Before Princess Cadance was Princess Cadance, before she was the ruler of the Crystal Empire, before she was an Alicorn and the Princess of Love, she was simply the most beautiful pony in the world.

This was before the Crystal Wastes were tamed. Umbras still stalked the shadowlands north of Equestria, and every expedition north for treasure-finding, knowledge, or conquest had ended in utter ruin and defeat. This was before any pony had ever gone north for love.

Cadance lived in the biggest house in the city. Her wealth, it was rumored, came from generous gifts from wealthy stallions who sought her hoof in marriage, or any other extremities she was willing to part with. Cadance was hardly the only mare to ever make a living off of the favor of wealthy stallions, but she was the only mare to be able to afford a mansion and a household of servants from it, and without doing anything whatsoever for anypony in return.

Cadance was, if anything, too beautiful. It was said that no stallion could view her face without falling in love. As such, she always wore a mask in public, and no pony ever saw her take it off, though no pony was sure if this was because the myth was true or because she wanted ponies to think that it was.

But a mask could only do so much. She was endlessly bothered by suitors. When she refused to pick one, it became a problem. The city was mobbed by the richest stallions, the handsomest stallions, and the most optimistic stallions in Equestria. They came to woo, to worship, or to conquer, each in their own understanding of love.

There were some upsides. The flowers, chocolate, and jewelry industries thrived. But time dragged on. Cadance was dragging her heels.

Proposals for her hoof in marriage grew ever more elaborate and bizarre as wishful stallions tried to guess what would finally cause her to accept their proposals, or at least agree to go out on a date for a hay pasta and maybe a movie. Finally the mayor herself begged Cadance for relief.

“They congest the streets and halt traffic. They wake up the whole city playing music outside your door. My own deputy is being investigated under suspicion of facilitating the illegal artificial rose trade. You must choose a husband. Or at least tell them you’re gay. Are you gay?” the mayor added hopefully.

So the next morning Cadance addressed the typical throng of lovestruck stallions from the balcony of her mansion, under which the rose gardens were being tended to by the gardener. She went through the usual routine first:

“Did anypony take in my mail?” snapped the future princess.

“I did!” yelled a bloodied stallion below. His clothes were torn and he was swaying on his hooves. “I had the honor of taking in milady’s—”

“And the trash?” barked the empress-to-be.

There was still a bit of a scuffle going on. A pony was attached by the mouth to the handle of the rubbish bin while two other stallions were attempting, bodily, to dislodge him from it.

“Hurry up,” she said. “And don’t tip the bin over like last week.”

“The bin will not be tipped or my life I shall end!” shrieked a stallion below.

“Don’t raise your voice with me,” scolded the future leader of an entire nation. “Anyway, I’ve decided on a test. Whoever passes it shall be my husband.”

Even the stallions by the rubbish bin stopped fighting and listened.

“First,” said she who would be known as Princess Cadance, Ruler of the Crystal Empire, “I want you all to tell me what I am to you. I want you to tell me what you would do for me.”

Sighing, she listened dispassionately as they professed noisily, shouting over each other, that she was the most precious jewel among jewels; a prize worth more than all the gold and silver in the Bank; that they would climb any mountain, face any danger for but the chance to gaze upon her face, etc., etc., yada yada.

“Shh,” she said, and at once they were quiet.

“In my readings,” she said, “I have come across the idea of revealed preference. Talk is cheap. So I want to see if any of you values me so much as, oh, a store-bought pencil. Yes,” she said, as if the idea had just come to her, “whoever brings me a commercial-grade pencil the fastest will have my hoof in marriage.

“But,” she added, raising a hoof to preempt the stampede to the nearest office supply store. “This pencil needs to be made from scratch. From scratch. The only thing you need not make yourself is the idea of a pencil. Everything else you must make as an individual. No food may you buy to fuel yourself while you labor. You must grow it. Nor may you buy wood, nor an ax to chop wood, nor may you buy graphite nor a shovel and pickaxe to mine it. If you intend to use it, you must make it yourself.”

