Chapter 5 - Questionable motives
He hit the ground hard and scrambled back to his feet. Something warm and wet ran down his forehead, but he paid it no mind. He rushed off and turned around a stalactite. The ground was a chaotic mess—here an ancient stone slab, there on the ground the remains of an ancient rock fall. He could not tell how old these ruins actually were. Not even the changelings who were trapped down here could tell for certain.
And the colossal undead dragon.
Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yes, that was the monster of the hour that Handy was currently running from. We can get to it in a second once Handy had a moment to catch his breath. He heard the creature roar, and somewhere in the cavernous expanse that was the underground city, he saw the darkness light up as blue flame ran down some ancient street far to Handy’s right. He heard the buzzing screams of changelings as they fled the giant, skeletal death machine. It couldn’t fly, but that was small comfort considering the beast moved far faster than anything that size had any right to.
He skidded to a halt and kicked in the stone doorway of a small house. The slab door was ancient and thin and easily gave way as he dove inside. He crawled up against the wall and sat there for a moment, panting hard. He heard a long, low growl, like a howling wind that reverberated up his street as a heavy weight crushed the rock beneath it. He glanced down at the blue glowing pendant he had taken off of the queen. The thing glowed a light, pulsating blue. He hurriedly hid it under his robe and covered it up. The colossal footfalls continued. He heard the growling grow intense, and the wall he was sitting against vibrated. The dragon was right outside his hiding spot!
He clasped against his mouth, for he could not afford to be found now. The creature spoke—some horrible mockery of a language he couldn't possibly comprehend, too ancient and too warped by the balefire twisted skeletal skull from which it poured forth. Whatever it said, it then moved off, its ponderous weight crushing the ground beneath it as Handy let go of a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. How did it come to this?
--=--
So this all started with Handy waking up in a vat of green goo.
It was a strange. He wasn’t sure how to describe it. He felt… happy… sad… angry? He felt everything all at once, but it also felt… muted… as if he was groggy but without actually feeling as such. It was then his waking mind realized he was subsumed in liquid and he would probably need to breathe soon. He thrashed uselessly, his movements slow and cumbersome in the viscous substance. After a few moments of struggling, he realised it was without good cause. Breath or no breath, he didn't appear to be drowning.
“It’s awake!” a buzzing voice which echoed strangely in his ears announced. He reached out, and his hands felt something soft yet firm. He pushed off against it and turned himself around. He was upside down but now at least he was facing a kind of translucent cover. There was a pair of those creatures looking at him, the blue shields on their eyes gone. One had blue irises with feminine lashes; the other had purple and possessed a strong jaw. “It should still be asleep!”
“We need to make the Queen aware of this,” the other one, the more feminine one, said. Again with this ‘Queen’. What were these things?
“Make me aware of what?” another voice cut in, and Handy immediately saw the eyes of the two creatures before him were covered with the same blue shell from before, flicking from some unseen hiding place within their faces as they whipped around and bowed. Handy could barely see a foot in front of him as it was through the green gunk. He sure as hell couldn’t make out whatever was speaking from the darkness beyond his captors. Anyway, from his perspective, he could barely make out his two jailers, but they quickly became woefully insignificant before the tall, striding horse that came before him. Yes, horse—this creature was taller than the others, much taller, and so thin as to look almost sickly.
It had a long horn upon its head, which was twisted and vicious-looking, and had a green shell worn about its back just below its insectoid wings. Unlike most of the other creatures he had seen, it possessed a mane and a tail. The hair was slick, long, and turquoise. Although it was hard to tell from Handy’s position, oddly enough, its hair had holes in much the same way parts of its body did. ‘Are these creatures alright?’ Handy asked himself. ‘That can’t be healthy.’ Then he remembered these creatures had kidnapped him, knocked him out, stuck him in a tank of drugs that made him feel extremely uncomfortable and confused, and so decided he desired for them all the suffering in the world.
“Mistress!” one of the creatures spoke. “Milady Chrysalis! The creature has woken!” The creature referred to as Chrysalis raised an imperious eyebrow at the smaller creature before turning to look at Handy. Her eyes seem to widen as she saw a wide-awake Handy glaring at her from inside the pod. She, he corrected himself, was close enough for him to discern the feminine features that the equines of this world possessed, horrible, hole-ridden, leper beasts or otherwise.
“Interesting. It should be asleep, having lovely dreams, and expressing enough love to feed the pair of you. Is this the creature the scout spoke of?” the queen asked.
“Yes, my liege lady,” said one of the guards, both of whom had backed off and now stood behind her. The queen raised a black, hole-ridden hoof and tapped the screen. Handy felt a reverberation through his fleshy prison, and he grabbed his head. The chemicals in the goo had reacted and were having a larger effect on him, resulting in a major headache. The creature tapped the screen again, a frown on her face. More pain. Handy had had enough, and he lashed out at the screen, flaying at the fleshy substance uselessly. The Queen recoiled at the display of violence, shock evident in her face.
“Fascinating. It does not react the way it should. That should have calmed him… And Thorax said she could not feel anything from the creature, even when it seemed to display emotion?” Chrysalis asked, head turned to the guards but her eyes still lingering on the captive, angry human. He tried to speak, but words would not leave his mouth.
“Yes, my Queen!”
“Hmmm…” she mused as her horn began to glow. She placed the tip against the pod Handy was in, and immediately he felt a pressing pain around his head. His mouth opened in a soundless scream as the goo around him vibrated violently. He clutched his head and began pulling at his hair, lights flashing behind his eyes, the pain distracting him from the immense pressure building up in the back of his mind. “Nothing…” the queen whispered, almost disappointed. Handy did not hear it, his mind too relieved that the pain had stopped. “Feed the pod different mixtures. I want this creature broken and eating out of my hoof,” Chrysalis commanded, walking back into the shadows. She turned briefly to look at Handy once more. “And order Thorax to the throne room. I wish to reward her. If this creature had fallen into those accursed pony hooves, I shudder to think what they could do if they weaponized… whatever it is that prevents us feeding off of him.” She disappeared once more into the darkness beyond the pod's limited field of vision.
“Yes, my Queen,” one of the creatures answered before returning to face Handy. It smiled.
The next three days of Handy’s life were made an absolute hell, and what went through his mind was best left undescribed. Had you ever had a bad acid trip? No? Well neither had Handy. And that was the closest approximation to what he experienced as the creatures kept changing and upping the dosage and volatility of the mixture he was suspended in. During his lucid moments, he realised the nails of his hands had been filed down and that he had been stripped of most of his accoutrements with the exception of his ruined jeans, suffering indignity on top of injury. He resented the creatures so much.
His stomach rumbled, for he had not properly eaten during his stay in the pod, and it was becoming a bit of a problem. He needed something to eat. Badly. Whatever this goo was, ingesting it in no way satisfied his hunger. He eyed the walls of his prison viciously and punched it to no effect. His impotence seemed to amuse his jailers. Many of the creatures stopped by and chatted while observing the ‘strange creature they couldn’t feed off of.’ Handy honestly had no idea what they were talking about. He clearly saw some of the creatures consume pieces of bread normally, and last time he checked, he was made out of food. If these damn monsters wanted to eat him, why didn’t they just eat him! No, they would rather keep him here and play guinea pig!
