“Excuse me. Ah, is this seat taken?”
“Nope.”
Sage sighed in relief. She unceremoniously dumped her saddlebags in the snow beside the bench and planted herself on it. The smooth stone was already warm as if somepony had just recently left. That shouldn’t be surprising, Sage thought to herself. There were only a few days left before Hearth’s Warming and the peak of the holiday season. Ponies were out and about, wrapping up business and getting in their last minute shopping—just like Sage herself. Every year she would always tell herself that this time she would not put her to-do list off until the last minute. Fortunately for her, luck had always seemed to be on her side in the shopping frenzies and she always found what she needed or wanted. Trotston had been generous to her this way—
“It’s busier than normal today. Is something happening?”
“Huh?” Sage snapped to attention and looked up at the pony sharing the bench with her. She found herself staring into a stallion’s bright white flank. “Wha—” she looked up even higher. The stallion didn’t seem to notice or, at the least, care about her accidental ogling. She turned her line of sight away from him as fast as she could. It was rude for a mare to stare at a stallion not from her own herd. “What? I didn’t hear you, did you say something?”
“Is there something coming up? I don’t have a calendar.”
“Tomorrow’s Hearth’s Warming Eve.”
The stallion turned away from her to look down the pathway. The park they were in was a popular shortcut between Downtown Trotston and Hackley Square during the day, forming a straight path between the areas. During the night, ponies avoided it like the plague, completely unwilling to venture into the swath of darkness it became once the sun went down. Named Eisley Gardens, it had been made along with several other recreational parks to form an, “Emerald Necklace,” about the city. Trotston itself had always been fortunate when it came to avoiding the foreboding appearance of a city like Manehattan while still remaining large and full of opportunities.
“What’re you gonna do?” the stallion eventually asked. He turned his eyes to the partially frozen over stream following the path, but his ears remained attentive, angled at Sage. “For Hearth’s Warming?”
“I invited some friends over for dinner this year.” Rather, Merriweather had demanded that Sage would be the one to do her herd’s holiday cooking and nopony else. Which only really meant Merriweather wanted Sage to cook for the two of them, so they could eat something other than ready-made meals and a few sandwiches. The two of them were busy ponies. Far too busy to spend time cooking anything decent on a regular basis. Sage had her shop to mind and Merriweather could barely stumble through the door after her incredibly difficult day of cloud pushing. “Well...more like, just one friend.”
The stallion breathed out a small, “Awh…” and gave Sage a gentle pat on the withers. The metal of his horseshoe was cold to the touch.You at least have somepony. Me on the other hoof? I’ll just go hang out in an alleyway and eat some carrots.”
Sage, in the middle of her efforts to avoid any awkward eye contact, caught a glimpse of the sun beginning its descent into the horizon. “Oh!” She bounced off of the bench and grabbed the strap of her saddlebags with her teeth. “I haff to geth moofing!”
“Wait,” the stallion said. He slid from the bench to his hooves and covered his mouth with a hoof. Sage swore he could see a smile on his face. “Let me help.” A bright green aura enveloped Sage’s saddlebags and carried them to the stallion’s back. His size made the saddlebags look tiny and he was almost unable fasten the strap around his barrel. The gesture gave Sage a moment to watch him and she immediately noticed the prominent horn poking through his mane. She bit her lower lip and there was a moment of silence as she thought over whether or not she should be accepting of the stallion’s aid.
“Uuh...I don’t want to be in your way, ah, mister…”
“Cosmo.” The stallion put a hoof to his chest and Sage could barely make out small reliefs carved into the dark, well polished surface. “And it really isn’t a problem. I mean, I just want to be useful again.” There was a moment of silence. The delivery behind the Cosmo’s words made Sage feel very nearly guilty for her feeble attempt to turn him away. “So. Where now?”
“I just have one last stop, then I’m heading home.” Sage took one more look at Cosmo before leading him off. His simple presence proved its use the entire way. When met with crowds, he would take the lead and canter straight through. Anypony who failed to clear a path was forcefully shunted aside and immediately disarmed with passing glance. Cosmo was, in essence, a considerably large earth pony with the magical backup of a unicorn. He was easily twice Sage’s weight and took full advantage of the fact; nothing stood in his path. Nothing!
