Stallion
Oh, in the woods, those ancient woods
Of slanted boughs and twisted roods
With oaken eyes and silent ken
That stand in guard over green glen,
A stallion ran, with thund'rous hoof
That clapped against vaulted tree roof,
A frightful din and clamor bright
That sent each beast of wood to flight,
To scurry fast to sheltered home
Before his form, his presence gloam,
Could fall on yon small frail body
And steal the life dwelling in she.
The stallion rode through undergrowth,
Whisp'ring to wood a vengeful oath,
And though he was, to bow, so loath,
He begged succor and fortune both.
And by the moon's silvering glow
Through canopy to ground below,
Under the eaves of sentinels,
Those gnarled wizards of the dells,
A conference he heard agreed
In creak of branch and fall of seed,
A solemn pledge that they would grant
The magic hid within each plant.
The source of life as his own fief
The wellspring from within each leaf
Through which does flow power divine
Coursing through root and stem and vine.
Those ancient oaks and pines and firs,
That solemn stood when ponies first
For magic might began to thirst,
Let power from within them burst.
Around his frame a dark aura
Did burn like flame in the flora,
Behind him streaming as he went,
Past ancient trees that gracious lent
Such power as to make him glide,
As graceful as beneath the tide.
The world went past him so dreamlike,
As unreal as our dreams seem like.
Indeed his hooves, they hit the ground,
Propelling him by leap and bound,
Yet all the same, as he went swift,
His legs not once did seem to shift.
Suspended in the moonlit air,
His shadow form, it did declare
A doom and gloom and great despair
For trespassers, stallion or mare.
For in that cloud of darkness dense,
The one that so harries the sense
Of those unfortunate to see
It come for them through brush and tree,
The one that if it touch moonlight
Does seem more like a shadow might,
The stallion laughed into the night,
His vengeance burning shadow-bright.
The chains that kept his true self fast
Were broke and cast away at last,
And soon would he, his true self be,
Of that which held him back, so free.
In triumph bold, now he did ask,
Galloping to his greater task,
Could this his mask, the hated mask,
Without which he could surely bask
In splendor of his divine right
To rule the teaming peasant blight,
The mask that kept him in this plight,
Be set aside this very night?
No, no, thought he, that would be dim.
Too rash by far, a careless whim.
But, oh, the time till he could skim
This facade off his face grew slim.
His soul was hale, hearty and frim
And soon he'd make the ponies brim
With fear enough to sing his hymn
Or suffer by his iron limb.
Because after all, thought that stallion with a smile most grim,
Who could challenge a pony as powerful as him?