>>8696
>even if they lack a horn?
That's right, and no I don't exactly have an explanation, it's just how I see it in my head.

>Feels a little demythologized.
>Like a emulation of a forgotten glory once known
>or at least a cultural leftover of it

So, here's an interesting twist ... the ponies in the heartland still have magically-appearing cutie marks. But the magic doesn't 'spill over' or through, the mountains.
There's enough magic for a few unicorns do levitate things, but the land isn't saturated. And the nigh-illiterate hillbillies are, in this case, plainsbillies, and the hills still have both magic and culture, and recorded history that goes back a bit farther.
Except I haven't quite decided why more of these farmers don't go back up over the mountains, although maybe I can guess why they don't come back. Any pony with enough gumption and curiosity to get through the mountain pass find a whole world worth staying in, and possibly only tries too, because they have a lot of negative memories, emotions, about their life back home that they just don't go back to say "hay, guis, there's still real magic over there!"

I notice I haven't listed Starry's coat colors. I've decided on them ... "midnight roan" ... I want him to explain it to someone on the other side, in the cauldron of magic.

"so, it looks black, but so do blackberries, right? But they're actually purple, and if you lay a few hairs out on a white tablecloth, you'll see I'm purple. Then there's the orange. The texture you're seeing is because of the scattering, not really spots just random hairs that are a metallic orange."
Starry looked down at his forelegs, which had no orange hairs except on his chest, which he couldn't normally see. "I'd be a ridiculous coppery ball of light if all of me were that orange. But it's just a few hairs." Of course, as with most roans, it also meant a pony's first impression was he needed a bath. His baby sister only had to get a bath once or twice a week, but he was taken out and scrubbed every other day, and a bucket of hot water dumped on him on the days in between because a relative might come over for dinner and he, he'd been told, looked like he stole away to a copper mine and rolled in the muck at the bottom of a runoff-slough.
Not, he noted again with no small amount of disdain, that there was a copper mine, or any strip-mining operation within eighteen hours of continuous trotting.