Origin Story

I’m at Yearling Manor. The locals haven’t given me any trouble, but they’re keeping a close eye on me. They don’t trust me, but it’s more than that. They all know that the zebra military has started up operations deep in the basin, and they know that their treaty with Tragedy’s End and all their neutrality won’t be worth a donkey’s fart if the Legion decides they aren’t.

Or, worse, if the Legion takes offense.

By Scorcherro’s claws, this place brings back memories. Most of them bad. I never wanted to return here. But Equestria calls and all that. They’ve boarded the place up so tight I think they put Wonderglue on the nails. Fortunately, I know how to think outside the box. I have what I came here for, safe and sound, and so on to the next objective. This is where it gets tricky.

Reminds me, though, that I still have one more story left in me. Since I’m supposed to add a “pad” with each of these for Final Echo, I might as well flesh out one last book.

This one will be different, though. I’ll need a different sort of opener. Not the big jump into action like the stories I used to write. Maybe an entirely different tone. Something formal. Like how she would sound.

Ahem… rough draft, author’s notes, take one…

First Pad Begins

First Pad -- a rough draft of

Origin Story: Prologue

What you have in your hooves, dear reader, is the first and, by all intentions, final story in a long series of adventures that began in my youth. For long-term fans, the generalities of most of these stories are exceedingly familiar, as I was driven to tell the tales of my own adventures, for reasons both obvious and heretofore obscured. The true details are, however, unknown except by a small few. (I will admit taking more than my fair share of artistic license in my writings.)

Fans may find themselves jarred by the tone and vocabulary used within this book, for it does not match my earlier writings. In younger years, I was quite a prolific writer. I chose intentionally to mimic the style of the pulp adventure novels that had so shaped my earliest years, and which lent itself so well to not only the stories which I wished to tell but the conceit which I was constructing in their telling. This book, however, I intend to write in a style more comfortable to the narrative of a confession… for that, in truth, is what this tale is.

It has been twenty-five years since I have lifted quill or tape recorder, much less put hoof to typewriter (or, rather, these new machines that have replaced them in the interim). I was content to sit back in my home and allow the world to go by without me, satisfied that I had done my part and the world was better for it. And, moreso, that the era of my adventures had come and gone, and that the torch had been passed to another generation.

Sadly, the word “retirement” is not sacrosanct to many a pony, not the least of whom being an old, one-time companion whose insistent knock on my door propelled me out of my comfortable solitude. Nor is it to the specters of the past.

The visit left me thinking of the words of one of my favorite professors: history is like a chain, each link following the last, irrevocably connected to it – no deed or event stands alone, without causes or consequences. As of late, I have been taken with a different analogy. History is alive – a monstrous mother, constantly spawning new generations of repercussions, each already pregnant and yearning to give birth to the next. You cannot hope to cut the chain; you can only hope to corral the swarm.

First Pad Ends

Okay, that was awful. If I tried to do the whole story like that, I’d probably go nuts.