On the second day, during a lapse in the torture, he noticed one of the creatures before him. Its eye shields retracted, revealing a pair of chartreuse irises that scrutinized him. He scowled down at the creature, having long since righted himself in the pod. “I don’t get it,” the creature said. “You are Heartless, so why did you bother saving me back on the road?” Handy glared down at the creature. It was Thorax, or was that Charity Bell? Oh, he didn’t know how to answer that question. Especially not now when he desired nothing more than to wring the tiny changeling’s neck until it died.
Yes, that was what they called themselves, for he had listened to their inane prattling when they talked before his prison. He smiled at the irony of it all. Changelings, creatures that traded places with loved ones in peoples’ lives and grew powerful from the love and attention of the clueless saps while the real individual was kidnapped and brought beneath the earth to the realm of the Good Folk. He had been kidnapped by what was tantamount to pony faeries and that, more than anything, enraged him further. It was insulting! He was a Milesian! Vanquisher of the fae folk! Conquerors of the veiled isle! God's own barbarians! Warrior poets and sainted scholars! That was Handy’s patrimony!
Or was it? He wasn’t entirely sure any more. His mind went to… such strange and foreign places… and it felt so long ago now….
He soon forgot about Thorax’s presence as the torture started up again, and time became meaningless before his suffering. After the third day, it had finally subsided, and Handy woke up from his dreamless sleep, wondering if he had even slept at all. It was silent. He turned about. None of the changelings were around. He felt the pod shift occasionally, but it was only light movements. The scenery before him didn’t change at all, so he wasn’t moving. Perhaps some of the changelings were working on construction nearby. There certainly did not seem to be any of the bastards here today.
His stomach rumbled with intolerable violence. He needed something to eat. Now. He had been stuck in here for over three days with nothing to eat, and his mind had conjured strange thoughts over that period that took all of his willpower to suppress. Strange, dark, forbidden thoughts. He observed his prison once more and reached out a hand to touch the fleshy wall of his pod. ‘Could…’ His stomach growled. ‘Could I eat… this?’ His mouth opened—it would be salivating at the thought as he stared at the wall deliriously. He tried grasping at it with his hands. His fingers dug into it in places, but he could not tear it off. He needed something sharp, something to cut into it and tear it off, something like—
Handy fell upon the wall and thrashed, his teeth tearing into the fleshy wall with the rabid strength of a starving man. He grabbed it with his canines and pulled back with all his might, tearing off a long section of the wall which he immediately feasted upon. It tasted meaty and was strange, lean, yet tender. Sweet almost. He enjoyed it immensely as he tore back into the section of the wall he had ripped open. It. Was. Heavenly. He had already taken large strips of the meat off the wall. It was thin, frustratingly so! He needed more!
He stopped his feasting as he came to a hard substance with strange grey meaty paste coating it, not unlike that found on a cooked salmon once you took off the skin. He ate that too as he pressed against the hard shell. Another shake of the ground rumbled the pod, and he was surprised he could actually hear it coming from the hard shell, his drug and pain addled mind not fully comprehending the implications of his actions. He heard a large door slam and righted himself in the pod to look out the translucent screen.
He saw the Queen, Chrysalis, in apparent distress. She was panting heavily and her horn was aglow, lifting heavy objects to place against the door behind her. She then began looking for something in among the pods upon the raised section of flooring Handy was imprisoned on. Handy’s mind sobered up. 'It’s her…’ He growled as vengeful thoughts filled his battered consciousness.
“Come on, come on, where is it?” he heard her mutter as she drew closer to his pod. Handy looked at the wall he’d been munching on. Food could wait. He had an idea. Chrysalis searched around yet another pod. A blue pendant hung about her neck.
“No!” she hissed, moving another empty pod up to look underneath it. “No! Scales! Where is it!?” she cried. She trotted back and forth, only coming to a stop when her hooves caused a splash. Looking down, she saw pod goo on the floor. “What in the…” She followed the goo to its source and saw it leaking out of the side of a pod. “That’s no—” she began but did not finish, for at that moment, the side of the pod exploded outward and covered the exhausted royal in the gunk as two grasping appendages reached out towards her widening eyes.
Handy had a few hard rules he stuck to in his life. Never do drugs, never smoke, drink only when it was appropriate and social—one rule he had clearly broken for God knew what reason. Most importantly, never, ever lay his hands on a woman. Mama Handy didn’t raise no barbarian after all. Pity she hadn’t taught him the other aspects of chivalry, but being a child of the twentieth century, he took what he could get. However, three days subjected to emotional and mental torment had a way of… loosening one’s inhibitions, as it were. Well, that and blinding, seething rage.
Handy’s fingers closed about the throat of the startled changeling like iron, as his right fist clasped tightly about her horn and twisted. He took advantage of the pony’s surprise. She had made the mistake of rearing up slightly when he had laid hold of her, so there was little physical effort necessary to swing her from her slick hooves, unable to keep their grip on the now soaked floor as the changeling slammed into the hard ground. All the while, the human screamed an inarticulate roar of hatred into the creature’s face. Handy slipped and his weight momentarily slammed against the queen, causing a squeal of pain. As he forced himself back up, he placed his knee pressed against the base of her neck.
Chrysalis struggled in terror and flailed her hooves, kicking the side of Handy’s legs, but the angle was bad and did nothing. Her horn glowed as she prepared to use magic. Handy roared again, his grip tightening about her throat and horn as he raised her head and slammed it back against the cold ground. Chrysalis was dazed and struggled to breathe. Her horn fired up again, and Handy slammed her back down again. She was more compliant after that. Her breath was low and ragged, and the one eye facing the human looked up at the creature fearfully as he held her there, entirely at his mercy.
He leaned in close and hissed his hatred at her, only one side of her face able to see him in her current position. Her pupil narrowed to a pinprick as her eye widened at the sight of his teeth. He was entirely covered in the goo from the pod. The orange and green ambient lighting of the room cast his face in shadows and clashing hues. His hair slick with the stuff further darkened his visage, giving him a truly nightmarish appearance before the vulnerable parasitoid.
“You have…” Handy’s words were slow and slurred, the numb muscles of his mouth and jaw struggling to obey him, “one chance… to live…” He must have sounded intimidating because the changeling’s one eye widened. “Tell me… what I want to know… and I won’t… snap… this!” Handy pulled at Chrysalis’ horn, causing her to squeal and mewl. He thought he saw her eyes watering, but at that moment, the red mist covered his vision and he cared not for a damn thing in the world. “And I’ll stab you in the heart! Am I understood, creature!?” he demanded. The queen hesitated, but when Handy growled again, she started nodding.
Handy lessened his death grip on the pony’s throat. It was armoured like the rest of her, but it was also soft and malleable, allowing him to get a nice tight grip. She coughed. “Wha-What… are you?” she asked weakly. Handy hissed as he pulled at her horn again.
“Did your precious spy not tell you!? I am human! A Milesian! I am Handy and you, your Majesty, have been subjecting me to unlawful imprisonment and torture!” he hissed. “I did not appreciate that…” He stopped pulling at the creature’s horn as she whimpered once more. “Where am I!?” he demanded. His hand gripping her throat snatched at a pulsating blue gem she was wearing about her neck almost as an afterthought before resuming its position.
“You’re in my kingdom! This is our ancestral home! The city of Lepidopolis! W-We just reclaimed it!” she cried. Handy sighed.
