Cheval lay in bed, a blissful smile on her face. Gideon was behind her, wrapping her body in his and holding her tight against his feathers. He circled her shoulder with the tip of a talon, tracing the curves of her body. Hovering in front of them was the book of poetry he’d given her.
“Read that one,” he whispered to her. With a single talon, he indicated the one he meant. She giggled, and did as he bid her.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
Her post-coital smile flickered for a moment, but did not quite fade from her face. She shut the book and laid it on the bedside, then shut her eyes and snuggled tighter against him. “You know Gia didn’t love you,” she said.
In the corner, Gia stood silently, said nothing, and waited for Cheval to give her an order.
“She was a whore. You’re the creature I’m meant to be with,” Gideon said, his voice firm. He nuzzled into the back of her neck.
“No. No. She wasn’t a whore.” Cheval stroked his talons with a hoof. “But she wasn’t right for you. Your relationship would have ended anyway. All I did was speed things up a little bit.”
“I know you always do the right thing.”
“Wow. No. You are um…” She bit her lip. “You are really doped up right now. I might have baked your mind a little too hard there. But it’s fine. It’s temporary. You’ll regain your wits soon.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, and after a moment, she went on: “I know you’ll be mad at me. Really mad. But I can feel that you do like me, a little. You’re not just beguiled. We did have a friendship and… you know. Sometimes friendships turn into romantic relationships.”
“I love you,” he said.
Cheval’s smile faded. “No. No. You…” She squeezed him again. “Not yet. But you will one day. Okay? You’ll get over this, and… everything will be okay. You’ll love me and you’ll be happy. I know I did some bad things. But I’m still the pony you made friends with, right? I’m not… I did some bad things. But I’m not the bad pony here. I’m not.”
“You could never be a bad pony.” His claws traced a pattern on her belly. “You’re my beautiful little griffon.”
Before she could reply, something exploded in the hallway. Concrete shattered. Shouts echoed through the building. “Revolutionary guard!” some griffon roared. “Talons up on the wall!”
Tied together by an unspoken bond, the three of them leapt into action. Cheval rolled out of bed and assumed the form of Cross Product. Gia leapt to her desk, spread out her homework, and in every way put on the appearance of normalcy. Gideon stood between Cheval and the door, blocking any attacker’s line of sight.
“Hey, you can’t come in here,” shouted one of Cheval’s student guards. They fought valiantly, though briefly. A series of meaty cracks marked the end of their struggle.
The door to their dorm room glowed. Metal groaned. Then, with a sudden rending scream, the door came away—sucked off into the hall as though by a tremendous wind. Bits of its shattered hinges flew through the air. One bounced off Girard’s chest, and he spread his wings to protect Cheval from any debris.
Out in the hall stood two changelings and a half-dozen griffons. All soldiers.
“Cadet,” one of the griffons ordered, “step out into the hall and put your talons on the wall.”
Gideon didn’t do as he was instructed. Instead, he locked eyes with the officer in the hall. His talons flexed. The illusion of normalcy dispersed, Gia picked up a letter opener she kept on her desk. She did not keep her talons sharp, and so required a weapon. A knife, while not ideal, could suffice in a pinch.
“Really now, that’s enough of that,” spoke a smooth, feminine voice. A bright green aura surrounded Gia and Gideon, freezing both of them in place. And through the door frame, Queen Amaryllis stepped into sight.
Her shell was the color of rainbows and candy. Her wings were delicate gossamer, reminiscent of butterflies. Her mane was a soft white tinged with flecks of pink. And when she smiled, the room lit up around her.
A reformed changeling could look no better. And, of course, she was tall. She had to lower her head to see Cheval beneath Gideon’s wings.
“Hello, Cheval,” she said.
In a flash of green light, Cheval reverted to her natural form. Her hole-ridden legs clicked on the concrete as she stepped out from behind Gideon.
What else could Amaryllis do? She giggled. “Oh, this is dramatic. You look like you’re rotting from the inside out.” In tones as sweet as candy floss and smooth as flowing wine she asked, “Were you really so afraid of being your mother's heir?”
For half a second, Cheval hesitated to answer. Her head lowered and her tail tucked between her legs. It was as though she was ashamed. But when she lifted her gaze to Amaryllis anew, her expression was shameless.
“I can be my mother’s heir,” she said. Her horn glowed, light flashed off the tip, and the magical aura surrounding Gideon and Gia dispersed. “Kill her.”
In the tight confines of the dorm room, complex maneuver was impossible. The concrete walls blocked the guards in the hallway from entering, and there was space for neither elaborate spellcasting nor dynamic martial arts. It was all over in seconds.
Cheval was fastest to act. Her horn flashed, and a thin haze surrounded Amaryllis.
Amaryllis was slightly slower. She attempted to teleport out, but Cheval’s spell inhibited her. Her outline momentarily blurred, but she did not move.
One of the changeling guards in the hallway was next. She fired a magical bolt over Amaryllis’s shoulder. It struck Gideon in the chest and passed through his torso. A spray of blood covered the dorm room wall. The smell of scorched flesh filled the air.
Gia wrapped her arms around Amaryllis, preventing her from backing out into the hall. And then Gideon, roaring through his injuries, lunged forward and got his talons around her neck. His muscles clenched, and he tore out her throat.
In a flash of green, Amaryllis transformed into a dead changeling drone, its throat still gone.
Without a friendly blocking their lines of sight, the guards in the hall were free to open fire.
Cheval sat on Amaryllis’s train, her legs bound with heavy iron chains. Dried droplets of griffon blood covered her shell.
“Is Amaryllis immortal?” Amaryllis asked her, a smile on her face. “Are her methods supernatural?”
No matter how hard Cheval looked, she couldn’t see any flaw in the disguise. “Is this one real?”
“All of them are real; I am the hive.” She leaned forward, and sniffed Cheval’s shoulder. “I smell two griffons’ blood. Which one is the father?”
When Cheval refused to answer, Amaryllis gestured, and a guard grabbed Cheval’s dock. By that means, she was yanked to all four hooves and her tail lifted. Amaryllis sniffed her hindquarters.
“Ah, good,” she said. “He has a strong bloodline. Principled. Vital. An excellent choice. Reminds me of your father.”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, dear, that’s for the best.” Amaryllis brushed Cheval’s cheek with a hoof. “How do you think he’d have reacted? You poisoned his relationship with his love. Lied to him. Entrapped him. And when he refused you, you took what you wanted by force. In this new, kinder era, changelings don’t use the ‘R’ word. But it’s a subtext.”