She leaned over the balcony, the cold smile of a future queen on her flawless face. It was a face that would have launched a thousand ships, had the dying oceans to Equestria’s east and west permitted such an action. “Let me lay out your task. You must journey to the cedar forests of Ostleregon. There you will need to collect cedar wood. First, of course, you must have a saw. So you will go to Whinnysota, to its mines. But you will need a shovel and a pickaxe, which are made of metal and have wooden handles. So you will scrabble for ore with bare hoofs.

“This will make you hungry. But you cannot buy food. You must plant or gather it yourself. Scavenging might seem appealing at first, but it will consume your time and force you to roam away from the mines. So you will have to learn the seasons and the soil and learn to plant crops without shovel or plow, and you will learn to wait to harvest them. To make bread, you will stamp grain into flour and mix it with water to turn it into dough. Of course this will all be easier once you have tools, but to make tools you need a smelter and a mold, which themselves are made with tools.

“But you persist, and finally you have your tools. You will take them and as much food as you can carry, in whatever wagon you fashion yourself, to the cedar forests of Osterlegon, and you will cut down a cedar tree and turn it into lumber. This you will cut in the way that pencils are made, I do not know myself. Then you will go to Broncodale to mine graphite, and you will have to figure out how to get it in the pencil, and how to give the pencil its color and shine. Then there is the rubber eraser, I admit this is totally a mystery to me. Will all this make your pencil? I do not know, I have probably missed some steps.”

The smile under her mask was cruel now, and yet more beautiful than before. “Now will any of you prove what I am worth to you? I tell you now that you won’t. And we shall see what I am really worth to you.”

Many of them tried. But hunger got to some, and the sheer impossibility of the task weighed on the minds of others until they broke. Others were driven to surrender by the pain of mining with bare hoofs. Not a single stallion completed the task. Not a single pony made it a week, in a task that would have taken years.

“I knew it,” she said to herself often after that. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

There was a stallion already in Cadance’s household on the day she issued her challenge. He had been her gardener for several years, and he was blind.

Cadance had the voice of an angel. But angelic voices were not known to send stallions into rhapsodies of desire. Since he could only hear her and not see her face, his opinion of her was that she was rather ignorant about greenery and otherwise a dull mare who obsessed over extracting gifts from suitors for nothing in return.

Her opinion of him was not much better. His body was broad-chested and well-built from a youth of laboring in fields, yet his touch among the flowers was delicate and caring. His speech was mild but confident, as firm and solemn as the trunk of an oak tree. He listened as ponies rarely did, and besides, he was the only stallion she could talk to who wouldn’t drop to his knees and beg to marry her before the pleasantries were halfway finished. And he did everything she told him to do without complaint, and in the evenings he would take a guitar and sing to the plants and didn’t mind that she sat in the garden and listened. It was fair to say that he utterly disgusted her. Just the thought of marrying him made her feel as nauseous as if a thousand butterflies were warring inside of her stomach.

After he finished with the roses, he thought about what she had said about making a pencil from scratch.

He found her after trimming the hedges. “I’d like some time off.”

“Whatever for? To go sightseeing?” She was not pleased that he was leaving and mocked his blindness to let him know how little she cared.

“I will travel, yes.”

“How long?”

“Could be fifty years.”

“I’m not sure you have that kind of vacation time.”

“You don’t have to keep me on. But if I come back, you have to keep your word.”

“My word? About what?”

“Your hoof in marriage.”

She laughed. “What are you going to do to earn that, my blind lawn-keeper? Worship me? Shower me in riches?”

“I’m going to prove you wrong.”

She had nothing smart to say to that. He turned to go, but she stopped him at the door.

“Where are you going?’ she demanded. “I didn’t give you permission to leave.”

“A pencil factory, just to ask some questions. I think it’s fair.”

If he could have seen, he would have seen her pink face burn red with annoyance. “You idiot, it was just to get rid of them all. It’s not possible, and anyway I wouldn’t marry you over a crummy pencil.”

