We came in time to a little basin in the hills, protected from the wind. The ground itself seemed to be giving off cold here, in the same way a body gives off heat. At the bottom of the basin was a clear stream, passed over by mirror images of cloud, and next to the stream was a peeling yellow cottage, wider than it was tall. Its windows still threw faint light across the flowery ground. The alchemist’s cottage.

“So,” Wile started. “I guess I should brief you, as they say. We’ve come to the difficult part of our little mission, girls. Here in this cottage lives an old stallion beyond the pale. He’s called Limerick, and he’s far gone. Very foggy minded. We’ll be lucky if Lemony’s being from the same Stable jolts him a bit, and gets him talking to us. All I know is other messengers have come this far and made as much effort, to no avail.”

“Now old Limerick uses their bones to make his broth,” I said, to Perigee.

“Please,” Wile said. “Let’s focus, ponies. What we’ll need most is time with him. We won’t be able to communicate at all, until the old buck’s comfortable with us. So, let’s try and be neighborly, okay?”

We nodded, and under Wile’s direction: moved in, passing first into a garden at the front of the cottage, sad and withering. The sage hung dry and flaky. One head of cabbage was all riddled with holes, from worms, while another sprouted long and creepy, flowering stalks. The soil itself seemed waterlogged and rotten. A small white cross stood, as an emblem of Celestia’s ascendant silhouette, with the name Winona written across it.

We neared the cottage door. “What’s this, a mailbox?” Wile said, for on a post there there did indeed sit a white mailbox. A plank fastened underneath it read Wit’s End. Wile checked inside the mailbox. “It looks like he wrote all of these himself,” she said, of the letters there – each of which was addressed from Wit’s End.

“It maybe goes without saying,” said Perigee. “There is no postal service in the Shy.”

Now we approached the cottage’s wooden door, which stood ajar. “Hello!” Wile called. “Hello in there!”

No one answered. Still, on entering the cottage, even as the first floorboard creaked underhoof, I could feel that someone was home. Blackened, wet firewood filled the little cave of the front room’s hearth, and still half-concealed behind the jamb of its door, the house’s grotty stone kitchen seemed to have been put to recent, clumsy use. Steam was drifting off faintly from the spout of a kettle there, and a wet dishrag sat moldy and organic-looking on the counter. To its rafters, the cottage seemed used. The front room in particular needed refreshing, that is, to be tidied and aired out. It carried a kind of funky, goaty smell.

I was curious of course, about this other, former Stable-pony Limerick. And this front room, or study, told me a little about his habits, with his most recently read books sticking out from the shelves, and even those points he most often walked across marked with creakier floorboards. I took a look at his books; those that seemed most often referred to. Old alchemical reference guides, spell books, and manuals on flight.

Arranged around the room’s hearth was a sordid set of vials, flasks and beakers, all stained or scalded with different, dirty colored rings. Beside them were a small bellows, two gas burners, a scale weighing lead against some kind of pink salt, and finally a few of the most disrespected looking books I had ever seen – with pages water-damaged and wrinkled, the lettering smudged, and inky, meandering annotations in the margins. And it was while I was standing and mourning these books, that Limerick entered the room.

At first, with his head down, muttering to himself, the old, paling earth pony didn’t notice us. He seemed quite sturdily-built and upright for his age, but he had a light, wispy white mane, like mist around a mountaintop. He wore only a dusty blanket over his back, and a pair of spectacles in front of heavily bagged, fish scale-green eyes. He moved somewhat stiffly, but his eyes were quick, shifting as if to read and consider each busy cloud of thought, behind.

On seeing us there, he reared up, spluttering: “Intruders! Winona, Winona!” he called back over his shoulder, as if he weren’t alone. “Get in here!”

“Good morning, sir,” Wile said. “I’m sorry to have to remind you, but unless I’m mistaken: Winona’s buried out in the garden. We just passed her little cross...”

“What?” The stallion scoffed, squinting back at her. “Winona’s buried in the garden? That’s absurd, I -“ Then, his eyes seemed almost literally to clear. “Oh,” he said. “That’s right.”

“You named her after Applejack’s Winona?” I asked, as it seemed like a safe question.