Cheval shivered in the warm air, and her gaze sunk to the floor. “I will never be a changeling queen. Kill me or I’ll kill myself.”
She tittered. “You already are. You found an area with plenty of love to steal, moved into a defensible central location, ensorcelled the locals to serve as your initial hive guard, and found a male with a good bloodline to be the sire. The nesting instinct is very strong. If I’d left you another month, you’d have been rationalizing getting the griffons to raise your grubs for you.”
The smile didn’t leave Amaryllis’s face. How friendly it looked, against that rainbow-colored shell. “I wonder if that’s why you came all the way out here, instead of going to Equestria. Perhaps, on some level, you knew the creatures around you would become your victims. You love ponies too much.”
“Did you actually reform or was this all just a big trick? A twenty-year long con.” Cheval spat. “Maybe you never changed. I think you’re still the same toxic creature you always were. Do you have as many holes in your legs as I do?”
“I instructed Double Time to train you in the ways of your kind. But it seems she failed.” Her disappointment was faint, but impossible to miss. “A pony may be one thing or the other. But we contain many ponies, young queen. I am kind and I am cruel and I am loving and I am vicious. I feel and I calculate and I forgive and I punish. I have as many holes in my legs as I wish to have.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I am,” she said, ever so gentle. “But I do love. Just like you are a monster, but you do truly love your family. You treasure them as they would wish to be treasured. It hurts you to know they are in pain.”
Reaching a hoof under Cheval’s chin, Amaryllis tilted her head. “Hear my words and know them to be true. You are many things. You are the daughter of Princess Cadence, raised as her own. You are also my daughter, bearer of my bloodline. You are a kind, sweet, loving creature who desires nothing more than to live in a world without conflict. You are also a liar, a brute, and a greedy, power-hungry schemer, who betrayed her closest friends to their deaths.”
Cheval’s words stuck in her throat, and her voice was thick. “I don’t want to be those things.”
“You want to be Flurry Heart. The firstborn. The one who gets to rule a kingdom, who everypony treasures, and who deserves her mother’s love.” She tilted her head, considering Cheval in detail. “Confess that you’ve fantasized about murdering and replacing your sister.”
“I…” Cheval tried to lower her head, pushing against Amaryllis’s hoof.
So Amaryllis slapped her.
“Cadence raised you to be weak,” she snapped, “but I expect better of you. When you lie to me, lie with intent. Lie because you want to deceive me. Never lie to me because you’re too cowardly to face the truth.”
And so Cheval stopped trying to lower her head, and looked Amaryllis in the eye. She assumed a calm, controlled expression, one of focused intent. “Better,” her mother said.
“Why are you here?” Cheval asked.
“Because I’ve been playing this game with Cadence for eighteen years,” she said, gesturing at a map she kept on the wall, “and I’ve gotten tired of it. The conflict between my hive and the Crystal Empire ends this month. So if you really do care for your family, listen carefully.”
When she was sure Cheval was listening, Amaryllis went on: “I’m issuing an ultimatum to Princess Cadence today. The Crystal Empire is mine by right. I ruled the north long before your kingdom returned from whence Sombra cast it and she is a squatter on my land. To that end, she has three options.”
She flicked a hoof: “One, she can abdicate the title of ‘Princess,’ forswear her fealty to Princess Celestia, and swear herself anew in vassalage to me. I will grant her the title of Duchess, and she will continue to rule the Crystal Empire in my name. It will become one of many territories in my empire, and its ponies will live in peace.”
“Two,” she flicked a hoof again, “I declare war one last time, and her crumbling nation finally implodes under its own weight. In the last conflict, her army’s morale was so poor some of her soldiers dropped their weapons and ran before they even saw us. I will take her kingdom and send her and her family into exile.”
“Celestia will intervene.” Cheval drew herself up.
Amaryllis smiled down at her. She reached out with a hoof, wiped a bit of the blood off of Cheval’s shell, and pressed it to Cheval’s nose with the tip of a hoof. “Boop,” she said.
“Why…” Cheval began a question, but couldn't finish it. Amaryllis went on.
“Option three is the one that involves you.” With that bloody hoof, she pointed at Cheval once again. “I will formally cede all disputed land to Cadence, return much of the land we took during the last few conflicts, restore her border with Equestria, acknowledge by treaty that I have no rights to her domain, and significantly reduce the size of my army. And all I want in return is…”
She gestured at Cheval.
“You…” Cheval’s brow furrowed into an incredulous stare. “You gave me away.”
“I gave away a grub. Now you’re a queen. I know everypony thinks I’m a brilliant mastermind playing five-dimensional chess, but, really.” She tapped her own shell. “I didn’t see that one coming.”
“I said I’d die before I served you.”
“Yes, but we’ve already established you’re a liar.” So light was her tone, one would think she was gently playing. Teasing a friend over tea and cakes. “So I like my odds. I can teach you the ways of your people. Soothe your damaged heart. Make you what you were meant to be. You spent your whole life thinking it was your destiny to destroy your mother’s kingdom. But I have good news.”
She rested a hoof over Cheval’s chest. “It’s your destiny to save it.”
Amaryllis had her dropped off in the Crystal Empire. One train track ran directly under the palace, for the royal family’s personal use. A few drones and a train car took Cheval for the last leg of the journey.
Cadence, Shining, and Flurry Heart were all waiting when her train arrived. She didn’t want to get out, so one of the drones pushed her.
She was tall, dark-shelled, and thin as a rail. Her legs were full of holes. Her teeth came to sharp points. The shackles about her legs marked her as a dangerous prisoner. And of course, she was still speckled with dried blood. Though it had long since turned brown and flakey, she had not been offered a chance to clean herself.
The drones removed her restraints.
Shining looked at her and didn’t move. She did look a great deal like Chrysalis. He could hardly be blamed. Cadence looked at her and also didn't move. She was trying to decide if this actually was her daughter. The creature before her didn’t look anything like Cheval, and they had only Amaryllis’s word that it was so.
Flurry Heart bounded up to sister’s side and wrapped her in a tight hug. “You’re a huge idiot,” she snapped.
Cheval turned into a perfect copy of her sister. For half a second, they looked each other in the eye as mirror images. Then Cheval’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said in Flurry’s voice. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I…”
Flurry told her it was okay, and Cheval hugged her so hard she knocked the breath from her lungs. She buried her head into her sister’s shoulder, and uncontrollably sobbed.
Awwww :)
9568066
The short description for this story straight up says it has a happy ending.
Oh, Cheval, you idiot...
Holy crap this was a good chapter.