He’d had enough of being insulted. “Your hoof in marriage isn’t worth a pencil. Isn’t that what they all think?”

“I can get any stallion to buy me a pencil made of pure gold.”

“Yes? Then where are they?”

She trembled. “I wanted them to go away.”

Maybe it was the frustration over several years of abuse and disdain bubbling to the surface. Maybe it was something else. For whatever reason, he said, “Yes, but they did go away, and not because you told them to. This is the first time a stallion has ever put an upper bound on your value. You’ve gone from a princess to somepony who isn’t worth a pencil.”

“Next time I shall hire a mute gardener instead,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.

He brought nothing with him but the idea of a pencil, as was the challenge.

In the end it took him a very long time to make a pencil. Once his anger at Cadance had faded, what inspired him then was curiosity. The more he labored, the more the apparent impossibility of making a single pencil overwhelmed him.

His journey began, as Cadance had suggested, in the cedar forest of Osterlegon. But the journey was long on foot, and he arrived hungry and blistered. He had to make food. He had to make an ax. An ax required wood and metal. Metal required metal and wood. And then there were the mysteries of the actual cut and polish of the pencil, the graphite, and the rubber eraser. He was very grateful to the friendly ponies at the pencil factory he had visited, who had shown him some instructive things.

I will not bore you with the details of his work because they are not boring. But I also will not exhaust you with them, and they are exhausting. An entire library could be dedicated to volumes describing the work that he did. Please trust that he did it. Pencils get made somehow, after all.

I can tell you that he worked very hard. There was no other choice. In the beginning, the work was very hard. Then afterward, the work was still very hard. But then toward the end, the work remained very, very hard.

He could not say what drove him on. Perhaps it was the idea of a garden so big that no pony could tend it

Some fifty years passed. But the end came, and at the end, he had his pencil.

It was time to return to Cadance.

Surely she was very old by now.

She did not live in the same house anymore. But when he identified himself to the new owner, she had a message for him.

“I was told by the previous owner that if somepony with a pencil came asking after Cadance, that I should tell them where she has gone.” she said. She gave him new directions. This also took him somewhere that Cadance was not.

“She moved away twenty years ago,” said the stallion who answered his knock. “Here is where you should go.”

When he knocked, it was Cadance who opened the door. He could not see her face, but he imagined it was very wrinkled and gray.

He did not expect to recognize her voice.

“Who are you?”

It was the voice of a young mare.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I am Cadance. What is wrong with your eyes?”

“I can’t see,” he said simply.

“I know you,” she said. “You’re that blind gardener with the foolish idea.”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“It was you who had the foolish idea. Mine was excellent.” He took the pencil out of its case and showed her.

She studied it skeptically. “I don’t believe that you did this without help.”

“We can discuss it.”

She let him in and set out tea and biscuits. It had been a long time since the blind gardener had eaten food he hadn’t grown himself. The biscuits, although plain, were delicious to him.

“So,” she said. “How did you make this pencil?”

He told her the entire story. She interrupted him constantly with questions and demands for clarification. All in all it took four days for him to satisfy her curiosity.

“Why do you sound so young?” he asked when she had run out of questions. Now it was his turn.

“I had to see the outcome,” she said simply. “I didn’t know how long you would be.”

“You could have visited me.”

“And risk affecting the results? Never. This way it was, haha, a double-blind study.”

He pushed the pencil toward her.

She broke it. He heard the snap. “It is only a pencil, worth hardly anything. Besides, I am not even worth a pencil. All the proper suitors gave up in a week.”

He breathed slowly. “If you break it, you buy it, or so I understand.”

“Funny, I don’t seem to have spent anything.”

“I said I would prove you wrong.”

“What a waste of your life. I could have bought a box of equally good ones for a couple of bits.”

“It is not the pencil you were wrong about.”

“I know you haven’t been keeping up with the progress of academic economics in the last fifty years, but really, I’m never wrong. You spent your whole life making a pencil for nothing.”

