Tear Stains and Ink Blots

by hollowstygian

Rating: everyone
Tags: Stygian, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Drama
Length: 2116

Stygian struggles with the writing process--and something else.

Writer's block: what a foul enemy. But is it worse than Star Swirl the Bearded himself? Stygian is struggling with life in the era of Twilight and co., and he's not helping himself any.

Published 2023-09-30 20:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-09-30 20:50:01 UTC

Tear Stains and Ink Blots

Stygian’s desk, floor and bed were covered in paper, half typewritten and half hoofwritten in his tiny, cramped, meticulous writing, so tense that it threatened to pierce the paper in a few places. It was a ‘second draft’ of sorts, but it had the continuity issues of a first draft with more holes than his old, moth-eaten cloak. It needed immense amounts of work to come together into something even remotely cohesive. It begged attention.

The small grey unicorn responsible for the haphazard mess was crouched over a board of Whisk, biting his lip and plotting the best way to take his opponent (himself) down in a blaze of lackluster glory. He’d swiped the box from one of Twilight’s friends—the pink one—when no pony was looking before he’d been promptly escorted away to out of sight, out of mind, and he was rapidly getting more and more invested in the little cupcake pieces and less and less focused on the half-baked novel lying scattered around his house. He hopped over the board each time the turn changed to simulate the experience of playing with an actual, living-breathing pony instead of himself meekly pretending to be the main character from his half-forgotten novel. It felt marginally less pathetic to him than the alternative.

Whisk was simply the latest in a long line of distractions Stygian had found intercepting his efforts to make progress on his book. Just two days ago, he’d read a very large book, entitled Neigh of the World, in two sittings and hadn’t written a single word down on paper for the duration. Crumbs of various scones and sweets he’d bought from the Steamer Café with the intent of asking Rockhoof over to share were scattered across the floor. He’d been dejected when the stallion had turned his company down, even though he had every right to begrudge Stygian his company. He had swallowed his anger and his grudge along with the cherry turnovers, still warm. What had he been expecting? The sweet cherries did an adequate job of smothering his frustrations temporarily, but they didn’t take long to return with a vengeance. The other Pillars may have been as out of time as he, but they were still being showered with affection and admiration. The ponies who’d brought them back, Twilight and her overly enthusiastic friends, were in regular contact with them.
As usual, they’d forgotten about him entirely.

I’m not bitter. It’s only to be expected that they’d forget about a slip of a unicorn like me. It’s not like I made a good impression.

Stygian—or rather, his protagonist Sand Dollar—slammed a party cannon down on the wooden board with a loud thunk. Try as he might to hide his annoyance, it coursed through his body along with his blood, heating his temper with each pulse. Forgotten. Was his fate to be anything else?

Irritated, Stygian rattles two sets of dice around in the dice cup, acting as two. Part of his rage about being forgotten so quickly in favour of the Pillars—Ages may come and pass, but some things never change, he thought wryly, then realized with a start that he’d been thinking about Neigh of the World again—was more than evident in his writing. There were scenes composed of words thoroughly soaked in angry blood, fury being transmuted into words that described heinous acts. It was a bit like trying to dig a hole into soft sand, but even the mild comfort it created brought a slight relief from his lot.

Stygian moved a party cannon onto the space labeled Vanhoover—he’d never heard of the place—with a final thud. With a resigned sigh he returned to the nearest sheaf of paper, desperate to accomplish something that wasn’t beating himself at a board game, and grabbed a quill with his magic.

He didn’t actually accomplish much with his chosen sheaf. He read over the words he’d written in frustratingly cramped writing, pressed so hard that the backside of the paper was embossed.

While he admitted his writing was sounding pretty decent, this did nothing to jog his creative muscle and push him to continue. Instead he found himself crouched back over the Whisk board before he even knew what he was doing, pulling little cupcake ‘infantry’ out of the wooden box and letting them clack in his hoof. Ideas were elusive.

This is all Starswirl’s fault, he thought wryly. He’d taken to doing that lately, blaming everything even remotely inconvienient on Starswirl. It was easy. Stygian’s grudge ran deep, regardless of what Twilight and the others tried to tell him. While he’d been gullible enough to listen to the Shadows, that didn’t change the fact that Starswirl had driven him to them in the first place, and that while him and the other pillars had been widely celebrated on their return, he’d just slunk back into the shadows like usual. After day five, even Twilight, who championed friendship and acceptance above all else, had more or less forgotten that he was alive.

That’s fine. Stygian was handling it just fine. Alone was okay. Alone was good.

He was absolutely not about to press one of his heavily dented sheets, smelling of ink, to his face to staunch his tears.

He wasn’t crying.

Stygian didn’t cry. He never cried. He couldn’t. The Shadow took that from him.
The ink started to run down the page and onto his face, wet with tears.
He’d been given this little apartment in Canterlot by the princesses’ good graces, but once he’d been settled there they more or less forgot about his existence. Writing was helping him relieve that pain, most days, but on days like today when the block was up that pain had nowhere to go except into his tearducts and through his heart like a shard of glass. It was days like these where his solitary board games only served as a crisp reminder of all that he had perhaps never had, but certainly didn’t anymore.

