Silver Letter wasn’t getting any younger. At 25, he followed the same routine, going from work back home to tend to toy trains. He didn’t have any family. No wife. No foals. He also had nobody pressuring him into getting married. Very little in his life seemed to fulfill his desires except his hobbies, in which he had many. He didn’t need anything else to feel satisfied other than collecting things.
Since he had gotten his job at the factory, Silver had been trying to make friends, for what it was worth. Ponies never lasted long at the factory. They would work a few months then disappear to do something else. When a pony invited him to go drinking or play games, Silver usually declined. He detested drinking bitter hard ciders and other such things. A good time for him involved reading a book beside a fire.
So it was rather unusual when he accepted an offer to join one of the older employee’s birthday party at the local pub. It all sounded like a waste of time as usual, but the guys he saw often had been being pests about it. Silver feared that the sadness in the stone had been wearing off at work, despite all the work he had put into maintaining the façade of happiness.
The noise at the pub was ridiculous. As Silver fought to find a place to sit, a hoof tapped his shoulder.
“Over here,” a pony said, gesturing to the booths. It was his coworker. Sitting at the end was the old pony whose mane had started greying before Silver started working. A little cake sat next to ciders and opened gifts of Jazz cassettes and cologne.
Silver smiled. The guy had often given him advice when seeing Silver walking around feeling glum. Silver often wished that he had the near infinite capacity for patience and kindness in which the old stallion possessed. After listening to a story about his first day on the job, Silver asked to buy a drink for all the ponies, which was met with much applause. For a moment, Silver too was the highlight of the evening.
Wobbling on the sidewalk, Silver unlocked his door in a haze. He made some coffee then sipped it slowly from a large mug. Snow was drifting downwards that evening. It was going to be cold. He would need to put some wood in the stove to keep his room warm. In the light of a lamp, the cold black stone looked like an eye plucked from a dragon. It always seemed to be watching him like it knew what he was thinking. But that was silly. It was just an object.
Silver placed his hooves on the smooth glassy surface. A light emerged from deep inside. Unlike the blue he saw before, it was a pale yellow like a sunflower. He felt another energy. Not daggers of glass but a pulsing warmth in his muscles. Silver’s heart relaxed as though his entire body was slipping into a warm bath.
When he set the stone down, Silver didn’t want to sleep as he did before. He opened his desk drawer and procured a pen and some paper. He wrote without a second’s hesitation. The words flowed onto the page, each prettier than the last. Setting the pen down, Silver looked at the stone, which had faded into darkness. Silver then went to bed.
Getting up for work, Silver saw the letter on his desk. He couldn’t fully recall having had written it. It couldn’t have just been the drinks he had. Had the stone affected him somehow? The thought of it worried him. Maybe it would be best to sell it or even throw it away. However, he saw something strange. The letter was addressed to Misty. Next to her name was her address, something which he couldn’t have possibly known.
At work, Silver was thinking about Misty for a while. The letter he wrote was very kind, asking all about her work, interests and so many other kind things. That very letter was already in the mail, on its way north to the Empire. Normally he would sigh and tell himself that she would tear up the letter. She wouldn’t read it at all. But there was this strange hope that she would want to read it.
A coworker interrupted him by waving his hoof in front of the magnifying glass that Silver was using to paint one of the trains that his company was going to sell. None were as good as Misty’s but they still looked pretty in the end thanks to him.
“Excuse me,” Silver said with much annoyance.
“Hey, I don’t want to bother but I was looking for a pony to hire for kind of a side job as a tutor. I think you would be the pony for the job,” the stallion offered. “One of the guys told me that you were college educated.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Silver replied with a sigh. “You need a tutor for something?”
“Oh, no. It’s my son. He’s fourteen.”
“I’ll think about it. No guarantees.”
The guy grinned. “Please do. It would be a great help.”
Silver slipped on the icy sidewalk. Manehattan was getting hit hard by a worsening storm. Snow was swiping his face and coat. His skeleton shivered. The sun was almost set when he knocked on the door of a brick city house. A colt answered it. He was wearing a red robe with a mug held in his hoof.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Silver Letter. You were probably expecting me?”
“Oh, yes. I’m Nate. My dad told me about you,” he said reluctantly. “I don’t think I need help but whatever. Come in.”