“Yes, she -“ he stopped again, and looked me over. Then Perigee. Then Wile at last. “Just a minute,” he said. “Who are you ponies?”

Now, what gave Wile the confidence to attempt this whole scheme, I’ll never know. But she answered: “Well, we’re from Country Life, remember? The weekly magazine. You had just invited us in.”

“I had?” he said, blinking.

“Yes,” said Wile. “We were worried we wouldn’t find you at home. So often the reader’s mailing address turns out not to be their actual permanent home address. But where were we? I believe I was just in the middle of telling you you’d won this month’s mail-in competition.”

“I did?” he said hopefully, and I felt sorry for him at that. He really was in some kind of deep fog.

“You did,” said Wile, smiling faintly. “You’re the winner. Our bachelor of the month. Your cottage came out first in this month’s A Mare’s Touch competition. Which means my expert associates and I will be staying here with you for the next day or two. That is, if it’s still a convenient time.”

“Convenient?” Limerick repeated, and looked around the dingy room. “Yes, I supposed it’s convenient.”

“Wonderful,” said Wile. “To business, then: I’m Wile, culinary arts. This is Perigee, horticulture. And that’s Lemony Cream.” She paused. “Administrative affairs.”

“You mean she can read and write?” asked Limerick.

Now he, Wile, and Perigee all looked at me, waiting for an answer. “You want to know if I can read and write?” I asked. “I mean, of course.” Little did I realize: this wasn’t a given in the country today.

“There,” Wile said. “Then I guess that’s that, Mister Limerick. With me in your kitchen, Perigee in your garden, and Lemony at your side here in the study, it’s our hope that within the next few days your unsatisfactory home life will be totally transformed. That means ambitious new recipes, renewed prosperity in the garden, laser-focused filing systems: a mare's touch, as we like to say at Country Life.”

“And what will I have to do?” Limerick asked, somewhat warily.

“Well, this is your home, of course,” said Wile. “So, we’ll want to know your habits, your hobbies – you know, what brings you joy. That’s what we’re always asking at Country Life. What brings me joy?”

She let the question hang in the air, until Limerick said: “Well, my alchemy...”

“Alchemy!” Wile said. “Wonderful. Country Life had a whole edition on the meditative benefits of alchemy. You really are working on yourself, aren’t you, when you’re doing it? Clearing away the necrotic. Burning off the excess. Much like cooking, in a way. So, we’ll start you off there, shall we? With Lemony.” I could tell there was a hint for me here... “She’ll do wonders for your record-keeping, I’m sure. Why don’t the two of you start going over your books? Nothing better in alchemy than a nice, clear recipe to follow.”

It was really an inspired move, on Wile’s part. We were now all three of us immersed into Limerick’s household. In fact, with all his old moth-eaten manuscripts stacked around me now, I almost felt trapped. It had fallen to me (“Miss Administrative Affairs”) to distill all this redundant, hard-to-read information into a legible account. In the Stable, to the secretaries that worked on the terminals there, this kind of work was known as data scrubbing. And Limerick had a lot of unclean data:

Alchemical recipes interrupted by hastily written strains of semi-perverse poetry; the method of one experiment here, and the observed results much later, appended onto a different experiment's method; serious sketches of pegasi, giving the ratio of wingspan to the head's circumference and so on, but then the pegasus would have a girly, winking face, with its little tongue stuck out at me. And still no sign of the recipe I needed to find, for the potion that granted the flightless flight.

All the same, I appreciated the chance to get into another pony’s private headspace. Limerick came off in his notes as an over-educated and now unsatisfied figure. Assured of his own skill as an alchemist, resentful of how often he had been overlooked, and lonely, most of all. I found no signs of spiritual or patriotic feeling. But then, as someone who had tried to keep journals of her own, I knew that even these notes could be a performance on Limerick’s part. Because even in private notes, one lies, and hesitates to show weakness. So, for all I knew, Limerick’s heart bled nightly for our race’s fall from grace, and for the friends he was forced to leave behind in the Stable. It did seem like he dwelt most often on past failures and humiliations, and on what could have been instead. A life of longing. I suspected it could happen to me.