“This town has some nice shops,” Cosmo said, once Sage had finished her last stop. “They’re all very small and personal. The clerks all seem like decent ponies, too.” Cosmo took a few glances at the several storefronts in his vicinity, one of his cheeks puffed out by what Sage figured was his tongue. “I just wish it were more open air, like back in...where I used to live.”
“You’re not from around here?” Sage asked. Not as though she hadn’t considered the possibility. This Cosmo fellow seemed far too humble to be the typical, unchecked city unicorn. He was likely just a big pony from a small town.
“Eh, no.” Cosmo looked at Sage for a moment and tensed just slightly. “I’m from south. West. Southwest, across the sea.” He drew his lips inward and glanced over his shoulder. In a quick display of spritely agility, he faced forward and began to trot with a pop in his first step. “Well, we should get going, hm Sage?”
“Yeah.” Sage spoke with hardly a thought to the word. Sage had noticed a pattern emerging in Cosmo’s behavior during her short time with him. On their way to the last shop, she had asked him a few questions and, without fail, every time his origins came up, his composure would falter. It was fairly suspect, but after having several inquiries concerning his lineage openly deflected, she assumed he was in some form of exile. Unicorns were always fretting about their social standing in ways earth ponies and pegasi never could understand and Sage was no exception among the latter two.
Even more prominent in Sage’s mind was that Cosmo, at least outwardly, appeared to be a lone stallion. Her herb shop saw few, if any, male customers and the need to maintain her greenhouse kept her from social venues. Her friend, Merriweather had been pushing for the two of them to start a herd for several months now. The two of them had, for their past few attempts, had poor luck when it came to their fairly limited choices. Despite his flaws and possible dangers, Cosmo was quite the catch, especially when placed next to the last stallion Merriweather had taken out on a date. Sage was not willing to allow the opportunity to slip through her grasp.
“Uh, Cosmo. Where do you live?”
Cosmo took the question in stride. In fact, he even seemed to be expecting Sage to ask; his face positively lit up and he opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he let it close and began to frown. “Well, I used to have a cart,” he said uncertainly. His horn glowed briefly as he tussled a bit of his mane to distract himself. “It was a nice one, too.” His eyes briefly shifted about, looking at various passing objects: lamp posts, particularly interesting cobblestones, hanging flower pots. “The other night, the parking brake failed and it may have smashed against a brick wall.” Sage’s eyes widened slightly at the implication. “I’m still picking splinters out of my mane, I think.” Cosmo barked out a short laugh. “So, I don’t really live anywhere. Just between you and me, I haven’t slept since.”
Sage felt unmeasurably gullible. Surely, there was no way a stallion of Cosmo’s calibre had been living out of a cart or had spent almost a whole day sleepless and out on the street and come out of it with the appearance to suggest he groomed twice an hour. Even so, it would be unbecoming to not offer a homeless pony any sort of assistance. It was clearly an excuse to get into her home, but she had been backed into a corner over the course of the past couple hours. This Cosmo pony had spent a long time getting to know Sage and she had done the same with him. In a few minutes, he would know exactly where Sage lived and even if she were to turn him away, if he had the desire, Cosmo would use his magic to simply let himself in. Magic-proof locks were expensive in a city not populated by unicorns.
Still, she reasoned with herself, Cosmo was either a genuine pony or plotting her inevitable demise and at this point, it no longer mattered. Her next question had been answered before she even asked it.
“Cosmo, would you like to stay with me until you can get back on your hooves?”
“Thank you for your hospitality.”