Before he knew it Stygian was lying on his side, oblivious to the sharp wooden cupcakes sticking into his side, face thoroughly squished into a piece of paper whose contents were fast becoming illegible. The smell of the ink was making the threat of an ache ring in his forehead, but that paled in comparison to the wrath of his raging sobs. His chest was heaving, making him struggle for breath. He just kept reliving it, running the same scenarios over and again in his head. Meeting Starswirl only to be crushingly disappointed. Being ignored during the designation of the Pillars. The day the Shadows first spoke to him—he regretted that day so much, but the pain had already mounted so high. The shadows had been so persuasive. He had been long gone by the time they got to him.
He could feel the knawing of guilt in his stomach again.

He remembered the millennium in Limbo worst of all, because he had retained only just enough consciousness to know how the Shadow was working, how it was destroying his body, how it was consuming his every waking thought until even the kernel of Himself, of Stygian, inside him was feeling half dissolved.

He owed Twilight, as much as she seemed to have forgotten all about the incident. Oblivion was suffocating.
After a solid half hour of weeping all over his second draft, Stygian roused himself just enough to crawl over to where his latest bakery treasure was sitting. Apple strudel, golden brown and flaky, still slightly warm from when Cinnamon Breeze, the baker, had taken them out of the oven and placed them in a small bag for Stygian’s pleasure. It cheered him up a little; the warm spice of the cinnamon almost warmed his heart a small bit, and the crisp and juicy apple slices were soft and comforting. The pastry flaked slowly, tasting like pure butter, warmth, and sunlight. Stygian closed his eyes to appreciate the sweet pastry, and for a short while the weight on his chest lifted just a tiny bit.

It was one of those instances that he wished would last forever. But, like all good things, soon enough the strudel was nothing more than a few more wayward crumbs scattered on the floor. Stygian was left cold and let down.
Eternal pastries would have been nice. If the Shadow had offered him that, who knows whether or not he would have surfaced.

Shaking his head a few times, Stygian sat up in his chair again, wincing at the crinkling sound coming from his second draft under his flank. His cloak had been all scrunched up, revealing the bottom third of his cutie mark, a dark circle and the tip of a triangle serving as an unwanted reminder. Not wanting to face the indigo sigil of shadow again, he pushed his cloak back down. What kind of pony is afraid of his own cutie mark? A cutie mark was supposed to represent yourself, your very essence. If you hated your essence, where did that leave you? Maybe that was the root of Stygian’s problems. He wasn’t in the mood to do some philosophical healing. Why couldn’t it have been a quill, or a book, or anything else? Why did I have to be saddled with the ancient Equestrian emblem of darkness and shadows?

He started scratching the quill against the paper with zeal, held in a cyan glow, before he even knew it. The overflow of emotions from earlier was arriving in a scene, only thinly disguised by an adjustment of circumstances (barely) and a haphazard filing of serial numbers that ensured it did not mark himself for what he really was. A corrupt traitor. As often as he stared blankly during his writing sessions, he found that this was the best way to vent the ever-building frustrations of his situation. More effective than Whisk or any other board game he’d tried (he dimly remembered pouring ten hours into Settlers of Canterlot one day over a warm tea, before he came to the horrified realization), perhaps not on the fun factor but certainly regarding his emotional stability. Since the latter was fragile at the best of times, writing had proved the only way to keep for himself at the very least a modicum of sanity. Words were a serviceable way to relieve the pressure of failure if even for a short while.

Stygian sighed and reached for the cup of warm cinnamon tea he’d bought along with the strudel. It had gotten a bit cold, but it still slid down his throat with a certain comfort. He looked down at the paper, and found with a surprise that he’d added a lot to it. Granted, most of it was his emotional outpourings with only the dinky skin of his story to disguise them, but he felt better. There was a few pieces of substance in the ramblings, to be sure. Stygian felt his heart warm slightly, and started to wonder about maybe getting up and going for a walk. To soak in the sunlight after so long in the shadow would be a welcome change of pace.

Five minutes later, Stygian was chugging down the last of his tea and assigning territories to him and his sworn opponent, himself.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the fic.

Once again I took metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper to vent my frustrations with how little love Stygian received after his only one episode appearance. This fic is another attempt to take matters into my own hands, and a lot of what he refers to is a reflection of my own dissatisfaction regarding his portrayal in the show (or lack thereof).

A few quick (read: not-so-quick) notes: Whisk and Settlers of Canterlot are parodies of our games, obviously, but these particular reditions of them came from the light novel 'Princess Luna and the Winter Moon Festival.' While the mention is only brief (one page), I tried to emulate their appearance as well as possible here. Stygian playing Risk--or rather Whisk--against himself is a funny habit taken directly from my childhood when I used to play Risk and sometimes other games against my own beloved My Little Ponies.

Also: Stygian's cutie mark has never been canonically confirmed, so I put my own headcanon in. The symbol I'm referring to, an upside-down triangle with a circle juxtaposed with each side, is what I've chosen for him in my own works. It's the emblem of the Shadow Medallion from the video game Ocarina of Time, which is appropriate enough. I loosely integrated it into pony lore.