The old stallion was in the study with me for most of that afternoon and, to my dismay, he kept a fire burning in the hearth. It was all I could not to sweat onto the newly inked pages, as I transcribed his work. It didn’t help that I could see Perigee in the garden, outside the sealed window in the cool autumn air. Still, I could have been worse off: Wile’s kitchen looked like one of the dungeons of Tartarus, full of steam and endless toil.

She came out smiling. “For dinner, mister Limerick,” she said. “We’ll have a wonderful autumn menu: pumpkin bread and chili, with peppered green beans and potatoes as our sides. And for dessert: pumpkin pie, served with spiced wine.”

“Life on the wastes is a terrible thing,” I said.

“Yes,” said Wile. “I admit I was curious as well, mister Limerick: given the clinically depressed state of your garden, where is it all this food in your larder comes from?”

The old stallion was busy fussing at his nose with a handkerchief. “Oh, you know,” he said, absently. “One makes arrangements with the local farmers. The simple sleeping potion is always popular. More difficult memory erasing doses. Truth serums. All exploited, I assume, in their messy family politics.”

“You don’t mind what your potions are used for?” I asked, as neutrally as I could. He seemed somehow more hostile to me, than to Wile.

“Why should I mind?” he asked. “I make them just for the sake of it. Once they’re made, I’m not concerned with what happens to them. A true creator loves the creative act. Not what he creates.”

“Just ask my father,” said Wile, to deaf ears.

Limerick continued: “So, the farmers send me food in exchange, as if that’s a fair trade-off. Most of it sits in the larder and rots. Of course, they tried stealing from me at first. They had most of my instruments and books at one point, but had to return them.”

“Oh?” said Wile, her interest piqued. “Why’s that?”

“Well,” he blew his nose. “The recipes are useless on their own. You see: on that point, my dear, alchemy is far different from cooking. It takes a lifetime’s practice. As well as a natural talent to start. It’s a form of magic, of course. Think of it: you wouldn’t give a spellbook to a unicorn, and expect another Twilight Sparkle!”

Wile and I looked at each other. “Not to imply,” Limerick continued. “That the famed Ms. Sparkle could make much of my books. Only an earth pony can perform alchemy, of course. It demands the same affinity for the mineral, and the natural, that makes our kind born farmers and cooks.” Now he spoke with real, seething excitement. “And that’s why, you see, that’s why alchemy was banned in the courts of Canterlot. That’s why I was excommunicated from that unicorn-governed Stable. It’s earth pony suppression. This is our secret magic. Our own magic. And yet, you never hear about it.”

“I take it, then,” said Wile. “That you prefer to share the products of your art, with earth ponies alone?”

“Naturally,” said he, and Wile exhaled heavily. “If the unicorns and pegasi are so proud of their own superior magic, let them rely on it alone. The unicorns usually do. While from the pegasi I’ve had quite a few inquiries, actually.”

“Oh?” said Wile, with heavy sarcasm. “And what was the nature of these inquiries?”

At this, Limerick started to rock and snuffle a little: laughing to himself. “Very funny thing,” he said. “These were pegasi, mind you. And they wanted a potion I call The Opening Cocoon. You’ll never guess what it does.”

“Gives you wings?” said Wile, with a tired, heavily rained-on look.

“Oh, very good,” said Limerick. “You must be a lepidopterist. Yes, that’s just it. The Opening Cocoon. An early masterpiece of mine. It grants the user the most beautiful wings. And these pegasi wanted to exploit it for some stupid land claim squabble, I think. Can you imagine?”

“Somehow, yes, I can,” said Wile. “In vivid detail.”

“I’ve really cocked this up,” Wile said. We were outside in the garden, she and I, with our backs to the beam of a wooden fence. Perigee was down on her stomach, replanting a cabbage head. It was now late afternoon. “I never should have mentioned that stupid magazine. I mean, Keats told us what to do. Now this stallion’s supposed to believe you work for Country Life, and you’re from his Stable, too?”

“Well, he does have memory problems...” I said.

“Yes,” said Wile. “And we’re in a very grey area already, morally, taking advantage of those.” She shook her head. “It makes you embarrassed to be an earth pony, his kind of attitude. Let it be said for the record: we’re not all that insecure.”

“Insecure?” I asked, prompting her.

