Following of the Sun

There was a breadth of emotion within me I was heretofore unaccustomed to, and whenever I thought - just for a brief moment - that my travels across Equestria would lessen the sensation, the work itself would remind me that this could never be so. I've heard of the saying that spoke of doors opening and closing, but in my experience there were a great many doors opening at all times, and most of them would have to be closed as soon as possible. Each piece I dedicated myself to brought with it the promise of another mission in some faraway place, beautiful and lonesome or tiny and old. In truth, I feel somewhat ambivalent now, when I look at those years. I had told myself that it wasn't to be expected that Celestia would take away every difficult thought or wistful sensation within me. That wasn't her way even if she could. Rather, hers was the strength that made me carry on and experience other, equally powerful emotions. I felt very wise whenever I reminded myself of this.

Beyond those feelings, there was a sense of permanence inescapable to me. Even when I was caught for days in a blizzard far north - perhaps I'll tell you that story another time - I never once thought anything would truly end. Being was reserved for the tree called now, I'd tell myself. Ever evolving, twisting its branches closer to the light, much like the coming of dawn itself. A curious phenomenon, and yet there existed this same magnetism everywhere I went. Three years I spent in small scholarly towns along the north western coast, where they told stories of only beginnings. A tired raccoon would meet a raccoon he liked. A lonely prince learned to sing and dance and do all sorts of things. There would always be tired raccoons and lonely princes, or dedicated doctors and silly little girls.

Long before this civilisation had been forged, ponies have fashioned coloured glass by adding salts and oxides not so much differently than I have; all bending the air and shaping the earth, and by shaping it, so strive to shape their own destinies. The multi-layered gemmail windows I had experimented with by using crystal glass in place of lead cames would stay there in the courtyards of the Crystal Castle, ever company to its sparkling columns and silvery trees. Not forever in their current form perhaps, but surely they would remain in some sense with everyone I assembled them for. So too, across all of Equestria I had contributed to a permanence, and through this permanence, I found myself carrying myself with more weight - not because I had thought I had paid so much tribute and brought so much importance, but rather I had felt it necessary to do so in order to represent the wishes of the Royal Sisters as much as I could.

The satisfaction that I had derived from my work was as untameable as the seas, and yet, as unyielding as the Smokey Mountain: if it was asked of me I would have continued in this pursuit indefinitely, as for all the wonders that Equestria held before me there was nothing that could touch that which I have lost and found. But, as my story continues to illustrate, in life there somehow always remained the room for the unexpected.