9567997
Against a nakedly aggressive country right on its border? Yes. This entire series takes place over about 16 years and in that time the Amaryllis Hive has attacked and absorbed a number of sovereign nations friendly to Equestria, including one in which members of the Royal Family are rulers.
Even if Amaryllis rules with a light touch, any single ruler this bent on expansion in their lifetime is going to turn her eye to Equestria sooner or later. Likewise, not stepping in to defend a friendly nation, especially one with ties as close to Equestria as what the Empire has, is like I said Equestria basically admitting that they have no interest in helping anyone. If they won’t defend the Crystal Empire, who will they defend?
9568093
I will note that in both Courtesans and A Foreign Education it's stated that the changelings time their attacks for moments when "the Equestrian princesses are focused on Equestrian problems."
To be more explicit, they either wait for or arrange a crisis that requires Celestia/Luna/Twilight's full attention for at least a few weeks, and then they keep their wars short. By the time Equestrian can help, it's already over.
RainbowDoubleDash has got a point. Sooner or later Equestria has to realize that whatever distraction has occurred, it is less important than saving one of, or maybe their only, remaining ally against the Changelings. Who certainly seem like they'd be perfectly happy conquering everybody.
The hilarious part of all this is that without the need for stolen love, the Changelings don't need ponies, or anybody else, anymore. Before, they had a population limit and a seeming need for either other functioning societies or at least somewhat happy helots. And Cadence's ploy to weaken obedience to Amaryllis seems to have either failed or, more likely, to be operating on a far slower time scale. Maybe the current generation of Changelings is only 95% slavishly loyal to the Queen? Even 20 years later they are still willing to fight and die for Amaryllis.
Also, I'm kind of surprised that Cheval isn't reformed yet. Did she never share love with the other adopted Changelings? And I wonder what those others are doing?
9567128
Also consider that Double Time saw sharing love as something distasteful and unnatural. Since she was Cheval's changeling tutor, she would've imparted some of her opinion onto Cheval. And since Cheval never needed for love, being the daughter of the Princess of Love, she never wanted for it.
Why drink rotgut when you can have champagne?
I’m kind of getting a little tired of changelings rationalizing that they’ve got a bunch of people inside of them. They don’t. A shapeshifted changeling is acting. If Patrick Stewart cheated on his wife he couldn’t get off by claiming it was actually Avery Bullock or Jean-Luc Picard or Charles Xavier who really did it. It’s a flimsy excuse and always has been, and it was one thing and a pretty creative thing when Double Time was using it as a way to help Light Step see past her own insecurities and self-hate, but it’s another when a changeling speaking to another changeling is using it in their own defense as if they should be believed.
Also I have a very bad feeling about that “boop” and I swear to God if Celestia is Amaryllis or really any changeling, that’ll be the biggest cop out I could imagine to explain Celestia’s reckless apathy for what happens beyond her borders. Not that I can actually think of any way to help Equestria’s characterization at this point, since, again, we have to believe that it is simultaneous adept enough to be at least 1,000 years old and yet inept when dealing with Amaryllis for really no reason. Unless Celestia is going senile or something. Ugh.
Sorry. Suspension of disbelief took a hard beating last chapter and this one didn’t do much to repair it, though it didn’t hurt it much either. In isolation it’s a good enough chapter, but if there really is only one left then I can see a few ways for this to go in that time frame and I’m not really a fan of any of them — not of Cheval leaving the Crystal Empire to become queen of the Hive, not of a TWEEST where Cheval really does replace Flurry Heart, not of Cadance naming Cheval as the heir apparent, not of that duchess option (which mostly just seems needlessly humiliating, a princess is already a lower echelon than a queen and there’s no reason why Amaryllis’ empire couldn’t have a subordinate principality, just change the name of the land), and most especially not of Amaryllis performing any kind of karma Houdini or some asspull reveal that she was dying and needed an heir or the Hive really didn’t fully reform and so it needed love or something trite meant to “explain” her aggressive expansion for the past few years.
That... damn, I didn't expect those deaths
9568098
It’s not over, because it still leaves aggressive changelings in a land that they’re not supposed to be in, several times over the past two decades. That’s not “over” by any definition of the term.
9568170
I can think of one more way this could end that hasn't been explicitly mentioned in either text or comments yet, that will in some fashion resolve all the lose ends, and will still be arguably a happy ending. Happy for us, at least.
9568215
There's a game on Steam called Long Live the Queen, where long story short you play as the princess Elodie, who's mother the queen just died, and you have a year to go before your formal coronation as queen yourself. You basically try to survive the year to the coronation. A lot can kill you, like, a lot. Elodie can die or lose her claim to the throne in a number of horrible ways, and after watching her be stabbed, poisoned, eaten by an eldritch horror, or defeated in a magical duel, you'll probably eventually get to the end of the game the first time by just abandoning any shot at trying to let Elodie be happy, and instead just focus utterly on survival and pragmatism.
And in the process of doing that you'll basically see Elodie hollowed out as a person. Sure, she makes it to her coronation, but she's basically dead inside with everything she had to do to achieve it. You'll get a victory screen but you'll feel like you've gotten a game over screen. And that's when you'll go for your next attempt, and struggle as hard as you can to not only have Elodie survive, but be happy. Because it's not fair and it's not right that Elodie should have to hollow herself out as a person and give up everything she actually wants just for the privilege of living. Elodie is going to suffer in the game, there's no real escaping that, but there should be a reward for the suffering, a way to make it so that by the end of it Elodie is happy as a person and is coronated and becomes queen on her own terms, not simply to survive.
That's what I want for Cheval in this. Not just for her to fulfill some destiny about saving the Hive or killing Amaryllis, not merely for her to make it to the end, but for her to do it in a way that she can be happy with, without sacrificing who she is in the process. Flurry too, and Cadance, and Shining. They all of them deserve it for what they've had to put up with for the past two decades or so.
A "happy ending" isn't enough. People try tell me that "The Little Match Girl" has a happy ending. It still ends with a girl frozen to death in the snow after she was too afraid to go home lest she be beaten by her father. If there's happiness in that story, it's a hollow thing.
9568171
Me neither, I kind of expected one of them to be the next character in the series.
9568098
After a certian point that strategy shouldn't be working.
9568244
Exactly this. The strategy might work two, maybe three times against a sufficiently moribund nation, but any nation run by actually competent leaders is going to know after the second time what's really going on, and the third time will be purely as a means of buying time or a last-ditch effort to try and preserve the peace.