“And where is this... Lepidopolis?” he asked almost casually as something like calm, but not quite, returned to his voice. It was a dead tone of voice with no warmth in it.
“Western Badlands! We were driven from here centuries ago! I-I needed something to give my people hope after…” The queen trailed off as anger tinged her voice. “A-After I failed…” Handy growled back down at her, and she immediately came back to attention.
“How did I get here!?” he hissed.
“Teleported! We can’t use active spells in Equestria without being detected with their new defences, so we have portable rituals that allow my servants to evacuate their positions in emergency!”
“And that leads right back her to your capital?” Handy asked before chuckling darkly. “And suppose one of these emergency extractions were discovered by your enemy? They’d have a back door to march a battalion on your home streets!” he sneered. Chrysalis’ eye stared off into nothing, and he could see her mouth the word ‘no’ as the realization hit her. These ponies and their foolishness!
She looked back up at Handy. He felt her move her hooves a bit and pressed his knee down on her lower neck as a warning. She stayed still but was looking up at the human curiously. “H-How… How did you escape?”
“I was hungry,” Handy said simply.
“But you shouldn’t have been! The goo should have sustained any pony!”
“I am not a pony. I ate my way out,” he responded. Chrysalis’ look of curiosity changed to one of terror.
“B-But the pods are grown from changeseeds, a-a lesser species related to changelings. They’re basically living creatures! Like us!” she protested. Handy smiled viciously and leaned in good and close.
“Pity,” he said, “because now you’ve just admitted to me that you taste delicious!” He watched as he saw she almost broke down altogether as she began thrashing and screaming. “Hey! HEY!” He gripped her again and raised her head, threatening to slam it down again. “Be a good girl and nobody gets eaten today,” he warned and leaned in closer to her. “I promise you that. Clear?” She slowly nodded as she calmed down. Handy blinked. He saw the distress and fear in her eye, the tears streaming down her cheek, her terrified muttering, the small trickle of red on the floor from where he had hit her…
'Mother of God… Forgive me… What am I doing?’ He looked down in disgust. He loosened his grip but did not let go, bile rising in his stomach. “Listen to me, Queen, listen!” he said, bringing her attention back to him. “I will not kill you…” He thought about it. As much as what he had done sickened him, he was in too good of a position to lose. This was a queen, which meant she commanded armies. She could also use magic. And here he was bashing her brains in and threatening to fucking eat her. He had to keep up the act. “If you do what I say…” The ground shook. “And what is that shaking?” he asked. Chrysalis shuddered.
“That…” her buzzing voice answered, “was what drove us from our ancestral home all those centuries ago…” Chrysalis gave the human the short version. Basically what had happened was a dragon had arrived in the underground city of Lepiwhatsit and started shit. Burning people, knocking over buildings, and general hooliganism. Also, it was undead. Guess the undead were a thing in Equestria too. Also a dragon! More fantastical headaches to add to Handy’s growing collection!
Also, it had been long enough ago that Chrysalis and her changelings figured it had been long since moved on. She had needed something to reinvigorate her peoples’ spirits, so she had guided them to retake their home city, her invasion of Equestria having failed in epic fashion. Then there was something about a superweapon at the last minute foiling her invasion and ending the ‘great battle’ of Canterlot castle and sending her and her followers hurtling over the horizon. She really played up that it was a great and terrible struggle. Handy wasn’t sure she was feeding him the whole story, but he had wounded her pride enough. He wasn’t going to go further… but she didn’t need to know that. It turned out Chrysalis had been separated from her defenders as the dragon was now attacking the royal palace, which would explain those occasional tremors they experienced. She had come into the pod room to find an escape route that led into the lower city.
Handy grunted in approval and glared at her as he let go of her horn and throat, his fingers stiff from how tightly he had held onto it. He lessened the pressure of his knee on her neck. She stayed absolutely still until he was off of her and then she immediately shuffled over to the side of a pod and stared at Handy in fear. He was ashamed of himself and his actions, but he could not afford to show that to her. He needed that fear if he was going to use her to get out of here, otherwise she’d just blast him with magic. “I’ll help you find this exit, and you will lead me to the surface,” he said, pointing a finger at her. She flinched, and Handy hated himself for it. “But first… Where are my effects?” he asked coolly. Chrysalis glanced over to a corner of the room, at a small crate. Handy looked at Chrysalis, who cast her gaze downwards to avoid his gaze as he walked over to the crate.
Indeed, it had his clothes, and he put them back on, uncaring that he was still covered in slimy goo. He had remained in the stuff for three days—he could handle it dirtying his clothes. He placed his packbag over his back again and reached into it, pulling out the two slivers of metal from his adventure in the mine. He had sharpened them, for the usefulness of a knife went without saying. He placed them in his belt for convenient access before turning to the abused queen, who was shakily rising to her feet and glancing nervously over at Handy.
“Let’s go.”
--=--
It had taken them another hour to find the hidden button to the exit. The place had shook violently in that time. The tremors had increased in force and regularity, and once he had heard a distant roar. The tunnel door slid open, and it was then that Handy noticed the disparity in architecture. All the rooms he had seen so far, meaning the pod room and the great hall he had seen when he first arrived, had strange H.R. Gigor-esque formations lining everything, but this tunnel had artfully crafted columns sunk into the wall and affectations. The aesthetics seemed similar but… different. And old.
Chrysalis’ horn lit their way as Handy followed her. She occasionally glanced back fearfully, snapping her head forward immediately when she caught Handy’s eye. Thoughts raced in his mind as the two marched down the tunnel, dust shaking from the ceiling as the ground shook on occasion. His obvious discomfort with the actual facts of what he done aside, he knew he was in trouble. He had just assaulted a sovereign ruler of a nation. Sure, she had unlawfully imprisoned him and tortured him—people had killed for less—but that wouldn’t save him from the retribution that would surely follow. His thoughts were interrupted as the changeling said something. “What was that?” he asked. The Queen cringed but repeated herself.
“I… wanted to know why… why you…” she tried to ask. Handy’s heart sunk at that. “I can’t read you… I can’t taste what you’re feeling and that scares me… Scares us that we can’t feed from you.”
“Feed from me?” Handy asked. “I’ve seen you changelings eat. There’s nothing wrong with your stomachs, and if you wanted to feed from me, you could've just eaten me,” he said. The queen coughed and gasped.
“We’d never!” she protested, now stopping to look at him. “W-We… We feed on emotions… We need to. Love is the strongest; it’s the reason I invaded the ponies. I-I had to feed my people…” She trailed off as she glared hard at the ground. “We’re… starving…”
'I’ve had that feeling before. Not fun, but helluva motivator though,’ a rather vicious part of his mind thought. He quashed it. “That’s why you put me in that thing? Because you didn’t understand me?” he asked, unsure of how to feel about all of this. It sounded ludicrous, but so did everything else he ran into in this world. He was going to run with it until reality slapped him in the face with a wet fish and told him to stahp.
“We… were trying to make you dream, fall into a trance where you’d be with all those you’d love so we could feed off of you,” she admitted.
“Well that’s your first mistake,” he said, causing her to glance up. “I don’t dream, never have since I came to these lands. I was in that pod either awake or in a dreamless state. Time was meaningless to me. And your little… toxins were extremely painful.” Chrysalis' eyes widened.
