Chrysalis has won the battle: Canterlot - and soon, all of Equestria - is hers. But staining her perfect day crimson is one casualty: one death she cannot - will not - allow. No matter the cost.
Everything comes at a cost. Somewhere along the lines of her impersonations and machinations, Queen Chrysalis forgot that, but it didn't take long for Fate to remind her. Canterlot is hers, and soon all of Equestria will fall under her rule, but deep beneath the ground on which her new throne sits is the one who paid the price for her perfect day.
Chrysalis owns Equestria, but Twilight Sparkle is as close to death as one can be: frozen in time, a fraction of a second before her soul would have vacated her mortal shell forever, and hidden in the Crystal Caves until Chrysalis can think of a way to save her.
But the new Queen of Equestria has more problems to deal with than one near-dead unicorn: elsewhere in the world, Princess Luna is gathering forces to drive her out, whilst wheels within wheels turn inside Chrysalis's own government and in the frozen north, an Empire and the tyrant who banished it grow closer to returning by the day.
Note For New Readers: Whilst this story is cancelled, I will be writing another with the same base premise in the near future. A blog post for this version will be posted to notify you when the redo is on site.
She looked at me, her eyes glossy with un-shed tears, and I could see her emotions plain as day; written in bold across those wide, glassy disks: fear, self-doubt, regret – oh, but there was so much regret.
The buzz in the base of my horn had informed me of all this without me needing to look into those eyes, but that would not have given me the justification for my actions that I obtained from seeing, beneath it all, a battered but not quite broken conviction that she was right.
And she gazed, beseeching; begging, into my eyes – though they were not truly my own – and her mouth opened, and from those trembling lavender lips came the words:
“I’m sorry.”
She said it so sadly, and I could barely suppress the laugh which rose in my throat. Even now, she did not understand the truth of the situation.
I grinned a wolf’s grin and replied: “You will be.”
She frowned; her peculiar pony face twisting into a look of confusion. It was in this moment, as her question raced in vain to her lips, that I struck. A spell I had practiced many a time - but never quite found a use for -sprang forth from my horn and summoned the emerald light of my kind out from the ether, bribing it into flame with painstakingly gathered love.
The ring of fire formed around her as I had known it would, growing by the second so that after a few moments the sphere of magic I had beckoned forth engulfed her completely, sinking gracefully down, first into the tiles of the floor, and then the earth beneath.
I must admit that childish curiosity coerced me into inaction, and for some precious moments I watched her go. It did not last long, however, and I turned upon the hooves I had stolen and swept from the room without so much as a glance back.
II: THREAT PREVENTION
The thought came to me in the midst of an impromptu song, the contents of which are of no importance, that it might not be enough merely to trap the unicorn who would so easily destroy my plans. Cutting short my anticipatory revelry, instead of the spell I used on her, I cast an advanced teleportation spell as the means to take me where I needed to go. It was speed, rather than efficiency, which dictated this choice: if Twilight Sparkle (what a ridiculous, absurdly pony name) was as adaptable as her reputation claimed, it was possible that she may already have found the prisoner.
They could not be allowed to escape.
As the spell took hold I let the green flames welcome me into their embrace, and did not flinch when they flared like miniature suns, cutting me a door through to the other side of a fold in the fabric of space-time. This was my magic, what cause had I to be afraid? There were more pressing concerns than the paranoid what-ifs that came with higher magic at present, after all. Glancing around me, my gaze was drawn by the faintly tugging buzz of emotions in my horn to one passage in particular. My quarry had not gotten far, then? It was unsurprising, I supposed, since she was at that point blissfully unaware of the hunt in progress.
I found her glancing listlessly at the unyielding crystal walls of her prison, searching for a way out. There was none to find – at least none that wasn’t guarded – and I relished in her distraction as I crept closer, dropping the useless disguise and humming in satisfaction as the fur-coated skin metamorphosed back to its chitinous true state.
She saw me as I closed on ten meters from her and she lit up her horn to defend herself, eyes widening whilst my horn buzzed from her fear. The bolt she loosed was hasty; poorly aimed, and I evaded it with ease with a mere step to the side, kindling an attack of my own.
She stared in dumb confusion as I cast a spell on myself, either unable to fathom – or, more likely, entirely ignorant of – my intended course of attack. The specialised sac in the roof of my mouth filled quickly and I let the newly synthesised gel-silk spill from my hollow fangs, to be spooled up in the grasp of my magic.
She fired again, and this time I had to dive to the floor to avoid being hit. She was clearly panicking: these were not purposeful spells but mindless bursts of magic. I had heard the naïve princess, Celestia, praise the unicorn’s intellect many times those past weeks, but it appeared that when Sparkle lost her cool, she lost much of her intelligence also.
I was almost disappointed – almost – by how easily this skirmish was turning in my favour; and very nearly felt a rush of pride in Sparkle as she dodged most of the silk that I whiplashed across the still air: mere strands sticking to her hooves whilst the rest careened on by. Her dodge had been clumsy, however, and I watched as the unicorn stumbled and fell – hard – onto the stone of the cliff edge. It made a curious crunching sound as she landed, and as I stalked forward to fire my second spool of silk, I saw why: cracks spider-webbed across the stone between her ledge and the cave wall proper.
I prepared to fire, and she got to her hooves in a desperate attempt to carry out some counterattack. Lowering her horn as if to stab me with it, she kicked off in an attempted lunge with both hind legs, a move which caught me off guard. But before she managed to leave it, the ground beneath her voiced its disapproval of her sudden movement by falling inexorably away from the rest of the cliff, taking her with it.
My spool of silk jetted over her head as she plummeted down, down, down. Slowly: too late, I redirected it towards her spiralling form and it caught her; slowed her; just a few moments before she hit. More silk stuck to her right legs than her left ones, and whilst it momentarily slowed her descent with a sharp yank at all four legs, the worst happened mere seconds later. With an echoing crack, the left silk snapped, her momentum carrying that side down and trailing her head violently behind the arcing torso, the weight of it flinging it round and down, then back up towards the still-bound right limbs.
The unicorn’s wail of terror and its terrible buzzing companion in my horn abruptly stopped, and just after, her body hit the ground with a sickening crunch, her head lying on its right cheek with the neck twisted further round than I felt it should be able to. The significance of the cessation of emotion not having yet hit me, I edged out over the precipice with horror clutching icily at my every cell, praying that she was still alive despite all the evidence pointing at the other option.
I looked down at her, dread in my heart, and she did not move.
I glided numbly down to her, thoughts ricocheting in my head, and she did not move.
I touched a hoof to her, praying to the stars, and she did not move.
It took me a moment to realise the pained, grievous howl I was hearing was my own, and another to understand why. Whether I had wanted this to happen or not, Twilight Sparkle lay dead at my hooves, and all because I had seen fit to hunt her down.
I collapsed beside her, my neck falling over the top of her outstretched foreleg, and noticed with a start that a weak pulse still beat, ever-fading, in her arteries. Desperate, not really comprehending what I was doing, I fired up a spell; dusting off the cobwebs of memory and shooting it out to be our saviour like one of those knights of old.
Renewed hope flared in my heart...
But then her body tensed up; becoming still and cold as stone as her pulse stopped dead. She was gone; gone forever where not even the most powerful magic could hope to truly return her from. For a long, long minute I grieved: my mind an agony of guilt, believing for all the world that I had wasted my only chance to save her. Then, some time later, when the sobs stopped wracking my body as much as they had been and the sick feeling in my stomach dissipated under my unwillingness to accept the truth of what I had done, my logical side caught up and I realised what spell I had cast in my desperation.
A temporal stasis spell: it was no wonder I felt utterly drained. It would hold as long as I kept adding magic to it, but it was an imperfect thing, as all spells are doomed to be, and it would not stop the march of time completely.
No matter what I did from this point on, eventually – perhaps in a year's time, perhaps less – that infinitesimally moving heart would stop forever.
After a while the reality of what had occurred hit me, and desperately, like a fugitive on the run, I teleported away from that place as fast as my magic could carry me. For the longest time after I dropped back into existence all I could think was that I had killed her; and that she was doubtless doomed whatever spell I cast upon her.
Eventually, though, my sense of purpose returned and I was able to pull myself together. Banishing my recent memories to a locked door far in the back of my mind, I painstakingly returned to my disguise, strode hurriedly out into the corridor and resumed the life of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza; attempting to hide both the fact that I had been crying from the ponies I passed, and the reason why from my own mind.
Try as I might, though, the truth of what had happened refused to be expunged completely and not even the soon-to-be-fulfilled dream of saving my malnourished kingdom could raise quite the same joy as it had earlier that day. A mare lay dead, or as close to it as one could get, because of me, and a corresponding piece of my soul lay likewise shattered and frozen beside her. I cannot imagine a worse pain someone could feel than that which grasped my heart at that moment, and which refused to go away. I could try to ignore it all I wanted, but a broken soul does not cease to be so damaged just because one wishes it.
III: A CANTERLOT WEDDING
In Cadance’s shape, I stood before the unwitting Celestia: beside me the fiancé I had stolen and around me many happy faces. The princess of the day said the words that served to marry us, and I tried to look as if I was enjoying the moment: the kiss: the day my apparent dreams came true.
I think I managed it – indeed, I must have, or Celestia would not have looked nearly as pleased about the proceedings as she did. But Cadance’s dreams were not my dreams, however identically to her I looked, and I’m not even sure my dreams were quite the same then as they had been earlier that day. I did not notice much of what happened there, strangled by my thoughts as I was, and as a result I do not remember many details of the proceedings that followed the wedding itself.
Eventually, though, the whole affair came to a close and I was allowed some time alone with my new husband. From the way they spoke and the laughs in their eyes, they were clearly expecting us to consummate our marriage; for me to… ‘make love’ … with Shining Armour.
I did no such thing.
To take the place of a princess in order to plan an invasion was one thing; to mind-control and marry her husband to allow it to take place was a step further; but to rob the couple of that most intimate of moments for no reason besides base desire would have been unforgivable. I already had enough guilt to bear without adding that, too.
And how, how could anyone – even the most twisted monster – have sex with the brother of a mare whose death they'd caused and steal him in every possible way from the one who loved him, whom they had imprisoned in a dank, cold cave under the city you planned to invade.
I did many things I am not proud of for my people’s survival, but that act is not one of them.
Pah... Small comforts…
Instead, I took him aside and asked him what I needed of him: more an act of courtesy than because I needed to.
“Shining, darling?” I called, my voice sickeningly saccharine in imitation of that of his true love.
He turned to face me, and I nearly cringed at his pathetic appearance, the fragile justifications I had amassed starting to fracture. He was slack jawed, dumbly smiling and sluggish; like a drunk puppy, a pale imitation of the strong and stoic captain of the guard he had once been.
“Yes, honey?” he slavered in response.
“I need you to order the guard from their posts, to convene in the parade grounds, alright? It’s very important to the castle’s security. And then I want you to drop that hideous shield – we’re already married, what’s the risk now?”
He took a long, long minute to work past his doubts and answer me, but I refused to add more mental conditioning unless I needed to, for fear of causing serious long-term damage.
“If you say, so, dear.” He mumbled, turning and heading shakily off to his troops. I watched him from our room’s window as he gave the commands, staring after the soldiers as they dispersed and re-converged on the parade grounds as I had asked. Once I was satisfied it was all underway, I locked the bedroom door and gave a minute’s sorrow to Twilight Sparkle: broken and doomed in my spell, entombed beneath my very feet.
IV: UPON A DARK CANVAS
The flood of my people, like airborne seas of ink, blotted out the skies as if they were spilt paint across a masterpiece; beauty laid to waste by the carelessness of its artist’s errant hoof.
The artist was Celestia – the complacent fool – and, unfortunately for her, the paint she had spilt was spreading of its own accord. The guard had been easy targets, and their bulky platemail had only slowed them down; preventing their escape. Looking out across the palace grounds, I could see them – or at least the silk cocooning them – from my waiting place in the palace’s outer buildings.
I had feigned capture by my own changelings and lay in illusory bonds not far from one of the lavish balcony gardens. Shining Armour – his conditioning stripped thoroughly from his mind in he hopes he would not suffer any long term damage – lay unconscious by my side. The guard whose escape I’d ordered my changelings to allow should been summoning Celestia at that very moment; in mere minutes I would be facing the princess, to battle one on one.
True, I could’ve had my army capture her for me, but if one was to rule a country one had invaded, one may as well inform one’s predecessors of their immediate redundancy oneself.
I was in my element: not a skulking creature of shadows and carefulness and paranoia, but a glorious, shining motor driving the axles of victory steadily forward. I was in command, I was ready for anything.
They were a long few seconds: the seconds in which she finally appeared. She saw me and galloped forward, horn ablaze as she blasted my drones aside. Their pain, transmitted to me through the painful buzzing of my horn, served only to fire up my own adrenaline; bringing the spell to cause our foe’s downfall to the ready even more quickly.
Panting for breath as she leaned down to me – oh, so trusting – she gushed at me: “Cadance – thank heavens you’re alright. Did they… did they hurt you at all?”
“No.” I replied, my voice changing from high and sweet to low and commanding as I shed the faux-form and lanced her newly horror-stricken face with emerald light. She staggered back and fell, and my newly arrived kin darted forward to restrain her thoroughly. Firing another shot into her desperately writhing body, I added; perhaps more viciously than I needed to:
“But it looks to me like you’ve taken a few nasty blows… Here, let me fix that for you.”
With that, I blasted her full in the face with a powerful stunning spell, and she fell into the waiting embrace of my subjects’ magic. They lifted her upon their backs, and between the four of them carried the dethroned regent to our temporary centre of command: the palace throne room, no less. I followed them eagerly; the tide of battle was in my favour, and I intended to keep it that way.
V: CHANGE OF MAGANGEMENT
It was as I sat in my new throne – a tall, golden thing, and thankfully more comfortable than it looked – that yet more good news emerged, snatched from the seas of battle in the mouth of a glorious gannet; carried swiftly to my new domain.
The gannet was a wiry runt of a changeling, whose eyes betrayed no intelligence above the average but whose sheer agility was impressive; soaring from her end of the hall to mine in mere seconds, stopping almost as soon as she flared her wings to slow herself; and floating gracefully, but not overly slowly, down to land by my hooves.
Tracing a circle of lime magic in the air with her horn in the traditional salute of our military, she simultaneously drew the report scroll from her harness and shook it open with a flourish of her hoof.
The weighted parchment which rolled down from her grip bore great news indeed within its hastily written shorthand:
Report of Capture, for eyes of Her Exalted Royal Highness, Hive-Queen Chrysalis de Vespidae-Alveare only.
Report follows:
Five (5) ponies: 2 pegasus, 2 earth, 1 unicorn. Captured on palace outskirts w/ no serious injuries/ loss of life.
Details below:
Pony, pegasus, female: l. blue, chromatic. Marked w/ white cloud & tri-coloured lightning. Suspected Bearer of Harmony; Loyalty. Violent tendencies; tenacious – treat with additional caution.
Pony, pegasus, female: c. yellow, l. pink. Marked with three (3) pink butterflies. Suspected BoH; Kindness. No significant threat, besides suspected BoH role.
Pony, earth, female: honey yellow, straw yellow. Marked with three (3) red apples. Suspected BoH; Honesty. High physical strength – to be restrained heavily. Promising candidate for interrogation.
Pony, earth, female: pink, pink. Marked with three (3) balloons: two (2) blue, one (1) yellow. Suspected BoH; Laughter. Appears to possess limited control of earth pony magic – high security risk, guard complement no less than six (6) category four (4) service personnel.
Pony, unicorn, female: white, d. blue. Marked with three (3) blue gems. Suspected BoH; Generosity. Violent when panicked; largely ineffective but v. persistent. Physically & magically weak – all magical attacks improvised; presumed no combat training.
End detail on captives. Details of capture:
Engaged: H24:M11, captured: H24:M19, by Categ. Four (4) GSaEU #114: “Stormy Day Matinee”. Minor engagement; hostiles unorganised & untrained; no serious injury on either side.
End capture details.
Planned course of action:
Send messenger to HERH with prelim. report. Transfer prisoners from current position to Temp. Comm. Base Epsilon (palace throne room) by GSaEU #114, assisted by GAAU #602 “Upon Great Tempest”. Imprison captives as per HERH’s will.
- Solid Case, Decanus Evocatus: Categ. Five (5), CO for GSaEU #114
End Report.
I thanked the young Excursor for delivering such heartening news to me, and for doing it so quickly: if the time notation on the report was accurate, she’d taken the scroll and then negotiated her way through both the raging battlefield and the labyrinthine palace corridors to arrive around thirty-five minutes after the prisoners had been captured.
Such a feat of speed would have required her to fly flat-out all the way, and for her to have taken no breaks in which to catch her breath. This display of duty impressed me greatly, and I signalled to my advisor to have her made a duplicarius by way of a reward.
At my wave of dismissal, the Excursor rolled the scroll up neatly, depositing it by my throne, and took flight once more to relay the news that I did not object to her Decanus’s plan.
I sat and watched as my subjects hastened back and forth, waiting for the next item of importance to be brought to my attention. I thought it odd that there, in the midst of my people’s largest battle in history, I could sit in a my enemy’s throne and actually feel bored.
In this boredom, my mind began to turn to memories I had managed to bury for those past hours: memories of a cave; a unicorn; a fall. Fighting to show no sign of the up-surging guilt and sorrow, I stood from my throne; attempting to give off an air of purposefulness as I strode from the room accompanied by my ever-present praetorian guard.
I had to do something – anything – if I was to prevent the entire hive learning of the cause of my woe. They could sense my unrest, I know, but somewhat illogically I felt much worse showing it outwardly than I did through my outgoing flow of emotion.
I strode down the corridor and fought back the tears… I very nearly succeeded.
VI: TO BLACKMAIL A PRINCESS
Our purpose was simple: find one of the unicorn messengers used by the princesses to communicate long-range and get them to send a letter of warning to the absent Princess Luna. My advisor had narrowed the possible locations of such a pony down to two: with one of our various units across the city, their capture as yet unreported; or in the besieged staff quarter of the palace, our current destination.
On the way to the staff quarter, we rendezvoused with one of our supply units and equipped ourselves with full changeling platemail and a variety of weapons. The armour was no substitute for my own, wherever that was, but it would certainly do a lot to protect me if there happened to be a guard squad trapped with the cornered palace staff.
It so happened that the integrity of my new armour was tested sooner than I had anticipated: I had been leading my elite force onward in the direction of the barricaded quarter that was our destination when a significant portion of what must once have been a palace room materialised above us; showering the corridor in flaming debris.
My praetorians dealt with the threat of fire quickly and effectively – as I had known they would – and spread around the epicentre of the fallen debris in a rough horseshoe, glaives drawn and directed, like mine, at the two figures who lay in the middle of this mess.
One, the fur on her foreleg matted with blood, merely stared up at us in dread; while the other got to his hooves and gave a look that might have been somewhat intimidating were it not for the fearful quiver of his lips.
“Stay back, filth! I am a prince of this realm and I will not hesitate to kill you in defence of it!” blathered the idiot pompously; vainly neatening his blonde mane even as we aimed our blades at him. “Now let me pass, before the Guard get here and kill you all – I care not what you do with her, the useless wretch couldn’t even cast a simple teleport spell properly.”
He made to step forward, as if he expected his pretentious, pathetic prattling to have made us forget our duty and let him go. The fool. Glaring down at him, I took a more methodical approach to my response than was strictly necessary: this infantile excuse for a prince had been Tartarus to deal with these last few months, and I was more than owed some payback.
“Firstly, you cowardly little shit, shut up or I will have you killed here and now.” He promptly did just that, and I could not resist issuing a mocking beat-down his way.
“Oh, so you do value life, so long as it’s your own?” No response.
“Now, little prince, I do not think you understand just how much danger you are in. Do you really think that you: unarmed and unarmoured, would last even a moment against me: the queen of the changelings?
“Even without my praetorians –Tartarus, even without my weapon – I could kill you where you stand a thousand times over. Save your pretentious bravado for the other prisoners, Blueblood, lest you want to start losing nonessential body parts.”
He gulped; wobbled on his hooves; blinked a few times: then his tough act broke down and he began bawling like a foal. Losing my already diminished patience, I slid my hoof along my weapon’s handle to grasp it just below the blade and swung the blunt end at his head – hard.
He crumpled, and the irritating wailing stopped, the only sound now being the injured mare’s sniffling. I stepped in closer, half-leaning down to examine her: the leg looked badly cut, but not broken, and her horn showed the tell-tale signs of magical overexertion: nothing as serious as I’d feared, both were easily cured.
As I had checked her wounds, I had noticed that her cutie mark displayed a scroll caught in a swirl of golden magic: I could hardly believe my luck – she might just be what we were looking for. I could have mind-controlled her to speak, but the weight of recent events on my conscience stayed my hoof. Instead, I spoke softly to the mare, hoping to obtain a favourable response without forcing it from her.
“What is your name?” I asked, and she looked up with an expression somewhere between that of a deer in the path of a carriage and simple bemusement.
“Starlit Scrolls…your highness?”
I appreciated her adding that recognition of my status; no matter that her hesitance and caution had almost made it sound like a question.
“’Your Highness’ will do nicely, Miss Scrolls. Now, am I correct in the assumption that your special talent relates to magical delivery of items, such as – as your name would certainly suggest – scrolls?”
“Yes, Your Highness. But I don’t think I can cast anything right now; I think I really hurt my horn with that teleport.”
“Don’t worry,” I soothed. “It’s not as bad as it probably feels… I could fix it for you - your leg too - if you'd send this letter for me in return. What do you say we do a nice, simple exchange: your help for my help?”
“A-alright, Your Highness. But p-please don’t hurt my… my mind. I-I’ll do as you say, you don’t need to do…that.” The mare quivered visibly, her terror plain for all to see, so I pushed down my impatience and continued to speak in the same placating manner as I had been until this point; raising my hoof to my heart as I made my promise.
“You have my word I will do no such thing. Only when absolutely necessary, and that should never become the case – if you remain cooperative, that is.”
Leaning even closer, I touched my horn to hers and brought the spell up gradually, so as to avoid overloading her already damaged horn. Even so, she whimpered as the magic washed over her soot-blackened spire; cleaning it inside as well as outside, preparing it for the follow-up spell which would soothe the magical tissues within and repair the scorched exit pathways.
As the second spell ran its course and retreated from her horn, the unicorn sighed in relief. Reopening my eyes, which I had shut in concentration, I straightened up and smiled at her in a manner I hoped would put her a little more at ease.
“Better?” I queried, and she nodded back. “Then you’ll have no trouble completing my task, I assume?”
“No, Your Highness.” She responded, and I couldn’t help a grin: it felt good to have the fear and respect of another’s subject. ‘How’s it feel, Celestia, to have your citizens call me “your highness” in place of you?’, I thought smugly, though the smile drooped somewhat at the realisation that the mare’s foreleg was still untreated.
Though her horn had undoubtedly required the most care be taken, it was the leg which would require the most complex treatment. Had she been being attended to by one of Equestria’s doctors, such a wound would likely have taken days to reach a level of healing where the leg was usable, but I am a changeling and we have certain shortcuts available to us; such as the one I used on her injury.
Whilst my subconscious concentrated on synthesising the necessary substances within my sac, I used the same simple cleansing spell I had on her horn to disinfect and remove foreign objects from the wound. Again, she winced in pain, but did not cry out this time.
The synthesised gloop in my sac was ready, and I spat some from my fangs to remove any silk residue from their ends before once again leaning in over the mare. Carefully positioning my head over the wound, I let the slightly viscous gel stream from my fangs onto the exposed flesh; changeling cells in protective goo coursing over every inch of the gash in preparation for the next step.
Starlit Scrolls was looking with a mix of repulsion and fascination at the translucent gel I had deposited on her injury, evidently waiting for it to do something more than just sit there.
I had love to spare, so the costly spell I was about to cast did not concern me as much as it would’ve done a year earlier when we were all starved of love, and I began the preparations to cast it calmly and professionally.
When I say I acted professionally, I mean as professionally as one can carry out the act of biting someone, this admittedly not being very professional at all. In one fast, effective manoeuver, I stabbed my fangs into her flesh just deep enough to draw new blood – which, given the state of her limb, wasn’t very deep at all – and retracted them to allow the gel to fill the gaps I had made in the covering.
The Scrolls mare looked up at me in shock, yelping in pain, whilst the blood burnt green on my fang-tips and I lit my horn up one last time, sending a jet of soft green light over to the gel-covered wound. Using the genetic information my body had picked up from her blood, the sweeping ray of magic commanded the dormant changeling cells in the gel to transform, reconstructing the lost flesh from the deepest point upwards.
