It had been three days since the horn-licking fiasco, and Twilight hadn’t slept a wink. It just didn’t make any sense. In the thousands of years of recorded history, how could no pony have ever noticed the flavorful properties of unicorn horns? She had searched through the entire Canterlot Castle library – even the restricted archives – and hadn’t found even a single mention of this aspect of unicorn biology.
Princess Celestia knew nothing about it. Princess Luna knew nothing about it. Not even Starswirl the Bearded seemed to have known anything about it, judging by the lack of any pertinent information in any of his anatomy treatises. She felt like she must be going insane.
Finally deciding to try some experiments of her own, Twilight went down to Sugarcube Corner to pick up several pieces of grape candy. (It seemed like it would be easiest to test the candy-like properties of her own horn first.) But when she got there, she discovered that there was no grape candy to be found.
“Sorry, Twilight!” Pinkie said, sincerely saddened that she was unable to help with this conundrum. “But there’s lots of marshmallow!”
Thanking Pinkie, Twilight bought several pieces of marshmallow-flavored hard candy, figuring that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get Rarity to help her with her studies. But when she got to Carousel Boutique, she found that Rarity wasn’t home.
“I heard her get up late last night, but I’m not sure where she went,” Sweetie Belle informed her. “She left a note saying that she had to go up to Manehattan for some reason, but I guess she’ll be home in a few days.”
So that option was out. As far as she knew, there was no pony else in town who had a marshmallow-flavored horn, so it seemed that she had wasted bits on candy that wouldn’t be any use after all. Or…wait…that wasn’t entirely true. It was candy, after all. Twilight popped a few pieces into her mouth, sucking on them thoughtfully as she walked back to her bedroom in her castle. She really did need to get some sleep, and maybe she could find somepony else to help with her research when she woke up. She fell asleep almost immediately after her head hit the pillow.
At first, when she woke up, she thought she must still be dreaming. She was clearly not in her bedroom anymore, and she seemed to be…strapped down on an operating table? “What’s going on?!” Twilight shouted. “Hello! Is anypony there?!” Growing increasing afraid of what might be happening, she used her horn to loosen the straps and climbed off the table.
Or at least, she would have done that if she could have done that. When she tried to use her magic, she found this to be impossible. The straps didn’t budge even one tiny bit, and now that she thought about it, she couldn’t feel the top of her head at all. “Help! Anypony! Princess Celestia! Help!” she shouted in vain.
Suddenly, a pony wearing a surgical mask and a white lab coat walked through a door that was just barely at the edge of Twilight’s vision and took out a scalpel. “Help!” Twilight called again. The pony merely walked over to some sort of gas tank and turned the handle a few times, forcing Twilight to breathe it in through the mask that was over her own face.
Twilight could tell that this was obviously an anesthetic, but she fought it as hard as she could and managed to stay just barely awake. Not that this actually did much good – the pony, whose features she couldn’t quite identify under the mask, lowered the scalpel to the base of her horn and began to cut. Though Twilight couldn’t see or even feel what was happening, she knew it wasn’t good.
As blood began to pool around the top of Twilight’s head, the surgically-dressed but presumably not surgically-accredited pony took out a small bone saw and began to saw away at Twilight’s horn. “No!” she cried internally. “NO!” But no sound was released and there was nothing that she could do about what was happening. Finally, she fell unconscious again, possibly due more to shock than to the anesthetic.
After several minutes, there was a small “snick” sound as the saw finished cleaving its target and tapped against the table. The pony who had performed the “operation” looked at his handiwork for a moment; then, seeming satisfied, he took out a pile of bandages and quickly pressed them to the spot on Twilight’s head that had previously housed her horn.
Deeming the job good enough, he then walked to the side of the room, dropped the horn into some kind of machine, and pressed the button on the machine’s side. After a minute or so of loud grinding noises, the horn dropped out of the other end of the machine…but now it was in about 20 or so bite-sized pieces. The surgical pony collected these pieces in a jar, then took out a marker and wrote a single word – “Grape.”
“Is it ready yet? My friend Twilight wanted to buy some earlier, so she might come back for it later!” a certain pink pony’s voice called from upstairs.
“Yes, just a second!” Mr. Cake called back, removing his surgical gear and heading back through the door and up into the main lobby of Sugarcube Corner with the jar. Though Pinkie worked there, she wasn’t allowed into the backroom where the candy was made. She just knew that it was delicious!
“Awesome!” Pinkie said happily as she took the jar from Mr. Cake. He froze for a second, noticing that one of the pieces of “candy” still had one or two drops of blood on it, but Pinkie didn’t appear to have seen that. Hopefully none of the customers would, either…
But he shook it off – no pony had ever noticed when that happened before, so it was unlikely that it would happen this time. He went back downstairs and turned the dial on another gas canister. This one would ensure that Twilight would have no memory of what had transpired, and in a few days, after her horn had grown back, she would be returned to her home during the night. For now, her operating table would be housed next to Rarity’s in the supply closet.
It had been a real pain to sneak into the houses of nearly everypony in town, and even Canterlot Castle, over the last few days to wipe their minds of any knowledge of unicorn horn flavorings, but he had done it. And he would continue to do it, for as long as ponies wanted to enjoy tasty candy, they would need him and the other Equestrian candymakers. The job wasn’t always pretty, but this (or some variation on it) was how it had been done for millennia. And this was how it must stay.
The End