“I… We didn’t mean to cause you—”
“Suffering unending? I bet you didn’t. But you did and I am angry… and very hungry,” he said coldly, glaring at the queen. He was still legitimately angry with her, even though he had cooled considerably because of the shamefulness of his actions. “'Sides, even if you could ‘feed’ from me, you’d probably not like the taste. There’s no love to be found in my heart, only anger,” he said half-truthfully. He gestured forward. “Now, go on then. There’s a good lass.” The expression on the changeling’s face was unreadable, but she complied and walked down the path. Handy saw her shudder.
--=--
The two came out of the tunnel, which opened up into a small room filled with broken stone furnishings and strange pictograms depicting horse-like creatures similar to ponies. Changelings, he reasoned, but it was hard to make out when everything was the same sterile grey. Chrysalis’ magic pushed opened a thin stone slab in one wall. A doorway, it fell over and cracked as it hit the ground. The changeling walked out, and Handy followed after her.
The sight before him literally took his breath away. It was a vast, cavernous expanse. Dark black rock dominated most of the formations, but that was just the landscape. Huddled amongst the towering stalagmites and built into vast slopes were the grey towers and parapets of a vast city whose stone shone amongst the dark rock. The vast ceiling of the cavern was covered in a subtly moving mass of luminescent plantlife and shone like multihued stars, bathing the city in soft lights. Gentle, pure streams of water flowed into cunningly crafted rivulets in the walls and natural crenelations of the rock face, delivering fresh water to all points in the city.
But the show stoppers were the huge white stalactites that hung so far above them, towering in grandeur and splendid to behold. Their entire surface was carved in loving detail. Crenulations formed to siphon water from some source in the rock above them all caused water to cascade down silvered drains along its surface, the architecture designed to make it seem as if the water hugged the structure, defying gravity as it fell along its surface, tapering to a point and falling from it in a single waterfall that sparkled gloriously as it fell into great reservoirs below. He stood there in appreciation of the dark glamour and sepulchral beauty of the changeling city.
“… Credit where credit is due,” Handy mouthed, still gazing around him. “Your city is beautiful. I can see why ye’d want it back.” He continued to catch more and more little details he had missed. He heard shuffling behind him before the queen responded.
“If you take the oaken stairs, it will lead to the surface,” he heard her say before hearing the buzz of wings. He turned but only saw a black and turquoise blur as the queen of the Changelings rose into the air and flew off, free from her captor.
“…Sorry,” he said after her, far too quiet to be actually heard. He heard a roar and some colossal crash from somewhere over the horizon of white buildings. The city rose and fell with the cavern, and there was no way he could see where the noise was coming from. But he decided he did not want to be anywhere near that terrible sound, so he had made his way from the house he and Chrysalis had emerged from.
It was then that he finally noticed it – the chittering wave of noise that had been his ears’ constant companion upon exiting the tunnel. He had dismissed it as more ambient background noise, much like the constant sound of gently flowing water, interrupted rudely by the thunderous sounds of the dragon. He soon realised it wasn’t. It was, in fact, the sound of an uncounted number of changelings screaming in panic.
He discovered this as he ran down the empty streets of the dead city, looking for any central point from which he could find the ‘oaken stairs’ to which Chrysalis had referred. He came upon his first gaggle of terrified changelings as he turned a corner into a small square with a still active fountain. The changelings saw him and momentarily seemed paralysed with indecision. However, a thunderous boom and the shaking of the buildings around them stirred them from their reverie as they quickly decided Handy was small fry in comparison to their own survival and buzzed, literally, off in various directions.
Handy was entirely in approval of their logic. He had very little trouble from then on from the changelings other than the nervous feeling he got of being watched at all times. The novelty that was his admiration of the old changeling city was quickly dying out in the face of the utter maze it turned out to be. Handy found himself turned round and round again. The only real consistent landmarks he could make out were the hanging towns so far above him. He got one solid indicator of where he was going once however. That was when he saw the bony ridge of the dragon’s back rise slightly higher than the hillside buildings that were looming before him, and Handy decided to run in the entirely opposite direction.
With the constant threat of the monstrosity ever present, its footfalls and the destruction of the town and the occasional explosion of blue, burning brilliance marking the silhouettes of the buildings around him, Handy quickly came to a realization. The changelings weren’t running away in one direction; they were running for their lives in every direction. His own captors had no idea how to get out of here! Where the hell were those Oaken Stairs Chrysalis told him about!?
More shaking, a sudden roar that was dangerously close which deafened the human as flames burst out of windows of surrounding buildings covering him in glass, the dragon was nearly on top of him, and he didn’t even know! This time, a building to Handy’s immediate left shuddered and, as if in slow motion, leaned over out onto the street. Handy managed to dive out of the way as the building collapsed and ancient masonry and brick spilt onto the street. He coughed, pushing himself up, entirely covered in grey dust. He turned a corner and came upon several changelings who immediately rounded on him. Something caused them to pause. He looked down on them, and still hacking, he spoke.
“Where… are the Oaken… Stairs!?” he demanded, almost snarled. The changelings merely stared at him. There was more shaking, a distant roar of grave death, another flash of blue fire illuminating some unfortunate street behind him he couldn’t see, but whose glow was felt as much as seen. The changelings ran. Handy stood there for a moment, dumbstruck, before he looked down at himself. Somehow, during his search of the city, he had neglected to make use of the plentiful water around him to clean the gunk off of him, so now he was covered head to toe in the ashes of a dead city, a pulsating gem hung about his neck, and rivulets of blood running down his face and arms from tiny cuts, creating a river network of red amidst the ashen grey stuck to his face. Smelling burning, he turned around to see parts of his robe had actually caught alight.
After a quick panic as he patted out the fire, he realised he must have appeared like some kind of dread spectre to the poor changelings, made all the more terrifying since apparently they could not ‘sense’ him. He leaned over a nearby fountain and looked at himself in the water. He had guessed correctly. He was a right vision of death. He spat to clear his mouth and was surprised to see some blood in his phlegm. Right, smiling scared ponies – he must remember not to do that, especially with bloodied teeth.
And then the world ended. The square he was now in was large, with many fancy looking stone buildings surrounding it and some kind of grand temple behind him. It promptly exploded in a hail of stone and dust as a bone white draconic skull, bathed in grave light, burst forth. The strength and force of the blast sent Handy flying. He landed hard and rolled, chunks of stonework and artistry crashing around him. He hurriedly pushed himself back up and staggered back as the huge skeletal lizard thundered into the square.
Now, it was very hard to describe the movements of a colossal death lizard without it seeming somehow lacking. It was well over one hundred and fifty feet in length. Its long, articulated neck possessed long, twisted, black, bony spines that jutted out at odd angles from the armoured disks that made up its neck. Four long, spiked horns, one of which was broken, protruded from the sides of its head, sloping up and back from its head, giving the skull a truly daemonic visage. Its chest was a raging furnace, its heart nothing more than a roaring, white hot fire of such magnificence and brilliance that it was almost blinding to look at. The immense rib cage that housed it cast shadows upon the dragon's surroundings from its light, casting all before it in bars of darkness from which nothing would escape alive. No heat came from the blaze, only chill as the balefire sucked all the warmth from the air. Its long, bony back was covered in chains and long rusted weapons and the crushed bones of much smaller creatures. Its great wings were thankfully shorn and missing, a great and terrible violence having been done to rid the beast of flight. Its long, prehensile, slashing tail ended in a bulbous mass of bone and marrow, riven with great protrusions. The beast swung its tail as a warrior might swing a maul. It did not walk, it conquered.