As her skin began to take shape, I felt fatigue begin to creep into my body, but I ignored it and focused on growing her coat back out from the bare skin to cover the last indication of the wound. The colour was slightly off, but close enough to the rest of her to be a passable fit, and I sat back in satisfaction as Starlit stared dumbly at her repaired foreleg, eyes wide in disbelief.
Stammering a little, she returned her gaze to me as she spoke. “Th-thank you, Your Highness,” she said, and this time the fear was very nearly absent from her voice.
My side of the bargain dealt with, I wasted no more time in giving her the scroll; and after a moment’s hesitation she grasped it in her magic and closed her eyes, her horn flaring with topaz light as the scroll vanished in a flash of warm orange.
“Come,” I said to her, and she got to her hooves obligingly, “I have further work for you, Miss Scrolls, and I would rather discuss it in more comfortable surroundings.”
My praetorians, who’d until that point been statue still in position to strike, let out audible sighs of relief that they would not be required to stand on their spots for another lengthy discussion with my new acquisition and hastened to reform around us.
Together, we returned to the throne room; our mission complete.
VII: VOWS OF THE GUILTY
It was not until much later that I finally got a reprieve from the running of the invasion: the last dregs of the Royal Guard were being mopped up by the second, and I felt I could turn command over to my High Imperator - leaving me free to get some much-needed rest.
Out of a sense of respect, I did not take Celestia or Luna’s chambers, and I avoided altogether the section of the castle in which Twilight Sparkle had once resided, which left me the ambassadorial suites. They were roughly equivalent to what I’d gotten used to under the guise of Cadance, and I had made myself quite comfortable in my new domain when a knock at my door roused me from my almost-sleep and a nervous-looking messenger pushed open the door in order to lay a sack full of parchment scrolls on the bedroom floor.
He saluted smartly and hurried to explain his uninvited presence in my chambers. “Letters, Your Highness: correspondence between Princess Celestia and the suspected Bearer of Magic. Apologies for the intrusion - High Imperator Labium insisted they be delivered to you at once, My Queen.”
I took the bag in my magic and waved him away, removing the topmost scroll and prising it open. Sitting up in my bed, I straightened the parchment out and began to read. Its contents were nothing particularly valuable from a tactical point of view, but it made for surprisingly compelling reading as Celestia’s correspondent – doubtless a close friend of hers – detailed her rather ordinary life in a town called Ponyville.
The more I read, the more engrossed I became, to the point where I laughed at the mare’s bad jokes and felt bad for her when she detailed how things had gone wrong for her and her friends. And then, I reached the end and saw whose name was written there.
"Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle."
NO! No, please! Not her – it couldn’t be her, it mustn’t be.
"Twilight Sparkle."
My eyes glistened with tears – please, don’t let this be the life I took!
"Twilight Sparkle".
The mare I had doomed was the very same mare who’d written this letter. The mare who’d made me laugh through her words alone, the mare who had forgiven an arrogant showmare despite her having nearly destroyed the town, the mare who’d diligently written all these letters to the princess she admired so much – this was the mare I’d killed.
I cried for what felt like forever, and, out of either a sick sense of fascination or a feeling of duty to find out exactly what I had cost the world today, I picked up another letter and began to read. Hours later: hours of sorrow and stabbing guilt; hours of fighting exhaustion to keep on reading, I almost-religiously deposited the last scroll back where it had come from and bawled into my already waterlogged pillow.
It wasn’t fair – I did not want to be a killer, and this mare, this mare did not deserve to die. It wasn’t right that she lay dead – or as close to dead as one could get – in a stupid bucking cave under this Tartarus-wrought city.
Eventually, the tears came no more, and I came to a resolution of sorts. Standing in front of the tall mirror; I straightened myself up as high as I could, set my jaw and vowed to the heavens above:
"On the lives of my people, on the honour of my ancestors, I will not let you die. No matter the price I have to pay; no matter what I have to do, Twilight Sparkle, I refuse to let it end like this."
Even the establishment of my new kingdom and the matter of feeding my malnourished populace fell behind this oath in my mind. It was all-consuming, this task I had taken on: unshakeably, undeniably the right thing to do.
I had perhaps a year to find some way of fixing the grievous injuries I had caused, a year to save Twilight Sparkle – and with her, my soul. It would not be easy, but there was no real choice. Refocusing my gaze to the skies, I spoke:
“Fate, you cruel, cruel bastard – I accept your challenge and all which may come with it. I will not fail her now.”
I awoke slowly the morning after my invasion, evidently having been left undisturbed by my subjects as I slept. Thankfully, I had not overslept: although I was slightly later in waking than I usually was, there was still plenty of time to prepare before the breakfast which I had, last night, ordered my personal chefs to prepare for this morning. Plenty of time for thinking, too.
I sat on the end of my bed for a long while, staring across the room at the image in the mirror: a tall, thin changeling mare gazed forlornly back, from her features clearly a member of the Royal Caste – if the crown did not make that much obvious – but her posture lacked any confidence and there were dark bags under her eyes. It took a significant, though not altogether surprising, amount of time for my sleep-addled, stressed-out mind to make the connection that this mare was me.
The sight did a lot to wake me up, if only by reminding me of why I looked so bad in the first place. I pushed the worst of the memories away, but even the most recent ones – last night’s letter-reading and the vow – doused the morning numbness in the icy waters of sorrow and regret.
I couldn’t help thinking that it would be so much easier if I just locked what had happened in the back of my mind and waited until I no longer remembered it, and following this line of thought I momentarily considered giving up on my promise and doing exactly that. Luckily for both myself and Twilight Sparkle, that thought was quickly banished from my mind: I hadn’t made a mere promise, to be broken if it no longer suited me; I had vowed upon everything I held dear, and that is not something I – or most changelings, I’d like to think - would ever simply turn away from and abandon.
Besides, a mare’s life still hung in the delicate balance; the trigger of her untimely death the mere pull of a hair-trigger away: how could I just walk away now?
And in the infinitely wide world of magic, there had to be an answer – it was impossible for there not to be. It wouldn’t be easy to find, even less so to cast – the only reason magic-medics wouldn’t jump on the idea of a spell to mend a broken spine would be if it simply took too much out of the caster to be safe, after all – but it would be out there somewhere. My mission now was to find such a spell – or a combination of spells – and cast it successfully on Twilight. No pressure.
Sighing, I shuffled away into my en-suite bathroom to make myself presentable, before heading with much-diminished enthusiasm to breakfast.
II : SLEEPER SERVICE
A little under an hour later, I left the opulent dining room in which my breakfast had been served and headed straight for my new throne room, my ever-dutiful Praetorians at my side as always.
Breakfast, undoubtedly delicious as it had been, had done nothing to take my mind off of my sparkling new mental shackles, and I found myself yearning for something to do. Entering the long, elegantly decorated throne room, I called out for my new assistant, Starlit Scrolls, to be brought to the room at once, eager to begin the day’s work.
It was to my surprise, then, when I heard a sleepy voice coming from the far side of the titanic golden throne; specifically from the bedraggled, unkempt unicorn mare peering out from behind it.
“I’m here, Your-“ she yawned impressively, “…Highness. What do you, uh, require?”
I have to admit her appearance took me a little off guard, but I’d seen worse amongst my own people before we took the city and voiced my reaction to the matter without too much delay.
“Ms. Scrolls, why in the name of the Verdant Phlogiston were you sleeping in my throne room?”
She blinked at me for a moment, evidently not a morning pony, before stumbling her way through an explanation.
“Well, I… there wasn’t… I didn’t know where to go, and no one said anything to me, so I just slept here. I’m sorry, I-I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, I was just so tired and-“
I held up a hoof to silence her, and to my moderate surprise she instantly stopped mid-sentence, eyes widening in anticipation of retaliation.
“It’s not your fault, Ms. Scrolls. I ordered a bedroom be set up for you, but evidently someling wasn’t listening when I gave those particular instructions. I thought I was quite clear when I told them to escort you to your lodgings but it would appear I wasn’t clear enough.”
Scrolls had another of her episodes of confused blinking, before her eyes widened in understanding and she smiled gratefully. “Th-thank you, Your Highness. I really appreciate it.”
Thinking back to my schedule for the day, I realised that the first item on the list would not require Scrolls’ attendance and promptly sent her off to the dining room for some breakfast of her own.
“I shan’t need you for a little while, Ms. Scrolls,” I stated, turning to the nearest non-Praetorian soldier and calling: “Legionary! Escort my assistant here to my dining room and have the chefs get her something to eat. I cannot afford to have her attention waver due to hunger; today’s work is very important and I want accurate notes.”
Sending me another grateful smile as she left my side, Scrolls trotted alongside the Legionary as he led the way to my dining room. It struck me then that perhaps I was being too nice to the unicorn – civilian though she may be, she had been a member of the Princesses’ staff – and resolved to watch how I acted around her more closely in future.
III: THE DAILY MAIL
Signalling another Legionary, I requested the morning’s report and she cantered off to fetch it from High Imperator Labium’s second-in-command, Sub-Imperator Mandible. Minutes later, she returned with a small collection of papers and, after saluting smartly, hooved them over to me.
The first sheet bore the latest estimates of how much food we had captured, along with how much food our newly claimed territory was likely to produce if we kept it tended to as it had been until this point. This was crucial information, so I read through the report’s entirety multiple times in painstaking detail in order to glean from it the most accurate understanding I could.
We had a lot of readily available food, but a much greater number of mouths to feed than it had originally been intended for: this would need to be rationed out amongst both Equestria’s ponies and my changelings if it were to last long enough; something which would need to be organised as soon as the nation stabilised enough for such decrees to be effective. Besides that, the crop yield could theoretically still support the larger population if we downscaled the amount being exported; which would likely be no real problem: if the other nations reacted as badly as I expected them to, we wouldn’t be able to export that much anyway.
Setting the food report aside, I skimmed over the contents of the next sheet: another report, but on a subject far removed from the peaceful topic of agriculture and food production. Upon the creamy parchment were multiple short summaries of various combat units’ activities over the past day and a half; amongst them the two squads who had captured the Bearers of Harmony, the General Search and Engagement Unit ‘Stormy Day Matinee’ and its escort, the General Air Assault Unit ‘Upon Great Tempest’. The latter was, I noted sadly, listed as Missing In Action: rarely a term which meant anything besides ‘we haven’t found the bodies yet’.
On the brighter side, at first glance the ten missing Legionaries appeared to be the only ones not to have returned to camp: the invasion of Canterlot seemed to be almost complete from a military standpoint. Now would come the more difficult battle: wresting control of its citizens – and then the inhabitants of the rest of the nation – without further bloodshed beyond that which was absolutely necessary. I had ordered my army to use lethal force only as a last resort, and it seemed to have worked so far: no deaths had been reported whatsoever; no easy feat when you’re taking control of a nation’s cultural and military capital.
The reports continued on the back of the sheet; and from then onto the first page of the third piece of parchment; where it halted roughly a quarter of the way down the page and promptly switched to the closely-related topic of which areas of the city now lay under our control. Apart from a few small pockets of resistance, Canterlot’s populace appeared to have accepted the coup d’état without much of a fuss: no doubt fearing the repercussions of rebellion against the force which had defeated their army in a day.
Although I did not mean them any real harm, it was a good thing the ponies were so afraid of my regime: it would make setting up a stable new nation less arduous, for one, and in addition their lack of organised resistance meant that there was less chance of them dying through whatever response my military might mount to counter such an attempt.
A map adorned much of the piece of parchment’s other side, detailing our city’s various districts and their current state of changeling control along with several suggestions for guard placements and patrols to keep Canterlot secure. I was still pondering over which of these might be the better choice when my little pony returned from her brief breakfast, freshly washed and mane styled smartly.
Now that she had cleaned herself up, I was able to see the mare as she had presumably looked before my invasion had pushed her to attempt the escape via teleport which could conceivably have killed her if not for her extraordinary luck.
I hadn’t looked at her much since our first meeting, preoccupied with other things as I had been, and so I was taken a little by surprise by the sudden realisation, aided by her newly tall, proud posture, that she was significantly larger in build than the other unicorns I’d encountered.
Indeed, she was bigger even than the average earth pony – standing an entire half-head above her Legionary escort – but graceful with it in a gentle, light-hooved way. Upon closer inspection, all her features within view were up-scaled from the norm; even her snout was larger: somewhere between the normal and alicorn length but more thickly proportioned than one would expect from the latter’s trademark delicacy.
Her big, kind eyes, gleaming topaz, were unencumbered by the oppressive rings of darkness which had previously strangled the joy out of them, and smiled cautiously out from under the cover of her steel blue mane. Unusual as she might look, there was a certain beauty to be seen in her features, which was accentuated well by her subtly atypical mane style.
Her long fringe, which had cascaded messily over her eyes in prior hours, was neatly combed so that its subtle V-shape stood out, the whole arrangement being held up by a simple navy headband. It neatly parted on either side of her horn, and the back of her mane likewise split in the middle to curve round either side of her long neck, lending her a joint elegance and smartness which her stylist must have taken considerable pride in.
Although she looked much better than she had previously, the soft duck-egg blue of her coat was still marred by the tired bags under her eyes and her smile of greeting was somewhat strained by fear and caution. The first would go away soon enough, seeing as she would have a comfortable bed to sleep in from now on, but the second would take time to work away.
Briefly, I wondered why I cared at all that she was afraid of me: her emotions were both unsurprising and, I would have thought, irrelevant. She was effectively a prisoner of war, no matter how well I treated her – which in itself was a bizarre way for me to act – and I was the Queen of not one but two nations, with so many more important things to care about than her feelings towards me. It was troubling, yet I couldn’t help but reply favourably – soothingly, even – as she apologised:
“Sorry I took so long, Your Highness, I just wanted to get cleaned up, too, because breakfast didn’t take long to finish. I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you, My Queen: I promise it won’t happen again.”
Such verbal appeasement from the pony ought to have made me feel ill, or at the very least irritated, yet some illogical yearning to become closer to the unicorn wove my reply into a meaningless tapestry of reassurance and friendliness.
“It is fine, Scrolls: I had barely finished reading my report when you arrived, so you are perfectly on schedule. You look much better for your wash… I do quite like your mane style: very smart; as it should be.”
The comment had been harmless enough, but still I cursed myself for adding such superfluous compliments to what had already been an irrelevant reassurance, and doubly so for being pleased at the earnest smile it earned me.
I suppose my overriding train of though was this: I had a country to run; prisoners to interrogate; an alicorn to keep at bay and a nigh-dead mare to save – I had neither the time nor the need to be distracted by such foalish ambitions as making friends. Nevertheless, the impulse seemed to be determined to remain in place, and I decided to ignore it in favour of focusing on more pressing matters.
“Anyway, now that we are both ready to depart – and I trust you are ready to depart, Ms. Scrolls – I have some important work to attend to, with your assistance. If you do well here, I see no reason our working relationship should cease to be pleasant and mutually beneficial – if you disappoint me, however, I may have to think about enlisting you in… less pleasant lines of work.”
I stood from my throne, mentally cheering my return to cold professionalism, and watched as Scrolls gulped at the implications of my closing statement. Getting over it rather quickly, she straightened herself up to her full height and said, almost defiantly:
“I shall endeavour to do my best, Your Highness.”
To my internal self-disappointment, I could not help a return to my previously friendly tone as I replied: “That’s all I ask, Scrolls… There should be some stationery supplies over there; take what you need, and don’t rush: I can wait a minute longer.”
How was I supposed to get anywhere seesawing back and forth like this? Perhaps, in due time, the one-changeling ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine would coerce her to behave as I intended, but I could not discern much of a positive result so far.
Remembering a number of infiltrators who had noted similar, peculiar urges to do right by ponies; I wondered momentarily if there might be something more to those tales than the storytellers’ own softness towards ponies.
If so, no wonder I was finding it difficult to retain my cold, impassive tone around the unicorn: her pleasant demeanour, coupled with her usefulness thus far, would make me an easy target for any passive emotion magic with an intent to make me like her.
This was even more troubling to me than it had been previously – with our minds connected in a network of mutual trust and respect, the idea of an outside force interfering with our thought processes was a horrific one for most changelings – myself included.
Shaking these worries aside, I deliberately thought back to what I should have been preoccupied with – Twilight Sparkle – and soaked myself in the sorrow so that the cold dread would linger in my mind and keep my focus on the real issue here.
Scrolls returned, snapping me out of my melancholy thoughts, and I turned my attention once again to the present. She stood patiently to attention, saddle bags fastened and neatly filled with the necessary supplies, and I, seeing no reason to remain in the throne room any longer, started on my way out.
“Come on,” I said, “We’ve work to do, and time waits for no one.”
IV: INTERROGATIONS FOR MACHINATIONS
Escorted as ever by my Praetorians, I and Ms. Scrolls neared our destination a little over ten minutes after our departure from the throne room. Scrolls looked around herself with mixed fear and curiosity as we trotted down the narrow staircase leading to the deepest, most secure section of Canterlot Palace’s dungeons; I myself did not bat an eyelid: the minor squalor around me paled considerably when compared to the torrid slums my hive had called home the past decade; I could not think of any changeling who would prefer freedom there to incarceration here.
At least in the dungeons you were guaranteed a meal, a veritable luxury back home. As we began the final approach, I pushed the memories away and fixed the prison guards with a commanding stare. We would never have to live like that again: the entire point of the invasion was so that changelings like the two now unlocking the gate would be able to live without fear of being struck down by disease or starving after another dead harvest.
“My Queen –“ said the Legionary on the left, saluting; “ – what services do you require of us?”
“At ease, Decanus. I wish to see the suspects, I trust that will not be problematic?” Following his gaze, I explained Scrolls’ presence in the dungeon. “My assistant, Ms. Starlit Scrolls, will be assisting me in recording the interrogations. She has experience working within Equestrian government, and I feel her viewpoint on such matters may prove to be as useful as her literary abilities.”
A buzz of understanding hummed through my horn, indicating without words that the Legionary was satisfied by my answer to his unspoken question. He let us through, while his partner maintained a vigilant watch over the cells, her glaive drawn in readiness for any eventuality.
“Your Highness – Interrogation? Suspects?” questioned Scrolls; and I attempted to answer without giving away too much of the classified information which was inevitably intertwined with the matter.
“Yes, Ms. Scrolls – interrogation. These five ponies actively fought against my forces; they are both powerful opposition and fiercely loyal to the princesses. A more ruthless leader than I would have had them executed – they pose a significant threat, even captured, and they are unlikely to conform to my regime – but I value life above all else, especially lives as vibrant as theirs.”
“Oh,” she said. “But what crime have they committed? Besides fighting your soldiers – and I rather doubt you lack proof to charge them on that front – what could they be suspected of?”
“I’m afraid I cannot say that, Ms. Scrolls.” As amiable as I might have felt towards the unicorn, the subtle influence of pony magic thankfully did not push me past the point of spilling highly classified information just yet.
Our taciturn guide – the Decanus from the gate – spoke only once more, explaining as he gestured toward the cells which of our five special prisoners inhabited each one. He left us to return to his post, and half my contingent of Praetorians followed a short way to take up position at each major entry point to the area. The rest stood guard along the corridor, barring the two who unlocked the first cell and followed Scrolls and I into its interior.
Within the cell lay an earth pony, well-built but not unattractive, with a practically styled mane the colour of straw and dusty orange coat. As we entered, she got to her hooves with a clattering of chains and shot me a glare and Scrolls a look of utter bewilderment.
I glanced at my assistant, nodding meaningfully, and she began unpacking her saddlebags: out came the sheets of parchment, sealed bottles of ink and quills she had neatly packed before our departure. Before too long, she was ready, a quill and a sheet of parchment held steadily in her topaz magic, her ink pot sitting to one side.
“Now, Ms. Scrolls, I think you should have little difficulty completing this task. I need you to note down everything which is said here, along with any other details you think relevant. If you are ready, I shall begin.”
Scrolls nodded affirmative, so I turned to the mare who’d been glaring hatefully at me for the past minute and began the interrogation.
“In case you had any doubts, I am Chrysalis, Queen of the Western Changeling Hives and, as of yesterday, Equestria. First things first, what is your name?”
“Applejack” she grunted. Despite her bad attitude, I took the fact that she’d answered at all as a good omen and continued with slightly higher hopes for success.
“Your date of birth?”
“Sixteenth of May, one-thousand-and-eighth year of Princess Celestia’s reign. I live in Ponyville, with my older brother McIntosh Apple and my little sister Apple Bloom. I have a dog, her name is Winona, I work on an apple orchard on the edge of town and my favourite colour is slate grey. Anything else you need to know, Your Highness?”
She sneered the last part, but I could detect no deceit in her words – it looked like Solid Case may have been right about her status as Bearer of Honesty, which boded well for the interrogation.
Waiting until Scrolls had noted down that slew of information, I then turned my gaze back to Applejack and began the second phase of my questioning.
“Now, Applejack, I’m going to say some names and I want you to say the first thing that comes into your mind. Got that? – Very good, the first name is: Princess Celestia”
“...Guardian.”
“Interesting… now: Princess Luna.”
“...Mystery.”
“Princess Cadance.”
“...Stranger.”
“…Queen Chrysalis?”
“Greedy. Manipulating. Tyrant. Bitch.”
Scrolls looked at me in concern when Applejack voiced this eloquent opinion, but I merely laughed it off.
“While I can’t say I like your opinion of me, your candour is certainly refreshing. Let us return to the subject at hoof: Fluttershy.”
Applejack’s eyes widened a little, and she half-glanced towards the butter-yellow pegasus in the adjacent cell before hurriedly correcting her gaze so that her eyes burnt furious holes in mine.
“Brave.”
Noting which pony she’d looked at for future reference, I brought up the baby dragon who’d been missing since the wedding in the hopes that her response would clue me into his location.
“Spike?”
“Well-meaning.”
So much for that, then: whilst it was nice to hear the dragon’s heart was in the right place, this did not aid in my finding the rest of him.
“Rainbow Dash.”
“Dependable.”
This certainly fit in with the suspicions that she bore the Element of Loyalty – dependency is a trait only attainable via loyalty, after all. At least some puzzles were coming together, even if Sparkle’s assistant remained missing. Used to multitasking, I carried on with my list of names whilst mulling this over.
“Rarity.”
The earth pony struggled for a moment with this one, conflicting emotions running across her face and buzzing discordantly in my horn as she made up her mind, eventually settling on “…Unique.”
There was only one name I could really bring up now, and I needed the full set no matter how much pain it caused me to remember her name.
“…Twilight… Sparkle,” I spluttered out, blanching as the image of her broken body came unwanted out of the depths of my memory to present itself macabrely in the forefront of my mind.
“Glue.” An interesting answer, but one that did not take me long to figure out: when I did, it only served to make me feel worse; the memory of Twilight Sparkle’s loose, empty gaze staring coldly into my guilty eyes. She had been the one to keep these unlikely friends together, and without her they would likely crumble into unfamiliarity and dislike: just one more thing I had ruined by dooming her.
Tears swam in my eyes, and I closed them to prevent them falling; covering my eyes with my hooves and mournfully whining into the crooks of my forelegs. A tap of a hoof on my shoulder brought me back to reality, and I slowly raised my head to meet the amber gaze of Starlit Scrolls, whose own eyes were filled with a concern I felt was genuine in my horn and in my heart.
“Queen Chrysalis, are you alright?”
Although ‘Your Highness’ had – being more of an expression of subservience and less of an impassive statement – been more satisfying to hear up to this point, it was far more comforting to hear her say my name in that concerned tone than ‘Your Highness’ ever could’ve managed. It’s funny, the things I remember with the most detail.
“I’m fine, Starlit. Just magical exhaustion – like pulling a muscle in your leg by running too fast. It’ll pass soon enough, I hope.”
Scrolls took that answer without question, but Applejack’s eyes flashed with suspicion: she knew how full of lies that sentence had been; of course she did. Not one part of it had been true: I was a long way from being ‘fine’; my magic was without issue; and it would not go away soon – if I didn’t figure something out, it might never go away.
Turning to the chained mare, I said “- Thank you, that will be all for now -“ before hastening to leave and move onto the cell of the pegasus I presumed was Fluttershy, wiping the one tear which had escaped with a covert hoof as I swept my mane from my face.
Knowing what to do by this point, Scrolls set herself up in very little time at all, I used the short break to regain my composure and examine the mare in front of me. One of Stormy Day Matinee’s Legionaries had mentioned the evening prior that they had not been successful in getting her to speak in anything beyond unintelligibly quiet squeaks, and I pondered how I was to get anything of use out of her. She was supposed to be Element of Kindness, so perhaps she would respond better if I showed her what she’d given her friends all these years?
“Alright, Ms. Scrolls, are you ready?” She nodded, so I returned my gaze to the lightly quivering pegasus and tried my best to reduce my intimidating appearance.
