The Last Changeling Queen

by Atuhor Name

CH. 14 Canterlot

Canterlot

Canterlot had changed. What used to be a gold-crowned beacon of stability and hope casting its rays across Equestria as surely as the sun itself now glowered down from its perch like a predatory vulture. Nightmarish structures had already been erected through some amalgamation between changeling emotion stone and physical nightmares. The structures themselves fed upon one another slowly causing the nightmares to ripple and grow like a vine, and the stone to glow brighter with the dull red light of hatred.

Twilight could swear she saw something oozing up and down the once majestic spires, but it was impossible to make out at this distance. Unfortunately she couldn't be entirely sure so she put it in the back of her mind to grow and itch at her.

The group, now much smaller but still easily measuring above a hundred changelings, was moving along inside the edge of White Tail Woods, trying to find a better approach on Canterlot, as opposed to the wide open plains that surrounded the mountain. There wasn't any reason for this specifically, but none of them felt comfortable walking out in the open right now.

Even the forest seemed to grow close around them. It was deathly quiet. It wasn't empty by any means, however. As the mismatched group walked along, a long trail of animals began to follow them. Anytime they stopped, everybody found at least two or three frightened animals trying to hide underneath them. In one incident, a bear attempted to hide below a particularly embarrassed changeling.

Dreading the possibility that morale could drop any lower, even as her mouth opened, Twilight let loose the question that had been on her mind.

“Naudia, is there any possibility that corrupted changelings are in Canterlot?”

“There shouldn't be.” Naudia said, squinting into the distance. “Nothing has ever been able to get them to work together, and trust me, not for lack of trying.”

“What are 'corrupted changelings'?” Shining asked.

Naudia turned to Shining and Cadance and began to explain. The changelings milling around them to feed on their ambient emotions moved away, as everything they were putting out soured with horror and disgust.

“You said 'but not for lack of trying' before. Does that mean changelings actually tried to… harness them?”

“Oh, plenty of times. While they would make horrible soldiers, they would make fantastic cannon fodder: They multiply like vermin and they feed on hatred and magic.” Naudia said in an unsettlingly casual voice. “I mean, it would basically be like having machines that ran on easy-to-harvest garbage, that you almost couldn't run out of. Any hive that could control them would control the Badlands very quickly.”

“Do you have any experience with them?”

“Oh, yes, all kinds: medical, historical, even tried a bit of harnessing them myself, for the good of changeling-kind, of course.” Naudia seemed to forget entirely about the broad aspects of the situation.

The last remaining changelings in the area attempted to scrunch away from Shining and Cadance. All minus Naudia, who was too full on love to even think about feeding at the moment, and too preoccupied with memories of science to care. Twilight, however, was not caught up in her scientifically-generated wake.

“How can you speak so callously about them?” Twilight asked.

“Partially because SCIENCE!” Naudia raised a hoof into the air triumphantly before being brought back down to the reality of the subject matter. “Partially, it's the hope that once we understand them, we can prevent it from happening to anybody else, and maybe one day, bring them back.

“I'm pretty sure they're still out there. The first corrupted changelings, that is.” Naudia gazed off into the middle distance wistfully.

Shining gave the most unconvincing fake cough.

“Shouldn't we be thinking about how we're going to get into Canterlot while it’s under enemy control?”

“Oh, that!” Mattar the not-literal baggage cart piped up, causing the baggage and rocks perched on his back to wobble. “That's easy, we just use the caverns under Canterlot! There are a whole mess of ‘em down there and we can just dig into people's cellars!”

“That's good, Mattar, but tell me: what don't baggage carts do?” Naudia asked sweetly.

Mattar, realizing he'd been caught in a trap, decided to shut up.

“Is that really necessary?” Twilight asked.

“Well, no. But, since it would take too long to go back to the Badlands and leave him to die there, this will have to suffice.”

“Yes, but that's even more harsh than this!”

“Twilight, perhaps you don't understand the depth of Mattar's accusation. This wasn't a simple 'impeach the queen' vote. Should I have been found wanting, I would have been systematically restrained, drained of love, and kept just on the edge of death, until I cracked and told them what hive this infiltration attempt stemmed from, and where the real Queen was.”

Everypony looked appalled; everyling still in earshot looked nervous.

“You ponies have almost a thousand years of relative peace under your belts. Even the Gryphonic Wars had rules. The Badlands have no rules. None could be enforced until very recently, when there literally wasn't anyling else to fight. Now let’s move, Canterlot isn't going to unconquer itself!”

Naudia's tone left a very noticeable gap, both emotionally and in just plain distance, between her and everybody else. Even the animals stopped trying to huddle underneath her.

----------------

As the forest thinned out, and Canterlot began to give up lurking and got down to seriously looming in the distance, Twilight found herself in the most awkward situation she could think of in recent memory. Behind her were Cadance and Shining, who, at least for the moment, looked like they didn't approve of Naudia in the slightest. Behind them, doing their best to not be noticed, were even more changelings who, as one, shrunk back whenever Naudia so much as glanced back at them. Even farther behind them, miles really, was the last hint anybody saw of animal activity.

