Twilight Sparkle and the Enigma of the Ancient Tome

The weather in Ponyville was calm and cloudy. A couple of big, mischievous clouds schemed to descend as low as they could, threatening to cause fog. Some ponies already started to feel the effects of sleepiness on them.

Pinkie knocked on the door of Twilight’s library and entered without waiting for an answer. “Twilly, where a-a-are you?” Twilight, in fact, was standing next to a lectern, studying a book about artistic applications of optical illusions.

“Oh, hey, Pinkie. How is it going?” Twilight said cheerfully, trotting towards her friend. With some confusion, she continued, “Is that… a book in your saddlebag?”

Pinkie gave the book a suspecting glance and took it with her left hoof. “This, this is a book with ancient curses! It made me fall to the ground!” Pinkie felt a bit anxious while holding the mysterious book, but she found calmness in Twilight’s light, friendly smile.

A purple glow promptly encased the dusty tome. “Let me see,” asked Twilight. Pinkie eagerly helped her to open the tome to the right page.

“Look! This is definitely not a rock, see? And these curvy lines — spo-o-oky! This book is a doozy, I can sense it. Maybe it belonged to a powerful sorcerer, or a vampire.”

Twilight was not too quick to adopt Pinkie’s predisposition. “Pinkie, you know vampires are not real? Let’s take this mystery apart piece by piece.” She looked at the page on the right. “This thing indeed does not seem to be a rock. Actually, I don’t think this is a real object at all. It looks more like some sort of a… scheme. The triangles, squares and hexagons are all connected with line segments, which all connect at right angles.” Twilight touched the scheme with her right hoof and said with some confidence, “Whoever put it here, has to have put it here for a reason.”

“An evil reason!” Pinkie interjected.

Twilight was not scared a bit. “Let’s not jump to a conclusion so early.” She then started to carefully inspect each element of the page. “These scribbles inside the shapes certainly look like… letters, of sorts. And look! The… text next to the scheme seems to consist of similar letters. Pinkie! This is likely a language and I had never seen a language like this before. This book is a great find!”

Staring at her friend’s glowing face, Pinkie was all too happy to relinquish the possession of this otherworldly artifact. “You can take it if you want. I for sure don’t want to color it anymore. Just… please be careful.”

“Thank you, Pinkie! Don’t worry, I will take all the necessary precautions.” Twilight only said that in order to comfort her friend, but it wasn’t technically a lie. She would indeed follow all the necessary precautions — all zero of them.

Twilight then asked Pinkie, “Wait, you said, that you don’t want to… color it anymore? Where did you get this book from?”

Pinkie didn’t really know herself. “Oh, it is from my box of coloring books, the box from the rock farm. Remember I wanted to show it to you?”

Twilight was stumbled by what Pinkie said. She needed confirmation. “This book is from that box?” asked she with disbelief.

“Yup, and I have no idea how it ended up there.”

Twilight realized that not giving Pinkie’s books a glance was a mistake. She also felt a bit downcast. Pinpointing the origin of this relic felt no less important than understanding its contents, but trying to find the original owner of a forgotten old book on a distant rock farm didn’t sound like a fruitful research direction.

“Let’s look at the other pages. There may be clues.” Alas, the other pages generally looked similar to one another and none of them had any obvious clues. They all had intricate schemes, blocks of scribbles, or both. However, one thing stood out. One thing Twilight was quite familiar with. “Pinkie, look! Page numbers! And they use Arabian numerals, too. This means that this book can not be more than two thousand moons old. But I can’t quite put my head around why the next page number after forty-seven is fifty. Maybe there is a page missing?”

Pinkie answered non-enthusiastically. “I don’t know, I certainly did not see any spare pages flying out of it.” However, it was not only 47 and 50. There was a skip between 57 and 60, too, as well as between 67 and 70. However, the most confusing of it all was what followed the page 77.

“One hundred?” Pinkie and Twilight both widened their eyes. “Well, there must be an explanation for this,” continued Twilight. “But what puzzles me the most is what’s on the page.”