“Hello,” I said, with as much softness as I could muster, but moments after she opened her eyes she jolted in fear and shut them in fear again. Evidently something about the way I looked had set her off: I sighed.
“It’s the fangs, isn’t it? Here, I’ll get rid of them for you.” They disappeared in a flash of green flame, making my smile just as flat as any pony’s; and I followed on from it by softening the sharp green of my eyes, widening the pupils to match the usual pony ones and switching my horn out for a typical unicorn one.
“Better?” I asked, and this time she did not immediately return to her fearful cowering upon opening her eyes, although she still shook with fear.
“I’m not going to hurt you, alright? I just want to talk to you… say, if you’ll speak with me, I’ll let you all have a section of the palace of your own to roam around in. How does that sound? You and your friends, out of these chains and with a little piece of freedom, just for talking to me?”
She squeaked something that sounded like “-I don’t trust you-” and I sighed again. This was hard work, but the potential results were still worth it… I hoped.
“Look, I’ll let you have that even if you don’t talk to me, as a gesture of goodwill. I don’t hate you, Fluttershy, I can understand why you and your friends did what you did – you were sticking up for your own, and I was doing the same for mine, that’s all. The thing is, Spike is missing and if you know where he is, I need to know. Twilight isn’t very well, and not knowing where he is hasn’t helped her get any better.”
She sat bolt upright at that, her long mane flying up into the air from the speed of the movement.
“What’s happened to Twilight?! Is she okay?!You have to tell me!”
Her rapid switch from fearful mutterings to assertive demands took me aback, and I raced to come up with a sufficient answer to quell her burningly expectant glare.
“She’s fallen very badly ill: a plague from the badlands. It’s my fault, really, it only got here because one of my changelings was sick with it and now she’s got it. I’ve had to quarantine an entire battalion and everyone they came into contact with, and we… we don’t have a cure yet.”
I’d said too much, and stuck far too closely to the truth. It was that stare - I had known there was something unnatural about it and now I was spilling my guts to this unassuming mare – she was even more overtaken by emotion now, tears spilling from her eyes as she cried out:
“She’s going to be okay, isn’t she? She has to! You’ll… you’ll find a cure, won’t you? You can’t let her die!”
She was still using that stare of hers, even while the tears fell and she began to sob: I couldn’t help but answer her, and in doing so reveal much more than I’d wanted to.
“Of course we’re looking for a cure! I don’t want anyone to die – I never wanted that! – I only wanted my changelings to have some food for once, somewhere to live… nothing like this! She’ll… she’ll be alright, I think. She’s a strong mare, I can save her… I know I will.”
Phlogiston damn her – now I, a Queen, was crying my eyes out like a common foal – all her fault, for reminding me of what I’d done and making me tell her. Why are these ponies so good at making me do what they want, all of a sudden? First the urge to be kind, and now to be honest… how was I supposed to get anything done like this?
The soft forelegs of my assistant pulled me in, and I couldn’t muster the conviction to make her let me go. I just cried into her shoulder: in front of my prisoners, in front of my changelings… what would they think of me now? A Queen was supposed to be strong, and now they’d seen me break down not once but twice in the same ten minute period… soon they’d be asking for my abdication, if they didn’t take it by force.
I realised I must have said some of this out loud, because the armoured hooves of one of my Praetorians joined those of Starlit Scrolls in comforting me and the deep voice of my Praetorian Decanus rolled softly into my ear.
“You shouldn’t worry, My Queen: we’re not going to think you weak for letting it all out, even if you could’ve picked a better spot to do it. I can’t begin to understand the stress you must be under, trying to stabilise an entire country and find a cure for a badlands plague at the same time… dealing with all that head-on instead of just running away makes you stronger than any Queen we’ve ever had.”
Following his lead, another of my soldiers spoke her mind; helping me pull myself together: “You saved us all from starvation, Chrysalis: even the most disloyal changeling can’t deny you’ve done a great job of it. There was always going to be a side effect of something this big, and I’m just glad it’s something we can help with. You have a friend in all of us, and I think you’d do well to remember that.”
As the other Legionaries gave enthusiastic calls of agreement, I opened my eyes at last and eased myself free of the embrace; bringing myself shakily to my hooves and looking gratefully into their eyes.
“Thank you, that means a lot to hear; but I-I think I had better call this visit short. I’ll start making preparations for these five’s transfer and get working on some other things.”
Signalling to Scrolls to follow me out of the cell, I trotted tiredly away and along the stone corridor which led to the stairs. It was high time I left, and in a half-conscious shuffle I made my way up the spiral staircase to return to my throne and the distractions which would come with it.
V: OF CONVERSATIONS AND INTERRUPTIONS
Starlit Scrolls accompanied me wordlessly as I made my way back to throne room, occasionally glancing at me like she wanted to say something but always turning away without making a sound.
Always, that is, except for the last time: we were back in the palace proper, in an empty hallway, when she turned to me and stopped dead, forcing me to do the same. My Praetorians, once they’d ascertained that she wanted to speak to me rather than attack me, stepped back out of earshot of her whispered question.
“I’ve seen the reports, Your Highness; there is no quarantined battalion. There isn’t a plague, is there?”
She said this quietly and seriously; voice hushed and suspicious, whilst her eyes demanded the truth. I no longer had the strength to lie, so I admitted, heavily:
“No, there isn’t… Sparkle isn’t well, though, and it is my fault. I don’t want her to die, really I don’t, but I’ve got no idea what to do to save her. And now I’ve got Fluttershy to worry about if I fail… Phlogiston damn it! Why can’t I be the heartless bitch this invasion needs? How can I run Equestria with all this hanging over me, Starlit?”
Her gaze softened considerably at this admission, and she opened her mouth, presumably to offer comfort. However, whatever she was about to say was cut off by a flash of light from her horn, a loud bang and a glowing object which shot from its tip and arced through the air.
My Praetorians closed the gap in milliseconds, pulling me out of the way and extending their glaives in Starlit’s direction. Taken by surprise, it took me a moment to realise what had just happened, and a few more for me to realise that the wailing noise was my assistant screaming in terror: “It’s just a letter! I wasn’t trying to hurt her – just look at it, it’s only Princess Luna’s response, I swear!”
Lifting the object off of the ground, I could see that it was as she said: a scroll had shot from her horn, rather than anything combat-oriented. I called out sharply for the Praetorians to leave her alone. They pulled back, some of them looking ashamed at their hasty actions when they saw that she’d been telling the truth: clutched in my emerald magic was indeed Princess Luna’s letter; her midnight blue seal clearly visible on the scroll’s surface.
I looked between the letter and the shocked, quivering unicorn – which should I deal with first: which was the most important? – the letter, of course, was far more significant to the greater scheme of things than one prisoner-of-war’s hurt feelings. It was clearly the right choice.
I dropped it on the tiled floor and pulled Starlit into a hug, comforting her like she should’ve been comforting me. Once again, the bizarre compulsion to do right by ponies overrode logic, but for the first time I didn’t care all that much. I held her until her breathing returned to normal and released her slowly; giving her a reassuring smile as I reached behind me for the discarded letter with my magic.
Together, we walked the last stretch to the throne room and sat together around the cluttered command table. Whatever I’d wanted this morning, unforeseen circumstances had forced us together and I no longer cared to resist it.
VI: A THREAT OF ECLIPSE
With Scrolls at my side, I opened the scroll and unrolled it to read the contents: it was not a long message, but certainly no one-paragraph response either.
It read:
Queen Chrysalis,
We must advise you against such actions as harming my sister: one would certainly think the last thing you would want would be a millennia-old alicorn with nothing to lose. Make no mistake, vicious little hornet, if even a hair of her mane is harmed by your hooves we will hunt you down across entire kingdoms until you collapse in exhaustion, and only then will we set about the process of ending your miserable little existence in as slow and painful a fashion as possible.
You have been warned, and you would do well to heed our warning: no other will come, and our response will be without remorse should you ignore it. Additionally, I wonder if it has yet occurred to your fly-sized mind that we are the only thing keeping day and night going? If it weren’t for the fact that innocents would be harmed in the process of pausing this cycle, we would already have plunged your tyrannical regime into darkness or scorched it from Equestria’s good earth.
You may have prevented us from acting in any significant military way against you, but rest assured that there are many more ways to destroy you, and destroy you we will. Enjoy your rule while it lasts, Chrysalis, for it will not last long – we will make quite sure of that.
Yours sincerely,
Your destined destroyer, Princess Luna of Equestria
We stared, slack-jawed, at the slew of hateful threats and insults, pondering how much truth lay behind her promises of destruction and reading it over again and again to find some glimmer of hope within its dark folds. There was none - Luna was right: I could not control the day or night, and the only other pony who could was also the one who was most capable of killing me.
I had never intended to hurt Celestia, and had merely wanted to scare Luna into submission through my threat – now it was apparent I had kicked a thousand hornets’ nests with my bumbling attempts at blackmail, leaving myself trapped under the full weight of the moon’s wrath. The crushing silence did nothing to ease the feeling of damnation, and I soaked in the atmosphere of dread I had found myself inside.
Starlit was the first to speak, choosing a wide arrangement of expletives to express her dismay at the letter. I merely nodded stupidly in agreement and stared numb-mindedly at the parchment clutched in my magic, unable to process what I had just read.
Finally, after the longest silence, I was able to speak: resigned and despondent and thoroughly defeated.
“It’s finished…” I muttered sorrowfully. “After all that effort… It’s all come undone. I wanted to save my changelings, but all I’ve done is doom them to a cruel period of hope, so they can be smashed one final time into the dirt by a furious goddess… Starlit, where did I fail them so badly?”
Cautiously, she reached a consoling hoof over to my shoulder and did her best to improve my morbid mood.
“You haven’t failed them, Chrysalis. This isn’t your fault! Let’s… let’s just sit and talk it over, I’m sure if we just think for a while we’ll find a way around this. You-“
I cut her off, unwilling to hear any more of her hope-inducing fallacies; choking out my dismissal: “There is no way around this, Scrolls. It’s finished, and I’m tired, and I’m really not in the mood to talk right now. Just… leave me alone, please.”
Standing from the table, I shuffled like a mare on her way to the gallows towards the privacy of my bedchambers, ignoring her distant calls for me to come back and talk about it.
I was done.
VII: AN UNINVITED GUEST
As one can probably imagine, I was not in the mood for conversation – or any interruption, for that matter – when I returned to my chambers. To my surprise, outrage and - less strongly – relief, I found someone already in my room, rooting around in the bag of friendship reports with all the stealth of a radioactive elephant.
“You really shouldn’t be here,” I said coldly, preparing the spitting venom in my palate sac whilst simultaneously charging a magical beam in readiness to strike.
The intruder jumped at the sound of my voice and fell clumsily in the pile of scrolls it’d been amassing – presumably to check they were all there – with a loud thump.
Leaning forward to get a better look at him (I assumed from the sound they made upon landing that they were male) I could see under the green light of my glowing horn that he was no pony: about the size of a ten year old foal, with bright purple scales and lime green fins adorning his head, there was no way this could be anyone besides Twilight Sparkle's dragon assistant.
“Spike...?” I asked, scarcely able to believe who the would-be-spy appeared to be . “I’m curious: where have you been all this time? More importantly, what are you doing with Twilight Sparkle’s letters?”
“I-I… Don't kill me, please,OH CELESTIA I DON’T WANT TO DIE!” The baby dragon wailed accordingly and, irritated beyond words, I lowered my horn; bared my fangs and snapped at him:
“Would you shut up?!” I snarled: apparently the compulsion to be nice did not work with dragons.
Luckily for him, he did just that; but unluckily for my patience he then transitioned to rocking back and forth on the floor, whimpering in fear. Finally losing all ability to care about my many problems, I ignored the dragon’s terror and curled up on my bed, the tears finally falling freely after the evening’s final, vicious blows to my sanity.
Eventually I became aware of the cessation of the dragon’s noise, but in my despondency I did not have the energy to check that he was still there. Several minutes passed where my sobbing was the only sound in the room, until a weight dipped my bed slightly and a smoothly scaled forearm reached out to stroke my mane comfortingly.
Too tired to be surprised by Spike’s course of action, I fell slowly asleep in the company of the dragon and my fears. Exhausted as I was, sleep didn’t offer me the comfort of unconsciousness: nightmares found me in the dark of my own mind and set upon my sorrowful heart like wolves, and I screamed into my pillow as the ghost of Twilight Sparkle herself sentenced me to eternal damnation.
I awoke, numb but still aching dully, before the light of dawn had brushed the shadows of night from the room. I remember supposing that either I had not been sleeping as long as I’d have liked, or Princess Luna had fulfilled her thousand-year-old promise and brought eternal night – I felt drained of energy, was struggling to raise my head off of the pillow, and so judged that it was probably the former.
I closed my eyes to return to sleep’s embrace, but it would not allow me to re-enter my peaceful, dreamless rest. Thankfully, I had not had another nightmare about Twilight Sparkle, but if the rumours about my good friend Luna were true, this would almost certainly be a short-lived affair: before long, I felt with a heavy sense of certainty, she would be causing me problems in the realm of dreams to match those she’d already conjured in reality.
Suspended there between consciousness and unconsciousness, my train of thought began along the morbid tracks which would take my mind close enough to all my problems that I could no longer pretend they were not real. What had I achieved, exactly… and at what cost?
Besides Twilight Sparkle and a few Canterlot citizens whose ill-planned, poorly executed escape attempts had ended especially badly, there had been no confirmed casualties sustained by either side in the invasion thus far. My army was under orders to use lethal spells only as a last resort, and with the main portion of the Equestrian army taken by surprise at Canterlot, along with nigh-all of their commanding officers, there was very little in the way of serious threat to my soldiers.
But the price paid had still left its mark upon my heart, no matter how much greater it could have been had some other changeling planned the attack, and it occurred to me whilst mulling this over that everyone who’d been hit worst by my invasion could be linked back to my biggest mistake. Twilight herself lay on the brink of death following her nightmarish fall; her brother’s mind might never recover from my meddling and her family had been injured in an attempt to outrun my forces. Her would-be sister-in-law and former foalsitter was imprisoned in a dank, forgotten cave; her friends lay in shackles, and her mentor lay drained of power, suspended in the very prison she’d designed as a Plan B for Discord’s capture.
One who did not know me might assume that I was doing this on purpose, and if I ever managed to save Twilight, she would likely never forgive me for all my transgressions against those she cared about. Now, everything was even worse and all these prices paid towards changeling control of Equestria would likely end up being in vain.
I already needed to set up some sort of government for the other settlements in the country, manage the now-barely-sufficient food supplies so that no one starved and make the ponies happy enough that the use of cocoons would not be a permanent fixture; and now fate had other means of ending my brief and stressful reign.
Princess Luna was threatening both to wield the heavens themselves against us and to lead an armed resistance against my thinly-spread troops, and an exponentially increasing number of ponies were going on strike. Additionally, I still had no idea how to save Twilight Sparkle and had had no time to even think of places to look, let alone find any answers.
Whilst I was staggering through these dark alleyways of thought, the sun had begun to filter through the curtains and the dragon, Spike, had started on his own slow path to consciousness. I ignored him as he rubbed his eyes with balled fists and stared forlornly at the dead mare in the mirror: she stared back and I held her gaze until something small and purple flashed in front of my eyes.
It took me a moment to realise the lavender blur in my vision was Spike waving his hand, and a moment longer to respond, in which time he’d resorted to snapping his fingers loudly and calling “Hey!” in my ear.
I looked into his eyes and sighed. “What do you want?” I muttered, speaking each word as emotionlessly as if I was reading them off of a sheet of paper whose contents didn’t interest me in the slightest, but which I had to read anyway.
“Why do you have all of Twilight’s letters? Oh, and who are you anyway? Is that a crown on your head?”
Taking another long moment to comprehend the stream of questions shot my way, I positioned myself more comfortably upon the bed and began, tiredly, to answer them.
“I have her letters because the leader of my military thought them tactically significant, his reasons for which are none of your concerns, dragon. To answer your other questions: I am Hive-Queen Chrysalis de Vespidae-Alveare, elected leader of the Western Changeling Hives and sole ruler of Equestria; and that is, indeed, my crown.”
“Oh,” he said, momentarily silenced as his mind worked through my answers and produced more questions to replace those I’d already dealt with. “Why are you in control? Where are Princess Celestia, Princess Luna and Cadance? I’ve spent the last few days hiding in a closet, so an explanation would be really nice right now. While we’re on the subject of explanations, do you mind explaining what exactly you are, ‘cause I’m a dragon raised by ponies and even I think you’re strange.”
Apparently my rather impressive list of titles had not clued him into how to act around me, and he continued to make demands as if he were the one with the power. As loathe as I was to deal with this so early in the morning, his persistence was endearing in a way.
“I am in control, little drake, because I invaded the city and won. Celestia and Cadance are securely imprisoned until I can trust them to behave, and Princess Luna is stuck in whatever sanctuary she’s taken until she decides to come out of it. As for what I am, I don’t blame you for your ignorance in that respect. I am a changeling, specifically from the royal caste in which all of our leaders are born, and therefore most certainly able to deal with whatever foalish plans you might make to get rid of me.”
Spike drew back into himself, his eyes widening in fear as his brain finally caught up with what had been said. Ignoring his spluttering attempts to speak, I scooped up a hairbrush, a comb and my crown and made my way out of the room without another word. My energy had returned at long last, and with it a considerable deal of stir-craziness: I was going for a good long walk, and that was final. Exiting the room swiftly so as to be spared the dragon’s last loud objections, I turned to the guards outside it and proceeded to give them the orders which would deal with Spike for the time being.
“Legionaries! There is an intruder in my chambers – a juvenile dragon, no less – who was attempting to steal articles of strategic importance. Apprehend him at once and put him with our esteemed guests in the dungeons. Once you’ve done that, I want you to find out who was guarding this hallway yesterday evening and have them permanently removed from the guard roster for this area: if a baby dragon with no combat training can sneak by them undetected, then they can most certainly not be trusted to defend me from highly-trained assassins. Their commanding officer may choose their further punishment, but inform them that I find such ineptitude to be unacceptable in the highest degree.”
The Legionaries saluted, and with a cry in unison of “Understood, my Queen!” proceeded to follow their orders to the letter: one remained watchful outside in order to catch Spike if he attempted to slip past his comrade, who slinked predatorily into the room, horn lit and ready to fire. As the sound of a single spellshot rang out, followed by a silence which told me that the job had been done, I turned away from my chambers and began my meandering walk to wherever my hooves decided to take me.
II : MORNING HAS BROKEN
With every step, I felt the frustration and stir-craziness and dread slip away into a rising sea of calm and assuredness, leaving me far more at peace than I had been after my fitful, miserable sleep. My body was on automatic, and I let my mind slip free of the restraints of ordered thought and spill out across the wide expanse of the world I was drifting through, providing a lightness to my heart that I had rarely had the pleasure of experiencing before that morning. Such was my detachment from the world at large that I did not immediately notice when my name was called, instead continuing on my aimless trajectory at the same high speed as before and forcing the caller to break into a jog to catch up with me.
“Queen Chrysalis!” called the voice, one last time, finally managing to hammer the fact that someone was trying to get my attention – and even that there was anyone there but me – into my skull and force a response. I reeled my lazily sprawling mind back into my skull with great haste and turned to face the speaker, finding with a small pang of guilt – although I didn’t know then why I should feel guilty – that it was my pony assistant, Starlit Scrolls.
“Oh, I’m sorry-“ …why was I apologising again? “-I was off in another world altogether. What was it, Starlit?”
She’d managed to match my stride in the moments between her calling my name and my reply, and wasn’t even out of breath when she gave her nervous, apologetic reply.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about last night, and that I’ll try and keep my opinion out of state affairs in future. From the way you reacted, there’s clearly much more to it than I thought, and it was foalish of me to assume I had all the facts. Please, my Queen, forgive me.”
So this was what she wanted to talk about so desperately... Sighing, I turned to her and tried to think up an adequate answer. It was unlikely to the extreme she was actually worried about anything besides having offended me and landed herself a job doing the ‘more unpleasant tasks’ I had threatened earlier, in which case I merely had to reassure her of her continued employment; but on the off chance that she was also attempting to salvage whatever pseudo-friendship we’d fallen into yesterday, I would have to be a little kinder than that.
I found to my mild surprise that I, too, did not want that camaraderie to vanish into the ether, and that I no longer cared particularly about why I felt that way. So be it, I thought, I had bigger problems than not knowing why I was falling into friendship with ponies to contend with.
“What’s to forgive? Yes, perhaps you didn’t understand the full extent of things, but I have to admit I wasn’t seeing the whole picture either. All I could see was the worst case scenario, and all you were doing was trying to open my eyes… I’ve thought it over and it still doesn’t look good, but there’s at least a small chance we can pull through. Luna is still a problem, though… I can’t think of anything, so if you’ve got even the most infantile, naïve idea, I want to hear it. Heavens know I could use some hope right now.”
It took her a moment to actually reply, in which time I decided to do something about my mane and drew the comb I had taken with me through the tangled hair in rhythmic, regular strokes: the familiar action doing a surprising amount to comfort me.
“I-I… you’re not angry at me?” Starlit eventually sputtered out, seemingly incapable of grasping the simple fact I had lain down for her – was my explanation not simple enough? I tried not to let the irritation show in my voice as I replied, although I still sounded extremely tired and accordingly grumpy.
“No, Scrolls, I’m not angry at you... At a lot of things, certainly, but not you… count yourself lucky: there isn’t much that I’m not pissed off at right now. Any ideas about the sun and moon situation?”
She shrugged slightly, and glanced up at me with an apologetic look on her face. “Only two… and neither are very good.”
“Well, I’ve got none, so let’s hear them.”
“Um… the first one was that we could try and use the unicorns to move them. We should have the numbers to overpower Princess Luna, but the problem is that nopony has had to move the skies since the Two Sisters first showed up, and trying to learn from scratch whilst fighting against an expert probably wouldn’t end well.”
“It would be nice if we could do it, but as you say, the results would probably not be to our liking. Still, such an approach might work as a countermeasure: if she tries to fry us with the sun, we could conceivably push back so that she only burns the area she’s in, but doing it accurately would take a miracle to pull off. What was the other idea?”
She looked down at her hooves sheepishly and spent an awkward moment avoiding answering entirely before I cleared my throat expectantly and she was forced to speak.
“I… I was thinking that… maybe… you could talk to Princess Celestia…?” She suggested, immediately tucking her head down in anticipation of backlash, but continuing nervously when I did not immediately shoot her down: “It’s a long shot, but you might be able to convince her – I mean, she wouldn’t have to do it permanently, and besides, if Luna tried to get you with the sun or moon, she’d be endangering much more than just you: Celestia’s always been like a mother to Equestria, I can’t imagine she’d let her sister do something which could harm her ponies that badly.”
I took her words into consideration, and came to the conclusion that her plan might just be the best option we had. She looked up at me expectantly, and I smiled encouragingly back at her. “Alright, Scrolls, I’m listening… Now, convince me.”
“Well, you might not have so bad a chance of getting her somewhat on your side than you’d think. Your soldiers used non-lethal spells even when they could have won the battle in minutes if they’d tried to kill the Guard: I know you ordered them to do that. Everything you’ve done outside of fighting these last few days has been designed to keep Equestria together - even the bits which your changelings probably wouldn’t need - and the most you’ve done to punish the most proactive anti-changeling force besides the guard itself has been to lock them up and offer them their own section of the palace. All that’s going to look pretty good to her, especially with you asking for her help… and I can vouch for you myself if you’d like.”
She had put her proposal across better than I had been expecting, and thus my fate was sealed: there was no other plausible option, and she’d somehow convinced me this plan of hers might just work, so we would just have to roll with it. The sudden rumbling of my stomach reminded me that I had not yet eaten and that it would be time for breakfast in a moment or two, and I turned to my companion, an idea having just struck me.
“Scrolls?”
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“I was wondering if you would eat breakfast with me and my advisors this morning, rather than with the other servants. Quite frankly, it is about time I made some permanent eating arrangements for you, and what better than eating by my side to ensure we do not lose so much time? I had been meaning to formally introduce you to the advisors anyway, so this should kill two birds with one stone in that regard.”
She smiled, brows raised in pleased surprise, and promptly accepted my offer.
“It would be an honour, Your Highness.”
“Very well,” I said, changing course for the dining room, “Follow me.”
III : COFFEE AND CONFLICT
A wave of salutes and smartly spoken greetings hit me the moment I entered the opulent dining hall, its long, polished oak table shimmering softly under the morning sun, extending off to the far end of the chamber. When Starlit Scrolls came into view, however, the tone turned icy, with all present tensing up as if a cold wind had blown past them. A few of them – one of whom, unsurprisingly, was High Imperator Labium – looked downright affronted to be put in the presence of what they clearly considered an inferior being, although others present looked comparatively unconcerned by her arrival.