Sage would be kidding herself to say she wasn’t eager to have a stallion in her home. It almost felt like a rite of passage, to be starting a herd. If Cosmo wasn’t the one to help her with that, there would always be another chance later on. “You can just set my bags down in the kitchen,” Sage said as she stepped into the hoof wash she kept in the entryway. Cosmo looked at her with a blank expression on his face before he turned back to one of the doorways. His horn glowed a bright green for a brief moment and he let out a little, ‘Ah hah!’ He slowly stepped from the entryway into Sage’s house proper, removing his horseshoes and stacking them one on top of the other as his hooves touched down on the carpet. Sage once again found herself fascinated by the reliefs on his near perfect extremities. Unicorns, she thought for not the first time this day, are strange.
“Cosmo, I don’t have a guest room,” Sage called, once she stepped out of the small basin she had used to clean her hooves of the outside dirt. “So you can sleep in my bed.” She locked the door behind herself and set out into the living room.
“I’ll elect to sleep on your couch this evening, but thank you for the consideration.” Cosmo’s answer was not among Sage’s list of expected replies. Stallions didn’t just sleep on a couch, even as guests. “It looks very comfortable—you have great taste in furniture!” Sage cocked an eyebrow and glanced around at her living room. Simple furniture pieces made out of common oak and light fabrics were positioned around a low-lying coffee table. The room as a whole was unremarkable, save for the couple of old family photographs Sage had taken from home and the stone lined fireplace and sitting stools by the far wall. While perplexing, Cosmo’s statement was likely justified, provided he really had been living out of a cart for an undetermined amount of time. Sage was uncomfortable with the thought of Cosmo sleeping on her cheap furniture, but she wasn’t about to argue with a stallion.
“Uh...okay.” She spoke up to buy herself time while she thought of more compelling subjects to talk about, only to find the action unneeded. Cosmo stepped through the doorway to the kitchen looking much more tired than he had moments before. With hardly a sound, he settled down on the couch across the table from Sage and propped his head against the back of it. He sighed and closed his eyes for several seconds.
“I’m really glad you came along when you did. I’m not sure what I would’ve done if I had to spend another night outside in this weather,” Cosmo said. “I don’t normally accept charity, but I was getting really desperate...thank you, again.”
“You can stay as long as you want. Are you hungry? I was going to cook some pasta for dinner toni—”
“Don’t trouble yourself with me,” Cosmo said, dismissively waving his hoof at her. “This is all I need for now—to sleep and know I’ll be waking up in the morning.” Sage was silent for a moment. Outside, Cosmo had seemed full of energy, but as soon as he reached the privacy of Sage’s home, he crumbled into a tired mess. It made Sage wonder just how skilled an actor Cosmo was and how much about him she had really learned in the past few hours.. Confident she wasn’t being watched, she looked at his cutie mark. It was decidedly, ‘spangly,’ with a multitude of small starbursts arranged in a ring around what seemed to be a split mirror. It made Sage wonder about his profession. Was he some form of showpony?
“Just let me know if you need anything else,” Sage said. She stood and trotted off to the kitchen to arrange her groceries and take care of the perishables.
o0O0o
That evening, Cosmo awoke from his slumber. He slowly pushed himself off of the couch and stretched his legs one by one as he thought back to his conversations with that pony, Sage. She was quick to pry at his nonexistent past and would probably try to get it out of him in a less direct manner the next time she was given the opportunity. He would have to come up with a believable background free of conflicts, before he trapped himself in a metaphorical corner. More importantly, after he offered to help her with her saddlebags, he felt a spark. She was smitten by him, even if just slightly. It was miniscule, but the juvenile beginnings of a relationship would keep him living at the least. He saw potential in Sage and it would be up to himself to fan the flames. Sage was his first potential food source and it only took him two days to find. “Just in time, too,” he said to himself. He kept his voice down to avoid being overheard through the floorboards of the likely poorly soundproofed building. “I really don’t think I would’ve lasted much longer.”
Cosmo strolled back to the kitchen and searched the walls for the clock he had seen earlier when he had dropped off Sage’s saddlebags. It took a few moments to find in the darkness. It was one in the morning—still considerable by some to be the dead of night and definitely no reasonable hour for a daytime pony to be awake. Sage, Cosmo assumed, was most likely still in bed, which left him to roam her property and see what she had. Cosmo knew that, to pull her strings, he would need to know her. His current situation was too precarious to risk making himself unlikable in Sage’s eyes. Without his hive to provide a safety net, if he couldn’t gather the love himself, there most definitely would not be a legion of drones willing to share with their great Lord Chitany.
