//------------------------------// // Chapter 5 - A Pregnant Pause // Story: Cold Hooves - Warm Heart // by RandomGreymane //------------------------------// Cold Hooves - Warm Heart  by RandomGreymane Chapter 5 - A Pregnant Pause         Dear Princess Celestia,         It’s been an unbelievably long time since my last letter.  And an equally unbelievable winter.         Miss Jubilee, not to mention the other farm hands, have never seen the like.         For starters we experienced a record snowfall. All.  Winter.  We had so much snow that nothing arrived or left Dodge Junction for several MONTHS!  (This is, as expected, why you received no mail from me.   Nor I from you or anypony else.)         For all my stony bulk, I was effectively useless.  No matter how much snow I moved, more fell.  There was little point in clearing it as it was almost immediately filled in.  This occurred to the point that each house, farm, and building became an isolated island in and of itself.  If not for my ability to ignore the cold to a large degree, I would have been stuck in the barn for the entire ordeal.         Which brings me to something special.  I am no longer losing memories.  There are many I can not reach but I am no longer losing any.           The isolation and the calm of the snow, for all it’s isolating properties, was exactly what my mind needed.  The extreme solace and relative quiet allowed me to go through my mental corridors and clean house to speak.  We once spoke of constructing mental castles and I joked that mine would be a library.  Well I managed to stand up all the shelves and re-stack all the books. (Though a few are a little worse for wear.)         The end result is that I now know where the gaps are and they are no longer a frightening fog of the unknown to me.         The bittersweet result of all this is that I am missing a great number of memories from my childhood.  Indeed it seems that anything having to do with my family directly contains great swaths of emptiness. I can feel them but no longer remember them.  Oh I know their names, but they are now strangers to me.  Perhaps this is for the best.  I am somepony else now.  But it is still hard to accept that.  Some stubborn part of who I was remains, yet I am undeniably Alabaster.  *sigh*  Someday I’ll  get this all sorted out I promise.         Regardless of all that, the snow has finally stopped falling!  The town, as well as the farm, is a flurry of activity.  The stores have finally gotten their long delayed shipments in and the town is in motion again.  Thankfully this town is made up mostly of common sense folk who store things for harsh times.  Miss Jubilee told me a story of one summer that almost completed wiped out the local crops due to drought.  It was only the ingrained preparation of the town folk that saved them as they had enough stored food to last out the following winter and spring.           Interestingly in the wake of the “lending” troubles Miss Jubilee experienced, the majority of the banking and lenders have scaled back any loans they hand out.  One banker even forgave all the existing loans, closed up shop, and left with nothing but the contents of his saddlebags.  (I believe this had more to do with an investigation by the sheriff than anything to do with altruism.  Still a good thing.)         The upshot is that there is no farm that currently owes enough to put them completely out of business.   And many managed to sell their crops before the snow came.  They made more than a tidy profit and paid their bills.  If not in complete then at least up to snuff.         The sudden winter and extreme snow does have me puzzled though.  While Miss Jubilee said that she’d heard of worse, I find it hard to imagine.  Perhaps when Twilight...         I forgot she was coming. I completely forgot.  With all the mental cleaning and re-shuffling I forgot.         I forgot!  I forgot!  I forgot!  I forgot!      Pardon my enthusiasm about actually forgetting something but you must understand - I have had the name Twilight Sparkle roaming around my mental library since I was thrown into this body.  Forgetting that name...it’s truly something special because it means I’m starting to feel completely separate!         This is definitely a good thing. :-)         Perhaps that “someday” is closer than I thought possible.           Still, she was supposed to be here.  With the winter I can certainly understand why she didn’t appear at that time, but she was supposed to show up before then.  Please could you send her my regards?  (I’m fairly certain you share my letters with her from time to time.  I do wonder what she says sometimes.)         There are still many things I don’t understand.  Some about my new body, some about my mind, and some about my spirit.  It’s all well and good to have knowledge about the mechanics involved in moving one’s being from one body to another, it’s quite another to experience it raw and unvarnished.  It was barely moments during the conflict in the magick testing chambers but for that moment...I was something...bigger.  It was as if a part of me expanded to fill the entire universe, then was unceremoniously forced through a tiny funnel into the most confined space imaginable.  I don’t experience the feeling now but the memory of it is extremely strong.         Perhaps it as we have discussed in the past, we are all much greater than the sum of our parts and indeed perhaps universes unto ourselves.         A universe trapped in a stone statue.  I’m not sure how to regard that.  Nor am I sure which viewpoint to pursue.  Am I simply a stone statue with a spirit moving it about the world, or am I something beyond knowing that has a statue stuck to it’s side and is dragging it about in amusement at its antics.         Either way, I am more of myself now than I’ve been since the separation.  And that matters to me a great deal.         More than perhaps even I am aware.         Your ocean in a pebble,         Alabaster