When Germany absorbed Austria, it was allowed because Britain was desperate to avoid a war and France wasn't going to go to war without British support, even though the absorption of Austria left the Czechoslovakian border dangerously exposed since they hadn't expected to need to defend against an Austrian front.
When Germany demanded the Sudetendland from Czechoslovakia, France and Britain knew for a fact that this meant that Hitler really was that stupid, that he really did want another general European war, but neither was in a position to do anything about it. So they let Germany take the Sudetendland (where all Czechoslovak defenses against Germany were), leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless when the Germans marched in, absorbed the Czech part and turned the Slovaks into a puppet state six months later. They'd held out hope that maybe Hitler was serious about no longer wanting anything else, but both Britain and France began re-arming and preparing for war at that point. Then we got Poland next year, and then World War II.
I could actually give a similar example with Carthiginian expansion across Iberia eventually provoking the Second Punic War, but the point is made.
And that's what Equestria should have been doing. Okay, Amaryllis attacked the Crystal Empire, but Shining Armor screwed Amaryllis into pseudo-reformation and she seems to be ruling with a light touch and letting the Crystal Empire remain semi-sovereign and keep its ties to Equestria, so it's a tolerable situation. But then she started a campaign of expansion across the whole north? At some point Equestria should have started building up a serious military force in its north and preparing for war, and a line in the sand should have been drawn somewhere and war broken out if Amaryllis crossed it. It's what any sensible nation would have done, for the purpose of self-preservation if nothing else since, again, Amaryllis' ambitions are going to reach to Equestria at some point.
And if that line in the sand isn't the sovereign territory of the Crystal Empire, then where is it?
9568291
It's a cipher. He doesn't want to risk spoiling it for people in case he's right. Hang on, I'll get to work on it.
Edit: Thought so, it's a simple ROT13 cipher. Just move all letters 13 spaces over. A becomes N, N becomes A, and so on. Here's a website that'll do it for you: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/rot13.php
9568297
She still chose to go to a place that didn't have a lot of ambient love floating around to eat. Which is fine, overall. She's a teenager, and teenagers make stupid decisions, it's what they do. Likewise I don't really blame her fully for what she did last chapter. Having started starving, of course she's going to go to extreme lengths to try and sate it, her morality and judgement having been compromised by her hunger and the fact that her home has been conquered by the being she hates most in the world.
I don't mind Cheval, she's making mistakes but in her case those mistakes are understandable (and they're something she's going to have to learn to live with). It's the world she lives in that I'm having difficulty coming to grips with.
9568279
The WWII analogy is apt, considering according to GaPJaxie, the war in Europe was 'over' long before D-day because Germany had already taken control of most of it before the Allies could launch a major counterattack.
Last comment I conceded that, due to their actions in canon, it's believable that Cadance and Shining are idiots when it comes to warfare. While I'm definitely on your side about Equestria sitting this conflict out to their inevitable downfall...I will play devil's advocate and point out that, also in canon, Equestria basically did the same thing when it came to the Storm King. They ignored and/or were completely in the dark as he conquered everything to the south, including a nation that was supposedly a close enough ally that Celestia expected to be able to get help from, until Tempest and her airships showed up almost literally on their doorstep.
9568359
While true, we do run into a problem: this isn't the show. The show can to an extent be used to excuse some behavioral traits of the characters, but at the same time if we're going to accept that this fic takes place in a more mature and somewhat more realistic setting, then it becomes hard to accept the naïvety of the ponies in the show.
Celestia ignored the machinations of the Storm King because the movie was written with 8- to 12-year-old girls in mind, the Storm King hadn't even been thought up as a character until maybe a year and a half earlier, and it's simply not a show that cares overmuch for continuity. The show is episodic in nature and doesn't concern itself with political machinations. New lands and the characters in them are invented as needed for the story of the week, and set aside or overwritten when no longer needed or when they fail to sell toys. The show does not attempt to justify how a nation as expansive as Equestria could possibly exist for 1,000 years despite the sunshine-and-rainbows naïvety because it doesn't need to, it's beyond the scope and tone of the show, the care of its target audience, and ultimately everything will end with happiness and rainbows because it's that kind of show.
But this is not that kind of fic. This isn't something like Hot Swap or En Fuego, which are a couple of fics that could slide rather comfortably into the show as episodes themselves. It's ostensibly a more mature and nuanced look at the characters, but by the nature of that premise it's going to face a different set of demands for audience satisfaction. I don't question how canon-Equestria has survived 1,000 years, but I do question how this one has - is the basic premise supposed to be "here's the show's Equestria, transplanted into a mature setting, let's see how it does?" Because I can answer that without having to read any fics: a nation populated by characters intended to amuse little girls will not survive in the real world.
Is Amaryllis supposed to be some kind of new and uniquely competent and capable threat? Why? Or if not, if she's basically of a kind in outlook and goals if not in methods with any of Equestria's neighbors - surely Celestia at some point in the past 1,000 years has had to deal with warmongers and would-be-conquerors - then why is Equestria failing so utterly to deal with her?
I'll read it to the end because, well, you have a track record of damn near excellence, and you use protagonists-who-are-bad-people to enrich your stories and themes, but. Seriously. Cheval sexually assaults (two) characters here. Chalking that up to nature (her hunger) or a mistake because she's emotionally distraught. Both are unconscionable things to imply considering what rape apologia in real life looks like.
Like. Fuck Cheval. Her paying for her crimes is literally the only kind of happy I can conceive of. Being sad about the dead friends she violated and subjugated won't cut it. It's hard for me to care about her emotional growth, or what decision she makes next, which I am assuming is what the future of the Crystal Empire hinges on, because I don't give a damn about what happens to her. I care about all the non-rapists, sure, but I'm really just full of pity for her victims.
...Ohhhh, the title has a dual meaning.
Foreign education. Attending school at the griffon republic.
Foreign education. The changeling educated as a pony/chrystal empire heir educated by a changeling.
9568424
Changelings are a species that feeds on love, and historically they weren't big on getting informed consent. The R-word is rape.
It's up to you if you want to be sympathetic to Cheval or hate her guts, but the magnitude of her crimes is entirely intentional. She's not a teenager rebelling against her parents, she's the spawn of a dark and terrible bloodline acting out her twisted urges. Amaryllis says, "you're a monster, but you love." It would be just as accurate to say, "you love, but you're still a monster."
There's only one chapter left. I think you'll be happy with the ending.
9568427
You got it!