“Good day,” I greeted, my crown set straight and proud on my neatly combed hair and my face equal parts friendly and unforgiving,
“As you may have guessed, this morning will be a trifle different from those which preceded it. With me today is my Equestrian Liaison, Ms. Starlit Scrolls, and she will be joining us for all our morning meetings for the foreseeable future. Since you have all made it clear that General Advisor Proboscis has been less than competent in his duties, something which I have also been very much aware of, he will not be joining us.
“Until I can find a suitable replacement, Ms. Scrolls will be taking over his post in a probationary manner. She already reads the general reports as a part of her daily work, and she has shown a great deal more attention to detail and careful consideration than her predecessor ever did. I will say this now, and I want this to be taken in by all of you: should her performance in this task satisfy me, as with any other in a probationary position, she will take that post on permanently. Now, let us be seated; I am hungry and there is much to discuss.”
I took my seat at the table and began eating without another word, guiding Scrolls to her seat next to the changeling opposite me with one hoof as I telekinetically raised a forkful of my breakfast to my mouth, wanting to get the matter of eating over and done with as quickly as possible. Pleasingly, Scrolls noticed my haste to finish and likewise increased the rate of her own eating, which had already been faster than I’d expected: perhaps the mare was hungrier than I had anticipated, or maybe she was just a fast eater anyway, but regardless of the reasons, she emptied her plateful of honeyed roast hay and side of savoury pancakes a mere minute or two behind me, even beating the slower eaters of my advisory circle to finishing in her rush.
As the last of the room’s occupants set down their cutlery and looked up at me expectantly, I cleared my throat and addressed them for the second time that morning.
“First things first, let us get the necessary introductions out of the way so that Ms. Scrolls knows exactly who she will be working with.“
I pointed first at the grim, snub-nosed changeling mare opposite me, and Scrolls followed my gaze. “Lady Prisca Slate, Representative of the Drones’ Unions.“
I next guided Scrolls’ attention to a thin, withdrawn stallion with a slicked back blonde mane and his neighbours: a wary, calculating mare cloaked in imperial purple and a hairless elder changeling whose eyes were hidden from view by sunglasses.
“Lord Flavius Blackbottle, Representative of the Shifter Council; Lady Aquila Longtalon D’Otho, of House Otho, this week’s representative of the Elite Houses; and Lord Marbled Iris, respected Imperator Emeritus in the Legionary Council and Representative of the Royal Caste.”
Wasting no time in finishing the introductions, I turned to my left and gestured to the changeling sitting there: he was a huge, hulking monster of a stallion, but with a gentleness around his eyes which served to give him an aura of amicability and a curly, flowing mane which similarly did a lot to decrease the intimidating effect of being so heavily set.
“Duke Praegrandis Mollis, Economic Minister and, before his kingdom was sadly lost to desertification and raids, known as King Praegrandis Mollis De Rubinus-Alveare.’
He nodded at Scrolls, the faintest hint of a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, and she nodded respectfully back at him before following my directions and looking at the armoured stallion to my right, his sail extending proud and straight from his scalp, not flattened as it had been under his helmet, which he had tucked smartly under his fetlock.
“Not the first time you have met him, but certainly the first true introduction: Praetorian Decanus Noble Mantle, Captain of the Praetorian Guard and one of the greatest warriors to grace the ranks of the changeling armies.”
To my surprise, Noble smiled earnestly and, smoothly removing the armoured boot from it, extended his hoof to shake Starlit’s. She took it nervously and without further ado they shook, my Captain gripping her hoof firmly in typical military fashion but not shaking any more strongly than he needed to; an action which was conducted in absolute silence and which ended in such, too, Noble Mantle having said all he’d wanted to through the simple gesture. The shake itself was his way of saying that he could see that I – for reasons unclear even to myself – trusted her, and that he would give her a chance to earn his: the firm grip and steely gaze were his reminders to her that if she betrayed that trust, he would not hesitate to immediately enact his duty.
Her expression after this was jointly pleased and wary, and I knew from the particular blend of emotional feedback vibrating in my horn that she was probably reliving last night’s aggressive response to Luna’s surprise reply and comparing the Noble Mantle of then to the Noble Mantle of now in mild bewilderment. Well aware of the time this had already taken, I hastened to introduce the last two occupants of the table: a ceremoniously-armoured, forbiddingly scowling, silver-maned stallion, and a regally composed, finely featured mare of the same royal caste as I, with a similar crown to my own perched atop her flowing, sunset-orange mane.
“Lastly: High Imperator Labium, head of my military-“ as I had expected, the moment Scrolls looked at him, he met her gaze with undisguised disdain, his scowl deepening by the second, “- And Her Royal Highness, Hive-Princess Maxilla D’Aelius-Alveare: the new ruler of our homelands and the second most powerful changeling in the country.”
Scroll bowed graciously the moment Maxilla’s royal status came to her attention, before performing a passable imitation of the changeling salute as an additional expression of her respect: encouraged by Maxilla’s serendipitous smile, she repeated the salute for all of the other occupants of the table and bowed again for Mollis and I.
The one changeling at the table who did not receive this gesture was Labium, who had snorted derisively the first time Scrolls had enacted it and made an additional sniff of displeasure when she proceeded to salute the rest of the table: instead, she made a show of saluting him the Equestrian way, mocking him as she returned his scowl with a pleasant smile whilst simultaneously intensifying her own sour feelings towards my military chief internally.
It was clear to me immediately that in these short minutes, Labium’s initially one-sided hatred for the mare, borne of prejudice and arrogance, had become mutual with Scrolls’s defiant refusal to bend to his will. This, I knew, had immense potential to turn out badly, but I couldn’t help feeling elated that she had not let his discriminatory nature crush her spirit: Labium was a great commander, but an awful equine being; and the last sort of pony I needed at my side was a weak-minded one, no matter how counter-intuitive one might think that sentiment is.
Introductions done, I proceeded to bring attention to the main purpose of the morning’s meeting: dealing with the Luna dilemma, along with the mass-strikes which had begun to spring up the prior afternoon. The situation was dire, and not even the mostly positive reception to my assistant’s involvement could shake the overwhelmingly pessimistic view I had of the chances of this discussion going well.
“Now,” I barked, “to press on with the issues at hoof: I received a response to my warning to Princess Luna yesterday evening; a response which contained not even a modicum of positivity and instead served as her way of establishing her status as – and I quote – my ‘destined destroyer’.”
A round of gasps and appreciative winces made its way round the table, a reaction mirrored by everyone except Scrolls, who had already read the letter and understood its significance, and Labium, who buzzed my horn with condescending amusement in regards to the princess’s claim. After letting them have their moment, I raised a solemn hoof and the room once more fell into silence, continuing my revelation of the situation without further ado.
“In her letter, the princess brought up the point that she, as of our invasion, is the only being continuing the celestial cycle and stated that the only reason she had not used her monopoly over said cycle against us is her fear of harming innocents. We cannot assume that this sentiment will last: may I remind everyone that this is the very same mare who attempted to plunge the world into eternal night in a fit of jealousy, and may I also make it clear that her letter revealed no less emotional tendencies. We have no guarantee whatsoever that this rare mood of rationality will remain around our enemy, and we therefore require another option with which we can control the cycle ourselves in the event of Princess Luna returning to her prior alias Nightmare Moon, or something altogether more sinister. Advisors – what say you on this matter?”
A long silence followed during which the only communication between any of us was from Scrolls to I, the mare asking with her eyes and her buzzing emotions whether now was an appropriate time for her to present her own ideas, to which my only response was a subtle shake of the head. It would not do well to perpetuate the quite possibly already forming sense that I was playing favourites with the pony, so her suggestions would wait until last.
Finally, a hesitant suggestion came from Maxilla, the princess straightening herself out and nervously clearing her throat in an attempt to prepare herself before she actually aired her idea.
“Ahem… As you all will know, my hive has long had a deep personal connection to the heavens – especially the sun – and I myself have spent a great deal of time practicing solar magics. I believe that, with assistance from a sizeable group of competent spellcasters, I may be able to exert some degree of control over the movements of the sun and moon. I cannot promise that this is a feasible course of action, or that I will be capable of any fine control of the aforementioned bodies, but I would certainly be willing to try, should the circumstances require such action be taken.”
“Thank you,” I replied, sending her a concentrated burst of gratitude for the suggestion: this might also prove a viable route, and if Scrolls’s Celestia idea worked out, the two sun-raisers in combination might be capable of overpowering any attempt by Luna to disrupt the cycle.
Mollis was the next to offer a suggestion, delivering it in his melodious, operatic voice without a trace of obvious nervousness, although the slight buzz of anxiety I received from his direction somewhat undermined that impression.
“What of the unicorns we have captured? Could they not be organised and used to move the heavens? I worry for the well-being of our dearest Princess Maxilla should she attempt to push back against Princess Luna, but if the alicorn is so concerned about harming her subjects, using Equestrians instead might convince her that diverging from the typical cycle is more trouble than it’s worth and remove the problem altogether.”
“Your concerns are certainly valid,” I conceded, “but it may similarly be ‘more trouble than it’s worth’ to attempt to organise such a large number of ponies into a group which can move the heavens. There is, also, the worry that any group of unicorns powerful enough to move the sun would pose a significant threat to our own regime, perhaps to match Luna’s own. Should this hypothetical group be corrupted by Luna, we may even end up dooming ourselves. Far be it from me to stifle your enthusiasm, Praegrandis, but, as with all ideas, your own carries some significant disadvantages.”
The last of the contributions came from none other than High Imperator Labium himself, and in his usual aggressive way of thinking his suggestion revolved around direct military action.
“With respect,” he began, sounding anything but respectful, “none of these suggestions would begin to be necessary if we simply removed the threat altogether. I strongly believe that if we crushed whatever pitiful militia the enemy has gathered, we would quite easily be able to… persuade… either the princess or her already-captured sister to continue the cycle. It really is that simple, and I’m astonished none of you have considered a military course of action… are we really getting so soft that we hesitate to strike down the most potentially lethal threat we have?”
Lady D’Otho clapped in agreement, backing the stallion before I could respond to his suggestion: anticipating further discussion, I lay back and let the situation play out.
“Precisely my thoughts: we have the numbers to crush an army twice what Luna is capable of, and we could do it within three months if we move now. Why is it that this circle of advisors has become so reluctant to take direct action? If we can invade a city, we can deal with Luna without a hitch, I say. For Phlogiston’s sake, where is your confidence in our nation’s military power?”
This sudden, impassioned reinforcement of Labium’s violent response concerned me greatly, and so it was with great relief that I watched the drones’ representative stand from the table and lean across it to send a furious riposte back at Labium and D'Otho.
“Where is our confidence in the military? Why, it is exactly where our confidence in High Imperator Labium is: sinking rapidly under the heavy weight of our concern for his – and, I might add, your – morals. As if our having to compromise with you both over the matter of keeping the drones’ minds intact was not enough, now you are suggesting deliberate, permanent rewriting of another sentient being’s mind following a no-doubt bloody and violent removal of her resistance forces.
“Was Labium suggesting we alter a changeling’s mind so fundamentally, he would already have been stripped of his position, yet because this is a pony, he is not only allowed to proceed without reprimand but is supported by deluded little imbeciles like you, Longtalon. The Code applies to all sentients, not just changelings... For the record, I strongly and on all possible terms object to this proposal and note my increasing concern for the moral integrity of both you and our High Imperator… I will have confidence in this nation’s military the very moment it is not being led by a dangerous psychopath and his elitist lapdog.”
Labium rose from his seat to lean dangerously close to Lady Slate, eyes narrowed and lips drawn back in a wolf’s animal snarl. Despite the rage pulsing from him, he somehow managed to remain his tone of condescending superiority and an air of terrifying calm. As I waited for his inevitable comeback, I prepared a twin-target stunning spell in my horn with which to break up whatever fighting would likely occur.
“You see, everyling, this is what happens when one spends all one’s time with drones: one starts to become a drone oneself; stupid and misconceiving, bitter and miserable, looking for any opportunity to make oneself something more than a cowardly little cockroach. Pathetic.”
He looked round as if expecting applause, but none came: even D’Otho was waiting with bated breath for Slate’s response. Some very serious lines had been crossed here, and the significance of that was lost on no one in the room.
“And this,” she began, contempt dripping from her every word like venom, “is what happens when we put changelings in positions of power for no other reason than their ability to maim and kill. This stallion belongs in an asylum, not in command: self-serving, heartless, sadistic and absolutely without morals – is this really the sort of changeling we want in charge of our armed forces? Are none of you the least bit afraid that one day he’ll decide that our lives, our minds, our families are not worth keeping and erase them from existence the way he has with everything he’s considered a threat? Have you forgotten Sanguis-Alveare already?!”
At the mention of the Hive of Blood, and the recollection of what had happened there, Labium seemed to physically grow, his sheer rage making him look bigger than ever.
“You have no right to mention that, no right at all! You weren’t there, you didn’t see-”
Staring coolly back into his gaze, Slate cut him off. “-I did see, actually. And I have every right to bring that up. You may have weaselled your way out of punishment, but the drones will never forget what you did that day, and neither will I… Has it occurred to you yet that you aren’t, in fact, invincible?”
“Are you threatening me, drone-rutter?” Labium growled, utterly lost to his fury and prepared to use everything he had against his verbal adversary. Whatever reply Slate had cooked up was lost, along with the inevitable spiral into fisticuffs, when Marbled Iris himself stepped in to break up the conflict, resting a hoof on each changeling’s shoulder and murmuring in that quiet yet powerful way of his.
“Enough, enough of this infighting. Have we no greater conflicts to deal with? Perhaps it was my old ears failing me, but I believe this meeting was for the discussion of solutions, not the creation of yet more problems. I fail to see how a sexual relationship with a drone – if that accusation even has basis in reality – would affect Lady Slate’s ability to contribute adequately to this discussion; nor do I consider the exploration of combat-free options to indicate any lack of confidence in our armed forces. I have had more than enough of petty arguments in my lifetime, do not make me suffer another because you are incapable of civility. Sit down, be quiet and grow up.”
Labium and Slate slumped back into their seats, rage still simmering within them, and the Imperator Emeritus released the pair, turning then to me.
“Now, My Queen, I do not have any contributions of my own, but I believe I sensed a question from our new General Advisor to you when this meeting began. Forgive my intrusion, but was she, by any chance, requesting permission to air her own suggestions? If so, I would like to hear them.”
Lord Flavius cleared his throat and all heads turned to him, causing to cough in embarrassment. “Ahem… I would like to second this motion.”
“…As would I,” interjected Noble Mantle, the first time he had spoken since his initial greeting. Looking around and seeing mostly faces in agreement with the suggestion, I decided that there would be no better time than now to have Scrolls bring her ideas to the table.
“Probationary General Advisor Scrolls does, indeed, have contributions of her own. We discussed the situation on our way here, so I felt it pertinent to allow the rest of the circle to similarly converse before having her present her suggestions. Advisor Scrolls, if you would…”
For the first time since her somewhat awkward introduction to the group, all eyes were on Starlit: to her credit, she hesitated only briefly under the weight of their gazes before answering swiftly and smartly.
“Of course, Your Highness. My first idea was very similar to Duke Mollis’s own contribution, although I must admit I did not consider the possibility that the unicorns might be used as a psychological means of defense against the princess as well as a physical one. I believe we have more than enough powerful spellcasters to overpower Luna, but the problem remains that nopony has practiced celestial magic since the alicorns arrived and learning may prove disastrous to the extreme.”
A hum of agreement greeted her from most of the listeners, with only D’Otho and Labium showing any significant displeasure at her words.
“The other idea I had may seem insane, but trust me when I say that it will likely appear more rational the more I explain it. My suggestion being that we attempt to convince Princess Celestia to move the sun and moon should Luna ever cease to carry that action out. At this moment in time, she is weak and disoriented, with no knowledge of the outside world besides what we choose to give her. Her subjects are like children to her, and I believe this attachment might be a viable route through which to influence her to our side. Princess Luna is threatening us with something which, in harming us, would likewise harm vast swathes of the population. Be it constant exposure to sun or deprivation of light, her means of attack would cause a great deal of damage to the country itself: crops would die, ecosystems would be disrupted, chaos would ensue and Equestria would be an easy target for an opportunistic invasion.
“Contrariwise, you have invaded the cultural and political capital of the country without a single Equestrian casualty, although I understand that a unit has gone MIA during the battle, with its status as yet unconfirmed. Everything Her Exalted Highness has done thus far has been to keep this country as stable and normal as possible, be it the encouragement of the ponies to continue their work, the admirable good treatment of her prisoners or the lack of the usual discriminatory measures taken by most successful invaders against the natives.
“She will not like us, but when faced with either helping a regime which has done no significant harm to her little ponies or aiding the sister who betrayed her once before in enacting an insane plan which would hurt the majority of the population for years to come, I believe we may have a chance of convincing her to make the right decision. Besides, the only time we would need to let her use magic would be in the event of Luna doing as she threatens, so it is not as if she would be a constant threat. What do you say?”
The moment she concluded her speech, an uproar of conversation burst into being, leaving her waiting with bated breath for a coherent response for several minutes. Finally, the hubbub lessened and finally fell away into the void of silence: one second passed, then another, then at long last a reply was given to her by none other than Princess Maxilla.
“You were right, Advisor Scrolls, that does sound insane… That being said, your logic is impressive and I, for one, would be willing to back an attempt. So long as we have a backup plan, I see no harm in at least speaking with the princess, and having her aid may prove a powerful tool from a propaganda perspective. At the very least, the revelation that their princess would aid us against her own sister might get the ponies to stop striking.”
Next to share their points of view were Mollis and Flavius, both of whom saying little more than that they agreed with Maxilla, followed by Marbled Iris, who had a significantly longer piece to say.
“I must say I am pleased that I requested your point of view, Advisor Scrolls, your input has been most enlightening. As Princess Maxilla said, your logic is indeed impressive, and whilst certainly unconventional, I believe your plan is far from insane: it may just be our best bet of sorting this out without bloodshed. I can see why Her Exalted Highness values your presence so greatly: you provide a fresh perspective on things which I daresay we are in dire need of, although I must question your motives for being so helpful.”
Scrolls half-opened her mouth as if to answer him, and he smiled graciously to let her know that she could, having clearly sensed the question in her emotions.
“To be honest, I help you because… well, I suppose it’s because I want to help her-“ she indicated with a twitch of her head that by ‘her’ she meant me, “-She ordered her invading army not to kill anypony; she healed my leg and my horn for nothing more in return than my sending a letter to Princess Luna; and instead of imprisoning me, she gave me a job... This may sound naïve, but I believe that Queen Chrysalis is a good person in her heart. Life these last few days hasn’t been all that bad, to be honest, just different. I truly think that changelings and ponies can work together, given the chance, and if aiding in stabilising the country helps me convince the other ponies of this, then I am more than happy to serve Her Exalted Highness for as long as she needs me.”
Marbled Iris looked at her for a long moment before saying, with an air of pleased surprise: “You actually mean that… fascinating.”
Scrolls shrugged in response. “Why would I say anything I didn’t mean? You said yourself that you can tell when I’m genuine, so what purpose would lying serve?”
“Fair point,” conceded Iris, who then reclined in his chair, content to let the rest of the meeting flow on without his intervention.
Growing tired of the wait between opinions, and seeing that Labium and D’Otho both had the coldly calculating look of people trying to come up with the most vicious insults they could muster, I raised a hoof to quell the talking and, once the room had fallen silent, requested the final vote.
“We run short on time, and I have important matters to attend to, so I’m afraid I must cut this a little shorter than I would have liked. Now, I still need your opinions on this matter, so we’ll have a vote: vote for as many options as you like so that I can decide on a backup plan, but if one is your preference above all others, please make that sentiment clear. Now, those in favour of Princess Maxilla’s suggestion, raise your hooves.”
Lady D’Otho and High Imperator Labium pointedly kept their hooves lowered, but everyone else raised theirs, Lord Flavius even going so far as to state it as his absolute preference.
“Seven votes, one preference. Alright, those in favour of Duke Mollis’s amendment to the aforementioned suggestion…”
Again, seven hooves went up, and another preference was called, this time by Lady Prisca Slate.
“Same as before… Now, those in favour of High Imperator Labium’s plan…”
Two hooves rose, their owners receiving a mixture of looks ranging from tired to condescending to downright hateful, and both stated it as their preference.
“Two votes, two preferences. Finally: Probationary General Advisor Scrolls’s contribution…”
As with both of the suggestions before Labium’s, seven hooves rose, but this time there was an overwhelming wave of statements of preference: Maxilla, Mollis, Mantle, Iris and Scrolls herself all voting in absolute favour.
“Seven votes, five preferences: that settles it, then. I will talk to Celestia about raising the sun and moon in the event of an attack by Luna, and we will have another meeting to discuss which variation or combination of variations of Princess Maxilla’s plan will be our backup. I must leave you now – Advisor Scrolls, you can return to the throne room and read the morning’s reports for me, when I return from my business I expect a detailed overview of the current situation.”
With that, I stood from the table and trotted out into the hall, making sure I was near nothing especially breakable before teleporting to the prison of crystal beneath the city. It was time I visited an old friend.
The changelings are perhaps the most unique pony race currently in existence, mainly due to their radically different biology and the fact that their homelands are some of the most inhospitable on the continent. Scattered across the badlands far south of Equestria atop the ruins of the civilisation which birthed their kind, and nestled in between the Zebran colony of Matumaini-Mapya and the north-eastern reaches of Griffonia, the changelings thrive where any other race would wither up and die.
None of their ability to survive the dry, infertile wasteland they call home is natural, of course, but several millennia of deliberate genetic modification via dark magic and the intervention of an alicorn-level magical being to save the changelings from death by plague have ensured that their unusual traits continue to pass to their offspring. Their civilisation's culture, however, has not been as enduring, and very little is known about the original changeling society, with modern changelings sharing very little besides their mournfully limited account of their own history and their universal praise of the aforementioned intervening being as thanks for its sacrifice.
Although around half of the changeling population inhabits other countries at any one time, those more static settlements have developed their own, rather distinct, cultures out of half-forgotten past and borrowed traits from nearby settlements. Those changeling settlements - called, rather aptly, 'hives' - to the east tend to incorporate Griffonian and Zebran, whereas the northern hives borrow heavily from the southern, unicorn-dominated territories of Equestria and her pony-ruled allies, and the heartlands base themselves around what little of the old ways remain.
II: SETTLEMENTS
Naturally, most changelings seek out lives in disguise within other nations, but there is still a significant population remaining inside their homelands who get by via dealings with neighbouring nations such as the aforementioned Griffonia, Matumaini-Mapya and Equestria. Those who stay in the race's homelands - either through choice or necessity - live in an array of different settlement types, the usual variants of which are as follows:
Coverts: Semi-permanent, communally maintained spaces dug into the earth, typically consisting of two-to-three entry tunnels leading to an artificial cavern between twenty and fifty metres below the surface capable of supporting a small camp of changelings. Most commonly used by travellers and badlands hunters, coverts are less a type of permanent settlement than they are a stopping point along the way to larger population centres, and as such are more often than not uninhabited.
Lacunae: Larger openings hollowed out of the land, usually with a small network of entryways and two or more moderately sized caverns, capable of permanently supporting the equivalent of a changeling village. Via magically waterproofed holes leading from the cavern roof to the surface, rain and sunlight is allowed entry into the lacuna, which is typically supplemented with magical light sources along with light-gathering spells.
Lacunae, like most changeling settlements, are simply dug out further when more space is required, enabling the growth of a lacuna over time into a burrow and from there to a hive.
Burrows: Comparatively massive cavern systems typically expanded from a lacuna or consisting of an interconnected group of lacunae, burrows fill the role of large pony towns as the most common type of large population centre, with hives being far rarer due to the sheer effort required to produce an underground settlement of that size.
They usually have multiple sub-divided districts, each with their own entry tunnels and ability to provide for themselves, although the whole burrow acts as one: this is so that, in the event of a cave-in or similar catastrophe befalling one sector of a burrow, the rest can continue to function.
Burrows, if not expanded into hives, can become quite impressive in both aesthetics, power and culture via the consolidation of resources into the existing structures rather than focusing on constructing more, and many rival their neighbouring hives as cultural capitals of their respective regions.
Hives: Hives are changeling cities, formed from an extensive, often miles-long network of caverns and capable of housing and providing for populations rivalling those of cities like Canterlot and Manehattan. Typically ruled by a changeling monarch, whose family name becomes that of the hive they pledge to serve through their leadership, they have been the sites of the best and worst of changeling history: from their glory days more than three millennia ago, to their near-destruction at the talons of Griffonia, to the sacrifice of their guardian being and deity to save the race from plague, the majority of the significant events in changeling history took place in hives.