Cosmo pushed the gripes of his situation and resulting poor quality of life aside and looked through Sage’s pantry. The mare kept an impressive stock of grains and several varieties of ground pepper, but seemed to lack many other seasonings that would require actual preparation to use. Her icebox told similar stories, being filled largely with basic ingredients that kept well, but weren’t much good beyond salads and sandwiches. “Does she not like dairy products, or has she not found a way to make them palatable? There’s not much here that’s good for protein either and—is that salmon? Hm! Edgey.” Cosmo slid the icebox’s door closed with his hooves. He turned to the other side of the kitchen and looked through Sage’s cookware as quietly as he could manage. He took a deep breath and inspected the stove and oven. The stovetop was blackened by soot and charred pieces of what likely had once been spilled bits of food. It had been cleaned to the best Sage’s earth pony hooves could manage, but it seemed as if she couldn’t be bothered to do much more than wipe away grease and larger droppings. “The oven on the other hoof seems almost completely unused. I guess she isn’t a baker.” His brief kitchen inspection complete, Cosmo returned to the living room, telling himself that he would cook Sage, ‘A real meal, prepared only the way a stallion would know.’ He had the feeling that Sage would enjoy something more than a lettuce and tomato sandwich stuffed with plain spaghetti for dinner.
Cosmo patted down a small circle in the plush living room carpet. He had been genuinely tired the evening past, although it was less from a lack of a good night’s rest and more his low energy reserves. Rushing Sage to love him fully would hardly end well, but it was nerve wracking to move ahead so carefully, knowing that his condition would begin to deteriorate in just a few more days. It had taken much more energy than expected to hold his form as Cosmo and in retrospect he should have given himself a smaller body to work with. Changing his appearance even the slightest at this point would only make him more suspect.
Cosmo set out to explore the opposite, west end of the house. There was a bathroom, which Cosmo deemed entirely unremarkable after sparing the tile laden room a passing glance, and a second room stuffed with tools, junk, and a few different odds and ends. Near a second doorway, there was a more involved hoof bath which made Cosmo consider the cluttered room more carefully than he did Sage’s restroom. Much of what he had previously regarded as junk he found to be related to gardening: packaged fertilizers, seeds, pots, work socks, and so on.
“Hm. She must grow some of her own food. Wouldn’t put it past an earth pony,” Cosmo said to himself and pressed a hoof against the door to open it. When the door refused to give even an inch, he furrowed his brow and pushed a little harder to find the same results. “A back door, then?” After a moment of feeling through the darkness, Cosmo found the lock’s handle and gave it a twist. He almost fell down the short, stone steps into Sage’s back yard once the door opened. Cosmo reached out with his magic and stopped the door before it swung into the side of the house, then chastised himself for having made the assumption that a mere door would be able to resist his weight once the lock had been undone. After a moment, he allowed his rear to catch up to his front and took a sweeping look at the small yard he had stepped into.
The yard had been lined with a pair of closely spaced picket fences reaching just past his legs and crossed boarding rising to eye level in between them. Sage’s neighbor had planted a few vines what Cosmo assumed to be some years back, further obscuring his view into the property next door; the other sides of the yard were pushed up against the walls of other buildings with just enough space for a couple alleyways. Sage kept a set of lawn furniture out on a bed of tastefully arranged bricks, but they were clearly not being used as evidenced by the snow slowly building up on the table and chairs. A greenhouse occupied most of the yard.