9568424
I'm trying to be somewhat sympathetic to Cheval for the rape (let's call it what it is), because, well, she actually needed it. It was established that she just isn't getting enough love in Griffinstone, and for a changeling, love is food. Human beings can survive around three weeks without food, but by that third week humans are willing to do pretty much anything to eat. If I locked you in a pit for two weeks without food and then dropped a dead human body into that pit, you would eat that corpse; not "might", you would. Hell, if I locked you down there with someone else, then in two weeks you might try and kill and eat that person, presuming he doesn't try to kill and eat you (and provided either of you have the strength to do it). And then afterwards, you'd rationalize it as necessary for survival.
It's monstrous, it's horrible, but it's nature. It takes immense willpower to choose to starve to death, and 99% of people don't have it, especially not people who are brought up in comfortable environments the way Cheval was. For her, love is food is love. There's no difference. Yeah, she raped someone. Yeah, it's horrible. But she was starving. What was she supposed to do - let herself wither and die?
What she shouldn't have done is put herself in this situation to begin with, of course, but she didn't go to Griffinstone with the intent of raping people. The Donner Party didn't set out with the intent of eating people. Circumstances and poor decisions are a bitch.
I can condemn what Cheval did, but I can't really bring myself to hate her for not choosing to starve, and I don't think it's something she should necessarily be punished for beyond what's already happened.
9568451
On the basis of what? That she's hungry? Changelings weren't monsters for what they ate, they were monsters for how they were attempting to go about it. Your own Double Time proves that changelings can exist perfectly well in normal society if they actually want to, eating and sustaining themselves perfectly fine as much as a pony with normal food, even without living with the Princess of Love.
And Cheval didn't have twisted urges, you established that she was starving, at least since chapter 3 with the line "Her gut threatened to devour the rest of her flesh." The desire to not starve to death isn't a twisted urge.
She shouldn't have put herself into a situation where she was reduced to rape-or-starvation, of course, but she grew up in the presence of the Princess of Food. As Double Time observed to Princess Cadance back in Courtesans, someone like Cheval wouldn't have any conception of what starvation was like. She didn't think she'd end up having to rape someone, just as no one in the Donner Party thought they'd have to eat people.
9568424
Thank you for saying this. I agree a lot with your first point here.
I could probably come up with half a dozen excuses and justifications for Cheval but in the end her friends' blood is solely on her hooves, literally and figuratively.
Mental assault, rape, instigation to treason, something legalese for basically homicide; you can't just go home and apologize to your parents and sister and everything is fine. I'd be very disappointed if that isn't addressed in this fic or in a sequel. Even if Cheval keeps quiet about it and Amaryllis keeps it to herself (possibly a big if), the Griffins know and there are victims who may speak out sooner or later. And even on a meta level I feel the need to see Cheval punished and most definitely not rewarded with a crown.
9568407
On a different note about what RainbowDoubleDash keeps saying:
I can totally see scenarios that would prevent Equestria from interfering immediately, Discord from the season 2 opener, plunder vines from season 4 opener, Tirek from the season 4 finale come to mind. In none of those cases Equestria would have been able to react to anything much less mobilize their military in aid of another country, allies they may be. Funnily enough one wouldn't even need to have a spy in Equestria to know; you just carefully observe the sky and when things get wonky, shit hit the fan in harmony land.
However. However Equestria should have an enormous interest in the CE because of the crystal heart and its significance to all of pony kind as emphasized in canon. So I agree with RDD that Equestria should have been on a hair trigger when it comes to the CE and the NCH.
This is not the same scale as Twilight not telling Celestia that she has problems. This goes far beyond Cadence assuring her auntie that she can take care of this on her own. And it most certainly should be above Celestia keeping her hooves off in order to teach Cadence a lesson. So, Equestria, what gives??
9568522
Not necessarily. Given that we know that the Amaryllis that showed up at the university was a fake, it's possible Amaryllis was in Griffinstone on nominally unrelated reasons (treaty signing or something) while she sent her agents to enthrall some griffins and seize Cheval. The griffins might have no idea what happened other than some violence at the university that resulted in a bunch of dead griffins. And they won't know about Cheval specifically unless Amaryllis told them about her - remember, Cheval was in there fully in disguise as a pony.
I'd argue that Cheval ending up with a crown - either Amaryllis' or Cadance's - would be a punishment from her perspective. I don't think she wants it, especially not the Hive's. That being said I also don't want her to end up with either, though especially not Amaryllis'.
9568287
I see that this took, like, negative hours to be jossed by the next chapter. :P
And yeah, I was being optimistic — about Cheval's foresight, anyhow. I wasn't paying enough attention to the hunger cues. But I think I captured the shape of her thoughts pretty well. I wasn't expecting the assassination attempt any more than Amaryllis says she was (although, given her precautions, I wonder if she lied), but Cheval's still trying to defend her pony family.
Which puts an interesting twist on the big theme outlined in the middle of chapter 2:
Cadance isn't projecting global power. She doesn't even have that sort of obedience from her subjects. But she's far from powerless in the situation of Cheval.
What's going to be interesting is seeing the last chapter unfold the second half of that Chapter 2 theme:
9568545
I realized after I posted that with sufficient use of mind control Amaryllis probably could hide her, Chevals and any and all changelings' involvement in the shooting at the dorm of a griffonian school. Especially if the two main witnesses/victims are dead (which hasn't been confirmed yet, but if it's convenient for Amaryllis to have them dead rather than alive, I've seen little that would convince me that thay won't be).
But still, Cheval knows, Amaryllis knows and most importantly we know.
Bitch, you're a Doctor Doom wannabe who geniounly doesn't understand that the ability to kill indiscriminately doesn't make it right, and by extension that if you do it often enough at sone point people will start treating you like an asshole.
Fear is a negative emotion, so it takes more work to make people feel it than love does. You will run out.
Oh, you managed to whoop up the Crystal Empire. Gosh, did you also beat up the local boy scout troop? I hear one of those kids is a hair-puller. If the Crystal Empire is anything lime they were when Shining was in charge, then there's no reason to care.
And besides that, you can do exactly one thing well: conquer. Your insanity was covered by the power you hold overy your citizens, but they aren't stable. You can't instill the same level of fear you used to because it's no longer backed up by magic powers, and some day people will stop killing 'traitors' because not starving to death makes thinking clearly easier.
And I'm pretty sure this is going to be laid out for you sooner than you'd like.
9568575
The thing is that we also know that Cheval was a good person, Hell, is a good person who was just shoved into a situation of physical, psychological, and emotional torment and responded to it the way any person might. Like I said upthread, if you were starving to death, and you could survive by killing and eating someone, you would, and you’d rationalize it after. And if you were a bug pony who ate love, and were starving, you’d rape someone, and then rationalize it after. That’s not the twisted urges of changeling nature. It’s just nature.
