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// Foreword 
// Story: Tales from Everfree City 
// by LoyalLiar 
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Once upon a time, most of these stories could be found in every history book in Equestria.  The Royal Library of Everfree City could have provided you a dozen retellings—some of them would even have the audacity to be mostly accurate.  That was back when there was an Everfree City, though; when a haunted forest hadn’t crawled its roots over the rubble that once made up the Royal Library, and when Nightmare Moon’s armies hadn’t wiped out most of a generation of ponies who could remember being told these stories as foals.

So as I sit here in my lonely tower in Canterlot, regrowing most of my skull, some of my neck and all of my right lung (missing because Nightmare Moon saw fit to help my complexion with some... ‘extreme exfoliation’), I find myself with nothing but time and a sinking fear in my gut that my love might be lost to the sands of time. Though writing this is painful both to my heart and the brutally shattered remains of my horn, I have resolved to put to page my memories of an era that only Celestia and I now live to remember.

Before I continue, dear reader, I do have one private note to one particular hypothetical reader.  Please excuse my moment of therapeutic pettiness.



Dearest Luna,

I hope you never get off the rock in the sky, but if by some cataclysmic turn of rotten luck you someday find yourself reading this: in the next few mornings, I will have regrown the incredibly beautiful face that you accused me of loving too much.  Once the scars heal, and I apply a bit of magic to cover it up, I’ll once more be the most handsome stallion in Equestria  You, however, will be cursed with ponies looking up at your silhouette plastered on the moon and associating every beautiful crater, every precious pockmark of a meteor strike, every delicious hill and mountain,with a brutal case of facial acne.

Oh, perhaps someday I’ll get over our differences.  Perhaps I’ll forgive you for Celestia’s sake—or at least pretend I’m over your betrayal long enough for her to stop sobbing on the roof every night.  Right now, though, the hole where my right eye ought to be feels like it’s on fire.  And every time my jugular throbs trying to pump blood that ran out a few hours ago and sends a twinge down my side, it helps ease the pain just a little to think that most of the paintings of you were lost with the rest of Everfree City.  Why, somepony with a lot of time on his hooves could make you look any number of interesting ways… and as far as history is concerned, I’ll be right.

‘Love’
Morty



My apologies for that distraction, dearest reader.

Assuming Celestia hasn’t defaced this tome to censor it like my prior work, the book you hold in your hooves, wings, mouth (how unsanitary), or magic contains a collection of true stories about a young mare and her friends living in Equestria’s capital.  These Tales from Everfree City may follow several of us in those teenage days of freedom when we had no idea how much of history we were shaping, but at the end of the day, this is the story of one mare.

To some, she was Platinum III, the daughter and heir of the Princess Platinum you probably know from Clover’s idiotic, ahistorical pageant.  To others, she was Aura Gladioprocellarius, the rebellious youngest foal of the venerable Equestrian living legend, Commander Hurricane.  But to me, she was Gale: the most inspiring mare who ever lived or ever will, and with the possible exception of Celestia, the most significant pony in Equestrian history.

You should understand, reader, that while the stories I’m about to record are true—taken from my own memories with the aid of magic to enhance eight-hundred year old recollections, along with the records that survived Nightmare Moon in Canterlot’s hidden libraries, and Celestia’s memories of events, supposing she ever decides to stop staring off into space—I will not pretend to be an unbiased narrator.  Gale was the one true love of my life.  And so while I have no intention of consciously lying to you—the fact that I record her foalish, foul vocabulary ought to be evidence enough of that—I cannot promise a historian’s untainted view of history.  I can only promise the truth as I saw it.

On a related note, I should warn you: Gale could be quite creatively crude when she set her mind to it.  If either my off-hoof mention of the damage Luna inflicted on my body in the course of yet another of my deaths, the implication of necromancy in the fact that I’m writing this story despite admitting to being ‘dead’, or the use of the word ‘fuck’ disturbs you, I encourage you to close this book now; your parents are probably looking for you in the picture book section of the library.

With all that prelude out of the way, my name is Mortal Coil, or if you prefer grandiose titles, Coil the Immortal.  Gale gave me the nickname ‘Morty’ when I first met her, and it’s now stuck for going-on eight hundred years.  At that time, I thought my special talent was necromancy; with the benefit of experience, I now know that it is actually ‘dying.’  It is a practice that I am by far the world’s foremost expert in, and much like a world-class painter or a first-chair violinist, that supremacy stems from repeated, deliberate practice.

Gale’s story begins where mine ended: with the two of us having just saved Equestria from my evil former mentor, Wintershimmer the Complacent, and my acceptance of Celestia’s offer to be my new teacher as I rounded out my magical education...