>>93017"Dear Cinnamon Corn
Over the past several decades I have discovered a way of conversing with spirits. I have reanimated dead matter. I have raided the tombs of ancient nobles and sent for the long dead of distant lands. I have spoken to ancient sorcerers, voodoo masters, priests, and wizards. I have learned secrets thought forgotten to ponykind. I have even discovered a way to forestall death in myself. There was something distinctly pleasurable in the knowledge and pleasures I found. Having power over death made me feel
alive. But for all of this, the power I sought eluded me. My attempts to bring back my Wood Hill, little Whinny, Petra, High Sails, and East Wind, have not produced the desired results.
I was very cautious to attempt to reanimate her, first conducting a number of tests on corpses, then later on zebras and other such living subjects, before having a semi workable product. I was never able to completely reattach body to soul, succeeding in either restoring sensation to a bodiless spirit, or motion to a soulless body. Never both. After having a number of working tests, I decided, finally, to dig up Wood Hill from Rosemont Cemetary, in that plot her father left her. I very carefully performed the spell, and succeeded in bringing forth her spirit. For the first night... the first month, it was everything I had wished for. Everything I had worked for. To be able to speak with her again. To be with her, in a way, for the first time since that terrible year of the plague. Though I could not feel her, touch her, nor see her face, I was overjoyed to have even that. But she was not so. Thogh her spirits were lifted as were ine for the first few weeks, after a while, her morale faded. Her spirit tethered to a set of salts, unable to move, or to feel properly, she became despondent. Something about the inability to trot through a moonlight meadow, or feel the sea breeze, or smell the salty air. Sadness overcame her, and she became inconsolable. She even became resentful of me, as if I had locked her in a prison. I eventually reversed the spell, and placed her salts away. I never subjected the children to the same proceedure. I became heartbroken, and for months backed away from both my experiments and my business.
You may recall two years ago I took a wife by the name of Midnight Maelstrom. She is the daughter of one of my ship captains, engaged to be married to some sailor. I needed the marriage to remain in good standing in society, as ponies began to notice my reclusive and strange behaviors. I blackmailed her father into allowing the marriage, and she broke her engagement and married me. What you may not know is how much I have warmed to her, how she makes me feel a warmth in myself that I have not felt in a very long time. A few months ago, she had my child, a colt named Tall Mast. I believe I will devote more time to my new wife and child, and to running my old father-in-law's company. I am going to step away from alchemy and the dark arts, though it has permanently scarred me. Perhaps, you should do the same.
Joseph Curwhinny, 890"
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