And it sucks because Light Step was kind of a bitch and suffered for it but ultimately things turned out good for her with effort, and Double Time was a soldier who did bad things in a war and is now making up for it, and things seem to have worked out for her...and Cheval is a sweet teenage bug horse who did nothing to deserve being forced into this situation. She wasn’t even the one who shouted “the throne is mine!” when she and Flurry play-fought as foals.
And now she’s got starvation-rape and manslaughter on her hooves even as her homeland has been conquered by a warmonger and her own mom (Cadance, natch, SEE Yondu Udanta) and dad scared of her on some level.
And a lot of all of this is happening because Equestria didn’t just drop the ball, but shinespiked it into the Laurentian Abyss, and did nothing to stop Amaryllis, forcing Cadance to adopt an apparently futile long-term vague hope about reforming Amaryllis’ hive and forcing Cheval into...I don’t know what yet, but it’s going to suck, because no matter what Cheval is going to have to live with what she was forced into rather than the life she should have had.
I wonder if Cheval is going to be a suicide risk after this.
9568602
1. Rape and feeding on love are not the same thing. She has survived her entire life feeding without sex so that was definitely not the life saving act.
2. More importantly she wasn't really starving, she was hungry and had a way out but deliberately for a nondescript period of time chose to not take that out. She chose not to go home where love is in abundance but stay where she was hungry. In the heat of the moment she may have not been of clear mind but she got herself into that situation out of
pride? fear?... personal reasons. I see her at fault just as much as I see a drunk driver at fault even if he was asleep at the time he caused the accident.As I said, I could make half a dozen excuses and justifications for Cheval but in the end I still see her as responsible and therefore I feel that she should be held accountable.
9568427
Oh My Cheese. You are brilliant
9568084
You are an amazing writer. Thank you for all the updates! I am so excited for the ending.
9568461
You've somewhat missed my point. (Throw aside that Cheval is tossing out the food her mother sends her, and that changelings can feed by giving and expressing love, not just being the object of it.)
My concern is not that I feel Cheval is poorly written, or that her motivations don't make sense, or that her actions are out of line with the tone of the story. Because none of that is true. It's that we have a lot of cultural and misinformed opinions on rape, often to the benefit of rapists, not their victims. Some of these include apologisms such as "Men can't help but rape/ it's in their nature" or minimizing/rationalizing statements "It was just a mistake. They are a different person now."
If you have chosen to write a character who either A) by their species, whatever, is predisposed to rape by their nature, or to B) write a character who rapes others as a part of their emotional crisis and coming of age, and just eventually learns that's not okay, you have to frame it so as not to prop up any of those apologisms or myths [ A = rape is something the assailant cannot help but do; B = rape is a minor thing, a mistake, and should be easily forgiven as the assailant ages). Stories teach and inform us, even if they are about ponies, and even if we tell ourselves to take them with salt.
GapJaxie is a pretty well informed and compassionate person, at least from what I can read from their work despite the dark subject matter they gravitate towards and the scathing tongues of their characters. They also jampack their chapters with last second heel turns, subversions, and dramatic anticlimaxes and time skips of much plot happenings. Something that held true can be flipped on its head or shown to be only a pretense but a few paragraphs after. I like this sort of tension and drama in their stories.
The nervous way Cheval tries to write off and justify what she did to her own victim's still drugged out face using similar criminal rationalizing in the beginning of the chapter already indicates a good level of self-awareness on GapJaxie's part for not only the severity of what Cheval has done, but also that there is no justifying it, and what those rationalizations are; excuses to soothe the assailant, not heal or help the victim or repair the damage.
Just still can't help but be wary. I'm a survivor myself, and I work in mental health and victim advocacy. I'm the wary sort.
9568675
Merely “hungry” people don’t, to quote the story itself, feel like their stomachs are trying to consume their flesh. That line was back in chapter 3, an indeterminate amount of time ago but certainly on the order of weeks. She wasn’t hungry, she was starving.
On top of that a read-through of the last chapter has me wondering if she entered heat or some kind of changeling equivalent. A biological need to have sex, exacerbated by being a Queen. Double Time is sterile, Cheval isn’t.
Yes, she should have gone home. She’s a teenager, though, and she made a stupid mistake. Despite what GaPJaxie tries to claim, she is a teen rebelling against her parents, or has all the hallmarks of one. She’s like a stupid kid who ran away from home over something that seems like the end of the world to her but in reality is a minor thing, and is refusing to go back home even though she’s destitute in the street and is stealing or mugging or turning tricks to survive.
I’m not saying that what she did isn’t wrong, it was. But ordinary human morality is difficult to really apply in this situation because of how different changeling physiology is, and it really does make more sense to look at it through the lens of starvation than sexual predation, at least from my reading.
Cheval doesn’t need to be punished, she needs help.
"stood two changeling and a"
"stood two changelings and a"?
"drone, it’s throat still"
"drone, its throat still"?
"All of them are real; I am the hive."
...Hm. Curious. Is it true, and if so, in what sense, and how long has it been?
"Ah, good,” she said. “He has a strong bloodline. Principled. Vital."
...So, really good sense of smell, or was there a good bit of research going into that? And if so, when?
"You poisoned his relationship with his love. Lied to him. Entrapped him. And when he refused you, you took what you wanted by force."
...Sounding like research. How long has Amaryllis known, then?
"reform or was this all just a big trick? A twenty-year long con.” Cheval"
"reform, or was this all just a big trick? A twenty-year long con,” Cheval"?
"Better,” her mother said."
And some significant choice of phrasing there, if I'm not mistaken.
"Because I’ve been playing this game with Cadence for eighteen years"
Hm. Interesting. Cheval's spent at most a year in Griffonstone, yes? And I think probably less. And she was exiled when she was sixteen and Flurry eighteen, with the war noted as happening when Flurry was not quite two yet. So was Amaryllis, then, playing the game with Cadence for over a year before Cadence knew there even was a game?
"will intervene,” Cheval drew"
"will intervene.” Cheval drew"?
Though I'm not sure if you're doing something deliberate there; I can see how you might be.
"marked her as dangerous prisoner"
"marked her as a dangerous prisoner"?
"Cheval turned into a perfect copy of her sister."
"Cheval never turned into Flurry again."
"Yes, but we’ve already established you’re a liar."
:)
(Oh, and I wonder just what Amaryllis meant by the questions she asked about herself in the third person...)
9568084
"Princess Cadence adopted a changeling, and now little Cheval is Flurry Heart's younger sister. As old enemies resurface, their sisterly love may be all that can save the Crystal Empire."?
