Prologue: Fair Forewarning
~BlackRoseRaven

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a Draconequus of wealth and taste; I've been around for a long, long year, stole many a pony's soul and faith. I was around when Celestia had her moment of doubt and pain... made damn sure that Luna rose her horn and sealed her fate. Pleased to meet you... hope you guess my name: but what's confusing you is the nature of my game.

You see, 'twas a long time ago, longer now than it seems, in a place that perhaps you have seen in your dreams; the story that you are about to be told, took place in the Midgardian layers of old. Now you've probably wondered where nightmares come from... if you haven't, I'd say it's time you begun.

Very well, friends... mind games aside for the moment, it is my dubious pleasure to present to you a story tonight that never occurred, a story that we brushed up against, the beginnings of which caressed us all like a lover's touch, but was turned away at the very last moment. A story that is disturbing, and dark, and painful. A story about power and pleasure, where the villains play the role of adored protagonists and the heroes shall be reviled and despised until the final act. Where good and evil have been forced to trade places, as we raise our glasses to the damned and the sinners and prepare the chains and gallows-hall and cold misery of iron cages for the petulant saints.

Is this story a tragedy, a touching tale of love and loyalty, or a fearsome, depraved hack-job of sordid corruption? Are they truly evil, or antiheroes doing whatever it takes to protect what is important to them? Will their victory spell a happy ending, or is it their defeat that will be the only bright point at the end of the long, dark tunnel?

It is all up to you to decide, for I am only a humble storyteller. My task is merely to point the way, and lay out the journey that never was, that had almost been... and episode-by-episode, this story will be told, the pieces will fall into place, until there is nothing more for me to tell. Then again, there is always more to tell... always another story, beckoning, begging, always a whisper in the future, always more characters evolving in an endless spiral. “What happens next, what happens next?” is the eternal question that can both always and never be answered, the curse of the storyteller: only fools believe that any ending truly ends. For, even when this entire universe collapses around us into shards of light and shadow that swirl down, down, down into the endless void of nothingness, it will merely be an interlude between one story and the next. Nature abhors a vacuum: something will always rise up, whether everything or nothing exists, to take the place of that which was missing.

Now close your eyes, my friends, and listen close as I tell the story of a paradise lost, the birth of an empire of shadows, and the steady and unstoppable corruption of the pure and good into the hedonistic and aphotic. All civilizations collapse, and the victors build their homes over the burrows of the dead to forget the past and bring about a brave new world... now, witness the ending of one world of light, and the beginning of eternal night.