Changeling nations are almost exclusively based around a ruling hive, which is often the crowning jewel out of a nation's achievements, and it is for this reason that so many of the most important events happened withing them: in wartime, what better place to strike than at the pride and joy of the country, where you also stand a chance of eliminating the leadership? And where does disease spread best but in the biggest population centres? Their value to changelings is also raised somewhat by the rarity of such large subterranean structures, as it is far easier to make a fully functioning pair of burrows than it is to undertake the vast process of constructing an entire underground, self-sustained city, and far less risky.
III: CASTE SYSTEM
One of the most distinguishing features of changeling society is their class system, which is a far cry from the class gradient present in Equestria being both decided at birth and rigidly enforced from that point onwards.
The divide is a result of the same plague which would have killed them if their guardian being had not sacrificed itself for their sake, and a direct consequence of the class division present at the time of he plague. The disease could only be slowed down rather than cured via conventional means and the potions which hindered the disease's progress were very expensive: as a result it was the higher classes which had best access to it and therefore suffered the least.
Although the intervention of their guardian saved the changelings, the genophagic nature of the disease left the surviving population with severe genetic disorders: the more one and one's parents were able to slow the plague with potions, the better off one was, with royalty coming out best of all. Through fear of gaining yet more defects and pride about their relative lack of deficiency, the changelings for the most part refused to interbreed with their more afflicted compatriots, resulting in a decisive separation of each main group, something which has remained in place since and which has only grown more apparent in the centuries following its inception.
There are still several castes of changeling present in modern culture, something shared between practically all changeling settlements; a list of these follows:
Drone Caste: By far the most populous caste is that of the drones, descended from the worst-affected plague survivors and as a result being the worst off class of changelings from birth due to their more severe genetic defects.
For the most part, drones are less developed than both the average pony and other changelings in almost every way: their magic, regardless of type, has a noticeably stunted development, leaving them inferior to other changelings and ponies in terms of physical ability. This is not to say that their magic has no use, however, and the vast majority of drones can easily master basic spells: they simply don't have a large enough well of magic to be able to cast much beyond that level.
Drones tend to be slightly smaller than changelings from other castes, and they are similarly inferior on a mental level: as with their magic, they can perfectly grasp basic concepts, but complicated mathematics and similar fields are beyond their mental capacity. They also think much more in abstract concepts than they do in objective reasoning, lending them great empathy but rendering them unable to solve mathematical and scientific problems without great difficulty.
Although their large numbers and relative inferiority compared to other castes tends to land drones in menial jobs, they also have a significant presence in changeling art, being quite skilled poets, artists and musicians given the chance to work outside the bounds of unskilled labour.
Shifter Caste: Second most common amongst the majority of hives are the shifters, who for the most part comprise a band of changelings whose lives, rights and income match that of the average pony. Whilst slightly underpowered in all their magics, they can easily pass for a pony if they aren't inspected too closely, with their main shortfall being their ability to practice any magic advanced enough to have earned a cutie mark.
Shifters' unicorn magic isn't capable of anything past the intermediate level of magic learned by most unicorns, allowing them to blend in quite well if they aren't asked to demonstrate their supposed talent, and likewise their earth and pegasus magic holds up under passing inspection since it, too, is equivalent to the general-purpose magic most adults of either race would be capable of.
They are notably more adept at mental magic than drones, and in the majority of changeling military units the commanding officer will be a shifter, who typically uses a variant of the 'psychic window' spell to partially merge their mind with those of their mixed-caste troops and enable the squad to move and fight as if they were one being. Their aptitude for psychic spells is also a useful trait when they are required to take on another's form, allowing them to more easily go about their business via the use of such spells as disinterest charms and placation spells.
Their name comes from the fact that they are the lowest caste to have aptitude for shapeshifting, and unlike the drones they can not only replicate others outward appearances but also their internal body structure such as their voiceboxes, allowing them to easily mimic a target's speech. They are also able to create new identities and accompanying appearances on demand, something aided by their retention of some of the drones' more abstract way of thinking, which is tempered by the objectivity and realistic tendencies of the higher castes to make them the most-competent caste at creating a new identity at a moment's notice.
As previously mentioned, shifters share many of the same characteristics as the typical pony, including their average intelligence and rate of maturity; but also their usual roles in a hive, which mirror those of the majority of ponies down to average income and quality of life relative to other classes.
Elite Caste: Roughly equivalent to the pony nobility in power and structure, but comparatively more common than their Equestrian counterparts are the so-called elite caste. Formed into an array of various noble houses, all of which vying for more influence over both the ruling changelings above them and their subordinate castes below them, the elites are a fickle, paranoid set of changelings for the most part, and remarkably hateful towards the lower castes, especially the drones, which many elites view as sub-equine.
A notable exception to this rule, of course, is House Slate, whose kinsmare Lady Prisca Slate acts as representative for the drone caste and who has used her position to forward the much-neglected cause of drone rights, a course of action which has earned her much mockery and dismissal at the hooves of her fellow elites.
Elites are more technically skilled at shapeshifting than the shifters, but are not as good at mimicking others' personalities, partly due to the common reluctance of elites to abandon the identity they are so proud of for that of a 'lesser' being. Like the shifters and the royals, their intelligence is not dissimilar to ponies' own, although it must be noted that shifters, elites and royals take the lower, middle and higher aspects of the spectrum of intelligence of average ponies.
They can conduct the kind of magic expected from a pony's special talent in all three aspects of magic, however they can only achieve this for one magic type at a time, with the others sinking into much the same level of ability a slightly impaired shifter or more able drone might have.
The elites tend to gravitate towards positions of power, and make up the majority of most monarchs' advisory circles, in which they take on roles such as caste representatives. They also share the officer ranks with the shifters in most changeling militaries, although the elites tend to have far higher ranks than shifters do.
Royal Caste: The ruling caste in most changeling hives (although some hives have been known to have no royal changelings and instead a ruling senate of elites) and by far the most powerful type of changeling, the royals are significantly more adept at magic than the other castes. While elites are slightly taller than the average pony, the royals are even more removed from the usual pony physiology, matching alicorns more than the lower changeling castes in appearance.
Along with having the potential to gain alicorns' power with the three pony magics, royals are immensely powerful at mental magic to the point where they can entirely erase and replace someone's personality even if the victim was fighting back every step of the way. This, quite obviously, gives them a lot of capability to abuse their position, and it is for this reason that royal changelings are constantly accompanied by a contingent of the best changeling soldiers: they are not only a royal's bodyguard but also their executor should they attempt to take complete control.
IV: THE CODE
Due to their shapeshifting and aptitude for mental magic, changelings have immense potential to manipulate other sapient beings, something which has been abused multiple times in history to achieve the will of dictators and serial killers alike. Recognising this, five hundred years before Luna's banishment, the changeling leadership met up to discuss what laws and countermeasures should be put in place to avoid their subjects abusing their power.
The Universal Code for Use of Changeling Magics, better known today as simply 'The Code' listed multiple rules for changelings to follow, and the recommended punishment for those who would break them. Though they have been modified and added to over the subsequent millennia, The Code's laws are little different to their original versions, with perhaps the most major difference being modern changelings' far less zealous upholding of The Code. The current version is as follows:
Law One: No changeling may use mental magics in any way which would risk permanent damage or alteration to another sapient being, nor may they imitate such a permanent change by using temporary mental spells in sequence so as to maintain the effect.
Law One may be bypassed in the following scenarios:
1. The lawbreaker cast the spell in self-defence or in defence of another. (Note that appropriate force must have been used for the bypass to be valid).
2. The subject of the spell was mentally unstable and the spell itself intended to return the subject to relative sanity. (Note that the likelihood of the break being valid is much diminished if the lawbreaker is not a trained practitioner of mental magical medicine.)
3. The subject of the spell was an enemy of the state and the caster was acting under orders from a superior in the act of casting the spell. (Note that non-military personnel may not use this exception, and that soldiers using mental magic without prior authorisation have a diminished chance of being found exempt).
4. The caster was acting with appropriate authorisation or authority, i.e. the caster held a high rank (Hive-Queen, High Imperator, et cetera) or was given orders or otherwise given permission to break the first law by a superior changeling of sufficiently high rank. (Note that all such instances must be investigated by an impartial committee of equal or higher-ranking changelings and that abuse of power will be dealt with swiftly and effectively.)
Recommended punishment is as follows, although the final action taken should be decided by whatever legal representative is in charge of the case.
Minor Instances (Inappropriate force for the situation, unqualified remedial use, unauthorised use of mind magic against an enemy) - Six plus months deprived of magic use, permanent record of the offense, public humiliation e.g. stocks.
Moderate Instances (Grossly inappropriate force, unqualified, damaging remedial use, repeated unauthorised use against an enemy) - One year deprived of magic use, permanent record of the offense, six to twelve months incarceration.
Major Instances (Deliberate, mostly unprovoked mental assault, minor cases of abuse of power, repeat Minor or Moderate offender) - Two to eight years deprived of magic, permanent barring from current profession, two to six years incarceration.
Extreme Instances (Violent mental assault with intent to grievously injure or mind-kill, significant repeat offenders, major cases of abuse of power, attempts to magically alter the mentality of changelings in power, treason by mind-magic, mind-murder) - Permanent restriction or removal of magical capabilities, e.g. amputation of horn, exile from the state or incarceration in excess of a decade for most crimes and in excess of two decades for mind-murder, treason and severe mind-assault
Law Two: No changeling may enter another sapient being's thoughts without prior consent.
Law Two may be bypassed in the following scenarios:
1. The subject is no longer able to give consent, and the party given responsibility of determining the subject's best interest agrees that the mind-entry is acceptable. (Note that the caster will still be subject to reprimand and possible punishment if they act beyond the bounds of the agreed task.)
2.The subject is suspected of severe crimes (mind-assault, mind-murder, GBH, murder, rape, active paedophilia, et cetera) and refuses to submit to normal interrogative tactics. (Note that all such action should be undertaken by a sufficiently high-ranking official, and be observed at all time by an impartial panel of judges, who will determine whether the action taken was justified.)
3. The lawbreaker is acting as part of the police force or the military, and is acting under orders or, if they are sufficiently ranked, on their own initiative to complete a task. (Note that all abuse of power negates this bypass and will subject the abuser to both the full force of this law and of those laws pertaining to abuse of power.)
Recommended punishment is as follows, although the final action taken should be decided by whatever legal representative is in charge of the case.
Minor Instances (Intrusion into private thought, little to no actual interference) - Up to six months deprived of magic use, permanent record of the offense, public humiliation e.g. stocks.
Moderate Instances (Intrusion which resulted in mental harm to the subject, minor to moderate interference with lower mental faculties) - Up to one year deprived of magic use, permanent record of the offense, up to six months incarceration, permanent monitoring of mental spells cast until lawbreaker deemed harmless enough for supervision to be suspended.
Major Instances (Intrusion with intent to seriously harm the subject, repeat Minor or Moderate offender) - Up to three years deprived of magic, permanent barring from mental links until deemed suitably safe by a board of advisors, two to six years incarceration.
Extreme Instances (The commission of, or intent to commit, mind-assault, mind-rape, mind-murder; or the abuse of a mental link in order to physically assault, rape or murder) - Permanent restriction of magical capabilities, up to ten years incarceration or long-term exile from the state.
Law Three: Mind magic must only be used when no better option is available.
Law Three may be bypassed in the following scenarios:
1.The lawbreaker was not aware of the presence of a better option.
Recommended punishment is as follows, although the final action taken should be decided by whatever legal representative is in charge of the case.
Minor Instances (Use of mental magic where another option would have been preferable, but not significantly better) - Official warning, public humiliation (e.g. use of stocks).
Moderate Instances (Repeated Minor offences, use of mental magic where other, noticeably more appropriate, action could have been taken) - Up to three months' incarceration, community service, magic use supervised via a monitoring ring.
Major Instances (Repeated Moderate offences, use of mental magic where a significantly better option or set of options was available and disregarded in favour of inappropriate mental magic use) - Up to one year's incarceration, extended community service, up to six months' magical restriction, supervision of magic use, forced to wear horn covering declaring their status as a mental magic abuser at all times in public.
Extreme Instances (Repeated Major offences, use of mental magic as a universal solution to any situation to the lawbreaker's dislike) - Up to five years' incarceration, permanent ban on performing mental magic, up to two years' magical restriction.
Although the laws set down in The Code were once followed to the letter, and any lawbreaker punished unfailingly, in recent centuries The Code has become treated as more of a guideline, with the recommended punishments often overlooked in favour of less severe ones by the judges, who ultimately get to decide the punishment. Various elite houses still uphold The Code zealously, such as House Slate and House Mantle, yet still more of them abuse the relaxed attitude to the old laws to gain more of a foothold on the rungs of power, most notably the rapidly ascending House D'Otho. Especially when applied to situations where the victim is not changeling, it is all too often that the laws which once defined and unified changeling culture are brushed aside for the convenience of the present.
The emerald flames spun outwards as they dissipated, and I emerged from the teleport apparently unscathed, with no obvious change from my pre-portal state and all four hooves firmly on the ground. However, with ill effects being an occupational hazard of long-range teleportation, I went through the obligatory checks with customary zeal, casting the full range of diagnostic spells in sequence and repeating the process in case I had made a mistake.
Finding myself as I had been before my arrival, I relaxed and glanced around warily at the place my contact had told me to wait. I had followed his portal trajectory, given no means to contact him for a renegotiation and therefore no choice in the matter, and thus found myself inside what appeared to be a battered-up, moth-eaten caravan of some sort, every surface overflowing with a multitude of objects the purpose of which were mysteries to me and whose own pristine appearances betrayed their new arrival in comparison to the dust-laden furniture they lay upon.
An antique grandfather clock, inexplicably hanging upside-down from the ceiling as though it existed in a world where gravity was the other way around entirely, showed me that the time was a few minutes before nine in the morning, assuming that the clock was in any way accurate, which given its age and surroundings, along with its rather eccentric approach to gravitational forces, was not in any way guaranteed.
My contact had warned me to arrive on time - nine A.M. to be precise - and therefore I found myself watching the clock slowly tick towards the hour, in full expectation that he would not make such a hypocrite of himself as to arrive late. As the seconds drifted past, I ran my gaze over the items which surrounded me, many being items of jewellery or segments of various ancient armours, with others emanating the unmistakeable aura of powerful magical items. As it happened, my prediction turned out to be completely accurate down to the very second: in the exact moment the grandfather clock chimed nine o'clock, the distinctive crack of a teleport rang out into the air, muffled by the simultaneous singing out of a long, low cello note.
With the cessation of the note, the sound sinking instead forever into oblivion, heavy footsteps sounded outside and I drew myself up to my full height, making sure that I was at my most presentable so as to avoid the usual jabs. I need not have bothered, in all honesty, but I still took a small amount of pride at my own appearance as the being I had come to meet opened the caravan's door and slipped noiselessly inside.
The creature which stood before me was; as one might have suspected from the noise, choice of meeting place, and gravity-defying timepiece; a draconequus.
His head was that of a windigo - albeit one who had not an eye but a unicorn's horn growing from its right socket, forcing the eyelids permanently open - and upon said head was affixed a complicated setup of lenses and mechanical workings. He adjusted this slightly; his horn glowing a light violet as he tilted the headgear into a more secure perch on his head; before cycling the device through numerous lenses of varying size and colour, his piercing grey eye watching all the while from behind this veil of metal and glass. There was an overwhelming sense of judgement in the act, and even with my long-running acquaintanceship with the draconequus, I could not bear to look back into his gaze, opting instead to examine his current appearance.
Around his neck - a dragon's, judging by the scales - was a dull crimson shawl, and wrapped around his shoulders - which, along with the rest of his torso, were that of a griffon - was a weathered grey traveller's cloak. Under this he wore a considerably more pleasant-looking tailcoat, although even this was in a utilitarian blue-grey and sporting only the most sparing decoration in the form of gleaming, yet entirely patternless, silver buttons.
His right shoulder merged into a jade green buffalo's foreleg, whereas his left expanded into a far bulkier centaur arm, the dense musculature just barely visible under the dented armour plates he wore over the limb. The fingers dangling out of the end of his sleeve revealed the appearance of the arm as being sunset orange in colouration and crystalline in much the same way as the bodies of the ill-fated Crystal Empire's citizens. His legs, on the other hoof, were both pony, as was much of his hindquarters, if the matching tail was anything to go by: this trait continued until where a pony's hocks would be, where they met the lower legs of a timberwolf on the left, and a diamond dog on the right; both feet encased in practical-looking walking boots with dull steel toe caps.
Though I could not see them, the fact that his appearance had only altered in regards to his attire since our last meeting meant that whatever flight organs - if any - he currently possessed, they were very likely the same mauve thestral wings he had unfailingly maintained through his more severe transformations over the years. They had some deep significance to him - though he had always stalwartly refused to inform me why exactly he gave them such special treatment while the rest of him swapped and changed at a moment's notice - and I was therefore quite comfortable in my assumption that they would be the same as always.
"You were early," he accused, snapping me out of my reverie as he punctuated his words with three sharp stabs of his centauran finger onto the softly glinting face of the burnished steel watch on his right wrist.
"Would you rather I was late?" I countered calmly, more than used to the draconequus's preferred dance of probing insults and leading statements. He frowned slightly at my response, before nodding in concession.
"Fair point, Chrysalis - now, what was it you required of me? My time is as precious as my wares, and you, old friend, would do well to choose quickly." He followed this statement up with a visual expression, swinging the watch, which had become much enlarged since I last looked at it, in wide, slow arcs.
"'Old friend' indeed," I snorted sarcastically, before answering him: he would only grow more unbearable if I waited and it was why I came here, after all. "Seeker, I need information. Anything and everything you can find on the topic - if it's related, I want to know - even the most ridiculous idea may lead me to a solution."
"Information...? Not armies of eternal demons, then? Or even a good old MWMD? No...? Well, this will certainly be a change; even if I was hoping you'd give me a better reason to summon the damned from Tartarus besides my childish desire to watch the mayhem which would undoubtedly ensue. Tell me, then, what subject do you require such a wealth of information on?"
"Medical magics, specifically those relating to bone and nerve repairs and the treatment of grievous, life-threatening injuries. Also, find me all you can on the Elements of Harmony changeling healing magic, I suspect that some of our longer-forgotten magic might prove to be useful in my efforts, and it often pays to know about everything someone might have been affected by."
"Spinal repairs, life-threatening injuries and the Elements of Harmony? My, my, you have been a busy little hornet, haven't you? I'll see what I can dig up for you..." He started to walk away, but paused no more than two steps later and turned back to me, the glint in his eyes and the buzz of excitement forewarning me that he'd had another of his big ideas.
"Say, the Bearers of Harmony defeated Nightmare Moon and Discord, did they not? You must be stronger than I thought to have defeated them: I may have to enlist your services in future, I can think of a few tough cookies I'd rather like to crumble."
The way he spoke of the Bearers' defeat reminded me painfully of the fate of their leader, and I all but snapped at him in response. "You misunderstand: they were separated; useless; and the one I did fight would have been an admirable opponent. I am not your private mercenary, Seeker, nor do I wish to be."
"Would have been...? Ooooh... Oooooh... I understand now: grievous injuries... medical magic... never a mercenary - you messed up, didn't you?"
He was far too close to the truth, and I hurriedly attempted to throw him off the idea, unwittingly confirming his suspicions in the very act of doing so.
"That's quite the leap of logic, Seeker; aren't you afraid you might fall into the chasm of falsehood?" I winced inwardly the instant after I spoke, and doubly so when the draconequus grinned wickedly, eyes twinkling with condescending amusement.
"Not in the least, dear Chrysalis, not this time. Because I am right, am I not? You don't want blood on your hooves, so you're trying to wash it off by saving the life you nearly ended."
After several seconds' awkward silence in which I found myself unable to come up with a response to refute the claims, I sighed heavily and said, tiredly: "Just get me my information."
"As you wish... That will be one precious memory, if you would be so kind." He held out a palm as if expecting immediate payment, something which only served to ignite the kindling of anger he had lain down earlier.
"I'll pay you when you bring me what I ordered, like usual."
My horn buzzed unpleasantly with his disappointment, and I could faintly sense the racing thoughts congregating in his mind as he formulated an offer to obtain what he wanted sooner rather than later. "Pay me up front and I'll try find you a nice, weak minded king to liven things up in the royal bedchambers..."
"No thank you, Seeker," I said, coldly, "I am more than capable of finding my own, should I ever want one."
"A shame..." the draconequus feigned disappointment. "I know a dashing young unicorn king who'll be available in a few months. He's had a little trouble letting go of the old ways, but I hear he's a reasonable fellow once you get to know him, and besides, changelings have naturally never had the same issue with dark magicians as the other races."
I took a deep breath to calm my nerves and looked at him with a decidedly unimpressed expression gracing my features. "You did hear the part where I said 'no'?"
The buzz of genuine disappointment told me that he had given up on the venture, and I relaxed a little at the knowledge that I would not have to deal with that tiresome line of conversation any longer.
"Sadly, yes, " he said, sounding a little disheartened. "Ah well, maybe the next one..."
"Don't count on it," I told him, still quite irritated. Draconequui being draconequui, he apparently could not resist adding a chaos joke to his closing statement.
"I wouldn't want to; mathematics are far too ordered for my tastes."
I sighed long-sufferingly and shook my head at him. "Of course they are..." I muttered, to which he did not reply but merely smiled, my horn buzzing with the particular vibration of smug satisfaction as he did so.
Our deal concluded, he turned away from me and strode back over to the door, looking back one last time to wave a silent farewell, before vanishing in a cloud of dark smoke, accompanied once again by the sound of a cello bow being drawn across the strings. I watched the place where he had vanished for a few short moments in case he made a reappearance as he was sometimes wont to do, but he did not return, and I did not linger long in the place he had brought me. With a flash and a roar of green flame, I vanished from the scene, feeling a slight pang of guilt as the caravan caught fire and the roof fell in, which I shrugged off quickly in favour of cold, hard purpose. I had work to do.
II: RETURNING TO THE SCENE
I reappeared not in the palace, nor in the streets of the city now reluctantly mine, for my current work was far from official business. Loathe to admit it as I was, Seeker was right: I had made a mistake, and I wanted to fix it; mostly for my own benefit rather than Twilight Sparkle's, but both our fates were quite thoroughly intertwined in this matter. The eccentric draconequus would provide me with the means to work out the how of saving Twilight Sparkle, but it was up to me to figure out the what; hence my current location at the mouth of a cave on the side of Mount Canter, several miles below the city proper.
As I trotted carefully down into the shadowy depths of the tunnel, checking myself over lazily, my mind wandered unwanted to thoughts of Sparkle: how she had screamed as she fell into the abyss; how I had rushed, unthinking, to save her; how the silk around one side of her had snapped and how her head had swung too far, too fast in the resulting motion. The screams had died out then, before she even hit he ground; before she sustained even worse injuries from the hard landing - not a good omen.
Try as I might, I could not shake the feeling that the venture had been doomed from the start, my doubts about Sparkle's condition worsening with each step and mixing with the blurred, half-remembered horrors of that day to the point where I almost gave up entirely. There was a reason that spinal injuries were mostly untreated even in Equestria, and that reason was that nothing was ever guaranteed to do anything besides add in another factor which might eventually kill the patient. There were treatments, of course, but they were experimental and often proved deadly, and mine would probably be even more so than the current methods. Even so, I had to try: I had vowed, and it had been drilled into me from birth that a changeling who did not uphold their vows was the lowest sort of changeling in the hive.
After some time, I passed the cavern in which I had imprisoned Cadance and, realising I was close to my destination, refocused my thoughts on the various diagnostic spells I would shortly need to cast on the unfortunate unicorn lying frozen in time a short distance away. I had stalled enough already; now it was most certainly time for work. My crystal-clear memory informed me that it was not much further to the fateful spot of those horrific events, and I continued automatically, trying and failing to empty my mind of all thought so as not to think of her.
Pausing for a moment at the cliffside, I looked out into the death-tainted cavern and tried to ignore the stabbing pain in my heart: so much of me wanted to simply return the way I had come, but I knew deep down that I could not let myself leave before my task was done, lest I lose even more sleep to thoughts of nigh-dead unicorns. Sighing mournfully, I returned to the rocky path and focused my mind on putting one hoof in front of the other.
III: DIAGNOSES, APOLOGIES AND OTHER WAYS TO ENJOY A MORNING WITH A CORPSE
When, at last, I got close enough to actually see the body, I found myself shying away instinctively, hot tears rolling unbidden down my cheeks as the realisation that the events of that fateful day hadn't been some frighteningly lifelike nightmare but cold, harsh reality. Ponies died, that was a fact of life, but it was I who had done this to Twilight Sparkle, not old age or illness or natural disaster... My fault, no one else's; and so it would be my duty to fix what I'd done. A changeling's vow was a sacred thing, and even this grim reminder of my wrongdoing could not quite persuade me to break my word.