And, in front of Twilight, marched Naudia alone. Twilight was torn. On the one hand, Naudia seemed very angry, but Twilight had a feeling in her gut that there was either another reason for it or she was acting.

On top of all that, she had something nagging at the back of her mind that she couldn't quite get a handle on. The best she could describe it, it felt… foreign to her, like it came from somewhere else.

For a time, they proceeded on in silence until they came upon an overgrown hill. Naudia stopped, and everybody left a generous space behind her.

“Here we are.” Naudia levitated aside some brush to reveal a dilapidated mineshaft that showed signs of changeling reinforcement.

“So this is how you got into the city?” Shining asked.

“One of the spots. Underneath Canterlot is filled with more holes than...”

“A changeling’s leg?”

“Yes, something like that.”

Naudia, in the same distracted air, turned and walked into the mineshaft. Once again, the entire rest of the procession, Twilight included, hung back a bit behind Naudia. They hesitated longer than they should have before entering the mineshaft.

Twilight was the first to enter behind her and didn't even look back to see if she was being followed. Catching up to Naudia, Twilight got a feel of the cave and found it unpleasant. Instead of the hard echoing of an empty cave she was accustomed to, she found it close and the floor unpleasantly soft to step on. The green fire of Naudia's magic gave the walls an infested look.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Twilight finally asked.

“Talk about what?” Naudia asked, still lost in her own thoughts.

“You have something on your mind. You've been acting odd ever since that speech you made to the changelings.”

“Well, I've got a number of things on my mind. Chief among them is a feeling of wrongness in my gut.” Naudia glanced at the hidden knife Twilight had and knew she couldn't voice the chief wrongness she felt.

Twilight, oblivious to this, motioned Naudia to go on.

“Back there, after the speech, I felt wrong. I felt wrong about hating Cadance this much.”

“Hating people isn't generally something that will make you feel good, at least not when you're doing it to their faces.”

“Well, yeah, but after, after... well, us, I thought it would be a lot easier to get over the prejudices that Mom taught me.”

“After us?”

Naudia took a deep breath before continuing.

“Before I met you, I considered ponies to be gross creatures, creatures whose only purpose was to consume and grow fat until they came into service feeding the hive.”

“That's horrible! How could you possibly think that!?” Twilight, who had unconsciously been walking closer to Naudia up until now, scooted back all the way, almost to the wall.

“That's what I was taught my entire life. Mother always told me to stay away from the wasteful ponies, and so did everybody else. Doing my tour across Equestria didn't help much either… The way ponies act around Luna only reinforced my opinion of them.” Naudia gave a wistful sigh. “Then I met you and your friends in Ponyville, and all that kinda fell apart.”

“And I'm certain that once you get to know Cadance better, you'll feel the same way about her!”

“I'm still worried, Twilight. I'm still worried that on the inside, I haven't changed. That I've just made a special exception for you or something… Listen, can we move off this subject? I don't think I'm ready to talk about this yet.”

For several awkward seconds, Twilight tried to think of something else to talk about. Upon entering into the eternal conundrum that faces anybody when they are told to simply talk about something, Twilight blurted out the first thing that came to her mind.

“Do changelings have hearts?”

It was as if all at once, the unpleasant warmth of the cave was sucked out, and replaced with a cold frozen silence, during which Naudia attempted to restart her brain.

“Why do you ask that, Twilight?” Naudia, said through a smile made of clenched teeth.

Twilight searched her mind to for an answer, and failed to come up with one.

“I'm really not sure. I thought it was important somehow, I just don't remember why.”

“Well yes, despite being made up of mostly magic, changelings do, indeed, have hearts.” Naudia was certain she may have pulled a muscle from sheer stress alone. “Most of the magic takes physical form, so we need a physical heart to pump it around our bodies.”

“Ooooh, that's really interesting! Reminds me of a paper Starswirl wrote once about the crystalline properties of magic. Does that mean your blood is made of some form of crystal?”

“No, it’s a liquid, I've seen enough of it to know.” Naudia looked very uncomfortable. “Twilight, can we get the conversation topic off changelings? This is bringing back some particularly bad memories.”

“Oh, I'm sorry...” Twilight tried to think of something else. Fortunately there was a debate topic that neither of them had properly discussed. “How about the Onyx Disc then? I never got your thoughts properly on that, and I think it would be very interesting to get an outside perspective on it.”

“Outside perspective?”

“Pony scholars have been trying to puzzle it's purpose out since pre-history, but obviously, you’re a changeling. The Gryphons think it’s some sort of doom timer, but recently, with a newer relativistic physics model, we've determined that every stellar event on there already happened, and the disc marked down exactly when the light would get here.”

“Well, since changelings have never studied it directly, I can't say much about it. From what I've read of the 'events' described, I really don't know what to think. They clearly aren't supernova activity, they come from healthy stars, and they don't match up with any other kind of stellar phenomena or theory that I've read. Clearly, it’s meant to be some sort of message, perhaps it’s a warning or roadmap for the-”

Naudia got no farther, because she was blasted into a wall by a teal bolt of magic from deeper inside the cave.