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“So how did it begin? Give me a moment to recollect, oh gentle reader, and I might just tell you…”
Discord/The Narrator. The Avatar of Albion.

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The wheels of fate turn. It is not something you can see unless you are outside of it - the threads of destiny, tugged, pulled, wrenched into place, woven into tapestries - what you would call your history - and then rewoven into something new, over and over again, spanning its way through to eternity.

And I can see it. All of it. Every moment, every thread, every tapestry.

Some are pleased to call this my blessing. Others prefer to think of it as my curse. They are all wrong - there is no judgement to be rendered, no value or quality one can say this experience has. It - like all things - simply is: immutable. Inevitable.

Many things are inevitable, from a certain point of view. Events repeat across the fabric of creation, over and over again. The old notion that “history repeats itself”... well, suffice it to say, whoever first said that had no idea how right they were. It’s almost funny.

There is often, in the fullness of time, a war. In that war, there is often a man and his allies. Set against them is a mare, and that conflict is one of opposites. Darkness and Light. Good and Evil. Love and hatred. Life and Death. Horror, and the breaking of innocence, alongside hope and fellowship. These things do not happen all at once, nor all to the same beings. These things are not always all true all of the time. It is the way of things, though, that all of them are.

These are sometimes thought of, by such as you, as stories. Tales to read to your children, or to never read to your children. Death-defying escapades and derring do and heroism. That s what you think you take from these events, isn’t it? Or maybe you’re a story too, somewhere, and someone else reads your life, takes their own lessons from that.

Stories such as these, though, are rarely told merely the once. We long for stories of conflict, of heroes and villains, of trials and tribulations. Though they are often horrible, the lessons they teach us are not merely of the struggles of those within them - they teach us lessons about ourselves, too. The teach us about the nature of life, of the heartaches of love, about the struggles that we ourselves may face between what is right and what is easy. They teach us that there is always hope - and, alas, that there will always be a need for hope. They teach us that darkness will always cast a shadow - but, comfortingly, that a light will always shine at the heart of it to beat it away.

Perhaps one day, we will learn these lessons forever, but for now, they must be taught again. You, my friends, must - if you are willing - step into a world the likes of which you may have seen before. This time, though, the outcome will not be quite what you are familiar with. This time, things will change. This time, the end is not certain.

You may have been here before, and if you have you know how it begins.

It starts in Ponyville, on a day much like any other…

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