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// Prologue: This Is Me 
// Story: Honour Bound 
// by Astral Star and Company 
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When I was young, I did not live happily. I did not have friends, nor a family. No food, warmth or shelter to call my own. My childhood, is a desolate ruined thing, like an old tattered cloak just waiting to be thrown away. My father and mother abandoned me when I was very small, before I learned how to crawl. Death was always at my shoulder, like a vulture just waiting for me to keel over and die. I fed on scraps, what I would today know as garbage and filth. I could not speak, or use magic. I didn’t even have a name. I was a starving orphan, on the streets of the oldest hive outside our actual kingdom. Times were spent in a cold war as hate for the Crystal ponies only grew like a parasite feeding on our reason, leaving anarchy and stupidity to fill in the gaps. Fear of starvation gnawed on the edge of all our minds as food became scarce, and disease more prominent. I could not run through the streets without being beaten or cursed. I spent the rest of my life remembering what dystopia I was born into. 

I was born to a bastard, drunken soldier and a whore he had used for several nights. As soon as I was conceived, plans were made for my ‘removal’. I was barely five minutes old before I was tossed into the street, along with the garbage they thought I was. Against all odds, I learned how to walk, and how to feed and drink. Life is a cruel teacher, as I learned the hardest possible way. Several times I fought for my right to live, for my right to have a home, for my very freedom. I was barely four years old before the conflict the whole hive had dreaded reared its ugly, blood soaked head. Years afterward, my life tumbled down into a pit of strewn with the bones of those I had killed for my own survival. The only opportunity I had to live a better life, was to leave the hive. 

Yet, as I made the most foolish, most dangerous choice a Changeling could make, living became that much more bareable. In the wild, food was plentiful, as was water. Shelter was a small tree climb and a couple leaves away. I lived there in peace for years until the shadows of my past returned to tear away my spirit once more. The Changeling army marched across the forest I called home, burning all in their path. Hatred and fury was all they had beneath those eyes as they wiped away what little fortune I found for myself. Again, I was forced to flee my home, in search of greener pastures.

There, in my final place of rest, I met the best of friends I would cherish for all my life. There, I had a family, a home with a warm hearth. Other beings I could call brother, sister, mother and father.

I spent the rest of my life remembering what dystopia I was born into. 

My name is now Honour Bound, and this is my story.