The greenhouse itself looked to be in use all year long, growing a small army of herbs. Unable to resist his curiosity, Cosmo tested the door. It too was locked, this time with a key; but a normal, earth pony lock stood little chance against a unicorn’s magic. Victorious, Cosmo stepped inside. The interior was pleasantly warm in comparison to the outside weather and Cosmo had begun to hold more interest in warming himself than inspecting exactly what Sage was growing. Having looked at her plain cutie mark, heard her name, and seen the tools she kept, he felt safe to assume she ran her own shop selling what she grew. “I suppose this also explains the absence of many interesting flavors in her kitchen as well. She can just gallop out here and pick what she’s in the mood for.” Cosmo took a small whiff of the faint, minty smell permeating the greenhouse and started back toward Sage’s house. “Having to maintain that garden means she shouldn’t be spending much time with other ponies outside of business. That should make things easier for me.”
Cosmo stopped partway into the house and craned his neck to look over his withers. He had left tracks all around the yard and while the falling snow would eventually cover them up, there would still be some suspicious depressions in the morning. Cosmo’s horn lit up and his magic pushed bits of snow around just enough to flatten out the holes his hooves had left behind.
Back inside of Sage’s house, Cosmo found his way into her basement. He didn’t find much more than a water heater and some sacks he would rather not pry into. The only object of true interest was a small, salt-lined cabinet filled with what appeared to be drying strips of meat and a cutting board on a nearby table, but little else. Cosmo found himself doubting the sanitariness of foods being preserved in a basement and would have very much liked to take his issues up with Sage, but couldn’t risk her knowing he had been snooping about her home in the middle of the night. He never failed to find it amusing how, to many ponies, the very concept of a pony eating meat resonated on a level near cannibalism.
Cosmo left the basement and began to ascend to the second floor of Sage’s house. He cast a muffling spell on his hooves when he was halfway up the steps and gently pushed open the door he found at the top landing. The second floor of Sage’s home was a single room, much to Cosmo’s surprise. He had been expecting the classic setup of a long hallway flanked by multiple small rooms. Instead, he found himself in a spacious study with a trio of pillars supporting the angled roof. In almost direct sight from the door, Sage was soundly asleep in her bed, oblivious to Cosmo’s presence. Despite his perfect silence, he frequently glanced backward at her as he read the spines of several books left in the open. A couple of them were volumes C and Q of a reputable encyclopedia, while the others were standalone historical reference books and hardcover novels. Knowing that Sage was an active reader brought a small smile to Cosmo’s lips. He had found a good one. Unwilling to press his luck much further, he retreated from Sage’s study, closed the door behind himself, and returned to the couch he had been using as a bed.
He hadn’t much of a chance to take in the finer details of Sage’s living room when he first arrived. All he knew was that Sage had a couch in her house and it made a much better mattress than some chiseled rocks in a cave. Perhaps he thought more highly of the plain furnishings than she did. The fireplace appeared to be in frequent use and the two stools on either side of it appeared to be the only expensive furniture Sage kept on the first floor. Cosmo was not quite sure if his guess was correct, but he assumed as much, given that the stools were built from a darker wood and had a deep, cool shade dyed into the fabric lining the tops. It was difficult to make out much color in the darkness. On the opposite wall from the fireplace, positioned in the space between two curtained windows, sat some form of box. It had a few small handles along the bottom edge and a curved, black, glass surface occupied most of the front. Cosmo told himself that it must have been some new invention that had been thought up during the long gap between his visits to the surface world. In most cases, the unknown did little to bother him, but this strange box had a faint magical aura about it. Fifty years ago, he knew that Trotston was a city of primarily pegasi and earth ponies. They found little use for technologies that were dependent upon magic, because finding a unicorn to work them or perform maintenance would often cost more in the long run. Even in current times, the city appeared to have changed very little. The box had Cosmo worried as such; a unicorn likely had to come along every once in awhile to keep whatever the box was in working order. There could be no telling how magic had advanced since the last time he had put effort into learning new spells and given what had happened some months back regarding the queen’s boneheaded, open invasion of Canterlot, some of those spells could easily be targeted at exposing Cosmo for the fraud he really was.
Despite this, Cosmo was in high spirits. Things would go quickly between Sage and himself if she were really as solitary as his midnight tour had suggested. I’ve lost everything but my life, Cosmo reminded himself. I can rebuild.