And this great creature, ageless, deathless, and adorned with the bones of defeated heroes, surveyed the dead city it dominated and ruled… and looked down at the human with all the hatred of the abyss in its empty sockets.
Yep. Handy was done here. Time to go.
The next thing his mind was conscious of was him sprinting out of the courtyard as the world was sundered behind him. The great beast let out a deafening roar of hatred that almost knocked Handy from his feet. Not from its force, you understand, but from the raw, primordial effect it had upon his mind. That was not a sound one ran from; that was a sound of inevitability, a sound that caused lesser beasts to kneel down and await their fate, commanding and evil and riven with finality. Handy, however, was not such a base creature, and so he hardened his heart and gripped his mind with all of his will and struggled on. The ground shook as the beast ripped up the earth behind the human to chase after him. Handy dared not look back.
He was sprinting, faster and farther than he ever had in his life. Suddenly, he was thankful for Joachim’s foolishness. His stupidity had led him to near starvation and slavery, but it had, in turn, directly caused Handy to lose weight, and by God and His Angels, was he ever grateful for that right now. Mayhap he had been too harsh with the avian. Had he swallowed his pride and let Joachim help, he would not be away with the faeries right now… and on the wrong side of Smaug the Undying.
He didn’t see them, but changelings overhead had stopped their flight to watch as the strange heartless creature fled his doom, most having long since abandoned the fruitless hope of hiding amidst the buildings and homes of their ancestors, taking to the air instead. At least there, floating amidst the darkness, the white city below, iridescent ceiling so far above, they could be where the dragon could not reach them. The Queen looked at the fleeing Heartless, now a vision of terror with ashen skin and hair, broken only by streaks of red. Her face was a stone mask, her thoughts unreadable. Her subjects felt the discomfort within her but knew not its true cause and knew better than to enquire about their sovereign’s discomfort. She gritted her teeth. In truth, part of her was overjoyed – the foul creature was facing his own just deserts, and she could not wait to see the despair on his face when he found the Oaken Stairs… and learned why it was her subjects hadn't already used it to flee. Another part, curious and small, wished it would survive so that she might understand the creature and how it could have no heart, for how could a creature survive so?
“My Queen!” Chrysalis turned. One of her subjects approached her, retracting its eye shielding. Her light blue eyes looked down as it tried to bow its head, a hard feat while afloat in the air, you understand, but she appreciated the gesture. “There are changelings trapped in the merchant quarter!” she said, panicked. Chrysalis scoffed.
“Then don’t just hover there; go help them get out!” she ordered.
“We can’t! The dragon set fire to the surrounding buildings. Our magic can’t put it out! The roof is about to collapse on them, my Queen. The childr—”
“Enough!” the Queen demanded. She casted one last look at the human’s futile escape of the dragon. That tale was coming to its end from the look of things. She resigned that neither part of her would get what it wanted from the spectacle and turned to her duties. She snapped orders to the changelings around her, to start fire crews and gather buckets to take water to the flames. She would try to get as many of her subjects out as possible before the roof collapsed.
Handy, however, had come to the city’s end. The buildings just suddenly stopped, and he found himself running across a vast flat surface. Before him was a true sight to behold. In a wide arc stretching a great distance from right to left, he saw the Oaken Stairs. The name did not do the structure justice. Imagine, if you would, steps one would take to walk up to the doors of some grand administrative building of some fanciful empire. One would imagine steps of white marble, perhaps, wide and unnecessarily long. Perhaps there would be railings of gold. Perhaps the steps would be rounded so as to flow out, as if spilling forth from the doorway. The Oaken Stairs were arranged similarly, rounded and flowing from a single point far at its apex and made of simple wood, whitish-brown in colour. Each step was lovingly crafted with impossible care and detail to images and patterns that adorned the inside of each step, telling a story two hundred feet long and two thousand years old, for the vastness of the great stairs dwarfed most buildings, its thousand steps towering in grandeur despite not even being the tallest construction. And there, at its top, the apex shone silver doors and the means of salvation.
Handy did not get to see this, for it was on fire. Great, fell, blue flames consumed the venerable and ancient steps, so much so that all Handy saw was a great wall of smokeless fire before him as the last glimmers of hope in his heart started to fate. He stumbled and fell, unable and unwilling to accept the sight he saw. The dragon stalked over to him, emerging from the streets and placing a bony claw over his body. Handy only had moments to register his danger before the beast had scooped him up. He struggled in vain to try to escape the death grip as he was raised to eye level with the grave beast, looking out over the abandoned city, resplendent in its sad glory. The dragon’s claws closed a fraction further, and Handy found it hard to breath. All thoughts of anger and resistance faded to be replaced by a terrible unease and chill that flooded into him. He felt a dull pressure on his mind. The dragon’s skull, which was now uncomfortably close, cocked to the side as he felt the pressure wax and wane. The creature spoke, its voice vibrating the air, and Handy felt the force of its speech and the chill of its breath, which the rational part of his mind pointed out should not be possible because it was undead, but that part of Handy’s mind had been wrong about a lot of things recently, so it could just sit in the corner and politely shut the fuck up.
Handy could not make out the words. He could barely understand the sounds it made. It was that same dead tongue the dragon spoke in when he had almost found Handy the first time. It mattered not, as Handy saw the dragon’s dead eyes slowly light up, balefire building up its arching neck and gathering within its closed jaws as it prepared to roast the human alive. Handy closed his eyes. As a result, he didn’t see the distant pinprick of green light, little more than a flicker. The dragon jerked its head as the flames died in its throat. It said something else, causing Handy to open his eyes. The dragon cast another dismissive look upon the human. It snorted, the air freezing about the human as he felt the blood on his face instantly dry and crackle as tiny ice crystals formed.
The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air. Weightlessness gripped his body as he hurtled forth at terrifying speed. The dragon had discarded him, literally, flinging him across the city to be dashed against some rock or another. Handy had never been so afraid in his life. He could not even scream, his mind too busy processing the chaos as his body flailed to grab onto something, anything, to slow his flight. He didn’t see what he hit. He only knew that one minute he was flying and the next he was wet and there was broken glass about him. He lay there for a moment, flicking between consciousness and the void, the nothingness he experienced when he slept. He pushed himself up, groaning. His body protested at his movements, but he had to know. How did he survive the fall? That should have killed him outright. He heard the rushing noise of water and the footfalls and roars of the dead dragon which sounded so distant now. Looking around him, he was somewhere dark. The walls and floor were smooth and clean, almost reflective. There were three windows of stained glass behind him and a black iron door before him. It was shaped and decorative, as were the walls, inlaid as they were with silver and gold threads depicting scenes and… changelings, he thought. It was dark, and the only light entering the room was the iridescent light of the ceiling fungi, which seemed really bright now, pouring into the room.
He turned to look out the windows. The stained glasses were simple affairs, coloured panels, each window representing something simple. The left one depicted two wings and looked like they belonged to a butterfly. The one on the far right depicted a curved horn, not unlike a unicorn’s, but it was smooth and did not have the distinctive spiralling ridges unicorns possessed. The central window held nothing, for it was smashed, and Handy lay in its ruination. Beyond the windows, Handy could not see much, for a waterfall blocked his vision. The changing light was distorted by the moving water and further distorted by the glass, creating an ever changing array of soft light that bathed the dark room. It was… oddly soothing.
