Tranquil and mundane was the wilderness separating Equestria from the Badlands, despite being filled with all manner of chirps, trills, snorts, and crackling. Its inhabitants went about their lives, scavenging, foraging and attempting to woo mates in whatever manner they saw fit, oblivious to the grand happenings of the land they were unknowingly a part of.
The peace was suddenly shattered by a great rumble of thunder. Casual tweets became panicked squawks as everything frantically scurried for cover, utterly startled. Little rodents quickly burrowed, fearful rabbits sprinted, flighty birds took off, and twitchy squirrels fled up trees. The birds of prey, however—not so easily chased from their perches—remained and looked to the sky, their keen eyes quickly noticing the lack of thunderclouds and instead spotting the great pink bubble rapidly expanding from the castle-bearing mountain. Of these, only a few also noticed the large, black, equine-shaped figure hurtling through the blue sky...
Wind tends to make a lot of noise. This is especially noticeable near trees, as it rustles their leaves, near buildings, as it whistles around them, and near any manner of hollow cavity. The latter, depending on the size of the cavity, tends to produce a deep or shrill whistle that reverberates and echoes. Experimenting with this phenomenon was how wind instruments were invented.
Thus, as Chrysalis sailed across the sky at a definitively dangerous speed, her hooves, littered with holes as they were, surprisingly caused her to produce a sound not unlike a symphony of flutes.
Though most would be quite thrilled—or at least amused—at such a discovery, the changeling queen was certainly not. Her mind was utterly elsewhere, still reeling from the events leading to her being inadvertently airborne.
WHAT MAGIC WAS THAT!? Her foremost thought was an understandable one. There she’d been, lavishing in her successful invasion of Canterlot, when the silly alicorn she’d impersonated and her dopey stallion of a husband-to-be randomly touched horns and categorically expelled her from the castle with some manner of love magic. One second, she was trotting about the throne room and the next, she’d been through a window—or had it been a wall?—and was hurtling through airspace at a velocity she’d never be able to normally achieve.
I was patient. I was careful. I was PRECISE! I’d done everything I could and they didn’t stop me. WHY DID THEY WIN? What was that spell? How does it work? Why haven’t they ever used it before?
Realizing she probably wouldn’t find the answer to her questions until much later, if at all, she set on deciding what should be her next move. First, she needed to land. Who knew when that was going to happen. Then she’d need to get her—
PWOMF!
Chrysalis felt like she’d just shattered her entire carapace and rammed her head into stone when she first crashed into the ground. The world began spinning wildly before she felt her left side get pummelled, then her right… or back, then head, then back limbs… or were those her front? The disorienting battering continued for several nausea and concussion-inducing seconds more before she finally, mercifully, came to a stop.
She lay still for a few minutes, breathing erratically, head spinning wildly, every part of her body throbbing in pain from the catastrophic landing. Eventually, once her dizziness subsided, she mustered up the will to move. She tried once to get to her hooves before collapsing with an anguished yelp, her muscles aching in protest.
Hnnnngngng!! No! No... too much. Can’t… can’t move... yet.
A few minutes and attempts later, she finally managed to sit up and observe her surroundings, albeit with bleary eyes. A semi-barren plain greeted her, with little greenery and plenty of sand and dirt. Long, thick furrows were visible in the ground from where she’d slid and tumbled before stopping. The edge of a forest was a few minutes’ walk away—she’d barely cleared its canopy. Far in the distance, she thought she could make out a slight pink tinge lingering in the sky, but couldn’t be sure if it was a trick of her eyes. She was lucky she hadn’t struck a boulder or tree when she landed; her demise would have been all but certain then. But one observation stood out among all the others…
She was alone.
Three-thousand-four-hundred-and-sixty drones had been a part of that invasion, yet none were in her vicinity. Two causes for this immediately came to mind. First, she was much heavier than the average drone, so the spell probably launched her significantly farther than any of them. Second, they were shot off in all directions, and considering how far she’d travelled, she estimated that even changelings whose trajectories were a mere degree apart likely landed kilometers from each other. She would have to find them, regroup and…
And what?
The thought crashed through her like a hammer through a rotten wall. She hadn’t planned to fail this invasion and certainly not so spectacularly. Nearly two years of scheming, careful resource management, espionage, and drone training had gone into this invasion—now all for naught. And here she was, far from her hive, far from her prize, and devoid of any of her subjects.
All because of some completely asinine, terrifyingly powerful, impossible-to-predict love spell by a sickeningly pink alicorn and her laughably idiotic unicorn husband.
Her howl of fury and anguish to the heavens, promising horrible retribution, scared every bird from the trees for miles around.