It is twenty five years before the rise of Nightmare Moon, and the streets of the Crystal Empire’s City are filled with rain.

It doesn’t always rain in the empire, but when it does, it rains hard. The barriers that keep the City warm and practically temperate in the middle of the frozen north have to be lowered occasionally to allow the clouds through. Otherwise, they gather in a grey mesh round the City’s outsides and block off the sunlight, a marr on its perfection.

That it lets in the wind and the snow and the slushing rain is a problem that has to be tolerated. After all, the process only lasts for one hour of each month, and the detritus and unpleasant cold are always quickly cleaned up in a show of the City’s magic.

The City is always keen to show its strength.

And yet every crystal has a crack, a part of it that is utterly out of place. The City’s power brings more than admiration: it brings refugees and fortune seekers, the unlucky and the luckless. For every polished crystal arch and well-maintained lock of hair, there is an alleyway darkened with rubbish and the starving stomachs of orphans.

Every city has its slum, and the City is no different. It just hides its better.

A grey waif hovers in the shadows, his black mane and tail melting into the background as his red eyes flash, almost disembodied as they hang inside the dark. The street in front of him looks half-melted under the water, wet and shining as the pastel shades of buildings slide in place along it like an impressionist's tortured dream.

Rainwater falls upon his face, distracting him from his focus even as his eyes stare unblinking. He wets his lips, carting the water off his face on a sliver of pink tongue, blinks and then tries again.

The fruit-basket still won’t move, no matter how hard he stares or wills his horn to cast. Any second now, the house’s owner could come back and close the window, ruining his only chance. He needs his magic to work for him this once, now more than ever. And yet it won't.

He curses his horn and tries again, frowning now as hearsay from a thousand wayward souls throbs through his ears. Half-remembered lectures and ill-formed opinions cloud his mind as he tries to recall everything he’s ever heard about magic.

You have to want it, he remembers, his eyes not leaving the basket. You have to want it more than anything. Strength overcomes all things.

He frowns again, wanting the fruit, wanting the basket, pouring the whole of his six year old self into the desire. Hunger spurs him on as he leans forwards, out of the alley’s protective shade and into the wide-open space of the street proper.

That it is stealing does not matter to him: he is hungry, and the other orphans have nothing for him to try and steal. Not that he would try, for the strong take from the weak, and he knows of no-one weaker than he who has food for him to take.

This might be his only chance to eat for days. A small part of him fears that it might be his only chance to eat at all.

He barely hears the clanking of armour until it's almost upon him, and when he does it is a loud and sudden and disturbingly close thing. He breaks out of his concentration blinking and dazed, like a stallion freed from a changeling’s trance, and then turns and pelts off into the dark and hidden confines of the City’s many twisting alleyways.

He runs for what feels like hours, darting past the eyes and dens of the City’s other unwanted residents in a greyish blur of movement. Some call out for him to stop; a few do so by name.

He isn’t stupid enough to listen. He carries on running, mane plastered against his neck and raggedly cropped tail slapping against his thighs like a wet, black rag. Smears of dirt run in haphazard lines over his flank and under-belly, formed from clods kicked up by his whirring, stumbling hooves. He breaks in and out of shadows cut from the night by the angled architecture of the City and piles of stinking, rubbish-made dens that fill the alleyway.

Eventually – almost paradoxically to one who doesn’t know the alleys – he reaches the place where he began. His breathing is heavy, laboured; the ribs on his chest are far too visible, pushing painfully against his coat. His red eyes vanish as he blinks.

He looks left and right, up and down the alleyway. A few pieces of rubbish have been removed since he was last here, as if someone had started to clear up and then realised the sheer scale of what they’d set themselves. He had been right to run when he did; the guards have been here.

He takes another step out of the hidden sub-alley, peering anxiously around the corner for the guard he knows was here.

He sees the open window instead, and the basket still perched inside of it. His lips crack open.

His ears swivel round as he walks forwards, searching for anything other than the pitter-patter of water against stone. He hears nothing at all, and he is long since used to hearing the subtle signs that someone’s there. He can tell when something is being deliberately quiet: when an invitingly open den is nothing more than a trap.

This doesn’t feel like one. He risks poking his head out into the gap between the City and the slums. Nothing. They’ve gone.

He licks his lips, eyes returning to their old staring-partner. He frowns. He concentrates.

The banging of an opening door startles him backwards, and he almost runs until his hunger tugs him back, overriding his caution completely. The house that holds the basket vomits two thoroughly drunk guards out onto the street, one of which is sagging as the other leans on him. A harassed mare follows them out, the shining locks of her hair slightly out of place as she shoos them away.

They don’t go quickly and they don’t go quietly. The smaller of the two slumps with a groan onto the ground, stomach seeping out from underneath his armour into a bulge of white fat. The larger – the one who deposited the other onto the ground – turns and throws a smile back to the mare, a smile which hints at things the small, grey unicorn foal watching may not ever understand.

That hardly matters to the foal. His eyes flick anxiously between the basket and the mare and the drunken pair of guards. He wants them all to leave. It is a funny kind of fairness – one he holds onto for the rest of his life.

And then the guard sees the basket, and one base impulse overrides the other.

The foal's eyes widen. That fruit is his. He is the one who has wanted it the longest, who has risked the most in trying to get it. He curses his horn and skitters about from hoof to hoof. The tears of a child grow in his eyes.

Hate blossoms in his chest, strong and gnawing: hate at the City, hate at the alleyways, hate at the guards. Hate at the strong and at his own weaknesses. His horns flickers, and an answering stain gleams off the apple held in the guard’s hoof.

Nopony notices, not even the foal.

The guard reaches up and bites a chunk out of the apple as the mare hurls abuse at him. The stallion by his hooves mumbles groggily as he pulls himself up off the floor. A heartbeat later, the larger one flinches backwards; the mare pauses, and there is horror in her eyes as the guard collapses outside of her house, armour ringing as it strikes off the street. The other groggily looks up before he starts shouting in alarm, stumbling unsteadily to his feet and bellowing a mixture of anger and concern.

The foal just watches all of it, his face shining with confusion and a dash of hope.

A minute later, and the street is utterly empty, the mare having long since ran for help whilst the living guard struggled after her, a dying burden on his back. What's left is a deserted street that's wet with rain and coated with almost-hoarfrost; nopony will be coming out in this weather. Chunks of the apple are left scattered around in a red, trampled slush; the rainwater carries the smaller parts of it far away and into the gutters. Globules of spit and vomit ride along with them.

The foal takes his first step out of the alley and into the city.

His eyes settle on the scattered contents of the basket, and then past them to the now empty house, its still open door letting a slit of warm, yellow light spill out onto the street.

He licks his lips, and walks forwards.