Princess Twilight sat on a velvety cushion, her spot on the high balcony allowing her to gaze out upon the shades of Canterlot in the dimming light of the afternoon. Sipping lightly on her tea, she grimaced slightly at the bitterness. A recent edition of the Foal Free Press had posted a rather embarrassing picture of her plump posterior, driving her to cut the sugar from her daily tea.
Another sip, and another grimace.
“Twilight,” came Spike’s voice, almost the same as ever. Almost. Yet there was a strange quaver he usually only expressed when he was concerned. “Fancy Pants is here to see you.”
Her eyes lighting up with excitement, Twilight turned to the balcony doorway. “Fancy!” she said. “To what do I… owe… the… pleasure…”
Twilight’s sentence slowed before coming to a grinding halt. She had never seen the fixture of Canterlot’s upper crust in such a state. He was unclothed, his normally pristine white coat was stained with streaks of dark brown, his mane was disheveled, and he smelled of milk and cocoa.
“What… happened to you?”
“Tartarus,” he uttered, wheezing heavily. “But… like I never imagined it.”
“Tartarus?! What do you mean?”
Fancy Pants stumbled to the pillow opposite her intricate tea caddy and slumped down, his frazzled appearance and out-of-breathness a polar opposite to the regal aura Twilight normally expected of Fancy. “You see, I’d been up in the Dragonlands on business. I brought back a pastry puzzle-box as a gift for my dearest Fleur, but when she opened it—”
Twilight sat up straighter. “Did you just say that you found a pastry puzzle-box… in the Dragonlands?”
Fancy’s eyes went wide, and he nodded manically. “Indeed! Are you familiar with this infernal, comestible monstrosity?”
“Comestible.” Twilight shivered. “You said comestible.” She shook her head. “What did it look like?”
“Intricate carvings, rainbow-hued exterior, about yea big…”
“Stop.” Twilight sat back, scrunching her eyes and grinding her forehooves into her temples. “That matches the description. Who’d you get it from?”
“The most peculiar dragon that I’ve ever seen!”
Twilight’s eyes flashed open. “Not a pony?”
The teacup that Fancy tried to lift to his lips shook violently in his magical grasp, spilling some of its bitter contents. “The box brought forth something like a pony, but its aspect—no, his aspect, was… twisted, to say the least. He seemed to be some kind of potentate of a tantalizing transformed Tartarus.”
Twilight slowly rose to her hooves and walked to the balcony, staring silently out over the darkening city.
“... Princess?”
“You’re familiar with Stygian?” Twilight asked without turning.
“The Stygian? You mean the ancient sorcerer? The one turned bestselling author? The onetime Pony of Shadows?”
“The same,” Twilight answered. “I never should have let him pursue this.” She turned back to Fancy. “He approached me a few years ago about some research he was doing into ancient artifacts. They are his passion… and obsession. The Well of Shade almost consumed Stygian in the past, and I was worried that he might be sliding down a dangerous path again. But he wasn’t asking for much; just a diplomatic dispatch to set up a room that he could work from in our New Asbestos embassy. And I gave it to him. Celestia help me, I gave it to him.”
“Princess,” Fancy said, “are you saying that this Cake Head is none other than Stygian himself?”
“I am.”
“Princess,” Fancy said. “I need your help.” He scrunched his eyes shut. “We must return with haste, I—I left Fleur with him.”
“I can take us there immediately,” Twilight said. “Good thing I attended that party of yours and made a note of the spatial coordinates—”
“Princess,” Fancy said, struggling to rise to his hooves. “Time is of the essence.”
“Right,” Twilight said. “Sorry.”
She ignited her horn and the two vanished in a flash of purple light—
“And what did we find?” Fancy asked in a rhetorical tone. As he paused for dramatic effect, one of his eyes developed an repetitive, involuntary twitch.
“NOTHING!” he shrieked, struggling against his tight white straightjacket. “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!”
“Please Fancy,” Nurse Redheart said, rising from a sterile cushion opposite Fancy’s own. She carefully picked her way around the small white room’s other occupants—including one Screw Loose, whose incessant barking left fellow patient Half Deck rocking back and forth with her forehooves and wings covering her ears. “Please lower your voice,” Redheart said calmly. “You’re disturbing the other residents.”
The frown on Princess Twilight’s muzzle deepened as she watched the ongoing therapy session through a wall-sized one-way mirror. “Doctor Horse, are you sure that committing him was the right decision?”
“In my professional opinion, it’s a good thing you admitted him when you did, Princess,” Doctor Horse said, next to her. “He’s been prone to even more severe verbal outbursts, especially around sweets.” Shaking his head, Doctor Horse lifted a clipboard and looked down at it. “Right after you brought him in, Fancy ruined another resident’s birthday party by throwing the cake on the ground and rambling incoherently about not being ‘a part of this system.’ Most troubling.”
Twilight continued watching as Fancy bucked Nurse Redheart away, struggled harder against his straightjacket, and tried to focus enough magic into his horn to overcome the inhibitor ring that had been attached to it. But the paltry eleven kilothaums that she estimated he was able to channel failed to come anywhere close to the device’s one megathaum limit.
“Ponyville General has one of the best mental treatment programs in all of Equestria,” Doctor Horse added with a subdued smile, clearly meant to put her at ease despite the additional white-coated staff who were swarming the room now, trying to subdue Fancy’s thrashing. “He’s in good hooves.”
“But he hasn’t gotten any better,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “You said it yourself: he refuses to eat anything that might have sugar in it, which makes mealtimes difficult.”
Doctor Horse flipped several pages on the clipboard. “Honestly, Princess… I think we could overcome that issue if we could disrupt his unhealthy fixation on this puzzle box he keeps mentioning. You said that you never found any evidence of it in his residence… are you absolutely sure it isn’t part of his current delusions?”
“I have no reason to doubt him, and every reason to believe him.” She turned her frown on Doctor Horse. “Please keep working with him on his outbursts, his impulsiveness, his self-induced keto diet… but don’t try to tell him that it wasn’t real, unless you want to tell it to me, too.”
“Of course not, Princess.”
Twilight nodded. “Very good. For what it’s worth, I’m actively trying to get to the bottom of what he may have experienced, both for his sake, and Fleur’s, and Stygian’s. I don’t have much to go on, but I’ve sent my best diplomat over to the Dragonlands to investigate some loose ends—”
The blazing heat only served to intensify the stifling atmosphere of the crowded restaurant. Massive temperature differentials created a haze that distorted the appearance of several peculiar items which lay upon a circular table. Illuminated by the mid afternoon sun, a teacup filled with black liquid, a pile of sugar cubes, and an ornate pastry box all sat within the diminishing rays of the day.
A white stallion sat down across from the items and the table’s other occupant.
“What is your pleasure, Mister Blueblood?”