On a sunny day, the old trail would have been a lovely place to walk down. The path would take one through the countryside, passing through a green meadow where the ryegrass and thistle grew in the shade of an ancient yew trees. It would have been a perfect place for a picnic or a holiday on the best of days.
However, after the heavy winter rains, and the meltdown of the snow in April, the trail was turned into a thick river of ooze and mud that was scarcely separate from the bog, which grew fat from the winter rain and snow and engulfed the meadow beneath several inches of thick, brown water. To see anyone travel down the muddy road that day would certainly be absurd in the highest degree.
Yet, against all possibility, there were travellers making their way down that sea of brown. Two Ponies, a young Earth Pony and an even younger Unicorn, were trudging their way down the muddy road. Their hooves were worn and tender from days walking in the rain, and their manes were rags on their soggy bodies.
The younger Pony looked up at his elder brother.
"Murtagh," he began, "I'm cold, and I feel all wet. When are we going to get to the Barrier?"
"Oh Pat," Murtagh replied, "Think of Saint Patrick. Do you think if Saint Patrick were here, would he complain about how cold and how wet he was?" Patrick was named after the old Saint, and hearing his story was one of his favorite ways of cheering up, "Saint Patrick was enslaved and taken to Ireland by pirates, who forced him to work herding cows in a dinky field for six years! But did Saint Patrick give up? Of course he didn’t! He prayed and prayed to God, hoping that he'll go to Heaven when he died. And after six years of being a slave, God told him to escape, and he walked two hundred miles to the coast and escaped back home to Britain. And then he went back again, and converted the Irish to Christianity! If he did all that without giving up, just think of what you could do!"
The two slogged down the muddy path for a few more hours until they came to an abandoned farmhouse sitting by the road. It was made of slowly decaying wood that had paint chipping off the outside walls. The side of the house was a barn that mainly had rotting carcasses and hay inside. They trotted inside, and noticed that even if the outside of the house was falling apart, the inside was in relative order. The house had a musty smell that mixed with the smell of decay the closer you went to the barn, yet the chairs were still tucked into the tables, the curtains were all drawn, there were even a few books on the sitting room table, piled up neatly as if the owner just went out to check on the sheep. They were all signs that whoever lived here had left to the Conversion Bureau to pursue a new life as a Pony, just like their family tried. Murtagh quietly prayed that the original inhabitants migrated to live a happy life in Equestria, unlike his parents...
"Pat, can you please go into the pantry and find something for us to eat? I'll go down here and look in the cellar."
"I will!" Patrick quipped as he disappeared behind the kitchen door. Murtagh grabbed a gas lantern sitting by the front door with his tail and went down into the cellar. It was dank and dark down there, even more than the rest of the house. He coughed several times as he breathed in the stale air and looked around for something that they could eat.
He searched the shelves. He noticed some tins of sausages, pork, and lamb, which he all rejected; Ponies could not (rather obviously) eat meat. He remembered back when his entire family were all alive in Dublin before the Civil War, just after they became Ponies. After realising that Equestrians, despite looking like Ponies, talked and behaved a lot like humans, he went into a butcher shop and ordered a full breakfast with bacon, both white and black pudding, and sausages. He subsequently spent the entire day suffering from indigestion.
Murtagh brought himself back to the present and checked the next shelf, which to his relief contained pickled vegetables. Let’s see what they have here, he thought. Pickles? No, he hated pickles. Onions? Better than pickles, but let’s see what else they have. After scanning the shelf, he brought out a tin of potato soup and a jar with pickled radishes in them. Unfortunately, being an Earth Pony, he couldn’t bring them up by hand or even with magic, like Patrick, but one at a time. He placed the lantern in his mouth (ignoring the taste of wood) and wrapped his tail around the tin of potato stew before setting upstairs.
After bringing the soup upstairs, he trotted to the kitchen, where Patrick was sitting dejectedly with a tin of gingerbread biscuits.
“The mice ate everything except this,” he said.
“Well, that’s okay, Pat,” Murtagh replied as he showed him the tin of stew. “There’s also some radishes in the cellar that I’ll put in the stew. How about we have the biscuits for afters?”
