Camaraderie is Sorcery Cover

What if Equestria wasn't all sunshine and rainbows?  What if the lands were wild, untamed, and ruled by powerful (and corrupt) nobles in the names of distant kings and queens?  What if magic belonged not to every unicorn, but only to the privileged (and persecuted) few?  

Camaraderie is Sorcery is a dark fantasy retelling of the story of Friendship is Magic.  In this Equestria, the land is divided into kingdoms hungrily eyeing each others' lands and resources.  This is a world where peasants are born, work, suffer, and die without their overseers shedding a tear.  It is a dark world where bandits and monsters occupy both the wild places and the civilized ones (but in different forms).  This is the world where Twilight Sparkle lives, in the last free bastion where sorceresses are safe to practice magic.  Cant'r Laht, a shining city perched on the edge of a mountain with more nobles and mages than it knows what to do with, has been Twilight's home her whole life.  Now, as the one thousandth summer solstice of the Fourth Age approaches, she will leave Cant'r Laht and depart for the tiny hamlet of Ponieville, where five companions await her.  These Brave Companions, as the ballads will come to commemorate them, are already bound by destiny, though they do not know it yet.  For who would ever imagine that a sorceress, a farmer, a Hunter, a blacksmith, a druidess, and a baker would ever become comrades with the strength to stop the end of the world?  

Camaraderie is Sorcery