Refocusing myself on the downed unicorn, I recast the stasis spell to keep it at maximum power, paranoiacally checking and checking again for signs that it was buckling or wearing off faster than I had anticipated. Satisfied that it was doing its intended task as well as I had thought it would, I prepared the first of the many diagnostic spells which would tell me exactly what Sparkle's condition was, from the types to the severity of the injuries she had sustained.
The green flare of my magic, tinged violet around the edges, jetted forth unto Sparkle's frozen form and spread across it in waves, each injury it found being reported back via a stabbing pain in the corresponding spot on my own body. My ankles burnt a little and my back ached, but worst of all was the searing agony throughout my neck, the wave of agony nearly causing me to faint as the spell continued up to the tip of Sparkle's horn and fizzled out, completed.
Once I had recovered enough to think straight, I began noting down what was injured and to what severity. Tissue damage: ankles - minor - probably sprained, or perhaps dislocated in the case of the limbs still wrapped in silk; upper back, shoulders and withers - relatively minor - probably whiplash and some bruising; neck - severe damage - probably several torn muscles, significant whiplash, extensive bruising.
With that out of the way, I prepared the next spell: this one would analyse damage to nerves and bone, and highlight the injuries in my vision rather than make me feel where they were - a good thing, since I wasn't in a hurry to feel that kind of pain again, even if it had momentarily cleared my emotional anguish via some sort of masochistic catharsis. Angling my horn towards the prone form of Twilight Sparkle, I ignited it in gold-tinged green and stood patiently while a small spark of light shot, comet-like, towards the unicorn; its impact triggering the rest of the rolling yellow flame to cascade over my own body before it, too, disappeared back into the ether.
My eyes glazed over in dimly sparkling amber and I could see quite easily the extent of the damage I had done: her ribs and legs on the left side were not merely dislocated as I had thought from the first spell, but also broken in several places, along with most of her ribs on that side. Her left hip and collarbone were both fractured, and her jaw was broken in three places on the right side, which had taken the impact after the violent swinging of her neck had ensured that specific spot would meet the hard stone first.
Surprisingly, her neck seemed to have survived without any of the vertebrae breaking to any real extent, but that did not mean that it hadn't suffered the most out of all of her: one of the bones in her neck was loose from the others, sitting in between the two halves of her severed spinal cord, and I had no doubt now about what had caused the sudden end to her stream of emotion.
Sighing heavily, I let my eyes return to normal and lit up my horn with the last spell, padding over to her side as if I were walking over graves in a cemetery, and leaning down to touch my jagged spire to her uniform spiral. The diagnostic spell lasted but a moment, and I immediately backed away upon its conclusion, adding the state of her brain and horn to the growing list of injuries in my head.
The tissue damage could heal itself in time, and if I brought in a team of professionals the damage to her bones could be repaired also, but the state of her spine was the real issue. There were ways of rejoining the cord, I knew, and the fortunately clean cut meant that such a spell was more likely to work, but the level of power and magical finesse needed was perhaps beyond even my own considerable skill, especially when taking into account that the stasis spell would have to stay up even through any medical procedure if Sparkle was going to stand any chance of surviving.
A team of specialists might be able to carry out the spell, but they would all be unicorns and therefore not powerful enough to penetrate the field simultaneously with casting the repair spell, and to give anyone else the task would run the very real risk of leaving gaps in the field unplugged by magic, something which could kill Sparkle before we realised something was wrong. A mental link might work, but that in itself would cause a great many problems: what pony would be comfortable enough sharing thoughts freely with a changeling, especially after my invasion, to be able to cast such a delicate spell? And we'd need at least half a dozen such ponies for it to have a chance of working - were there even that many spinal repair surgeons in the country?
A wave of dread and sorrow hit me and I sank to the cold, rough stone in a fit of mournful self-doubt. There was just too much which had to be perfect! Why did I have to let her fall? Why couldn't I have just caught her properly? Why did I have to vow to save her? Three mistakes grave enough to topple an empire, all in one day - how could I fool myself into thinking that this even stood a chance of working? It was hopeless... Just hopeless.
I lay there for what felt like days, contemplating the futility of life and cursing myself over and over for all the mistakes I could recall, and probably a few I made up on the spot. Eventually, though, I came back to the reason that I still pursued my impossible goal: I did not want to be a murderer, true enough, but most of all, Twilight Sparkle did not deserve to die. She had friends, family - even her country owed her thanks for her defeat of two would-be tyrants - and I, the third such threat she faced, had killed her through ineptitude. If I failed in my quest to save her, fair enough, but if I let her die by just walking away selfishly, I would be no better than Mother, the heartless, self-serving traitor of whom I had the dishonour of being a daughter.
I am not her...
I raised my head from the hard ground and reopened my teary eyes.
I will never be...
I forced down another shuddering sob and focused on reaffirming control over my body.
...Not now, not ever...
Shakily, I lifted myself up onto my hooves and looked down at the frozen unicorn.
...Twilight Sparkle will live again...
Jaw set determinedly, I turned away and strode from the scene.
...Even if it kills me, it would be worth it...
Looking back just once, I whisper a soft, heartfelt apology and run my hoof unconsciously over the mark burnt into my scalp.
...Just to prove forever that I am not my mother's child...
Letting my hoof drop back to my side, I leave the cavern without further pause, green fire engulfing me after a few paces and a sharp crack announcing my departure.
IV: A QUESTION OF LOYALTY
I flared back into being on the upper level of the palace, not far from my throne room and the dining hall in which I had convened with my advisors, and began to briskly trot my way to my command centre. Changelings of various castes and roles passed me as I strode towards my destination, with not a single pony to be seen anywhere in the stolen heart of their capital, and as this struck me, my thoughts drifted from the broken mare miles below me to her quite healthy counterpart: the curiously helpful unicorn who was very likely continuing her work in the throne room as I walked, and whose true motives remained a mystery to me.
The logical explanation for her wilfully given aid was that the mare was simply doing her best to survive in the very different world that I had thrust her homeland into, but it was interesting that she had formed such a loyalty to me in such a short time. Perhaps she had not been quite satisfied with my predecessors' reign and enjoyed the idea of being able to help change the way things were run - unlikely, given the ponies' worship of the alicorns, but not impossible by any stretch - or her botched teleport had damaged her worse than anyone had realised and made her more susceptible in general to forming amiable connections to others.
Ponies had been known to be rather naive in the past, so maybe part of her sudden allegiance stemmed from such naivety: it was entirely possible that my recent positive actions towards her were enough to convince her of my internal goodness, and in all honestly it was rare that an invading party would go to such lengths to preserve the lives of the invaded, nor was it typical of a ruling tyrant to heal a subject's injuries in exchange for a mere foal's errand.
It was, I decided, very likely a combination of all these reasons: coming out of the confusion and terror of her disastrous teleport only to be healed by the bizarrely kind-mannered leader of her nation's enemy would have laid the foundations for at least some positivity, and Scrolls's fear and will to survive had probably driven her to accept my offer of work. Follow that up with the revelation of my pacifistic invading army, my continued good treatment of the unicorn and my gentle handling of the Bearers of Harmony's interrogations and it was not quite so surprising after all that she'd be eager to keep on my good side by doing the best she could.
There was still a taint of surreality to her almost-enthusiastic help, but I pushed it aside, having no way to prove that there was anything untoward in the mare's intentions and not wishing to dwell on any more dark thoughts. Looking back, it seems likely that even then I was beginning to harbour feelings of friendship towards helpful, enigmatic Starlit Scrolls, and it is perhaps for this reason that I was so eager to avoid following the scent of doubt that her unusual behaviour had left.
Indeed, as I turned the corner and trotted up to the grand double doors of the throne room, I felt a small spark of happiness ignite at the thought of speaking with her again, and even the characteristically scowling face of my High Imperator could not quite erase my newfound glint of good feeling. The feeling grew stronger at the sight of Noble Mantle and my ever-loyal Praetorians, and I joined my subjects with a light-heartedness I had not felt for some time.
"My Queen," Noble greeted, sharply carving a salute as his mouth twitched at the corners into a small, but nevertheless warm, smile.
"Noble," I replied, with a nod and a smile of my own his way, before running my gaze over the rest of the gleaming-armoured entourage. "My trusted Praetorians... I hope today finds you all in good health: friends of mine as you are, it would not do to have you in an unsatisfactory condition."
The group did not respond directly for a moment, the majority angling their horns at Mantle's lieutenant, Praetorian Sub-Decanus Sabre Flourish, in transmission of their feelings. Taking a second to register all these inbound emotions, she straightened herself up and looked up at me with the ghost of a smile gracing her features.
"We are fine, Hive-Queen: all of us are quite well indeed, in both body and spirit; dear Tyria perhaps more so than the rest of us, being two weeks with foal as she now is. I myself hope to, uh... tie the knot, as the ponies say, in my own relationship before too long. Emerald and I had wanted to marry some months ago, but as they are wont to do, bigger events than even our special day came around and we have simply not had the time as yet. I'm sure Noble's life has not been dull, but that is his tale to tell."
After a moment to take this all in, the good news filtered through into my heart and I finally relaxed, smiling at my bodyguards and taking the time to respond to each and every piece of information.
"I'm glad to hear it," I said, generally, before turning to the Praetorian with royal purple eyes and beaming sincerely at the mare. "Congratulations, Tyria - if you ever feel that you need some time away from your post in order to carry your child, do not be afraid to ask, and good luck to both yourself and your husband in the time to come."
Turning back to Flourish, I aired my newly arrived thought with equal openness. "And Sabre, if your inability to find time to marry your own special someone stems from conflicting schedules, I would be more than happy to change things up so that you and your special someone can have your day... As for you, Noble, I hope that you would be able to regale me with recent events in your own life at lunch: for the moment, I have certain things to attend to which prevent me from chatting just now."
He did not allow much of a smile, retaining his professional demeanour, but buzzed me a burst of happiness as he spoke. "Of course, Your Highness, I would be honoured to join you for lunch. You needn't fret about leaving me mid-conversation, by the way; I understand that your duties must always be the priority, even amongst friends."
Thanking him, I turned away and glanced around for Starlit, the distinctive frequency of pony emotion drawing my view faster than even her bright colours could to her current position nested amongst mounds of paperwork. Smiling a little at the sight of her, tongue sticking sideways from her mouth and eyes screwed up in concentration, I made my calm, measured way to her kingdom of papers.
"Ms. Scrolls," I called, softer than I usually would so as not to startle the mare too much, and smiled reassuringly as she turned to face me with a look of surprise. "I see you have made good progress on your report, don't worry that it isn't yet finished; you shall have more than enough time to complete it later. For now, however, I need you for something else: pack your usual things, and I shall call for you when the time comes to leave."
"Of course, Your Highness," she replied and began sorting out the items she would need, though I soon paused her movements with a light touch on her shoulder.
"Starlit... I do appreciate the work you do for me... You know that, right? If there's anything you need, within reason, just ask."
She looked startled but grateful at my offer and hurried to thank me, though the wave of gratitude that washed over me had already served that purpose unbeknownst to the mare. "Thank you, My Queen...I'm just doing my best for Equestria, even if it is under new management for the time being."
Her words gave me momentary pause, before I followed on from her statement:"As am I..."
As she made herself busy arranging her equipment, I turned away, searching for my fellow royal, Princess Maxilla, and the ever-grim High Imperator. This did not take too long, since Maxilla was easily visible, surrounded as she was by her own silvery-armoured Praetorian Guard, and Labium was still where I had seen him on entry to the room, coldly surveying his subordinates.
Buzzing each of them with a stream of urgency, I gestured for them to follow me and made my careful way out of the packed chambers and into the more deserted hallway. I had something more important than most issues to discuss with them, and I did not particularly want every changeling in the throne room overhearing and roaming free with that information, especially since a great many of them were parts of military units and therefore inevitable transmitters of such knowledge.
Finding myself near one of the palace's many balconies, I made my way over to the railing and looked out over the landscape many miles below, waiting patiently for the others to catch up to me. It was a beautiful land, I mused, and I found myself suddenly even more proud of the non-lethal approach my soldiers had taken in capturing the area: such a view might likely have been scarred by mage-fire and corpses had we gone in all horns blazing.
V: MI PRIGIONIERO, CADENZA
The sound of hoofsteps, along with the following silence, alerted me to the presence of my colleagues, and I turned to face them with professional efficiency.
"Princess, Imperator," I greeted, not bothering with unnecessary niceties.
They responded in kind with an unanimous "Your Highness," and I steeled myself in preparation for the coming conversation.
"I shall keep this short for I have important business to attend to today, but I require some input from the both of you regarding Princess Cadance, specifically where and how we are to contain her, since I am no longer convinced that the crystal caverns are sufficiently secure.
"I have made plans to separate a section off a small portion of the palace for the Bearers of Harmony to be housed in. This would be an easily fortifiable part of the building, and one which would be guarded extensively both against unauthorised entrants and escapees. This will be constructed in return for important information on the Elements of Harmony and the defence of Equestria as a whole, and should enable us to negotiate more easily with Princess Celestia since she has a personal connection with the Bearers. It will also discourage Princess Luna from attacking us with her most powerful magic since the Bearers would be right in the firing line.
"The relevance of this to Princess Cadance is that I am contemplating installing more powerful magic-suppression systems and housing her and her fiancé there along with the Bearers. I realise that this would present a greater singular threat than keeping her in the caverns would, but while she might have been able to exit relatively undetected from the caves, she would be up against our full occupational forces the moment she attempted an escape."
Labium was the first to speak his ever-skeptical mind, the buzz of near-condescension that washed over me as I had spoken having forewarned me of the kind of response he was likely to give, though that did not make it any less frustrating to hear.
"You want to move the alicorn which took half a battalion along with your own efforts to subdue, and give her a quarter of the palace?"
His tone of mocking pseudo-incredulity irritated me greatly, and I made doubly sure that my response shot down any attempt by Labium to gain a foothold in superiority by delivering a sharp counter to each and every one of his implied meanings.
"Her magic is bound for the time being, and both your Legionaries and I were half-starved and magically exhausted even before that skirmish. She does not pose anywhere near the same threat she did then, and I am stronger now than I have ever been in my life. Additionally, were she foalish enough to attempt an escape, we have more than enough soldiers to prevent her leaving the building, let alone getting away long enough to unbind her magic and beginning to pose a threat... And it would hardly be a quarter of the palace, dear Imperator: we'd need just one of this building's myriad rooms to house her, another room in which she and the Bearers can eat, and a bathroom. It would barely be more than a side corridor, Labium, so kindly stop the over-exaggeration and pay my words some heed."
"Apologies, Your Highness," he said, though the buzz of emotions from him were part anger, part amusement rather than any real measure of remorse. "It was not my intention to offend you, but merely to put forth my concerns."
I let the irritation in my heart stand in for a verbal answer and chose not to waste any more time on perhaps the least pleasant of my advisory circle, instead turning to Maxilla and attempting to gauge her reaction with sight and emotion-sensing alone. She looked thoughtful, brow creased in concentration, and the swirl of emotion I was receiving from her revealed her mental state as one of conflict, although one that I could feel clearing with the lessening of the buzz in my horn.
"And you, Princess Maxilla? What do you think?"
She looked up sharply at the sound of my voice, the buzz of emotion flaring momentarily before settling down into a more ordered stream of feelings, and took a moment longer to answer.
"I think... I think it could work. We'd need more guards than she currently has, and far more wards if she is to have the autonomy you seem to be suggesting, but it might work out well. Certainly, she cannot stay where she is at the moment, but whether this or simply a reinforced cell in the dungeons is the best spot to relocate her is another matter entirely. Bring it up with the rest of the circle, see what they think - it wouldn't hurt to have a wider source of opinions on such a serious matter, after all. But, to answer your question... Tentatively yes."
"Thank you, Maxilla. Now, unless our High Imperator has anything to add, I have a certain sun-commanding alicorn to negotiate with. Good day, both of you."
With no further comment from Labium, I made to leave, but the princess called out to me, a buzz of nervous hope hitting my horn as she spoke and making me pause, looking back at her over my shoulder.
"What is it, Maxilla?" I enquired, scanning her eyes for any sign of what had made her so suddenly full of hope.
"I would like to go with you when you converse with Princess Celestia, if I may. I know my role in leadership is not quite as significant as your own, but I would prefer to be present for such negotiations as these, if at all possible. It should be interesting meeting the fabled Celestia in person, as well: word of mouth does not give quite the same judgement of character as meeting someone yourself."
I hummed thoughtfully, considering her request. It was likely that she was as excited at the prospect of meeting the one being in living memory to achieve the royal's lifetime aspiration as she was eager to take a more direct role in politics after her relative sidelining following the unification. Ordinarily, such emotion towards the thought of meeting an important party would be cause for concern, but in this case I did not believe it could cause much harm, and may even help win the ancient monarch over.
"I don't see why not. Come along then, Maxilla, Ms. Scrolls is waiting for us back at the throne room."
Labium's cutting gaze followed us as we left, and I found that I could not sense enough of his emotions to garner an understanding of what the old soldier was thinking. Brushing it off in what was quickly becoming a bad habit, I led the way back to the throne room and my almost-friend. With a bit of luck, the meeting would put us a little closer to achieving our goals, even if it was unlikely to garner us any immediate allegiance or even amity from Celestia.
Either way, at least it would distract me from her.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR (PART ONE)
Chapter Four (Part Two): Necessary Negotiations [REVISED]
The three of us made quick progress along the labyrinthine passageways of the castle's lower levels; Starlit Scrolls to my right and Princess Maxilla to my left. Though Scrolls did not as yet know where we were headed, she remained silent as I led us onwards, electing to trust my judgement and wait for things to be explained in due course, or perhaps a little intimidated by the grim purpose which had gripped me since last we spoke. Either way, she did not break the hoofstep-punctuated silence, and Maxilla and I were both quite content to leave our thoughts in our heads as well, although the way the unicorn was acting made me wish she would share what was on her mind.
The worried glances towards my fellow royal and the anxiety radiating in waves from the unicorn indicated fear, and I found myself once more attempting to puzzle out what was going on in that head of hers. She had shown some small fear towards many of the other changelings we'd encountered together, but this was something more, perhaps stemming from Maxilla's royal status and accordingly imposing stature.
If it was her appearance which unsettled my unicorn so, then that only made her easiness around me more puzzling: of all the changelings Scrolls had met, Maxilla was by far one of the most pleasant looking, with wide, genuine smiles and bright eyes full of eagerness as opposed to the jaded majority. I, by comparison, was a downright haggard-looking creature: even ignoring the insectoid features and hole-ridden limbs, there were sizeable bags under my eyes and my body was tall, thin and looming in stark contrast with my counterpart's youthful curves and Prench-taught elegance. My face, its flaws brought daily to the surface by the mirror in my room, was drawn and lined in such a way as to give the appearance of a changeling many years ahead of my own twenty-six, and my snout did less to suggest delicacy and elegance like Maxilla than it did bring to mind the sharp, angular proboscis of a mosquito. Complete the image with my lank green mane and one would have a sight that should rightfully terrify a pony, but inexplicably my unicorn seemed to not only not mind this, but take comfort in it. With every passing moment, the theory that her amity towards me was a result of her backfiring teleport gained more and more credence. The idea made sense, but it also saddened me - the unicorn was the closest thing to a friend I had outside of my advisors and guards, and to believe that her friendliness was the result of a mere accident was to write whatever we had off as nothing more than a convenient turn of events, rather than anything more meaningful.
By the time I shook myself out of that line of thought, we had arrived at the third and deepest level of the Royal Canterlot Dungeons, and I had to take a more active role in our navigation, being the only one in our party who knew anything of this final level of the dungeons. Leading my companions left and right, through branching corridors and sudden dips, it was another long few minutes of silent concentration before we arrived at the most heavily-guarded portion of the palace. No less than four full Legionary squads, each led by one of our very best Decani, stood alert and ready for action with glaives drawn and horns lowered in the direction of the one - and only - entrance.
The sight was at once impressive and intimidating: five rows of eight morbidly glimmering blades stretched out from the seamless silver ranks, the coloured, rank-indicating crests on the helmets revealing that the most experienced soldiers formed the front line. The standard formation of Decanus on the left, Sub-Decanus on the right repeated four times across the narrow chamber; a row of grim faces staring out from under helmets, somewhat at odds with the gaudy crimson and azure of their crests. Behind them, two ranks of green-crested shifters levelled their weapons in readiness to use them, horns lighting in anticipation of a fight, and to their rear a further sixteen amber-crested drones adjusted their glaives for improved manoeuvrability. I could not help a grin - these were soldiers I could trust to do their job well.
Near-imperceptibly, one of the Decani glanced without even the slightest twitch of the head towards his fellow squad leader on the left, and a silent conversation took place between the four leaders and their seconds in command. In combat, a changeling squad did not fight as ten individuals, but rather one ten-cog machine: the ponies had discipline, but we had more than that: advanced mind magic, and the skill to use it well. Each individual retained their motor control and the freedom to move wherever they needed to, but their minds and their senses all served the Decanus, providing a constant stream of vital information along with the raw brain-power to process it. Every part of the whole was simultaneously commander and commanded, and the moment one spotted a threat, they all knew - the ten-part squad worked incredibly well, and it would be hard to imagine a better group of fighters without having met the Praetorians.
What was happening here was even more sophisticated: command decisions were spread between not one but four minds, the situation analysed by another four, and streams of input poured in from no less than forty different sources - if someone were foolish enough to take them on, it would be like fighting a sentient sea of steel and magical fire. I knew, the moment it happened, when the decision had been made: as one, the forty retracted their weapons and stood down, a chromatic sea of dissipating magic rising up from the ranks as twenty-four horns powered down.
After a second, the middle-left Decanus marched smartly forwards to greet us, smoothly enacting the simultaneous salute and bow the military preferred to use when greeting royalty and sending a curt nod the way of Starlit Scrolls before opening his mouth to speak for the group.
"Your Highnesses," he barked, "how may we be of assistance?"
I responded with equal conciseness, the to-the-point nature of military speech a refreshing break from the sycophantic warbling of the noble elite.
"We need to speak with the prisoner. You know what to do."
"Understood, Your Highness," acknowledged the Decanus, saluting once more before turning smartly on the spot.
He immediately strode back to rejoin his nine Legionaries, unseen communications flitting back and forth between the amassed minds, and after a moment the entire mass of forty armoured changelings split neatly down the middle to allow us access to the miniscule gateway behind them. As we strode briskly towards our final destination, the closest half of the soldiers turned to face the entrance, glaives forming a crescent of blades behind us while their higher-ranking comrades at the front adjusted their own positions to better cover our way in.
The chamber we were about to enter had been constructed by Celestia as a backup in case the Bearers of Harmony failed to defeat Discord, and it must have taken centuries of research for ponies to even lay the basis for such a powerful magical device. The proper name for it was a State-Maintaining Order Field Generator, and it was worth far more than the palace under which it resided. There had always been the very real risk that the near-god draconequus would have found some way to circumvent the Elements of Harmony, and Celestia had known from experience how dangerous he could get; and so she had prepared, and researched, and finally built something truly incredible in both power and complexity.
In appearance, it did not look like much besides a very large, spherical hole in the rock; but if it had been built for the sake of appearances it would not have been sitting as far out of the public eye as it could get, guarded by the best soldiers its possessor could throw at it. Its actual purpose was very simple: fuel it with magic, and whatever was inside would be affected more and more by the order field it created, the greater the sum of magic fed into it. At low power, all it might do would be prevent any sudden movements, spells or other chaotic happenings, but at the power level it had been intended for, with all the Royal Guard's unicorns giving their all, it would be enough to freeze even a near-god of chaos itself like Discord permanently in place, unconscious and unchanging, and feed off of his own chaotic magic to keep the field running.
In short, Celestia had built a prison for a god... A cage which had become hers, unlocked with a key that had become mine. The irony of the situation was not lost on me, but I did not take pleasure in it: I bore my predecessor no grudge, in fact respecting her a great deal for the unwavering leadership she gave her ponies, and the weight of what I had already taken from her prevented any amusement at her expense from taking flight.
We emerged at last, on the far side of the long, narrow cylinder which we had entered, into the vast spherical space of the order chamber and took a moment to sweep our gaze over the room. We could not see much: the material which lined the interior was utterly black to the point where no light at all reflected off of it, lending the chamber a shapeless quality which did nothing to ease our minds, and everything within it was bathed in brilliant white light, which threatened to blind us. The furious illumination did, however, allow us to see the one thing we'd come here to find; suspended in the very centre of the sphere, curled into the foetal position and with her mane motionless and weightless, was the statue-still form of Princess Celestia, the ever-present brightness making her appear to be made of the very sunlight she brought.
