A vast expanse, often covered in snow, freezing for most of the year, and what little life there is often hides away from the weather where it can. How did Thorax survive that? A changeling, battered and weak, with the closest source of sapient love far, far away, is usually a dead changeling, and the tundra is very unforgiving.
Chapters will be published as I finish them and give them an editing pass or two. I'll try to get at least one a week, but I can't make any promises.
Timeline stretches from shortly after the end of the Changeling Invasion of Canterlot to when Spike discovers Thorax, with maybe an epilogue as a closer. Again, no promises on that last bit.
Note: The prologue is filled with scientific jargon. It should be readable to most, though it might not be the easiest to go through, so I have a summary in the author's note at the bottom just in case. Later parts have narration more befitting Thorax.
Cover image is a crop of a screenshot in the wiki's gallery for The Crystal Empire Part 1.
I remember reading about that experiment. Don't remember the star thing, but it did say that they adopted characteristics more like domestic dogs. I don't think they ever had a fully domesticated fox, but they got pretty close.
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It has been a while since since I read about it. So I might be misremembering some details.
So, I went ahead and looked it up just now, which maybe I should have done before writing that in. Some of the foxes did obtain spotted coats, which may have had a star pattern or shape, I didn't dig that deeply into it.
However, it seems that the foxes that were obtained were from a Canadian fur farm that had been operating since 1800 or so, adding at least a century of selective breeding history, if not necessarily for tameness. The original scientist might not have known, and he died a while back, but the experiment is still ongoing.