Puzzle Master

By Night Shine

• November 3, 2013




Age: 30

Gender: Male

Species: Earth Pony

Appearance: A relatively tall stallion with a midnight-blue coat and red eyes, the latter accentuated with a translucent-red monocle over his left eye. He wears an expensive pitch-black coat, and a watch on his left foreleg.

Cutie Mark: A black king chess piece. This symbolizes how he views the all of life as a chess game, and that while he is not very dangerous alone, he has extremely powerful allies. This also symbolizes his fascination with the darkness within ponies, which he constantly tries to bring to the surface.

Personality: Very calm and collected, yet also an extremely unsettling presence. He constantly analyzes the flaws in anyone he speaks with, so that any conversation with him quickly turns into a high-stakes game that is not easily won. While he hides under a guise of cultured politeness, his motivations and methods are closer to those of Discord that to those of any other pony...except his methods are much more subtle.

Backstory: No one knows what led him to possess such a twisted mindset, but his 'backstory' primarily relates to his little brother, Soul Shade. Puzzle Master spent many years psychologically abusing his little brother as an experiment, and when Discord flipped everyone's personalities upside down (during "The Return of Harmony"), his timid brother became The Shadow, who unleashes Soul Shade's magical potential by haunting other ponies' dreams. Puzzle Master decided that this "Shadow" was a much more useful minion than Soul Shade, so he convinced the Shadow to lock Soul Shade away within the depths of his mind; when the Elements of Harmony restored the world, the Shadow was able to live on and became one of Puzzle Master's most reliable minions.