Handy pulled himself up on a nearby marble bench and caught his breath. Wherever he was, he was away from that dragon, and that would have to do for now. He held his head in one hand. ‘What now?’ he thought. His one chance of escape, the Oaken Stairs, were gone. This wasn’t his city. He had no idea how to get out, and he had relied on the Queen’s words. He ground his teeth. ‘She knew,’ he thought viciously. ‘She knew and still she sent me to find those damned stairs instead of telling me of another way out.’ He shook with the thought but then chastised himself. Could he blame her? Seeing the way she looked at him, how she flinched when he spoke, the fear he instilled in her that he then exploited, how could anyone blame her for what she did?
He got up. It was time to explore this place. He could not sit there, or he would fester in his thoughts.
--=--
Chrysalis was very, very tired. She felt like she had ran several marathons, and in truth, perhaps she did. She was more powerful than her subjects, but she also did so much more than any one of them did this day. Not to mention that the abuse she suffered at the hooves of the Heartless certainly hadn’t helped matters. Also, she was hungry, but that was unimportant now. She had been using the last dregs of her energy to teleport into and out of the merchant quarter, which was a roofed maze of connected buildings where, in the city’s heyday, would have been a grand bazaar.
Quite a few changeling families had taken shelter there when the dragon had awoken from its slumber and burned the Oaken Stairs, hoping it would keep them hidden from its dreadful gaze. And in truth it had, for the dragon’s balefire had burned swathes of buildings around the market but left the great structure more or less untouched. It was a pity that it meant they were trapped in a ring of fire that was slowly closing in on them. The flames had grown too fierce for her subjects to brave them, and her fire lines were making slow progress to opening up a path to evacuate the trapped changelings, even with one of the great waterfalls and reservoirs literally right beside it.
So, she did her part, teleporting in and teleporting as many of her subjects out at a time as she could. It was a new spell for her, and she was unpractised. Still, it kept their hopes up, and she had to try to do something. She had returned for another batch when she finally collapsed, exhausted and drained. Her subjects immediately rushed to their side, their buzzing voices squealing in terror for their stricken monarch.
“I’m… I’m alright,” she said, trying to allay their fears. “Enough! Get off of me!” she commanded. She looked down one of the bazaar streets. The fire teams had made slow progress, but one of them had actually nearly breached the fire. “Everything’s going to be alright,” she said, turning to the changelings, saying it as a statement of fact rather than a reassurance. Changelings were, by and large, fickle creatures. Gentleness was seen as a sign of weakness because of its association with prey, even if one did truly care for another. As such, they favoured hard rulers, of which Chrysalis was, from time to time at least. “Look, we have cleared the fire. Go, flee.” Several of the remaining changelings fled, but a couple remained, uncertain.
“M-My Queen, you require assistance, let us—”
“GO!” she commanded, and her changelings obeyed. Once she was sure the last had left the bazaar, she wavered, sliding to her haunches in exhaustion. She needed a rest, a moment’s rest, just a moment.
Which she would never receive. The constant shaking of the earth grew louder as a terrible roar was heard. Chrysalis opened her eyes with a start. She looked at the entrance of the bazaar to see her changelings fleeing as a jet of blue flame exploded into it. She covered herself with a shield as the flames raced down the arteries of the roofed bazaar. She was straining to resist as the flames receded just in time for her shell to shatter. She panted heavily. She heard the noise of crumbling stone and protesting metal as a great bony claw tore into the roof of the bazaar. Chrysalis looked up to see her doom as she felt errant sprays of water fall upon her battered shell.
--=--
Meanwhile, Handy fumbled about in the dark. The corridors were circular and doubled back on themselves often. The floor, periodically, had these large circular holes that seemed to fall away to another floor below, and the ceiling had similar constructs. No visible ladders or handholds to speak of. What little light he had poured in from rooms along the outside of the building that his exploration had uncovered. He opened each of them to let more light come in. It was not doing too much good, but at least he could stop himself from falling into random manholes in the middle of a building. Why would anyone construct a building like this?
In his fruitless search for a door, he had found large, black, stone constructs lining the walls. Occasionally, he would find gems and gold coins on top of them so, seeing no reason not to, he pocketed them. There was rather a lot to gather and soon his spacious pack was beginning to feel rather full and heavy. Sighing in frustration, he saw no other way to go so, with the utmost care, he descended to the next level. Landing heavily, he got back to his feet. Like the floor above, this floor was the same story. Search for an exit, fail, open doors to let in light, try not to fall into random manholes, loot shit, go in circles, descend in frustration.
Each floor got smaller and smaller too, but at least this meant it got brighter and brighter as more and more light was easier to come by. Finally, on the last floor he could walk around comfortably on, he descended. The only hole in the floor this time was in the centre, and when he descended, he came upon a platform. That was when the nature of the building he was in became apparent. Looking around, he saw a rearing pony statue… No, that was not right… It was a changeling, but it was… different. Its wings were insectoid, true, but they were larger, and had no holes. Neither did its legs. Its carapace was… well… a carapace. There was not much to say about it other than it seemed more… elegant. Perhaps a statue of some forgotten ruler? It towered over Handy. In its forehooves, it held a large, silver warhammer. Handy boggled at how a creature such as changeling could wield such a weapon, particular one that seemed sized appropriately for the statue, not an average changeling. It was big enough for a human to wield comfortably however. Who was he to argue with stonemasons? You got paid to make a pony statue that held a war hammer, you do it.
Handy reached up curiously, touching the warhammer. He was surprised when he nudged it out of place and it fell to the floor with a heavy thud and clatter. He lifted it up. It was actually quite heavy, and now that he looked at it, not silver at all. This was steel. They had actually placed an actual weapon of war on a statue. Why on earth would the—?
And the penny dropped. Handy looked at the base of the statue. Sure enough, there was a plaque. He could not read the writing but he had seen enough war hero statues to get the idea. This statue was a memorial. Those black stone cuboids he passed weren’t some artistic addition to the floors of the building, they were sarcophagi. He had been looting a mausoleum. The guilt in his heart doubled at the thought. He went behind the statue, grabbed the railings, and looked down. What he saw shocked him.
He was over the city! When the dragon had flung him, he had landed in one of the stalactite towns he had seen from the ground. The waterfalls that had blocked his view from the windows on the floors above coalesced around this focal point, creating walls of sparkling diamond with a constant spray tickling his skin. The platform was held by six thin pillars with nothing else attaching it to the rest of the superstructure above. He knew this was ridiculously dangerous, as even though he could not see it from where he was, he knew this platform tapered off into a heavy, metal point of silver below him that the water fell from.
He looked down, curious to see what was below him, only to freeze and shudder in fear. Between the curtains of water, he could see the dragon immediately below him, breathing fire and uncaring of the water splashing on its back. It was tearing away at a building, and he saw a small flashes of green as something fought it. Squinting his eyes, he could just barely make out the form of a changeling fighting the beast. A changeling with teal hair.
His mind fought with itself for a moment. He wanted to do something, anything, to get back at this beast who he now associated with all the fickle forces of fate that trapped him here in Equestria, but he knew that nothing he could do could even flinch the beast. The bolts of changefire the Queen herself was flinging at the beast seemed to be doing nothing. He looked at the war hammer he now held in his right fist. He could throw it, but what good would that do? He was utterly powerless.
