Had a lot of pondering over the Together Trees, this was obviously not just for G5, as Opaline had said she helped create the tree in the dark castle which is so old, that it may have existed in the G4 world. It is possibly on an IDW map that shows a place called “Kelpie Keep” which overlooks the Froud Valley which can be what we see in the G5, the valley with the flowing river. The castle looked more like a guard fort and it was built around the tree that Opaline was not alone in creating, she had to have friends back then.
When the Pillars of Old Equestria were to confront the Shadow Pony who they knew posed a very serious threat to Equestria at the time, they planted a seed and combined their magic with each other to “feed” the coming tree for future generations. Starswirl’s plan means they had to sacrifice themselves to save the world from their enemy, so the tree they planted was a memorial to them with magic that would help ponies after their time. But when Starswirl saw the result, he was amazed and slightly confused that the tree could have become so formidable, this means that the Tree of Harmony was not planned.
This suggests that the tree was originally intended to be a Together Tree. The Pillars knew what they had planted, and Starswirl was undoubtedly familiar with the concept of these magical trees that could be created by combining magic from several individuals, we must remember that the wizard did not believe that magic could come from friendship. It still means that the group that united their magic must have close ties with each other for this to be possible, with a high level of familiarity with each other. This is probably not just limited to the ponies.
From S10 we had learned about multiple harmony trees, and this was not exactly popular to say the least. But the new lore about the Together Trees puts this in a new picture, considering that the trees were already there when “the Knights of Harmony” came to them in different parts of the world and they were looking for the sixth and last tree. We know that the roots of the Tree of Harmony extended very far outside Everfree, and so do the roots of the Together Trees, so these can come into contact with each other. Since Opaline could go to the Dragon Lands, it means that these roots can cross oceans to other continents.
So this produces a hypothesis that can sweep the whole controversy aside; the Tree of Harmony remained singular, but its roots had come into contact with the five other trees that must have been Together Trees, “evolving” them into harmony trees. Probably only the ponies had access to elemental magic, but with these new trees non-ponies could gain elemental magic - and Cunabula chose to use this innovation destructively for their own interests. “Knights” went around the world because they want to find the original source of their power, but their arrogance and self-interest led to conflict with other elemental bearers.
In S8, the Tree of Harmony “re-emerged” and it had been naturalized by whatever wiped out the Everfree before the G5 movie, but if it’s inherently a Together Tree, that could mean it’s still a magical tree that is “dormant” as with the Wishing Tree in Bridlewood. The same fate may have befallen the other harmony trees in the rest of the world, if the naturalization effect spreads through the roots.
Then it could mean that there are five Together Trees in Equestria - Bridlewood, Opaline’s Dark Castle, Maretime Bay, Zephyr Heights, the meadows of what used to be the Royal Sisters’ castle. To get across long distances there had to be a Together Tree at each end point, and then it means that there might be a Together Tree in the Dragon Lands, which might have been created in Twilight’s time, perhaps by Spike and his dragon friends. And if ex-harmony trees in Abyssinia, Ornithia, Caninia and Farasi are still intact, these can be activated for ponies and non-ponies to visit each other.
Twilight’s “empire” which may have encompassed the entire world through bonds of friendship and mutual contact, may have its main anchor point in these Together/Harmony trees which were vital for communication over very long distances, and also very easy for the various powers to communicate with each other, a kind of “United Nations” would have arisen. Based in friendship magic, these trees would be very important to the world order - and as Twilight’s guarantee of having a peaceful world. She had not forgotten the Storm King’s assault, and the threat from Cunabula had to be countered.
Then one can easily imagine the chaos in the whole world when harmony trees were naturalized and when the magic of the Together trees no longer worked. It is possible that Misty disappeared in Bridlewood because the magic in the Wishing Tree malfunctioned. This may be what Opaline was referring to when she said Twilight’s empire “glitched out”.
With these Together Trees it means that Sunny may in the future make contact with the rest of the world, the map in C5 shows that there is more than just one road from Maretime Bay, a couple seemed to end in the seabed where underwater civilizations may exist. Perhaps there are far more than these trees listed here, and that they can exist underwater as well as on land.
With the breezies it is now very clear that Bridlewood is not the Everfree, it is said that the forest was created as an evolution from the legendary forest, not that the two forests are one and the same. The Troggle ghosts in C4 open up the hypothesis that Bridlewood may have been a battlefield where uncontrolled unicorn magic created the crystals and the fragile ecology when the troggles were exterminated during the war between the ponies and Grogar.
In the last seasons of G4 it was learned that Everfree had its own magics and that it had an unnerving dark influence on all who came there, it was completely absent in Bridlewood. The ponies and the Tree of Harmony had to hold back the dark magic. There were several mysterious magical places there or nearby, and we know that the royal sisters had a castle with possibly a city there, where the Pillars planted the tree of what would become the Tree of Harmony. It is possible that the Together Tree that had been planted had been affected by the latent magic that might have enhanced the pony magic that was poached into it. No other place in G4 had as much latent magic as Everfree, which in the early seasons was believed to be magic free.
Everfree was not only a refuge for monsters, it almost attracted monsters to stay there, even those that went out - they return sooner or later, and remain a very dangerous place. So dangerous, that the zebras in Farasi thought Equestria was a monster-haunted land - and they have their own monsters in their homeland. In G4 we know that for a long time the ponies had traveled over great distances and in the end the entire continent on which Equestria was located was mapped - long before modern Equestria arose. From the IDW comics, it was said that the land, to which the founders of Equestria came fleeing from the cold, had been abandoned for a long time, formally “owned” by griffons. If this is canon, why did everyone avoid Middle Equestria until the windigos drove the ponies there? The ponies had to buy the land rights from the griffons, even the Diamond Dogs who had an abandoned city south of the Everfree valley, did not touch this land that no one guarded.
It was in Middle Equestria G4 happened as a rule. This has been abandoned in G5, with the possible exception of Zephyr Heights which may be in the same mountain plateau as Canterlot which had been escaped according to the official G5 story. Ponyville was also abandoned by the ponies who fled outside the valley. If the tree in the meadows that the Mane 5 came to on the way to Bridlewood was the Tree of Harmony, something very dramatic had happened in the valley where the Everfree cannot be seen for long. And since the movie, we haven’t seen anything from this country in TYT/MYM.
And then we have the disappearance of magic. All indications are that this was a deliberate act by Twilight, who must have been forced to do it, as Sunny thought may be the case - although Equestria may have existed in the beginning before the tribes split up, as seen by the confusing book from C3 and the glass window in the hangar. The new lore about the Together Tree, and the harmony trees that may have arisen as a result of the great mystery of the Everfree, makes it clear that if the magic disappears, the whole world will fall apart - and Twilight knew this. Yet she chose to do so, and she wouldn’t have been so irresponsible to have a built-in weakness of letting the magic just disappear if the ponies stopped being friends. The ponies don’t need magic to use violence against each other, we saw this in the movie.
Twilight knew what would happen. So why was the active magic “disabled” for several generations? Everything indicates that Equestria’s collapse - and the collapse of the world - happened four generations ago, we have been given indications of that several times. Zipp himself had said that the dragons were last seen “several generations ago”, and Opaline confirmed that they had gone into hibernation because the magic had disappeared.
We now know how long that magicless time had lasted.