...Where's the guaranteed happy ending (even just happy for someone) in that? Or is there a different description I'm missing?
9568093
Oh, huh, I didn't get a reply notification. Well, found your comment anyway.
Looks like GaPJaxie already answered this, though. But to add a bit of commentary on how that interacts with what I was saying: it's presumably harder for Equestria to justify declaring war than it would be for them to join an already-active war. Equestria's leadership can also play long games, which means a situation that seems good enough in the short term might incline them to a longer response rather than an immediate intervention that would come with its own costs both to Equestria and potentially the people Equestria was trying to defend.
9568136
"And Cadence's ploy to weaken obedience to Amaryllis seems to have either failed or, more likely, to be operating on a far slower time scale. Maybe the current generation of Changelings is only 95% slavishly loyal to the Queen? Even 20 years later they are still willing to fight and die for Amaryllis."
There's also Amaryllis apparently doing the same thing in reverse... and it kind of seems like she's better at it. Or at least at doing it quickly.
"Also, I'm kind of surprised that Cheval isn't reformed yet."
Well, I think she was reformed. At least as much as any of the changelings in her hive.
9568170
"but it’s another when a changeling speaking to another changeling is using it in their own defense as if they should be believed."
From the text, I think they seem to believe it. And to some extent, at least, I think it's possibly true.
"since, again, we have to believe that it is simultaneous adept enough to be at least 1,000 years old and yet inept when dealing with Amaryllis for really no reason"
Well... Equestria often doesn't seem to have much in the way of connections to the rest of the world in the show, does it? I mean, it varies from episode to episode, but it often seems like that. And the country surviving for a thousand years doesn't mean it helped anyone else survive that long.
And in this scenario, if, as it seems might be the case, Amaryllis indeed does not move on Equestria, well, nonintervention ends up serving to preserve Equestria, doesn't it? Without the costs even of a victorious war, nevermind that joining the conflict might have given Amaryllis reason to turn on Equestria that she hadn't had before. Of course, it's possible she will want to conquer Equestria as well, in which case, yes, not dealing with her more firmly earlier will have been a bad move, but it seems possible that Equestria has multiple times in the past let existential threats to its neigbors stay on the far side of the border.
9568189
What is "not supposed to be in", though? The changelings have a claim there. There Empire has a claim there, but by the time Equestria could intervene, the Empire has declined to contest it. Does Equestria declare war on the Empire's behalf regardless of the Empire's wishes? Does Equestria try to convince the Empire to want to start a revanchist war? Certainly, Cadence would like those lands, and to contain the changelings... but not enough to start a fight over it. She doesn't build up the Empire's war industries and fortifications. She doesn't expand the army and prepare for an offensive campaign.
Instead, she tries to find a peaceful solution. And it's working! The Empire isn't in ruins; she isn't dead. Neither side is suffering the depredations of an extended war. But in seeking a peaceful solution without preparing to wage a serious war, she lets Amaryllis choose the terms, and they both know it. The terms aren't all that bad... but they are, of course, in Amaryllis's favor.
9568424
Two? Who is the other? Gia, indirectly? I hope I'm not forgetting something.
9568584
But she is working to make her subjects and intended-to-soon-be-subjects love her.
9568602
How did Equestria force Cadence to seek a peaceful resolution without even a major military buildup for deterrence purposes? Yes, that would have come with costs, but it was her choice which tradeoff she wanted to make. And I think it's still not clear whether she didn't make the overall best choice available for taking care of her people, including the possibility of an Equestrian intervention; the Crystal Empire likely would have been on the front lines there, or fallen behind them, and with the whole of Equestria involved and determined to win, the war seems unlikely to be quick and relatively painless.
Also, regarding what 9568427 realized, I'm not sure I completely understand the second part. Perhaps it will become clear to me later, but apparently there is already enough revealed to work it out now...
9569202
And do the changelings have a claim to the yaks, or any of the other nations they’ve conquered? The Amaryllis Hive is apparently at this point so expansive that it controls most of the northern reaches, with only vaguely defined borders.
You’re making the same excuses that Chamberlaine bought into. Oh, the Rhineland is part of Germany, so who cares if Hitler re-arms it? Austria surely rigged the plebiscite that said they didn’t want to join Germany, so it’s okay that Hitler marched troops in. Well, the Sudetenland really is ethnically German so sure, the Germans should have it instead of the Czechoslovaks, who don’t really get a say.
Wait, why did Germany just annex Bohemia and Moravia and puppet Slovakia? Those places were never ethnically German! And why are they eyeing Poland?
The difference is that Britain’s failures from 1935 to 1938 were born from a national trauma experienced in World War I, a belief that another general European war was something to be avoided at all costs (though not a universal one, Churchill was crying for war from the start) - and it was a belief that cost Britain dearly.
With someone like Amaryllis, all you’re ever doing is staving off a war, but the war is coming and so really all you’re doing is trading potential allies for time. There is near-universal agreement among historians that if the war had started in 1938 over Czechoslovakia instead of 1939 over Poland, then Germany would have crumbled in a matter of months and the war would have been over by 1940 at the latest as the Germans bled men and materials against Czechoslovak defenses and fortresses and Polish intervention in the east while Britain and France readied a killing blow in the west. Even Hitler himself knew that, in fact, as we know from surviving Nazi documents.
But the thing is that 100 years or even 50 years previously, that sort of naked aggression wouldn’t have been tolerated. When the French Revolution and Napoleon tried to take over Europe, Britain organized or took part in seven successive coalitions against the French. When Russia tried to carve out the Ottoman Empire, the British and French fought the Crimean War. The aggressive expansion of Prussia was tolerated as a check against a resurgent France, but once it became Germany the British started taking steps to check their power. And so on, and so forth.
It took a unique combination of circumstances and one Hell of a war (WWI resulted in more material cost and more munitions being exploded or fired than every previous war in human history combined) to push Britain into its pacifistic stance with regards to the Nazis, and even then the British realized their mistake after Czechoslovakia. They didn’t fail to contain Nazi Germany for nearly two decades, they took action after less than ten years.
Why hasn’t Equestria? What has been so demanding of their time? The only thing that would make sense is an ongoing war somewhere else on their border, but there hasn’t even been the vaguest suggestion of that, just “distractions”.
To make another comparison, as I pointed out, Kuwait was attacked and annexed by Iraq over the course of just two days in 1990 and a puppet regime installed. The war was “over” as GaPJaxie would describe the term for seven months before America’s coalition responded with war on Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait on the basis of understanding that Kuwait was a first step towards an Iraqi war against Saudi Arabia and an attempt to dominate the Middle East.