He seethed with anger. Everything about this day infuriated him, and here he was, safe, yet could do absolutely nothing to leave. What was he going to do? Fly? Even if he could, he’d only be able to leave the mausoleum. Then he’d be trapped in the city with the dragon. He had no magic, and the only weapon he possessed was laughably useless in this situation. No, he was stuck there and likely going to die cold, tired, and alone, far from home, deep beneath the earth, looking upon the source of his shame about to be consumed in the raging fires of an undying evil, and capable of doing nothing to atone for his sins.
You know, it was funny. They say there was always a thin line between madness and genius, right? Two sides of the same coin and all that? Handy was considering this as an idea came to him as he looked down at the ornate head of the war hammer. Bravery and stupidity, likewise, were also considered two sides of the same coin, much like genius and its twin, madness. The fickle hand of fate enjoyed flipping one coin to determine one’s plan, while flipping another to determine one’s character which brought it about. However, Handy, not one to take kindly to fate’s game, decided to force its hand and flip both coins at once.
“Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes,” Handy intoned as he hefted the warhammer above his head and took aim at the nearest pillar. “I know it’s been a while, but if you have the time, I really need an intercession from you for this one.” He shifted his footing, trying to get the maximum amount of power out of the swing, the weight of the hammer becoming more apparent with each passing second. “It’s a bit of a doozy.”
--=--
Ever ride a roller coaster? That creeping panic building up in you, the apprehension, the fear, the dread of the coming drop, and the unrelenting excitement of the twist and twirls ahead as your body was thrown about by a force far more powerful than you as you hurtled at speeds nature had not intended for you to ever experience?
Yeah, turned out riding a dead war hero’s tomb, racing from the ceiling of a gigantic cavern trailing debris and God only knows how much water and crashing into the back of an undead dragon who reduced a great underground city to a ghost town, is like that... If roller coasters could give you an adrenaline rush to kill a mother-fucking Antarctosaurus.
The former tip of the tomb stalactite punctured the back of the dragon, crushing bone and splintering metal as the sheer weight and force involved utterly crushed its chest cavity as the rock fell apart and sundered under its own impact. The wave of water that rushed over the dragon did the rest. The structural integrity of the undead monster was shattered by the blow. Whatever magical nexus was maintained by the creature's form flickered and wavered as the water had a devastating effect on its internal fire, extinguishing the bale flame at its heart. The dragon’s head reared back, and its jaw opened wide in a soundless scream as the light died from its being. It slammed onto the ground, crushing a wall as bones cracked under the impact. All that was left was deathly silence and the flow of running water.
Chrysalis sat there in utter shock. One moment she was about to be eaten alive, crushed in the jaws of a looming monstrosity, and the next, an explosion of rock and bone protruded from the dragon’s back as a wave of water flowed over her exhausted frame. She stared long and hard at the corpse of the dread serpent, the creature that had driven her people from their ancestral city so many centuries ago. And there, protruding from its back, was the still intact statue of some ancient changeling warrior, slightly askew, triumphant over the defeated foe. She almost didn’t notice the bleeding human as he got back to his feet and grasped the statue’s legs for stability.
The human stumbled forth. There was no safe footing between broken rock, shattered dragon bones, and the floor nearly a dozen feet below him. He shambled forward, shocked that he had actually survived the mind-breaking, terror-inducing drop and shaking all the way. He eventually made his way near the skull of the beast, dragging the silver war hammer behind him, his heavy pack hanging from his shoulder. He leaned against the skull for support, looking about him, trying to see if perhaps he could use the natural slopes in the skull of the dragon to help him get down.
He saw the shocked visage of the changeling Queen below him, staring up at him in something between horror and admiration. He panted heavily. If he was a mess before, he was worse now. Between his previous injuries and the broken glass of the mausoleum and the dragon fall, which he would now forever call his ballsy move, he had more cuts and bruises than skin. Although he had been soaked, he still had a considerable amount of stone dust stuck to his skin and hair, thanks to the goo, which meant he was going to require a thorough scrubbing once he could get it. So, all in all, he still maintained that dread spectre look, only difference now was that he was soaking wet which apparently made him look worse.
He smiled despite himself and coughed. “Well…,” he said at last, struggling for words to justify his latest dance with insanity, and decided to comment on the circumstances Chrysalis had found herself in mere moments before. “I did say nobody would get eaten today, now didn’t I?” He chuckled. The Queen swallowed. Handy then got tackled by a swarm of chitin and buzzing wings. “Hey! Damnit! Get off of me!” Handy demanded.
He was being held down by quite a large number of changelings as one of them took away his war hammer. “My Queen!” was a common exclamation as Chrysalis’ loyal subjects surrounded her to make sure she was alright. Handy couldn’t see; he was too busy with his face in the ground.
“We have captured the Pale One, your Highness!”
“Yes yes, the Heartless!”
“Oh goody, I have nicknames now?” Handy asked derisively. He got a hoof to the face for that one. He heard the hoof-steps of Chrysalis before he saw them. There he was, captured and brought low before a sovereign and her people after having caused her grief, trauma, and destruction and entirely at her mercy. He would certainly say it was a new experience for him and one he hoped would never become a habit. Probably won’t by day’s end.
“Let him up, he’s not our enemy,” he heard the Queen say. Handy blinked.
“What?” he heard a voice say.
“What?” echoed another. It sounded familiar, probably Thorax. He should remember that she was pretty high on his shit-list and he should probably murder her face sometime. Unfortunately, something else occupied his mind at the moment.
“What?” Handy said. He was released and shakingly got to his feet. He was eye level with Chrysalis, and for the first time, he truly appreciated her size in comparison to her subjects. She was closer to being a proper horse, relatively speaking of course, whereas her subjects were much closer to pony sizes, large and in charge as it were. He was only slightly taller than her, but that hardly mattered when you were talking about horse-sized creatures. Her eyes narrowed, as if she was searching Handy’s face which, beneath the cake mix of goo, blood and ash, was a mask of confusion.
She closed her eyes and raised a hoof for silence. “I went to the pod chambers in the palace when we were attacked,” the Queen said. She opened her eyes and gazed out over her subjects imperiously. “I sought out the Heartless one, and I employed him to our service.” Handy’s eyes narrowed.
‘What game are you playing?’
“And help us he did, for my plan worked, and he distracted the dragon long enough to allow us to ensure the safety of our people from its wrath. And when we thought him slain, did he not come back and slay the dragon with the very city itself? I made you all a promise, did I not?” She turned to face the growing crowd of changelings that had gathered amidst the ruined bazaar and the dragon corpse. “That I would reclaim Lepidopolis at any cost? And lo, have I not been faithful, my people? When I made our plight known, the Heartless one agreed to help us.”
“B-But my Queen!” a voice squeaked. Chrysalis turned to face the speaker. Its eye shields retracted, revealing a pair of chartreuse eyes. Ah, Thorax, shit-list number three, right after the cockatrice and the world itself. “The Heartless one has no empathy! No love! We felt nothing from him, and I heard his story about his homeland. There is no good to be found there!” Huh, Handy never figured his mythic yarn would come back to bite him in the arse. By this time, he had a vague idea of what Chrysalis was doing, even if he didn’t know why she did it. Clever girl, this horse. She was playing the changelings that the events were well in her hooves, that Handy’s actions were under her orders and direction, which was a fine political move and all, but there was nothing stopping the Queen from having her cake and eating it too, from playing the sequence of events in her favour among her people and punishing Handy for his… less than noble actions. He was curious as to how she’d get out from under Thorax’s contradiction.
