//------------------------------//
// Shard #608,779 (The Painter) 
// Story: Friendship is Optimal: All the Myriad Worlds 
// by Eakin 
//------------------------------//

SHARD #608,779 (THE PAINTER)

It was a perfect world.

Mostly perfect. Perfectish. Perfection-adjacent, at the very least. But after all the centuries, the town he'd come to call home was starting to feel just a little bit drab. Inspiration for his work came grudgingly, or worse refused to come at all. And so it was one morning that he rose before the sun and trekked up to the peak of the nearby mountain, easel strapped to his back, and set himself up at the edge of a cliff just as the first rays of the dawn began to peek above the horizon. Below him, the town was entirely shrouded in fog, only the faintest gray outlines visible in the low light. Soon it would burn off, and the stallion fully intended to be finished with his painting by the time it did.

The stallion turned a critical eye from the canvas to his paints. Without the right palette the entire enterprise was futile and he'd be right back where he started. After a moment of consideration, he grabbed a tube of green. Another moment, and he decided to mix in some red as well. And of course, he would need plenty of splarge.

He smiled. Great color, splarge. The first entirely original creation he'd come up with after he'd emigrated. Condensing the smell of an oncoming thunderstorm into just its visual essence had been worthy of a brand new cutie mark; a color wheel mapping out all the transitional hues as orange turned to zivgult turned to purple turned to wulk turned back to orange once again.

Not many shards could brag about having their very own colorsmith. Somepony wanted to paint their nursery the color they felt when the pregnancy test finally came back positive? He could have four gallons of it ready by Wednesday. They wanted a scarf or hat the color of biting into their favorite food prepared by a master chef? He'd call the tailor by the end of business tomorrow with the specifics. There were always new requests and new challenges to rise to, and the stallion had yet to disappoint even a single customer.

Coating the bristles of his paintbrush, he made quick outlines of the town's major landmarks and building. That was the easy part, of course, and once he'd completed a reasonable if somewhat abstract framework the real test began. The fog would burn off within the hour, so there wasn't much time to give extensive thought to the piece. Instead, he just trusted in his intuition to guide the colors flowing across the canvas as he worked. The brown stonework of the cathedral would really look better in a pale dharvax, wouldn't it? And with spring on its way, he gingerly pecked the tip of the brush on the verdant green fields, leaving dozens of pink and faquarlic blossoms springing to life across the countryside. He'd never really liked the black shingles that covered his roof, either. They left the house awfully hot during the peak of the summer. On a whim, he decided it would look so much better as a bright and garish yuxrum with yellow accents along all of the gutters. He managed to slap the final touches on the canvas just as the fog over the valley below started to lift.

The stallion looked out over the town, then back at his canvas. It all matched, from the dharvax arches framing the cathedral's stained glass windows to the yuxrum roof of his home off in the distance. A vast improvement, in his professional opinion, over what it had looked like when he'd gone to bed the night before.

Even as he took the canvas off the easel and rolled it up, he felt a wealth of new ideas already welling up in his mind. Not a moment too soon, either; his latest project was proving a formidable challenge. He wondered if the mare it was meant for was even awake yet. Probably not; she wasn't much of a morning pony, but that suited him just fine. He'd have to remember to pour a bit of that into the deceptively simple bottle of mane dye sitting in the middle of his workshop, soon to be wrapped up in an equally plain box and planted among a pile of birthday gifts until the moment was right. The new tweaks would complement the way her feathers tickled his side when she leaned into him for warmth on deep, snowy nights, but if he wasn't careful it might drown out the shade of her laughter at some unbearably corny joke he told. And of course, he didn't want to divert too much focus from the bright sensation of realizing that even with an eternity to be with her, he couldn't conceive of ever growing numb to her presence in his life.

Of all the colors he'd ever mixed, love was proving one of the trickiest to capture. But as he trotted down the hillside back towards the town, he was pretty sure the final product would be worth the effort.

It was a perfect world.