//------------------------------//
// A completely unearned coda 
// Story: The Education of Tumbling Leaf 
// by Slipshod Extension 
//------------------------------//

In the Philosophers’ District of Cloudsdale, where ponies argue about the names of clouds, and whether the wind is figuratively or actually the breath of the world, and whether Reason and Feeling are one or two after all, there stands a cookery.  From its open doors spill the scents of baking pies and bread, of vegetable soup on the boil, of cordials sweeter than a foal’s first smile.  Within there lives a gnarled green stallion, a bit halt of one leg, who laughs at the philosophers as they carry their arguments into his shop and over their meals and out again.  He laughs when they ask him what he is laughing at, and does he not understand the importance of whether Right is a function of Virtue or Good Accomplished, and could they please have another of those spinach pasties and the arrowroot tea that soothes the voicebox.  But he smiles quietly when one of them pauses her pontification to savor a bite, a brief lull in the endless windstorm of debate.
And when sometimes in the evening a whipcord old mare with eyes the color of the darkening sky swoops down and through the doors without landing, he laughs to see her bounce from the cloud-walls at the rear of his shop and hobbles over to help her up.  And when young ponies, their faces sticky with sweets or dripping with gravy, ask him the meaning of harmony, he ruffles their manes and tells them to run home and ask those who love them.  They, he says, will answer far better than he.