“Some of us are quite content,” she said. “We don’t all feel pangs of impotence at every sunrise, or every pegasi’s flight. He’s full of jealous feeling, that old man, I can tell. He’ll never be satisfied. He doesn’t even appreciate what he himself can do. Instead it’s just a show piece to rub in unicorn's faces, and to hide his own insecurities behind.”

“Like Trixie Lulamoon’s tricks, you mean,” I said. “That she performed so spitefully for the ministers.”

“Just stems for love to flower on, all the ponies of the earth,” said Perigee sagely, from the dirt. “If love flowers in our daily work, we’re content to work. Whatever task love flowers in, we’re most content to do. While even Trixie Lulamoon hated her own loveless, unflowering tricks, and was forever discontent.”

I nodded. I knew the feeling: of long, unflowering days, in which I did not seem to appreciate or express love at all. Days without poetry, where I hitched my focus nowhere and languished and did not grow. What would a lifetime of that, alone and hateful in an unfriendly little wagon, turn me into?

“No one’s arguing that lovely, flowery love isn’t the answer here,” said Wile. “Of course it is. But so what? That’s all very easy to say. Our problem is that yes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. It’s Limerick’s choice, I mean, to withhold his gifts if he wants to. So, what can we do?”

The answer, we would soon find out, was to drink the water ourselves, and let him see, that reluctant horse, how much good it did us - just being friends, being free with our gifts - and how much good it might do him.

Here it all was: the chili and pumpkin bread, pats of butter, peppery green beans and potatoes, with mead from Limerick’s basement. Watery mead, but still effective! We were at a table in a smaller, candlelit side room whose windows showed off the darkening hills. Limerick sat at the head of the table, with Wile on the opposite end. At the start of the meal, Perigee and I bowed our heads to thank the Princesses for fulfilling their ancient functions, because no potato, pumpkin or green bean grows without sunlight, or without being spared the sun’s light, nightly. After this, we started on the food gratefully, thanking Wile too.

With a napkin tucked into my collar, I ate so enthusiastically that I started to feel hot in my clothes. I had never tasted real butter, and now I had buttery green beans, buttery potatoes, and buttery pumpkin bread. And in the dim heat, after the first few drinks of mead, all the day’s tightness seemed to melt away, and I felt somehow soft and buttery myself. Lighter in my chair, as if a slight levitation spell was being cast around the table, or around the whole cottage, so that it hung suspended amid the darkened hills. Perigee too, seemed to be under a similar spell. So we ate, or else thanked and complimented Wile, and said no more.

This was, in fact, all we had to do to set off the beginnings of a change in Limerick. He watched on from the head of the table, eating too: but often looking down at his food, as if to see how it was different from ours. He didn’t feel the same joyful effects from it. And he wasn't unperceptive: he could tell why, as Wile looked so gladly over us eating, glad to have made us happy by her day’s work. She had cast her care for us into the food, and we, her friends, could feel it there. But the same devotional care was not in Limerick’s meal - Wile didn’t know him: it couldn’t be. His was the same food, but without the same care being transmitted through it.

Limerick admitted none of this to us then of course. In fact, for him the table had seemed to grow longer, with us further off toward Wile’s end of it, and him left alone. He felt resentful that such crude matter as food, should earn Wile what he had all his life desired: the gratitude of others. Such immediate, grateful appreciation of her work. Yes, he was resentful. When his own efforts were at such a greater level of genius, so far above this fodder on the table. When all it seemed to take instead was simple food.

But he too had this in his power to give, didn’t he? His time, his care, his gifts, to be generous with. And shouldn’t he be? It seemed to have rewarded Wile. While he lived here alone, in bitterness.

His own work, his alchemy, had once seemed cast full of a similar care. Out of his own feelings of friendship for strange, generous nature around him, Limerick had finished The Opening Cocoon. Out of care and admiration for the butterfly’s fragile wing. And because he’d cast that care and admiration into his work, and performed it as a loving service, he had found the results beautiful, and been happy then.

I learned all this after dinner, from the horse’s mouth. Not because Limerick confessed it to me in confidence but because, as the others cleared the table, he asked me into the study again and dictated these thoughts to me, to write down for him. It seemed he didn’t want to forget.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Karma Beacon: Karma is doubled for the purposes of dialogue and reactions.