That evening, they ate the stew with the radishes cut up inside. They were spicy and a bit bitter, but it was a welcomed change from the monotony of potatoes, mouldy hay, and leaves that they ate for the past week. The biscuits were a bit stale, but they decided to eat them anyways for the sake of something sweet. Patrick decided to read one of the books on the living room table. The book he read was a copy of the Missal, and it was full of Latin words that he couldn’t understand. Nonetheless, he and Murtagh had fun reading through it, trying to figure out how to say them and what they meant. Eventually, as evening turned into night, they went upstairs to see what bedrooms there were. As it turned out, there were two: a children’s bedroom and a parent’s room. They opted to sleep in the parent’s room, as the children’s room was close enough to the barn to smell the carcasses inside.
As Patrick lay in the bed, he turned towards his older brother, and said, “before we go to bed, can you please tell me a story?”
“A story? What kind of story? Do you want me to tell you about Saint Patrick?”
“I don’t”, the young Unicorn said, “Tell me about when we get back to Mayo, and about our new life!”
Murtagh smiled. His plans for life after they got to Mayo (which was probably already being covered by the Barrier as they spoke) was one of Patrick’s favourite things to hear, after the life of his namesake. The Earth Pony cleared his throat and began.
“Well, the first thing we’re going to do is find our old village and build a nice, big house with a barn in the back and fields of wheat, barley, and apple trees as far as the eye could see. And there are going to be plenty of halls and rooms and windows, just like the old landlord houses, but we’re going to invite everypony there to live in. We’ll sing songs at the pub until midnight, and we’ll help make our village the biggest, most beautiful village in all of Ireland.”
“Will there be a library?”
“There’ll library, and your special talent will be reading books and taking care of them. It’ll be filled with hundreds of books, all about the Saints, the birds, and trees, and all the old stories about Finn MacCool and Bran the Blessed and the magical land of Tir na Nog. It’ll be so big, and so beautiful, that one day Twilight Sparkle will come over to your library and marry you because she’ll be so impressed.”
“HEY!” Patrick objected.
Murtagh chuckled quietly for a moment. He first learned about the Element Bearers in a crash course about Equestria’s history and culture. After learning from the lecturer that the bearer of the Element of Magic, Twilight Sparkle, was, like his brother, a Unicorn who loved to read and learn, he always joked to him that he would grow up and marry her one day. It was admittedly unlikely, but it was still an amusing idea in his head.
“Can you please go on with the story now, Mur?”
“Don’t worry, Pat, I will,” Murtagh tried to recollect where he was and continued from there.
“And the school will be filled with teachers and students who’ll all come flocking to you to ask questions about old Ireland, and you’ll tell them of Carolan, Brian Boru, Saint Patrick, and the monks who copied all the books that the Romans wrote.”
Murtagh suddenly hesitated as he continued to the next part, “And we’ll plant two trees right in the middle of the village green, one for Ma and one for Da. Ma’s will be a magnolia tree like the ones she used to love, and Da’s will be a Rowan tree. And everypony who stops by and rests in the shade of the trees will think about Ma and Da, and there’ll be a garden with poppies growing by Da’s tree so they’ll all remember his sacrifice in the Great War…”
He choked back a sob as he slowly said the next words, “Patrick, are you going to say your prayers?”
“At this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with his power,” he mumbled, “And the sun with its brightness, and the snow with its whiteness, and the fire with all the strength it hath…”
“And the lightning with its rapid wrath, and the winds with their swiftness along their path, and the sea with its deepness-“ continued Murtagh.
“And the rocks with their steepnes, and the Earth with its starkness,” murmured Patrick again, “All these I place, by God’s almighty help and grace…”
“Between myself and the powers of darkness.”
Patrick was asleep now, his rhythmic breaths forming a soothing counterpart to the rain outside, yet Murtagh wasn’t tired. He was thinking. Ireland had suffered so much in the past centuries, first under the hands of the Norse, then under the Normans and the English. Would the Ponification process finally free his homeland from oppression, or would they just be enslaved by a new master? Princess Celestia appeared as a mare of kindness and friendship in the films and pamphlets he read in Dublin, but why didn’t she just stop the barrier? Why didn't she help mankind overcome its problems without the Bureaus? Beneath that smiling exterior, was there just another Oliver Cromwell?