When it comes to telling stories I was never very good. I fumbled the words, forgot the jokes and usually missed out key information. So when I found myself having to tell the story of my life I was a little overwhelmed to say the least.

The majority of my life wasn’t exactly dull, things like getting my cutie mark and finding myself in bed with Helix for the first time were definitely highlights, but it wasn’t something that I thought would grip and enthral anyone enough to voluntarily lock themselves into a memory orb. I guess part of this is to do with my child hood, teenage years and young adulthood were spent in what could be described as a glorified fish tank in reverse: Stable Seventeen.

We had been taught little about the exact origins of Stable Seventeen, but there were enough key details to satisfy all but the most stubborn and curious of ponies. The stable was built one hundred and fifty metres below the surface of a giant inland lake. We were told that its source of the river feeding it was hundreds of miles away in the mountains above Canterlot, once the oldest and grandest of all the pony cities, and then wound its way to the sea. Our lake like section of river, and to some extent the final third of the river, was actually a vast underwater scar caused by two ‘tectonic plates’ pulling apart. It was somewhere in this vast underwater chasm that the stable rested, next to several geothermal vents and other natural resources that were a by-product of the huge wound in the planet’s surface.

The stable and another hundred like it had been built all over Equestria during the Pony-Zebra war to preserve as much of the population as possible in the event that either side resorted to launching mega-spells. It was the Zebras that had fired first, annihilating Cloudsdale, decimating Manehatten and vaporising Canterlot into a pink mist.

According to the small number of geologists in Stable Seventeen, the whole structure was built on top of a huge electromagnetic anomaly. What it was exactly was still the subject of debate to this day but one thing was clear. When a mega-spell was detonated it produced a vast amount of magical radiation. If the initial blast did not kill you then the exposure to several thousand rads of radiation would. But the anomaly either neutralised the radiation or stopped it dead in its tracks whilst it permeated everything in the landscape above. The result was a small pocket of habitable water and land beneath the surface, enough to support a fairly diverse food chain and a huge pocket of pure water.

No one truly appreciated what we had. I had done my best to comprehend how lucky we were to be alive but without knowing what life I could have had if the war had not engulfed Equestria, and gaining some kind of perspective, it was like trying to understand what it was like to be the last foal to get your cutie mark when you were the first or what it was like to be a colt if you were a filly; impossible.

Only when I was forced to the surface, to experience the wasteland first hand did I truly understand, but my reaction was not what you would have expected.

I guess the only thing to do now is to introduce myself.

Hello, my name is Francium.

And this is the story of Ouroboros