A Most Grievous Mistake

He wasn’t an important tsar, not like the one the Bolsheviks did away with. He didn’t rule a sprawling empire or command an army of millions. He was a small actor in the grand theater of world politics. And as he sat in the shadows, his small throne and the small town he commanded were gradually forgotten. Wiped from the collective memory of an ignorant world.

Tsar Irmanas Kahnov, emperor of the forgotten town of Glyburg, somewhere in the northern expanses of the USSR (for nobody could say exactly where the town lay), was benevolent but strict, just but kind. And what he lacked in power, he made up for in enigma.

The people of Glyburg had become accustomed to his mysterioso. And after the Kurie mine incident, they never questioned his decrees. That is, not until the decree banning cupcakes.

“Irmanas, you can’t possibly be this unreasonable,” the Empress-Dowager tried to reason with the Tsar, but he was proving to be characteristically obstinate.

“When have you ever known me to be reasonable, mother dearest?” the Tsar had had a long day. He didn’t like explaining himself to people who were beneath him. And in Glyburg, everyone was beneath him. He waved his hand trying to shoo his mother away, but the crone refused to budge. He felt drained even though it was only noon, he sighed and explicitly asked the Empress-Dowager to take her leave.

“Your people love you, Tsar Irmanas,” her emphasis on his title felt like needles being jabbed into his ears, “but continue with your antics and they will do worse than what the Bolsheviks did to your cousin.” The Empress-Dowager turned on her heels and, in a rush of silken skirts, left him.

“He was not my cousin,” he bit out just as the door to his rooms slammed shut.

Two days after the decree banning cupcakes was announced in Glyburg’s town square, the Tsar’s guards arrived. Every cupcake tin and medium-sized cup was confiscated and thrown into the back of a wagon. All the cupcakes that were already baked were also confiscated – wrapped in brown paper and arranged in neat rows in the back of a different wagon. Any cupcake batter was left with the owner after written testimony that it would be used to make anything other than cupcakes. As the wagons wheeled away to the Tsar’s smallish palace, the townspeople felt a deep unease. If it was cupcakes today, what would it be tomorrow? Pancakes? Cookies? Cake? “Surely, nobody would stand for a ban on cake!” an old-timer exclaimed. “It would cause a revolt,” said a lady clutching her knitting. “It would be disastrous,” cried a teenage boy who only liked the buttercream icing his mother put on her cakes.

Tsar Irmanas swung forward the bookcase in his study to reveal the hidden stairs leading to the basement – and a cold draft bit into his cheeks. He shrugged on the moose-fur coat hanging on the backside of the bookcase – the cooled fur warming with his body, trapping heat in its seams.

His thoughts lingered in front of his lips, in the steam he exhaled as he descended the thirty-three stairs to the first landing. He bunched his coat around himself tighter and descended another thirty-three steps until he reached the basement proper. In front of him lay a large, well-lit space big enough to fit the ballroom of the grand Alexander Palace. For now, it housed the cupcakes confiscated from the excellent people of Glyburg. All two hundred and fifty-four of them. They were housed along the west wall, arranged in neat rows on the shelves, each on its own wooden pedestal, and covered its own glass dome.

A few steps in front of the shelves rested a large rock with an unnaturally flat top. On this unnatural flatness, on a wooden pedestal holding runic carvings, covered with a glass dome larger than the others, lay the most special cupcake in all of Glyburg. In all the world, as the Tsar believed it to be.

Lemon-custard cupcakes had always been his favorite. He would’ve devoured this last one ages ago if it hadn’t been for two reasons:

1. It was the last one his cook, Sergei, had baked before he lost his hands in a card game, and as a consequence lost his mind.
2. It was sentient.

It would seem that the second reason was far important than the first one, but it would not seem so to a person who had known and eaten of Sergei. Although it was the second reason that had made him keep the cupcake hidden.

The last lemon-custard cupcake in Glyburg, the only one of its kind in all the world, called itself Larry. Every time it began speaking, a hum would begin in the air and it lasted until Larry began speaking. Whether the hum came from the cupcake itself or from the universe readying itself to carry out Larry’s missives, the Tsar never truly figured out.

A hum began and before it could reach a fever-pitch, as it sometimes did, it was cut off by Larry silvery voice, “My dear Irmanas, so nice to see you again so soon.”

The Tsar sat on the armchair a few steps in front of Larry, facing him and his legion behind him.

“It was kind of you to rescue my comrades,” Larry continued, “for now that we are together, and with your patronage and protection, we can undertake the task that has been entrusted to us by the Flour Gods of Albynissa!”

“The Flour Gods?” Tsar Irmanas knew in his heart Larry was making this up, but he was not one to question a sentient being he only barely understood. “What task have they assigned you?” Irmanas sounded exactly as puzzled as he felt.

“The taking of the human world, of course.”

And in that instant, the unimportant tsar who had signed away his life to a sentient cupcake knew he had made a most grievous mistake.

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