Reaching back into my mind for the stolen memory of the magical code required to operate the device, I lit my horn at the various, very specific frequencies which signified each digit of the great machine's shutdown index. As I worked, Starlit watched wordlessly, waves of interest radiating from her like ripples in a pond; Maxilla stared instead to the sun-goddess herself, slack-jawed and enthralled by the awesome sight before her.
The last digit lit in my horn, and at once everything changed: a contracting, spherical tidal wave of chromatic radiance rose from the once-black sphere and sped into the centre, leaving dull green-grey where once had been ultimate darkness. The sphere of light shrank into Celestia and vanished, and moments later she drifted slowly towards the ground, dropping the last five metres to land in an unceremonious heap as the machine's effect died once and for all.
Glancing left and right at my companions, I gave the silent signal and we advanced as one towards the downed alicorn.
II: THE GREATER GOOD
She rose slowly, visibly pushing through the viscous waters of her magically induced coma to surface, gasping and disoriented, in the cold air of consciousness. The alicorn's eyes were glossy and unseeing for her first fleeting moments in reality, and she staggered to her feet without truly being aware of our presence.
Her vision soon cleared, however, and those drooping eyelids snapped back instantaneously in an expression of simultaneous shock and fury. She frowned in concentration, evidently trying to cast one of the many spells she had leaned over her long life, but no change occurred to the appearance of her horn no matter how much she screwed up her eyes and tried to force out some measure of defence against us.
Shock and rage turned to frustration and desperation as she tried and failed to cast even the most simple spell, and from there; with her attention now aimed at my companions and I; to dread, fear and the tiniest hint of betrayal - directed, no doubt, towards Starlit. She took one hesitant step back, faltered and fell onto her rump, and I in turn took that as my cue to speak.
“Princess Celestia,” I acknowledged curtly. “I see you’ve found that you haven’t any magic at the moment – I’m sure that, looking around, you can guess the reason why – and it must have become quite clear to you that you are at something of a disadvantage. You have no magic of any kind with which to attack us, and I myself am capable of defeating alicorns in a one-on-one fight, even without the trickery I used to take you down. My fellow royal, Princess Maxilla, is similarly powerful and has her own, rather unique set of skills, and my colleague here, General Advisor Starlit Scrolls, is certainly not to be overlooked. Even in the unlikely circumstance in which you defeated all three of us, I have forty of my best Legionaries stationed outside ready to deal with any escape attempts. Furthermore, Canterlot belongs solely and in its entirety to us: your palace has become our barracks, your city our stronghold and your country our dominion. So please, don’t attempt anything… inadvisable; it will only end badly for you.”
She glared defiantly at me and rose into her usual regal posture, limbs rigid and head held high and proud, using the slight difference between our heights to look down at me in distaste.
“If you are quite done monologuing,” she began, not even attempting to hide the condescension in her tone, “I’d really rather you got to the point of why you bothered waking me up – unless, of course, you simply wanted to gloat; in which case I must ask that you consider a less clichéd way of doing so. Evil speeches – especially when you’ve heard as many as I – are so very tedious.”
I sighed, resisting the urge to roll my eyes, and – as Celestia so eloquently put it – ‘got to the point’.
“I need your help, or rather your word that you will help, in a matter of some great importance. Your sister, Princess Luna, has fled the country with a contingent of guards in the rather futile hopes of amassing a more sizeable force: with such a force she would try to counter-invade and expel my kind and I from the country. This plan, we could deal with – if, that is, she wasn’t also threatening to use the sun and moon as weapons against us; an action which I’m sure you’ll agree would be both reckless and very likely to cause collateral damage.
“Changelings are quite resistant to extremes of temperature, and it is no great task for us to adapt to alternate light levels… Ponies, on the other hoof, are far more vulnerable. If she tried to use either the sun or the moon to harm us, either directly or indirectly, many more innocent ponies would die for every changeling casualty. I’m sure she knows this, and I very much hope that this is a bluff, but in the event that she might slip into her old ways and try it, I want your word that you will do all you can to counter such an assault. I don’t like having to cede control to others, and I am very sure you do not like the idea of working alongside those who deposed you, but where the greater good of both our kinds is at stake, letting personal pride affect matters is a fool’s gambit.”
She stared hard at me, her eyes burning into my skin as she scanned my face for deception; finding it emotionless, she snorted in undisguised frustration and instead deigned to turn the tide of the conversation to her favour.
“Why should I believe a word you say?” she asked, her face, though her expression was entirely impassive, having become surprisingly intimidating simply through the disappearance of her usual serene smile.
It was a good question, and one that I would have to think carefully about before giving my answer. I ran my mind over the options I had: short of linking our minds and showing her my memories, a method she was unlikely to agree to, my best bet seemed to be my peculiar unicorn assistant – she had, after all, said she’d vouch for me if I needed her to, and from the looks of things that offer would be one I’d have to take her up on.
“Because she is here,” I said simply, gesturing towards Starlit. “I first met Starlit Scrolls when she attempted to escape the palace via teleport alongside your nephew and very nearly killed the pair of them, along with me, when it went quite catastrophically wrong. This left her with a deep cut in her foreleg and a burnt-out horn: injuries that might have taken weeks to heal on their own or days in pony care, and which I healed at the cost of my own life force for the trivial matter of one letter sent by magic.
“I did not need to help her – there are, after all, a great deal more unicorns able to send letters than Ms. Scrolls, and I was not far from finding a great number of them – but I chose to do so. If my actions in invading your country had been out of a lust for power or hate for your kind, then why would I do something so utterly counter-productive in either respect?
“She works for me, now; not because I forced her to, but because I offered her a job. She could – and still can, should she hand in her resignation – have gone out into the city and found work elsewhere, or even left the country, but she chose to work for me. If I am as hateful and selfish a mare as you seem to think, why would I give her the opportunity of work, let alone a paid job? And why would she voluntarily take the offer I made?
“Today, she stands here not as an assistant, as she once was to you and initially was to me, but as a central and valued member of my own advisory circle. As General Advisor, she – whilst not as knowledgeable in the specifics – is one of the most important aides I have, capable of giving a crystal clear view of the wider situation and suggesting courses of action. Princess Celestia, this mare was nothing to me when we first met – I did not have to heal her, employ her or respect her; but I did so anyway and will continue to do so. I may not be a hero in your eyes, Princess, but I am no villain – you would do well to consider that."
She remained silent for some time, mulling it over, before turning to my unicorn with suspicion in her eyes.
“You, Assistant Scrolls – is this true? Are you really working for this tyrant?”
“…Yes, Your Highness, I am. With respect, Princess, you have to at least consider that all her actions besides invading have been of no negative consequence to Equestria. Nopony’s dead, the only wounded are the ones who hurt themselves trying to escape, and the most oppressive measure she’s taken is rationing food so that everyone can eat. Tartarus, the changelings have smaller rations than we do!”
Celestia scowled at Starlit's last exclamation, evidently unimpressed.
“I do not, Ms. Scrolls, take kindly to voices being raised at me, and I would appreciate it if you would refrain from doing so in future... Now, I can see that this matter – for whatever reason – means a lot to you, so I will consider what you say. Even so, I cannot fathom why you would turn away so willingly from the leadership I offered you – are you so dissatisfied with my rule that you would rather aid an invading foreigner than see me return to the throne?”
Starlit winced visibly under the hard look Celestia was shooting her, but remained, to my pride, resolute in her defense of her views.
“Not dissatisfied, Your Highness, not in the least bit. You’ve kept Equestria safe and stable for more generations than my family has records of, and I have never doubted your rule; I do not help Queen Chrysalis to spite you, even if it might seem so to you. I realise that popular opinion says otherwise, but I consider changelings to be just another race of ponies, equal in importance to the three whose unity founded Equestria, and just as deserving of a safe haven the likes of which I, like nearly all ponies, have enjoyed all my life.
“Their homes are gone, invaded and razed to the ground by the Griffons, so they came here and did what they had to in order to once again have a place to call their own and a steady supply of food. I, like everyone, wish they had not arrived here in such a violent way, but what’s done is done. They have nowhere to go, and there is a way that all ponies – earth, pegasus, unicorn and changeling – can live together as one – it is this path which I am trying to help Queen Chrysalis follow; a path to peace and unity rather than the violence which accompanied the changelings to Canterlot. I just want a happy ending for all ponies, not just the ones who were here first.”
Celestia considered this, snout scrunched up in confusion and doubt, before shaking her head and snorting, a small, somewhat sardonic smile making its way back onto her face.
“How very noble of you. Quite possibly misguided, and probably too optimistic, but noble nonetheless. I am sorry to say that I do not share the same opinion of the changelings as you, nor do I have nearly the same enthusiasm towards working with them, but I am no fool. The changelings, not alicorns are the ones in charge now, and if I want any say at all in how this country is run before I gain another century in age, I too must follow the path you have so nobly set us all on. I will aid your new Queen against my sister, if it should come to that, although I will obviously not be happy if it proves necessary to do so. One thousand years was long enough, or so I had hoped…”
I leapt upon this sudden compliance with no small measure of desperation.
“Thank you, Princess,” I said gratefully, “If you’ll sign it, I think now’s the time we make a written agreement; just for formality’s sake. Starlit, take a fresh piece of paper and get a quill ready; I want to make this as official and by the book as I can.”
She made no move in objection to this, and I turned away from her to my unicorn, who met my gaze expectantly as she telekinetically closed her saddlebags, the quill and paper wavering a little in her magical grasp at the division of attention.
“Ready? Alright, let’s get this over with… The following, binding pact between Hive-Queen Chrysalis Noxa Prasinus De Vespidae-Alveare and Alicorn Princess Celestia Serena Equestria, its conception witnessed by Hive-Princess Maxilla Succinum D’Aelius-Alveare, and General Advisor to the Changeling Crown Starlit Scrolls, consists of two sections…”
I waited for Starlit to finish writing, then continued. Maxilla stood off to the side, somewhat awkwardly – I suppose she was expecting something more interesting out of a meeting between a goddess-diarch and a changeling queen, or at the very least a more radiant creature than the downright irritable alicorn we’d ended up encountering – but she seemed to be staving off boredom at least a little in her thorough examining of the pony she’d idolised.
“Section One: in the event that the former Alicorn Princess of Equestria, Luna Proxima Equestria, poses a threat which cannot be adequately dealt with by conventional means, Princess Celestia shall use whatever means necessary to ensure that the threat is neutralised, with the minimum damage to infrastructure and injury to other beings being caused in the process. To the completion of this task, she shall receive any and all assistance she requires, except in the case that the current leader of Equestria should veto such assistance for a valid and relevant reason. Final judgement of the adequacy, moral integrity and appropriateness of Princess Celestia’s actions in accordance with this term shall fall to Hive-Queen Chrysalis or the highest ranking member of the Changeling-Equestrian government able to conduct the function.”
With the conclusion of that monolithic segment of legislation, I once more sat back and watched Maxilla’s curious gaze flit over our bored-looking alicorn companion as Starlit painstakingly etched out each letter of the words which would bind the princess and I to our word, though surprisingly my co-ruler did not let her interaction with Celestia remain at mere observation for very long at all.
“Princess Celestia,” she began, bowing respectfully to the alicorn, whose eyes – for the first time since this meeting had begun – sparkled with genuine curiosity. “If I may, I would like to ask some questions about you – specifically your command over the sun – so as to better understand the magic and thinking involved in the tasks you undertake. It has long been a subject which has fascinated me and confused me in equal measure, not to mention closely linked to my former kingdom’s culture, and if you are willing to share any details, I would be very grateful.”
Celestia met Maxilla’s gaze evenly, her expression unreadable save for the serene smile which had returned to her face, and the silence rang out more profoundly than any noise might have. To her credit, my fellow royal did not shy away from the powerful stare of the alicorn, but merely returned it with that same expression of guarded curiosity and respect she had directed towards Celestia thus far, an innocent smile mirroring the princess’s own. After some time, the tension finally broke and Celestia smiled more broadly, letting out a small chuckle as she sat back on her haunches and ceased her confrontational staring.
“Very well… Hive-Princess Maxilla, was it? I will answer each of your questions in return for a question of my own answered – I trust this appears a fair exchange to you?”
“Of course, Your Highness.”
“Then go on and ask.”
“Alright… Is the magic you use to control the sun and moon of the same kind as the usual unicorn magic, or a different kind; much like dark magic and chaos magic are separate from the norm?”
“I’m afraid the answer to that is both yes and no. The magic I expend in the action of moving the sun is entirely standard unicorn in nature, but the celestial bodies themselves have their own kind, unique to each of them as a cutie mark is to a true pony, which plays an equal, if not greater part. Your turn, changeling: through what means are the various castes of changeling able to remain so different in appearance even after centuries have passed in which they should have converged?”
“Pride and tradition, more than anything, are the cause for that. The castes generally keep to themselves, and both due to some misguided concept of superiority over the so-called ‘lesser castes’ and tradition, they default to their own distinctive appearances. At birth there is not all that much difference between foals of differing castes besides their inherent mental and magical states, but as they mature, their growth into an adult body is guided so that they outwardly show their place in the community’s hierarchy. The only reason the deeper mental differences have not disappeared is the strong stigma against ‘breeding under one’s caste’ as they call it. ‘Drone-rutter’, to many an Elite, is a very severe insult and quite often cause for a fight.”
“Interesting… I trust you had more than one question to ask, Princess?”
“Oh, yes… You said that the celestial bodies have their own unique magics, powers that, as much as your own magic, were the driving force behind their motion. Would I, then, be correct in the assumption that they have some form of autonomy or sentience, perhaps even sapience, given that half the process is not due to your own efforts?”
“You… You are quite sharp, Princess Maxilla – more so than I had expected, to be frank with you. Were it not for this conflict between us, and the inevitable involvement of Captain Shining Armour in it, I imagine you and my student would get on rather well indeed. But that’s neither here nor there – to answer your question, I must admit I cannot be sure. Certainly, they possess some limited intelligence and semblance of desire, but whether they truly think and feel is not information even I am privy to.”
“I see,” Maxilla said, disappointment evident in her tone. “And your next question?”
“Ms. Scrolls mentioned that this invasion was an attempt to secure territory and food supplies following the defeat of your kind at the talons of the Griffons. What, exactly, happened in order to bring about such violent events, and why did you feel it necessary to invade a peaceful country rather than discuss the matter of food and housing in a civil manner?”
“Our kind and the Griffonian Empire have always been at odds with each other. They have considered our lands their territory for as long as we’ve been there, despite the fact that they are too barren and inhospitable for anything save our kind to survive in, and our refusals to leave our one-and-only homeland so that they might extend their borders over another thousand miles of dead desert have been a sore point for centuries. Recently, their leadership has taken a more expansionist and xenophobic foreign policy, and we changelings – being not only a near-universally unpopular race but also one with historically bad relations with Griffonia, and one whose homeland is on so-called ‘griffon land’ – must have appeared the perfect target for another campaign of rapid border growth.
“They struck without warning, and in overwhelming force, not producing any official declaration of war until after they had slaughtered the populations of our three greatest cities and brought the bloodstained ruins to the ground. We could not hope to fight them and win, so we engaged their advancing armies with guerrilla tactics to buy time for the evacuations of the rest of the country and then fled into the desert, hoping to find some kind of sanctuary on the other side. Instead, we simply found more desert, and we lost two thirds of our surviving population to starvation and disease before we found Equestria. The farmsteads we initially commandeered helped keep us alive, but they were never going to provide for all of us, so we looked to other options.
“We did try to engage in diplomacy first, but your niece, Princess Cadance, opened fire on our envoy and would have killed his entire group had they not fled. She was quite clear in her intent, and we knew it was only a matter of time before she took more extreme means of driving us off. If we had not moved against her, she would have surely mobilised Royal Guard platoons to drive us back into the desert, and we would all have died either by Guard spear or starvation. We engaged her, and Queen Chrysalis defeated her in a one-on-one fight, after which we imprisoned her and made sure the order to engage us was never sent. We knew that her disappearance would be noticed, so Queen Chrysalis took her form and infiltrated your ranks. Our invasion plan was hasty and ill-conceived, but we did not have the luxury of time to make a better one, so we made our move and… well, here we are.”
Celestia did not look pleased to hear this, not that I think any of us expected her to, given that the explanation painted her niece as a warmonger, but I suppose even she had to agree our reasoning had been solid. Begrudgingly, she nodded at Maxilla, conceding the argument before it could begin. That did not, however, mean she did not have other lines of questioning to pursue.
“That makes a certain amount of sense, but why would you not seek out myself or my sister and request asylum from us? Princess as she may be, Cadance does not have nearly the same power over Equestria. Her hostile actions towards you would have been halted, her mobilisation vetoed and your kind welcomed, had you come to Luna or I.”
“We did not know that Princess Cadance was not your equal, and assumed that her views of us were representative of the Equestrian leadership as a whole. I can now see that we were mistaken about that, but at the time we had no way of knowing, and certainly no real way of contacting you anyhow, with most of our number exhausted and the rest being mobilised to defend against any attacks your niece might launch.”
The frown on Celestia's face deepened further at this, her mouth curling into something of a scowl at the explanation.
“I see. I must admit that I cannot see many alternatives to your actions, but I am still deeply, deeply unhappy at what has occurred. Regardless of your reasons, you have still invaded my homeland and stolen my throne, and I am not so quick to forgive such serious transgressions.”
Clearing my throat to draw Celestia’s attention back to me, I proceeded to voice the second half of the treaty, giving a quick glance at Starlit to make sure she was ready.
“Alright, if I could have your undivided attention for a moment, Princess, Starlit… Section Two: in the case that the circumstances detailed in Section One come to pass, and one or both of the signatories does not comply with the terms to which they agreed, to a degree deemed genuinely unsatisfactory to the other party, then they shall forfeit their leadership of the sovereign nation of Equestria until such point as the other signatory deems them fit to rule, or the sum of one hundred years have passed since the agreement was broken, whichever happens first.
“To ensure that this section’s terms are complied with, both signatories shall bind their magic to this agreement so that, in the case that they act in a way contradictory to these terms, they shall forfeit all use of their magic above a power of twelve Volutes. This forfeit shall be lifted in either of two scenarios: Firstly, if the other signatory wishes to return the noncompliant signatory’s magic to them, in which case they shall rest their horn against the other’s breast and say, clearly and solemnly, “I forgive and return.” Secondly, if the noncompliant signatory is in a situation where they genuinely believe that they, for the good of those around them or the sake of their own life, require more magic, they may draw upon the amount they need. Desire for more magic will not yield more, even when the limit has been raised; only a genuine belief that a greater amount is necessary shall return the desired amount.
“To determine whether the actions, thoughts and words of either signatory are genuine, two Feathers of Veritas shall be bound to the signatories via the spell sealing this pact, enabling the unbiased, independent determination of whether these sections’ terms have been met. Each signatory signs acknowledging and accepting these terms, and consents to the judgement of the Feathers of Veritas following their completed signature. The terms of this pact may be altered or rendered null at any time, so long as both signatories genuinely agree that the amendment or dissolution of the pact is the correct course of action. The signatories shall sign below, clearly and without obscuring either the words of this pact or the signature of the other signatory.”
The furious scratching of Starlit’s quill upon her scroll of paper continued after I finished, her mouth moving silently around the words she was recording, and for some time it was the only sound to breach the air of the room. Silence never lasts, however, and Celestia was the first to break it, her brows raised in surprise.
“Feathers of Veritas? I did not think that you would take such extreme measures, but at the very least it gives me some reassurance that you are taking this matter as seriously as I am. To have the forfeiting of leadership and magic be punishments for breaking the pact is similarly extreme, but since I do not intend to break my word, I am quite content knowing that you have sufficient incentive to hold up your end of this deal. When your… advisor is done writing, and I’ve had a chance to give it a thorough read, I shall sign your pact.”
Though the slight air of disgust she used when saying Starlit's new rank irritated me, I put on a mask of gratitude and nonaggression; arguments would not help me here.
“Thank you, Princess. I only wish we had met in a manner that would have circumvented all this painful formality.”
Turning to my still-writing advisor, I gave the mare instructions to help prepare the completion of the pact.
“Starlit, when you’re finished, could you please leave the scroll with us and then ask one of the Legionaries to fetch the Feathers of Veritas from the Imperator Emeritus.”
Not pausing for a moment in her writing, she responded dutifully. “Of course, Your Highness.”
A somewhat awkward silence fell over the room as she wrote on, with everything to be said having been done so before, or so I thought. Celestia, on the other hoof, had other ideas.
“Queen Chrysalis – what of my student, Twilight Sparkle, and her friends? What have you done with them?”
The mention of her student caught me off guard, and even as I fought to keep the emotion from surfacing into an expression, I thought I saw Celestia’s impassive mask shift subtly, her paradoxical, youthfully ancient eyes refocusing sharply to gaze into my soul. Forcing an answer out was shockingly difficult, but even under her close scrutiny I managed to prevent the gap between question and answer being suggestive of anything besides a moment’s careful consideration.
“They are currently incarcerated for attacking my Legionaries, but I’ve made sure they are well fed and well treated; prisoners though they may be, I am not in the habit of allowing mistreatment take place under my snout. I also know who they are, and why they are so important to you – nothing save for the Elements of Harmony could have so easily banished the Nightmare’s essence or resealed Discord, and by all accounts your student’s group was there on both occasions. They are the Bearers of Harmony, are they not? I would not be so foolhardy as to allow such important ponies to come to harm.”
“You mistake my concern for Twilight and her friends as avarice, Queen Chrysalis. I suppose I cannot blame you for applying the only mindset your kind has to the situation, but I am, in fact, capable of valuing others for more than their usefulness to me.”
The irritation I had been pushing to one side came back in full force at her insinuation, and I could not help myself from snapping a sarcastic response to her words, not even bothering to hide the dislike which had been building in my heart.
“Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise? I never pegged you as a closet racist, Princess, but here you are saying such lovely things as that.”
Celestia remained aloof and condescending, attempting to brush off my complaint as my seeing insults where none lay.
“Twist my words to suit whatever viewpoint you like, Queen Chrysalis, but the truth of what I meant shall always remain so.”
Try as she might to cover her intent, I was not having any of it.
“Twist your words? You insinuated – condescendingly so, I might add – that the only value a changeling can give someone is that of their usefulness to them. From your tone and your presentation of a quite frankly offensive falsehood as fact, how could I come to any other conclusion as to your meaning?”
Her expression shifted subtly, and I could see I had caught her off guard, but she recovered with the practiced liar's grace of a true politician, still intent on trying to smooth things over without admitting that she had meant to offend.
“I had heard from some very reputable sources that your kind were incapable of forming emotional attachments to others, and assumed that these sources were correct, as they so often have been. I assure you, no offense was meant.”
With every sugared word, I felt myself getting closer to losing my temper, and it was all I could do not to raise my voice and snarl at her following her latest white lie.
“I see. And pray tell, is it often that you assume such things about other races? Is it just a matter of course for the Equestrian leadership to take the word off the street and use it in a thinly veiled insult towards foreign leaders, before finishing the neat little one-two punch with an insult to their intelligence? ‘No offense was meant’? You must truly take me for a foal, Princess, to think that I’d believe that.”
She blinked, still feigning innocence. “I am truly sorry, Queen Chrysalis; it was not my intention to insult you.”
The snarl that I had been holding back these past minutes came out in full force, and with clenched teeth and my lips pulled back, I all but growled my response, edging still closer to truly losing my temper.
“Were that true, you would surely have dropped this façade of innocence by now. I am sure that a millennium of lying to your nobles has made you think that you can fool anyone, but I am afraid you are sorely mistaken. Why don’t you do us both a favour and cease this charade of insulting dishonesty?”
Her brows went up visibly, before descending into a frown, growing tired and a little irritated in tone herself.
“Very well, I shall be fully honest with you from now on, but do not complain if what I say is not what you want to hear.”
“That is fine by me. It should have been so from the start.”
Truly growing sick of her superior tone, I tersely snapped my reply, before turning myself fully away to signal that I'd had quite enough conversation for the moment. As she, too turned away from me, a tense, ill-natured silence fell, and was not disturbed until Starlit sheepishly delivered the completed pact to us and scampered off to relay my orders to one of the Legionaries outside. When my advisor returned, she too fell silent whilst Celestia and I took our turns reading through her painstaking copywork, and the dank fog of mistrust continued to shroud all our minds.
