//------------------------------//
// A Glance Behind 
// Story: We Aren't All Monsters 
// by Arctic Inferno 
//------------------------------//

Breezy woke up, his head swimming and eyes stinging with the sudden reintroduction to light. He sat up and made a strange noise- sort of a large inhale of air crossed with a sigh- and stretched out his new limbs. He didn't know precisely why, but doing so felt good, almost satisfactory.

"Good morning." Twilight said with a slight chuckle, causing him to turn his head and look at her. "You slept so soundly last night, it was like you hadn't been asleep for weeks." The Changeling failed to catch the unintentional irony in that statement.
"Yeah..." He said dazily, still not fully awake. She smiled at him and motioned for him to follow her down the stairs.
"Come on, sleepyhead." She said back to him, "You need some breakfast before you set off." He didn't know what breakfast was but he knew one thing; he was unimaginably hungry, as he had set off from the hive mere moments before his secondary feeding of the day. Reluctantly he arose from the bed and trotted down the steps after her.

To his surprise the room she had entered on the lower floor had a table spread out with a number of items of food in bowls and on plates, with two seats, one of which occupied by the lavender unicorn. She was eating one of the pony foods he had learnt about in the hatchery, a sandwich of some kind. He sat down on the seat across from her and picked up a similar sandwich on his plate; it had some kind of vegetation inside of it, which he had at least half-expected, considering he had never actually been told that ponies eat meat like Changelings did. Breezy picked it up and took a bite. It wasn't terrible, but his instincts told him that flower petals weren't something he should be eating and he threatened to choke it up. Forcing it down, he looked up to see her tilting her head and looking at his flank.

"Interesting cutie mark," She commented, "What's your special talent?"
"Special... Special talent?" He paused, thinking back to his lesson on pegasi. They really hadn't told him much about them, other than that the wings were the more painful bits to remove before eating, but he could distinctly remember that they controlled the weather. "Um... I like... water." He said, receiving a confused look in response.
"What do you mean?" She asked quizzically, "You swim or something?"
"Yeah, I swim," He said, "And... uh, I just, you know... Like the rain."
She paused for a moment before speaking again. "Well, that's nice to hear. I quite like the sound of the rain on my window too, in the evening whilst I'm reading."
He listened, pretending to be interested, before she stood up.
"Well," She chirped happily, "Shouldn't keep you! I'm sure you came to Ponyville for a reason, right?"
"Uh, no, actually. Just came for the views and the friendly ponies."
"Well then," Twilight smiled brightly at him, "I hope I've set a good example good far!"
He nodded and thanked her a number of times before stepping out of the door.

Immediately the Changeling fell deep into thought. He had learnt a lot about ponies that could likely help out his race in the coming revolution; like, for example, they ate at set times throughout the day, at least in the morning. But now as he looked back at the treehouse and through a window, he saw the beautiful lavender unicorn sat peacefully on a sofa in her front room and reading from a book, and there was a twinge of emotion from deep down in his black heart. Maybe they didn't deserve to be wiped out?

Breezy cursed to himself and pulled his gaze away from the window. No, of course not, they all needed to be converted or consumed. The Changelings had been hiding in the few shadows available, waiting for the day when they could consume the inferior races in a blanket of darkness and smog, and no amount of pony kindness could make him think otherwise. They had banished his Queen to the depths of an inky blackness in the Crystal Forest thousands of years ago, and now they were about to receive a far worse punishment than that.

Still... the unicorn had been nice to him.

He forced the thought to the back of his mind as he looked around to get his bearings and search for some real food. The sun beat down on a bustling town, and ponies of all colours and breeds trotted along, socialising with each other or just enjoying the weather. He walked through them, receiving little more than a moment's glance from anypony, before branching off from the main street onto a path that led along the edge of a nearby forest. A rabbit hopped onto the path from a bush before him and stopped, sniffing at the ground for a moment. Oh, this would do nicely.


***


Back at the hive, Queen Chrysalis sat at the desk in her room, impatiently tapping on the top of the skull she had exchanged pleasantries with after returning from the hatchery. First some hatchling had tried to dig out of the wall and now this.

Of course, the hatchling had been killed immediately. Minor things weren't worthy of The Punishment, but they still found it necessary to kill them. There were three major benefits she had thought of when she came up with that rule; for starters, the problem was dealt with immediately. Secondly, it set a good example to the other hatchlings. And lastly, they no longer needed to go out and hunt some animals for them to eat, they just needed to toss the disobedient hatchling in the meat tenderiser and let the others feed as they please. She usually took the brain, though. The brain was the best part, and as royalty she deserved only the best.

But now there was yet another issue that had arisen, and that was the intruder. She hadn't heard much past the excitement of her child that had informed her, but what she understood from it was that a filly had been found wandering in the edges of the woods and captured. Apparently it was being taken up to her office now so she could do as she pleased with it.

A Changeling appeared in the door with a quick hiss of respect, revealing its slim black tongue. She nodded and stood up as it nudged a filly into the room and left, shutting the door and leaving the Queen and the new filly alone in the room.
"Hello..." Queen Chrysalis said softly, walking up to it. It was clearly terrified, pushing itself up against the wall as she approached and whimpering. "Do you have a name?"
"U-Um..." It stuttered, petrified, "S-Shimmering S-Skies..."
"That's a lovely name." Queen Chrysalis purred as she lowered her head to face the filly directly. Her mouth opened and a long black tongue snaked out, smoothing across the filly's left cheek and coating it with a thin layer of a glossy, sticky fluid. "So, Shimmering Skies, may I ask why you decided to enter our forest?"
"I-I-I..." The filly was starting to weep silently, "I-I thought I s-saw a bunny when I was w-walking with my m-mama, and I f-followed it..."
"Okay. That's entirely fine." Queen Chrysalis straightened up and walked over to a blank wall of the room.

The filly watched in horror as she opened her mouth and started to do something strange to the wall. It was like a cross between vomiting and licking, forming a lumpy mass of a dark black material on the flat surface with a hole in the top and a number of transparent blobs on it to see the hollow inside. Queen Chrysalis turned and, with a heartless smile, lifted the filly up off the ground and placed her inside of the sac. Shimmering Skies was confused at first but quickly started to panic when Queen Chrysalis sprayed a thick green fluid from a number of spouts hidden under the carapace that made up her abdomen.

Queen Chrysalis stopped spraying when the filly was almost entirely submerged and turned to look at her through one of the transparent gaps. She shushed Shimmering and whispered to her in a reassuring tone,
"Don't worry. You'll be back with mama soon."
Somehow, though, it was far less than reassuring. The Queen broke into a hissy laughter as the filly squirmed a little, quickly being forced down by the liquid as it softened and then quickly hardened like ice. The last thing the filly saw was the Changeling Queen turn her back on the chrysalis cocoon and walk away before it slipped into darkness.