Freakin’ America wasn’t distracted for even a year (not even swayed by Saddam offering us oil at $10/barrel for the rest of his life if we just stayed out), but somehow Equestria has been bogged down for twenty?
9569202
Oh, and by the way, the idea that you always go to war with your allies against expansive powers before they can turn their eyes on you isn’t unique to 19th and 20th century thinking. In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli outlines that you ALWAYS go to war in those circumstances alongside your allies. If you both win then you get a share of the spoils. If you both lose then you commiserate together and find your bond strengthened in defeat and can go for revanchism later. In either case, neutrality in a conflict is something to be avoided, since all that happens is if your ally wins you get nothing and they resent you for making it harder, and if they lose then you get nothing and your ally resents your apathy and may actually move closer to the power that conquered it. Which is what happened here, Equestria didn’t help the Crystal Empire in its time of need 20 years ago, and now the Empire feels closer to Amaryllis.
Pacifism is fine on an individual scale, but there is no virtue to be found in a pacifistic nation. It is ALWAYS better to be asked “why didn’t you stay out of this?” then it is to be asked “where where you when you were needed?”
9569221
Ah, you may have a point about claims on the yaks or possible others; thanks.
I still think you may be too strongly assuming that things have to hew close to early twentieth century Europe, though; in particular, I don't think the same multipolar dynamics of containment have applied, because this seems more a situation of a long period of one fairly isolationist superpower (Equestria) and a number of much smaller and weaker nations. The Northern Changeling hive is rising to and may already have achieved a point where it can offer serious competition, but there hasn't been the careful balancing of the great powers of Europe.
Furthermore, while it was of course quite infamously a mistake with Hitler, not every conquerer has unlimited ambitions. Many do, of course, and it's something that needs to be watched for, but, for instance, even if it was wrong it Hitler's case, I think it's quite plausible for someone to actually only want to unite Greater Germany and then stop.
As for Iraq and Kuwait, I think that that's also a different situation; in the example of early twentieth century Europe and the leadup to the Second World War, Britain itself was threatened with being attacked. Iraq seems very unlikely to have even tried to launch a conquest of the United States, no matter how successful it was in the Middle East, and even more unlikely to have succeeded. America had interests in the region, of course, but Iraq was not nearly the same sort of existential threat to the USA that Nazi Germany was to Britain.
9569230
Oh, I'm not denying the idea existed, but the existence of an idea doesn't mean that it's always followed, or that it's a good idea in all circumstances.
And as for there being no virtue to be found in a pacifistic nation, I think that that depends on the values of those doing the judgement. I'm not saying that what Equestria seems to be doing doesn't have drawbacks, or isn't risky, potentially dangerous for them; I do think it's plausible, though, and plausible enough that this has been their strategy for a long time.
I'd imagine that Equestria has presented a great and tempting jewel to past peripheral conquers, but also a formidable one. If Equestria makes it easy to not be troubled by Equestria, many may do what they need to to keep the Equestrians away and content themselves with their peripheral empires, not fully satisfied but not wanting to risk the mobilization of Equestria against them. Others may have tried to strike Equestria itself, or committed acts Equestria could not ignore, and these Equestria appears to have defeated. Equestria intervened in Sombra's Crystal Empire, for instance.
But Amaryllis is taking the former path. Pose little enough threat to Equestria, treat her own subjects well enough, and time her actions Equestria would object to so that they have less opportunity to do so. Pull it off, and she can dominate the entire north without Equestria interfering; decline to try Equestria itself at that point, and she can quite possibly rule the north for a very long time.
9570140
Those were only examples off the top of my head; I also said that I could have made similar analogies to Carthiginian expansion in Iberia eventually provoking the Second Punic War with Rome. Or Rome's own expansion into the Mediterranean and Sicily provoking the First Punic War, for that matter. Egypt used to engage in an on-again, off-again series of war with the Hittites until the conquering rise of the Assyrians to their east lead them both to sign the first known defensive pact.
This isn't modern thinking, this is ancient diplomacy and statecraft dating back millennia.
Even if we want to look at it through the lens of the friendship-addled sunshine-and-rainbows ponies of the show, it still doesn't make sense. A friendly nation who's rulers are members of the Royal Family - who's princess is Celestia's niece-by-adoption and who's prince dowager is Twilight's biological brother whom she loves to pieces - falls to a foreign power, and Equestria just shrugs? The Princess of Friendship just decides "I'm sure that they don't want me butting in?" For twenty years, as the foreign power proceeds to continuously conquer other friendly nations in the north? Finally culminating in Amaryllis throwing aside all subtlety and pretenses and just conquering the whole thing, without Equestria taking any action?
Twilight not gathering up her friends and inviting Amaryllis to Taste the Rainbow™ only makes sense if Celestia is reining her in for Realpolitik reasons, but that same Realpolitik should be driving Celestia to build up Equestria's military forces in order to eventually draw a line in the sand up north to stop Amaryllis from expanding any further into other Equestrian-allied nations, and if that line was going to be crossed anywhere, it would have been Amaryllis' outright absorption of the Crystal Empire. So what's happened?
Or, it does admittedly also make some sense if we assume that Celestia is an idiot, a hidebound isolationist and weak ruler uncaring about events beyond her borders. The kind of idiot rulers you read about in school, usually shortly before learning about how Europe colonized them or forced them to sign humiliating treaties because while the native ruler sat at home content with believing their empire was the most powerful and wonderful in the world, other people went and actually advanced. What, is Equestria supposed to be 19th century Imperial China or something?
But then we must ask that if Celestia is an idiot ruler in the vein of Santa Anna of Mexico or Commodus of Rome, how did Equestria last for 1,000 years?
The situation, in sum, is fractally wrong. It is wrong when viewed as a whole, and when you look and examine the individual pieces of the situation you find them to be just as wrong as the complete situation.
9569202
I mean, yeah but...
I don't think it's going to work. The narration states later that she's genuinely unaware of what she's doing wrong, and this looks like more of the same.
9569202
Yes, Gia. Forced voyerism and proximity.
9568084 Yes, but a happy ending for who?
Hört, Rachegötter, hört der Mutter Schwur!
9569202
And the many typos herein are also corrected.
You should be in the forward for more of my stories. You deserve it.
Was it even clarified what use could Amaryllis have for Cheval, who incidentally hates her guts?
This could be a move to make it harder for Equestria to justify military intervention, given that a single hostage defuses the entire situation. But I'm still confused.