//------------------------------//
// Further Mysteries. Further Answers. 
// Story: Beginnings 
// by Ironthread 
//------------------------------//

	The place was enormous. Cold Scent had seen it from the outside, of course, but that never really prepared him for the scale on which the Palace of Friendship was built. Or grown. Honestly, he had no idea what had happened to bring the place into existence. It had just… appeared one day.
Twilight was already a few steps ahead of him by the time she noticed he had stopped. She walked back, leaned over, and gently closed Cold Scent’s gaping mouth. “It is quite impressive, isn’t it? I’m almost certain the inside is bigger than it ought to be, but I’ve never tried measuring it. Now that would be an interesting experiment, I’ll have to look into… but that’s not why we’re here, is it? Come, I’ll show you the case.”
Cold Scent managed to tear himself away from the sight the castle’s swooping arches and crystalline halls and followed the princess to a secluded reading area piled high with tomes that looked older than Celestia, and probably were.
“This is what I’ve been investigating for the last few months. Ever since I started to understand the mechanics behind making new magic, I got into some of these very early theory books. I always thought the magic of fairy stories had been dreamt up by amateurs or non-unicorns with only a vague understanding of the subject, but look at some of these!”
Giddy as a schoolfilly about to have her first sleepover, she levitated down at least a dozen books, each looking like archaic version of a common story. Cold Scent caught “Cynderella,” “Jak and the Beenstalk,” and a few other Early Modern Equestrian spellings of fairytales embossed on the covers, flakes of long-ago-worn-away gold leaf still clinging to some of the letters. Each story, he noticed, featured magic very prominently.
Twilight, meanwhile, had a smile the size of a dinner plate. “Starswirl mentioned something about living transmogrification in some of his notes, which is nearly impossible, but it seemed like he could do it… and that got me thinking about Cinderella. Then I realized - what if the magic in those stories were true? What then? And most importantly, where did that magic go?”
Cold Scent was barely managing to keep track of the thread of Twilight’s thinking. “So, what, you want me to track down missing spells?”
“No, no, I’ve tried to recreate the spells already. They’re not missing, the magic is. The stuff that made those spells possible - poof! Gone! I don’t even fully understand how, or why, but someone has actually stolen magic.”
“And you think I can help?”
“I tried to figure out what happened myself, but… Well. I’m not a detective. I can research well enough, but this? I don’t even know where to start. You’re trained to get answers out of old text and dead people’s testimonies.”
“Okay.” In that moment, Cold Scent realized something. “Just one more thing. Will this count as work hours?”
Twilight giggled. “I’m a princess. I think your superiors will be willing to be a bit accomodating.”

***

Cold Scent slumped back in his chair. He had been looking through pages of Twilight’s carefully ordered notes, attempting to approach this like a normal case. Petty crime and larceny indeed, he thought to himself, smiling slightly at the irony. But someone has stolen something, haven’t they? It’s just not something people normally steal.
He looked back to his desk. He had decided to begin with the facts. The closest thing to that, he found, were the fairytales Twilight had suggested he look into. It was surprisingly like what he normally did - whittling down a whole load of conflicting information to the few pieces he could be sure were right - and he had made some progress. His notes, a disorganized black scrawl next to Twilight’s perfect purple cursive, sat in front of him, his inkwell staining them slightly as it rested atop the parchment. 
He frowned, staring adversarially at his scribblings. They were annoyingly vague. After a thousand or more years of history, information got terribly warped. He traced stories back to the earliest editions he could, thanks to the libraries at the Palace of Friendship, but even those were usually in other languages or mostly lost. And there had almost certainly been an enormous amount of corruption through oral propagation before that. It was maddening.
He sighed, shuffling around more papers, attempting to organize the desk, if not his mind. Despite his attempts, he still barely understood what was going on. The core of this case was in the magic, and Cold Scent still had only a basic understanding of what magic even was, let alone what it could do or how it worked.
Time for a crash course in magic, I suppose. And there’s only one good option for that.

***

“You’re kidding.” The mare said, looking at Cold Scent with incredulity.
“I assure you, m’am, I am not kidding.”
“Not in one of the classes, surely?”
“Whatever works.”
Cold scent had gotten a great deal of experience dealing with people who were clearly in the wrong place. This was, perhaps, the first time he had been on the other side of that altercation. The difference here being that he was in the right place, if only this secretary would listen.
He sighed, and looked up at the mare behind the desk. “Look, It’s for a case, so I can write it off as work expenses. Charge as many bits as you like. All I need is the basics, like you give to the foals that come here.”
“I’ll… see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
Cold Scent walked out of the little schoolhouse, passing a sign bearing the words Magic Kindergarten in a cheerful, technicolor sans-serif. It was only when he was looking back at the place when walking off that the concept that he had just enrolled there really dawned on him. It had, he only just realized, been a very odd day.