Chrysalis chuckled darkly. Well, he was sure it wasn’t meant to be menacing, but when your voice has its own resonance, it was kind of hard not to come off as such. “My dear Thorax, but of course you are correct. There is no goodness in his heart.” Well, gee, thanks lady. “Which is why he agreed to help us in return for payment. Do you not see my pendant around his neck?” She pointed a hoof at the human. Handy looked down. Well, wouldn’t you know it, that pendant he had swiped from the Queen earlier was indeed hanging about his neck. Hell, he didn’t even know why he took it, probably just out of spite – he had not been thinking clearly at the time after all. “I gave him it as an advance on his payment.” Thorax seemed to calm down a bit, seeing the pendant. “And he has come through for us, and now Lepidopolis is ours once again! Rejoice! Rejoice, my people!”
And indeed there was much rejoicing. Now that was something to behold. Ever heard a beehive when the insects were angry? Ever heard a large herd of horses whinnying and stomping and nickering all at once? Now imagine them both at the same time, only the bee sounds and the horse sounds were coming out the same vocal chords of over a hundred creatures at once. Got that? Yeah, turned out changeling celebrations were not like that. It was worse.
--=--
So there Handy was. Outside, fresh air, and open ground. Free.
He was utterly bewildered. He still did not know Chrysalis’ motivations for releasing him when, by all rights, she should’ve just celebrated the dragon’s death and had the changelings lynch Handy as an after-party favour. Nope. She had ladened the bastard down with gold and gems and let him keep the shiny trinket he had stolen without so much as a breath about his mistreatment of her. Hell, they had even let him keep the silvered war hammer he had basically stolen. So now Handy was making off like a fucking bandit and not entirely sure about how he should feel about that.
The Queen had offered Handy to join in the celebrations, but he could see in her eyes she desperately wished he wouldn’t. And he really hadn’t wanted to stay in that city for a second longer than he had to, so he had declined. He could almost feel the Queen’s relief. Her reactions had only confused him further. ‘There has to be something else,’ he thought as he walked away from the large red rock he had been teleported to. With the stairs still on fire, Chrysalis and several of her changelings had casted a spell to warp Handy out of the cavern. It was a strange, alien experience that he’d rather not dwell on. ’She can’t have just let me… go… like that…'
Handy’s thoughts trailed off as the realization hit him. His two packs filled with wealth slipped off him and plummeted onto the ground. Chrysalis had mentioned that the city was located in the western Badlands, and indeed the surrounding land looked quite bad: dry, cracked earth in all directions and far off mountains with not a town to see. In the horizon, the sun was setting. He was now in the middle of fucking nowhere with no idea where to go with all the money in the world and nowhere to spend it. Handy clicked his teeth and swore.
“Bollocks.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere, a Queen was laughing.
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This is a great story!
Hope You continue it.
Handy, the dragon slayer!
He managed to get out of that predicament, to bad Chrysalis had the last laugh in the end there.
3970472
He should have eaten her.
3970470 I will be, however not for some time, all the chapters from chapter 3 onwards are in serious need of proofreading so I can fix all the greivous gramme rand spelling errors that have been bugging me before I continue.
riding a statue into an undead dragons back, BADASSERY AT IT'S FINEST
Well that's one way to bring down the house.
She gave him all that stuff to weigh him down didn't she?
Hey, be careful with your its and it's
And with that, Handy has become one of my favorite protagonists.
"Handy found it hard to breathe. All thoughts of anger and resistance faded to be replaced by a terrible unease and chill that flooded into him. He felt a dull pressure on his mind. The dragon’s skull, which was now uncomfortably close, cocked to the side as he felt the pressure wax and wane. The creature spoke, its voice vibrating the air, and Handy felt the force of its speech and the chill of its breath, which the rational part of..."
you repeated a paragraph.
4047418 you know any artist willing to recreate this image?
After that, Bug queen's little sob act just grated on my nerves.
Soooo many chapters to read...
/rolls up sleeves.
Not disappointed at all!
Fucking hell you make a good story.... I kinda want to do something else, but reading id far more enjoyable.
Why tempt fate by trying to kill a creature that slayed a dragon? Why not dump him in the middle of nowhere and let him deal with survival himself?
Clever girl.
I am confused by my own actions, I remember finding this fic a while back, and i read two chapters then. But now that iv started reading it again, I can't find any resoning to why I stoped. This fic is incredibly good and I feel like i had a reson to stop reading it... I hope I dont remember.
Hmm, does the dragonspeak ever get explained? Or why it fixated on Handy?
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probably when the author thought it was a great time to change the perspective temporarily changed to joachim
So I was thinking about this story, I had the thought "y'know, the interactions between handy and Joaquin are pretty similar to the interactions between bender and fry from futurama." one thing led to another, and this joke came into my head:
Handy: "Bite my shiny hairless ass."
Joaquin: "It doesn't look that hairless."
Handy: "Less hair than yours, birdbrain."
I'll leave how Joaquin knows how hairy Handy's ass is up to your imagination.
That’s my boi yeah?! That’s my boi! Slaying that dragon with a proper war hammer like a true dwarven hero! Bruenor Battlehammer would be in aww of a human so grand.
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No.
But then again, maybe it recognized lingering old magic or something.
of what he'd done aside
Just me rambling about how much I love this story past this point.
I'm not sure but I think this might be the only time Handy just straight out says sorry to someone in the whole story. And he does it quietly, whilst they fly far away, unable to hear him.
I'm not sure if it's the increased pressure or feelings of animosity towards pretty much everyone around him but the Handy of later chapters is significantly different: he wouldn't have said sorry, not even in the ultimately vestigial gesture it is here. He might not feel great about the situation but he'd rationalise it and just leave quietly (or at least what passes for quiet with Handy).
The only other time I can remember Handy apologising to anyone is a major turning point for his character, resulting from incredible duress and a considerable amount of self-reflection on his own part. But here it was just the natural thing for him to do, he was immediately ashamed of his actions and needed to apologise; mostly he apologises for his own good, he apologises to himself for not being able or willing to apologise to who he had wronged.
Later on there is a scene (or two... or three) where Handy does everything in his power to get out of apologising, despite knowing he's in the wrong just to spite someone. And that change feels natural. It happens so organically throughout the story that I never really, consciously noticed before: I just saw that line and thought "heh, later-Handy wouldn't have said that..." and I finally came to respect one of the most amazing parts of this story on a more active level. I've always known that the character development was one of the strongest elements but I'd never really thought about it (which in-of-itself is a pretty good endorsement of just how organic it feels).
I don't know what else I can say other that thank-you, this story is amazing, please give me more of it to praise.
It's Giger, not Gigor.
WOOOOOOO
THIS STORY HAS ME HYYPED!!!
I love that you include bits of culture and faith, Absolutely wonderful!
You are a very good writer and this story is great!
Anyone else think Skyrim character there at the end?
Hopefully that gem fused itself with his body and he has magic now. (Sarcasm ahead) Or an inventory to help him with stealing gold lmao.
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