Natty Nate or “Nate” as he likes to be called, was not doing great at his “hooves on” science projects. As a foal, Silver loved to tinker with mechanical things. It was his favorite science. Nate had his science project spread out over the living room rug. Silver saw very little semblance of order in what this cute colt had managed to accomplish.
“This needs a lot of work,” Silver observed, while putting a hoof over his eyes.
Nate looked up from his school papers, his freckled face smiling. “Hey, that’s what my dad said.”
After a week, Silver letter returned from his third tutor session with Nate. He was exhausted from walking in the snow to get home. It was already dark and Silver fumbled with his keys to open the door. He took the mail inside and set it aside while he cooked dinner.
As night went on, Silver poured himself some tea. He had a deadline soon to come up with a new toy design. Something kinetic perhaps, he thought. Motion. Energy. Action. As much as he wished to think about it, his mind was muddled. Bored even. He got up and paced around until he saw the mail he forgot to open. He picked them up, tossing aside bill after bill, until he reached an unknown letter at the bottom. It was a baby blue envelope with a pretty wax seal. The sender was named “Misty” from the Crystal Empire. Silver’s heart pounded.
Silver couldn’t believe it. Could it be true? Had she truly responded? He carefully opened up the letter. It began thusly: Dear Silver Letter: What an adorable letter you had sent to me.
It only got better from there. Silver felt humility and friendliness coming from those elegant words. It gave hope that there would be more to come. More kindness and more words. Even the end of the letter had ended with: Your friend, Misty.
Silver was so overjoyed. Never in his life had he received such a letter. At least not since he had a family and ponies who cared about him. Silver picked up the black stone. It turned that lovely shade of yellow as if to congratulate him too. The familiar energy flowed through him. He worked for hours, churning out a hundred award winning ideas. He thought of Misty just like she had thought of him. He was a great toy creator.
The guys at work noticed a sudden spring in Silver’s step. Rumors spread that he had gotten a girlfriend. Ponies just assumed that Silver liked girls just as much as any other guy. In reality, he preferred colts. Other ponies didn’t know it. It was one of his many secrets. It didn’t help that guys easily pried into Silver’s affairs. One of them was looking at new drawings that Silver had drawn up earlier that morning.
“Hey. That’s mine,” Silver protested upon seeing the coworker.
The pony, a fellow craftspony, put down the paper with some embarrassment. “Oh, I’m sorry. I was just interested in these drawings. That’s all. Did you draw them?”
Silver fiddled with his hoof. “Yes. It’s nothing much, really.”
“I think it’s rather impressive. Professional, even,” the pony said.
Silver thought about what his coworker had told him. The idea that the drawings could be of some use didn’t occur to him until now. Perhaps he was right. Those were the best design work he had ever done. Maybe they would catch the eye of somepony who built the finest of toys? Even Misty?
Silver walked to Nate’s house in the bright chilly afternoon. He was rather excited, his mind bursting with new ideas. The colt let him in as usual.
“Nate, you know how you have been working on your robot design for the science fair?” Silver inquired as he set his saddlebags on the floor.
Nate was drinking hot chocolate. “Yes. I’ve only been working on it for weeks.”
“Well, forget all that.” Silver took up his design paper and balled it up. “I got something far more inspired.”
“What are you doing? You can’t just do that,” Nate blurted in anger.
“Listen. I’m a professional toy designer. I can help you make a robot that will blow the competition away.”
Nate seemed to be convinced. “Well, if you know what you’re talking about…”
What Silver built was fantastic. Nate watched a metallic spider take its first electric steps across the carpet. A remote control took it to a wall where it easily started climbing upwards.
Watching the spider walk up the wall was much less about helping Nate than it was about Silver proving to himself what he could do. On the other hoof, Nate was Silver’s best test audience, and the colt couldn’t get enough of it.
Silver sent photographs and descriptions of the robot to Misty the next morning. Over the following weeks, the two ponies sent each other more letters. Misty was always quite curt in her responses, formal and quick like a rapier. Silver thought that perhaps a pony like her was already overwhelmed with letters from her fans so he excused the apparent lack of interest in the lengthy letters he sent to her. Yet, she sent a letter requesting that Silver act as a consultant. He would work on her team, coming up with new ideas and building test prototypes. What a wonderful idea, Silver mused.
He took the black stone in his hooves and saw the sunny glow resurface. The happiness he felt was true, like being reborn somehow. The light was renewal, perfection. It would be the brightest that the stone would ever become.