“I wasn’t making a pencil,” he said. “And it wasn’t for nothing.”

“No?”

“I was making this moment. And I made it for you.”

He reached into the case and took out a second pencil.

“It got easier,” he said. “After the end.”

Probably the sun crashed into the earth and the mountains stood up and leapt into the sea and rain fell from the clouds unaided, or so it seemed to her.

“Fine, have it your way,” she said when the earth had settled once more. “Let’s get married.”

“Oh, I don’t love you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could falsify your hypothesis.”

This story is mostly true, or at least it contains most of the truth. What the second pencil might have been traded for is anypony's guess. But it is known to every student of economics the story of how a pencil is made, the incredible vast amounts of knowledge and labor it takes to create a single pencil.^*

^*Some other things happened afterward. He died. She built an empire. And so on. Science continued its work.

It is a solemn tradition in Equestria that when this story is told, everypony who hears it breaks a pencil in half. Because the most amazing thing about a pencil is that for all the effort and knowledge it takes to create one, you can buy a dozen for a bit these days. Where are you shopping? Oh, yeah, the deals are pretty good there right now. Well, you know how it is when the school year starts up again. Hey, can I borrow your pencil? I’ll give it back—thanks. Look, if I shake it like this it looks all floppy….

”La fin,” said the old mare. (The end.)

The filly was giggling at the wobbling pencil, but she looked up sharply at those two words. (That’s not the end. How did she become a princess? Did they ever get married? You skipped all the important parts!)

(I told the part of the story that matters.) The old mare smiled at her beloved granddaughter.

The filly sniffed. (Becoming an immortal all-powerful Alicorn princess matters.)

(Don’t talk back. I have a present.)

(What is it?)

(It’s this very pencil that made you laugh so.)

(A pencil.) The filly was clearly disappointed.

(Yes, a wonderful pencil, just like in the story.)

(But...but, it’s just a pencil.)

(Only just a pencil, hm? If you don’t like it, then go ahead and break it. I won’t be offended.)

The filly gripped the pencil at both ends. But she hesitated.

(Yes?)

(Well, it’s just that it was so hard to make this pencil. Even though I’ve broken so many in the past. They were easy to break. And hard to make. And I broke them, and didn’t know….)

Wrinkles moved across the old mare’s face. (Now you know the worth of a pencil, which not even Princess Cadance was equal to. Except perhaps to a single gardener, tired and old and hobbled, who might have played a song for her with arthritic hoofs in the garden under the moonlight, and then….)

(Aha! There is more to the story!)

The old mare’s eyes sparkled. (There is more to every story than you know. Even a pencil’s story takes years to tell.) The old mare leaned close to the filly so that her mouth was against her granddaughter’s ear. (Be a voice for those who can’t tell their stories.)

The filly giggled at her grandmother’s lips tickling her ear. (Mémé, do you think I will ever find true love?)

(Yes, I do. Because you are a little princess of Cutebuck. Do you know what the name of our province means? It means Narrow Passage, little one, because the path to all good things is narrow, like the path to creating a single pencil. To care for something is to present the world with a narrow path, like a gardener guiding trees to grow where they will be tallest and healthiest and most fruitful. Never forget it.)

The old mare lifted the covers over her granddaughter’s shoulders. She kissed her cheek, straightened up to leave, then paused. (It's funny.)

(What is?)

(You asked how she became a princess and what happened next. Ponies always ask that. You never asked how she became so beautiful in the first place. But that is even more mysterious.)

(How do you know so much, Mémé?)

(It is the heritage of Cutebuck. In time, you’ll know more. Now sleep, little cabbage, and do not fear the shadows. The Heart of Love protects you at all times. Even in the dark.)

The filly closed her eyes and slept. In the morning, she looked with great curiosity at her spoon during breakfast and studied it instead of eating, to the consternation of her mother. But her grandmother’s eyes twinkled like crystals in the snow.