III: DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Half an hour of disapproving glances, scowls and general unpleasantness passed between Celestia and I before the Legionary whom Scrolls had sent to retrieve the Feathers of Veritas from Marbled Iris returned to us. The armoured stallion, a drone, judging from his helmet’s crest, carried an ornate, rare wood box with him, decorated tastefully with sparing leaf of gold and silver, which he held out to me steadily even as he bowed deeply and saluted me with a flourish of his horn.
I took the box from him gratefully, tossing him a small golden coin with the royal insignia by way of thanks, and made my way over to Maxilla, who’d been preparing the spell that would bind Celestia and I to our pact. Flicking the box’s catch open with a flare of magefire, I offered it to Maxilla, letting my friend and fellow royal pick out and handle the feathers since she would be the non-signatory who’d be sealing the pact.
With a bright flare of her own magic, she teased two shimmering white feathers from the box’s black velvet interior and imbued them with the binding spell, before extending the magefire holding them out, first so that the two were joined by a beam of magic, and then so that each was likewise linked by its own beams to the all-important spell. Her horn ignited in verdant brilliance, and a blinding flash flared out from the objects held in her spell, before her aura receded into a near-imperceptible shimmer, simply holding the enchanted objects in the air.
“It is done,” she said, solemnly. Her horn brightening a little, she coaxed the delicate magical feathers, untarnished in their brilliant whiteness despite the bright green glow of her magic around them, so that one each hung in the air before Celestia and I.
“Take your feathers, they shall act as your quills. Sign, and the pact shall be sealed – if either of you wishes to back out, do so now, before the pact is irrevocably bound to you. Otherwise, step forward and complete it.”
To my right, Celestia swayed a little, making me think that perhaps she was second-guessing her decision to go through with the pact, but shook her head violently after regaining her balance and instead started forwards towards the pact scroll. Taking the feather in her golden aura, she strode forwards and made her mark on the scroll, signing quickly but elegantly in the empty space below the pact’s terms, before stepping back clumsily in surprise when her feather flashed out of existence in a brief, bright white incandescence and her signature burned brilliant white, before fading back to black.
Once she was out of the way, I plucked my own feather from the air and advanced to the scroll, held steady in Maxilla’s aura. As I raised the magical quill to sign, a loud thud from behind pulled my attention away to see Celestia sprawled on the floor, insisting to Starlit and anyone else who’d listen that she was alright, so long as they’d give her the space to get up.
“I’m alright, I tell you; I don’t need your help, I can get up just fine.” Celestia stated indignantly, moving to get to hooves as she continued. “I was just a little dizzy, that’s all. It’s… it’s just a little hard to think all of a sudden. I just need a moment, and I’ll be alright.”
Shrugging off my nagging doubts as to the reality of the Princess’s condition, I turned back to the scroll and signed my own efficient scrawl below Celestia’s graceful signature, noticing that even with all its painstaking beauty, it seemed to have been written surprisingly shakily. Concern began its shift to the forefront of my mind, and I turned back to the Princess just in time to see her attempt a few uncharacteristically inelegant steps.
She managed the first few, before her eyes seemed to glaze over and her limbs went weak, legs splaying out awkwardly as she collapsed again. Starlit caught her, thankfully, and I used the moment to cast some of the diagnostic spells I’d used on Twilight. Bizarrely, she seemed to be in peak health: she had no serious injuries as far as I could tell, and from the looks of things she hadn’t hit her head at all, yet her pulse was moving erratically and she was clearly not in her right mind.
The buzzing emotions coming from her seemed genuine enough: fear, confusion, powerlessness; all of which were perfectly normal considering the situation she seemed to be in. Poison, maybe? I wouldn’t have thought an alicorn would be so afflicted by something like that, but even so I made my way urgently to her side and cast a deep scan, which turned up nothing of interest.
Concern began to work itself up into panic as I struggled to think of what could possibly be behind the princess’s bizarre affliction. She’d devolved into foalish babbling now, and out of desperation I scanned her for foreign magic, even though I knew that no one in the room could have cast such a spell without the Legionaries noticing and notifying me. This wild approach, to my surprise, yielded results: still entwined with her own magical essence was the unique signature of the order chamber’s own magical field.
Astonished horror struck me – the machine had never been designed to hold an alicorn, only a draconequus, and I had just stuffed Celestia in there without even considering the consequences! Whilst similarly powerful, a draconequus’s magic was far removed in nature from the supercharged pony magic alicorns used; who knew what adverse effects her days-long suspension in the machine might have had besides this debilitating mental devolution.
With no other choice left to me but to shield her from the order machine’s field and take the matter of her mental deterioration into my own hooves. My horn blazed with emerald incandescence as I shielded her, before shifting to an even brighter lime inferno which washed over my body, covering my eyes with a solid cyan sheen, even as I held the spell in my horn in search of consent from Celestia.
“Princess, if you can hear me, I’m going to bridge our minds and try to fix this. I’m going to give you five seconds to tell me if you don’t want me to do this, then I’m going in anyway.”
Five seconds of incoherent moans and nonsensical babbling passed, and I touched my horn to her thrashing head, transferring my consciousness into her mind in a bewildering swirl of verdant fire.
IV: REACHING THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Emerging from the spiral of magefire in the vast spaces of Celestia’s mind, it struck me immediately how pristine the colossal sprawl of her consciousness was. It didn’t make sense – if the issue was not with her mind, then why had she lost control the way she had?
Ice gripped my veins again as another horrific idea struck me: the Nightmare which had possessed Princess Luna until Sparkle's group had cleansed her had not been destroyed, merely stripped of its host. It had infected one alicorn already, what was to say it could not use what it had learned from Luna’s mind to invade that of her sister by way of revenge?
In response to this realisation, I focused my mental magic into a fiery lance with which I could drive out such a threat, the horn of my avatar igniting as I drew strength into my consciousness from my mindless body, and glanced around paranoiacally in search of a potential threat.
“Nightmare!” I yelled, loosing a vibrant beam of green fire at something moving fast in the corner of my eye. “Release this mind at once!”
As I turned sharply to face the threat, I was astonished to see a brilliant golden shield block my fire, rather than the shadow magic which I had expected. Lowering my horn at the figure, I let the fire in it die out at the realisation that it was Celestia, not the Nightmare, which had joined me in the cavernous chamber.
She dropped her shield and laughed, the sound bright and melodious in sharp contrast to the fearful mare I might have expected. She seemed genuinely amused, and her incredulous tone merely confirmed that I had once again jumped to conclusions.
“The Nightmare? In my head? I am flattered that you’d assume that I was under attack, and come to my aid so valiantly, but there is no threat here, Chrysalis. I simply wished to speak with you in private, and given your ability to bridge minds, I thought I’d seek the most privacy I could get.”
My concern for her wellbeing evaporated in the resurgent heat of my anger at the revelation that it had all been a trick.
“That was an act? You lied to me, again?! I thought I’d already made it quite clear how much I dislike deceptions, Celestia. If you wanted to speak mind-to-mind, you should have asked; as it is, I’m not really in the mood for a conversation.”
“We’re in my mind, Chrysalis, you’d do well to do what I ask.”
“And I’m in control of the link. I can leave any time I want, and right now I’m not sure I like your tone.”
“Leave now, and you can say goodbye to any cooperation from me in the future.”
We stared each other down for a moment, before I broke gaze and sighed in defeat.
“Enough of the threats, Celestia; what do you want?”
“I want to know the truth about Twilight Sparkle and her friends. You aren’t the only one who dislikes deception, and I’m not about to let you lie to me about my student’s wellbeing. Where are they, and what have you done to them?”
“They’re in the dungeons, in their own cells. They’re chained up at the moment, but I’m planning on sectioning off part of the palace for them to live in. They’re not going free just yet, but I’m willing to give them a gilded cage at the very least.”
“I don’t see you just leaving them there sitting idle; what have you done with them?”
“I’ve interrogated some of them, if you can even call it that. Mostly, I was just trying to gauge their character; I don’t expect any of them will give anything vital away, and I’m not about to torture them for information I could probably find stashed away in a file.”
“Gauging their character? Alright, if that’s the case, you won’t mind telling me what each of them is like, then? Let’s start with Twilight; what’s she like?”
“I haven’t interrogated her yet.”
“Forgive me for finding it hard to believe that you didn’t interrogate the leader of the Bearers, my personal student and a close friend of both my sister and I, before you moved onto the others.”
“I wanted to hear the others’ opinions of her first before dealing with her.”
“Applejack. Fluttershy. Rainbow Dash. Pinkie Pie. Rarity. Twilight Sparkle. You see, you claim you haven’t had contact with her yet, but out of all of the names I just listed, hers got the most noticeable reaction. What happened between you that you’re struck so hard by the mention of her name?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Don’t lie to me, Chrysalis. I assure you I find it just as insulting as you found my deceptions.”
“Nothing happened, I’m telling you the truth.”
“You are telling me lies, Chrysalis, and if you don’t tell me what you did to my Twilight, my patience is going to start running rather thin.”
“I did nothing to her.”
“I won’t ask you again. What did you do to Twilight?!”
"I didn't do anything to her. In all actuality, I should have done more to keep her safe. She's hurt, Celestia, and badly; but not by my hoof or by that of my changelings. We are working on healing her wounds as we speak, alright?"
"I don't think I believe that. When I mention her name, you look visibly hurt, distraught even, and very, very guilty. No, I think she did something to one of your little bug friends, and you hurt her in retaliation. So, what happened, Chrysalis? Did you lose your temper for a moment and burn her with the magefire you've shown yourself so eager to loose? Because I don't think she got hurt by some kind of accident, not for a moment - why else would you be so evasive about her wellbeing? Why else would you be so desperate to keep me in the dark?"
I could not respond, gagged and bound by her words; fueled by my silence, she went on.
"Maybe... maybe you even killed her." I flinched visibly, and she leaned her face in to mine, snarling as I had done earlier. "Well, did you?!"
I could not answer, and she continued, incensed.
"Did you?!"
Her mask shattered with fury as I failed to respond, and I could see all her pain and fear and anger as plain as day, radiating out from her in intimidating waves. I could make out tears on her avatar's face, rolling down from increasingly maddened eyes as Celestia finally snapped.
"Tell me, you insect; WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY TWILIGHT?!"
Her horn blazed into life, anguish-driven rage powering her every movement. Even separated from my body, I could feel the sheer force of the psychic blast she was about to release, and as fear for my existence raced down my veins, I regained my ability to act. In the face of such power, and such righteous fury, I did what insects do best; I turned tail and fled.
Snapping the link, I tried to ignore the heat of her magic behind me as I dived headlong into the welcoming emerald flames, shooting along through a tunnel of my magic into my own mind, my own realm. But even as I left Celestia's mind, her magic accelerated onwards, faster than I could manage, faster than I could comprehend; finally catching me as I emerged on the other side of the link and blowing the once-closing tunnel into a vicious tear a mile wide.
The shockwave hit me, and I descended, spiralling helplessly into a mind turned to chaos.
V: BROKEN GLASS AND AMNESIA
It all happened in an instant, and the time it took my returning consciousness to catch up to current events was more than enough for the wake of Celestia's magic to wreak havoc on my mind. Thought, memory and self were torn from their rightful places and tossed around without aim or destination.
I thought I felt a slight buzzing of guilt, of horror in my horn, but I could not hold onto the feeling. I could not keep any thought alive long enough to act on them, nor could I feel my body. For once in my life, I was completely, absolutely alone in my own head, and it was terrifying.
This was why mind-crime was treated with such seriousness - this feeling, this violation of the very concept of self, should never be felt by anyone. Had I been able to focus on anything to truly feel more than abject terror, I would have been furious, horrified that Celestia would do this, but no thought would form; they were all hopelessly broken before they had even been fully made.
Desperately, I tried to hold onto my fragile sense of self, to view my mind as an outsider, but it was in vain. Everything was blurred, even the most simple thought being squashed and dragged across the surface of my brain like an insect being stomped under a city-sized boot, and I fell back on the most simple mental exercise I could remember. It would not save me from having my mind torn asunder, but it would at least let me check the damage. Focusing myself inwards, I began to list.
My name is Chrysalis Noxa Prasinus De Vespidae-Alveare. I am a twenty-six year old royal changeling and the queen of my people, as well as the current ruler of Equestria. I have led my changelings across the Griffonian Desert to escape the griffon army which sacked our cities and killed our kin and, out of necessity, obtained the food the only way I could, by invading Equestria. I have few friends, and none whatsoever outside of my own Praetorian Guard, but I wouldn't trade a single one of them for anything. Twilight Sparkle is dead because I was too slow, too clumsy to save her, so I have vowed to do what I can to bring her back. My favourite colour is navy blue, my favourite smell that of lavender.
It was getting a little easier to think now, the scattered papers of my thoughts finally beginning to spiral back down now that the hurricane of the alicorn's magic has passed deeper into my mind. My senses, whilst I could finally feel something, were going haywire, and vaguely I was aware that I was falling, the dull pain of the impact rolling through the spell-blocked passages of my mind to arrive belatedly in the shattered throne room inside my skull. I could only guess that her force was passing through the sensory part of my brain in the same ruthless manner it had traversed my conscious thought, but my head was in such a state of disarray that guessing was all I could do.
Finally, I understood, truly understood, why entering another's mind without consent was treated so seriously: even the guilt of Sparkle's death was a far preferable feeling to the sheer, gripping horror of being rendered powerless within my own head while another ransacked everything that made me who I was. I was afraid, even more than when the griffons invaded and I had fought for my life and the lives of my people in hoof-to-talon combat, even more than when I had thought Twilight Sparkle completely removed from the land of the living, even more than when my mother hung me from the flagpole of our mansion by mane and left me there until the dehydration and exposure had nearly killed me. That was nothing by comparison - this was true terror.
I could no longer feel my body. The detachment hit me like a tidal wave, and I am sure that if I'd had any control left over my physical self I would have curled into the foetal position and wept. As it was, I had no idea what my body was doing, only that I could no longer control it: briefly I considered that if I could not control my body, then maybe my heart would stop beating and my lungs cease to open, but the icy stab of fresh fear was enough to scare me away from that particular line of thought. Eventually, I clawed my way back to a semblance of sanity, and as I finally convinced myself that if I could not change the outcome, then there was no use fearing the inevitable, a peculiar flood of calm rose up and submerged me in its warm waters.
Out of curiosity more than fear now that I had so fatalistically detached myself from the events overtaking my mind, I started to list the same things I had done the first time.
My name is Chrysalis Noxa Prasinus De... D'Aelius-Alveare? I am a twenty-eight year old - wait, shouldn't that be sixteen? Or was it twenty-one? I am a... fourteen year old changeling royal. I will never be queen; Tegimen will be king, and even if he doesn't, Cormetit and Tela will be on the throne before me. I suppose that's a good thing: the only orders I give are to my toy Legionaries, and look what happens to them. The worst sorts of winds fly in from the Griffonian Desert; everything gets covered in sand and Mother will just make me clear it up again. I wish I lived where Clover the Clever and Star Swirl the Bearded did, Equestria: I bet they don't have to clear up sand over there. I don't have any friends, but that's okay because Tela says they're only trying to use my power for their own benefit or something. I don't know how they're supposed to 'use my power' or anything, but it can't be good. Besides, who needs friends when you have Legionaries? I get to play with them, and they never call me names or try to use my power. Maybe I'll become a Legionary too, one day, like Daddy. Twilight Sparkle is a funny name. What sort of a changeling goes calling herself silly pony names like that? Weird... My favourite colour is red, like roses, and I love the smell of coffee.
Briefly, I wondered what the point of checking my memory was - how exactly was I supposed to know if I was remembering the right thing if I couldn't be sure any of my memories were right? Still, something about those thoughts didn't seem right. Maybe she was in my memories, maybe she was somewhere else, but for now all I could do was list endlessly until something else happens. And so, I listed on...
After a while, these lists became - although I had no way of knowing at the time - much further removed from the truth, and looking back it is quite easy for me to assess Princess Celestia's ruthless path though my brain. The closer or further she got from my most recent memories, the more I listed what I might have done at those points in time, and if I had had any recollection of what was correct for the present and what was simply the result of dredged-up memory, I would have known ahead of time that the alicorn was growing closer and closer to the one memory which I wanted her least to find.
My first and only warning, had I been in any state to understand it, was my final, increasingly incoherent list:
Her name is Twilight Sparkle. She is a unicorn, personal student of Princess Celestia, and rumoured to be the Bearer of the Element of Magic. She is onto me - I have to deal with her before she dooms us all. She is out of the way now, and unharmed unless she did something stupid like trying to escape the portal sphere. She might be a danger after all - if she frees the alicorn, everything will come apart. She needs to be stopped. She has gotten quite far since I set her down here: I'm impressed - she works fast. She is not, apparently, one with a cool head in a crisis. This is just too easy! I'm almost disappointed... She is... What is she doing? Is she going to leap at me? Is that her plan? Really? She is falling! Shit! I can't let her fall! What do I do?! The silk, of course! Pleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmiss... Oh, thank Phlogiston - I caught her! What just happened? Oh, no, please don't tell me it snapped! It snapped! Buck! She has stopped screaming. She has stopped feeling. She can't be dead. She can't be. She isn't moving. She can't be dead. Please, dear Phlogiston please let her be alive. She can't be dead. She isn't breathing. She can't be dead. She can't be... She can't... She is dead. Oh, Phlogiston, she's dead. I did this. I was too slow. I did this. I failed her. I did this. She is dead. I did this. It is my fault. I did this. It is all my fault. Wait, is that... It can't be... Please let it be... Her heart is still beating! She's not dead yet! I can save her! I will save her! I will... Oh, Phlogiston, it's gone! What did I just cast?! I killed her... Oh, buck, I killed her! Why?! Why did this have to happen?! I could have saved her! I could have saved her! Why?! I'm so sorry. I can't... What did I cast? It wasn't a lethal spell, was it? I wouldn't have... Would I? I didn't! She is frozen, not dead! Not dead! I can still save her! Twilight Sparkle is nearly dead, but I will save her. She is not dead yet. She is almost certainly doomed. She is not dead yet. She has a family that loves her. She has friends who support her and care about her. She has a mentor who is almost a mother to her. She has a life. I will not take that from her, or her from that. She is not dead yet. She is almost certainly doomed. She is not going to die. She is going to live again. I will make that happen. I have to make that happen. I vow to make that happen. Twilight Sparkle is my greatest responsibility. I will not let her down.
My mind became very still, all of a sudden, before a fresh burst of magic, not violent this time but desperate, rocked my unsteady mind. The foreign presence of Celestia's mind in mine had gone, and at last the final remnants of our link were torn asunder. Slowly, horribly, I began to wake up.
VI: DELIRIUM
Thought and memory swirled like the tumultuous tumbling of the river at the bottom of a waterfall as my bubble of consciousness fused into place amongst the poorly reassembled pieces of a lunatic's jigsaw puzzle, into the Frankensteinian bastardisation of thoughts and memory that had once been my mind. Feeling rushed back into my body, the reunification of body and mind nearly complete, and with a sickening feeling of sudden acceleration I lurched awake, eyes opening involuntarily and remaining pinned back as wide as they could go, my newly regained vision swimming with tears and lurid, blurring colours. I was conscious, at least, but I was still damaged beyond the limited capabilities of my self-repair - I had thought Celestia's mental invasion more terrifying than anything, but this nauseating blend of familiarity and alienation within my own body produced its own kind of horror.
Even as hooves touched my body and voices rang incoherently in my ears, I was alone, my barely-functioning husk of a body my only companion, a companion whose usual comforting responses had disappeared completely in favour of fresh nightmares of twisted sensation and shattered comprehension.
Even as those same hooves lifted me, the voices asking what, exactly? Could I move? No, no I could not, despite how much I might crave the return of control over my body. And so, as the stone corridors passed in a dizzying blur, I did the only thing I could: I cried for everything I had lost, and tried to ignore the humiliating sensation of hot liquid trickling down the insides of my thighs, yet another bludgeoning reminder that I controlled nothing in this horrible new reality besides my lungs and my tears.
When, at long last, we stopped, I took a long, long time indeed to notice it; lost as I was within the broken labyrinth inside my head, and no longer caring about the world which no longer belonged to me. Voices; calm, soothing, but still incomprehensible, cooed this and that and tried to soothe the unsootheable. I was right in the middle of one in a series of fragmented, raging rants about their - to me, incredible - inability to do anything of use besides talk, when I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my left foreleg and the world turned to still, comforting blackness.
Unconsciousness enveloped me like a blanket, and I flew into its embrace with open hooves. For now, at least, the nightmare would be over.
When I dreamed, I dreamed in memories.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR (PART TWO)
Chapter Four (Part Two): Necessary Negotiations [Old/Non-Canon]
The three of us made quick progress along the labyrinthine passageways of the castle's lower levels; Starlit Scrolls to my right and Princess Maxilla to my left. Though Scrolls did not as yet know where we were headed, she remained silent as I led us onwards, electing to trust my judgement and wait for things to be explained in due course, or perhaps a little intimidated by the grim purpose which had gripped me since last we spoke. Either way, she did not break the hoofstep-punctuated silence, and as Maxilla and I were both quite content to leave our thoughts in our heads as well, although the way the unicorn was acting made me wish she would share what was on her mind.
The worried glances towards my fellow royal and the anxiety radiating in waves from the unicorn indicated fear, and I found myself once more attempting to puzzle out what was going on in that head of hers. She had shown some small fear towards many of the other changelings we'd encountered together, but this was something more, perhaps stemming from Maxilla's royal status and accordingly imposing stature.
If it was her appearance which unsettled my unicorn so, then that only made her easiness around me more puzzling: of all the changelings Scrolls had met, Maxilla was by far one of the most pleasant looking, with wide, genuine smiles and bright eyes full of eagerness as opposed to the jaded majority. I, by comparison, was a downright haggard-looking creature: even ignoring the insectoid features and hole-ridden limbs, there were sizeable bags under my eyes and my body was tall, thin and looming in stark contrast with my counterpart's youthful curves and Prench-taught elegance. My face, its flaws brought daily to the surface by the mirror in my room, was drawn and lined in such a way as to give the appearance of a changeling many years ahead of my own twenty-six, and my snout did less to suggest delicacy and elegance like Maxilla than it did bring to mind the sharp, angular proboscis of a mosquito. Complete the image with my lank green mane and one would have a sight that should rightfully terrify a pony, but inexplicably my unicorn seemed to not only not mind this, but take comfort in it. With every passing moment, the theory that her amity towards me was a result of her backfiring teleport gained more and more credence. The idea made sense, but it also saddened me - the unicorn was the closest thing to a friend I had outside of my advisors and guards, and to believe that her friendliness was the result of a mere accident was to write whatever we had off as nothing more than a convenient turn of events, rather than anything more meaningful.
By the time I shook myself out of that line of thought, we had arrived at the third and deepest level of the Royal Canterlot Dungeons, and I had to take a more active role in our navigation, being the only one in our party who knew anything of this final level of the dungeons. Leading my companions left and right, through branching corridors and sudden dips, it was another long few minutes of silent concentration before we arrived at the most heavily-guarded portion of the palace. No less than four full Legionary squads, each led by one of our very best Decani, stood alert and ready for action with glaives drawn and horns lowered in the direction of the one - and only - entrance.
The sight was at once impressive and intimidating: five rows of eight morbidly glimmering blades stretched out from the seamless silver ranks, the coloured, rank-indicating crests on the helmets revealing that the most experienced soldiers formed the front line. The standard formation of Decanus on the left, Sub-Decanus on the right repeated four times across the narrow chamber, a row of grim faces somewhat at odds with the gaudy crimson and azure of their crests staring out from under their helmets. Behind them, two ranks of green-crested shifters leveled their weapons in readiness to use them, horns lighting in anticipation of a fight, and to their rear a further sixteen amber-crested drones adjusted their glaives for improved manoeuvrability. I could not help a grin - these were soldiers I could trust to do their job well.
Near-imperceptibly, one of the Decani glanced without even the slightest twitch of the head towards his fellow squad leader on the left, and a silent conversation took place between the four leaders and their seconds in command. In combat, a changeling squad did not fight as ten individuals, but rather one ten-cog machine: the ponies had discipline, but we had more than that: advanced mind magic, and skill to use it well. Each individual retained their motor control and the freedom to move wherever they needed to, but their minds and their senses all served the Decanus, providing a constant stream of vital information along with the raw brain-power to process it. Every part of the whole was simultaneously commander and commanded, and the moment one spotted a threat, they all knew - the ten-part squad worked incredibly well, and it would be hard to imagine a better group of fighters without having met the Praetorians.
What was happening here was even more sophisticated: command decisions were spread between not one but four minds, the situation analysed by another four, and streams of input poured in from no less than forty different sources - if someone were foolish enough to take them on, it would be like fighting a sentient sea of steel and magical fire. I knew, the moment it happened, when the decision had been made: as one, the forty retracted their weapons and stood down, a chromatic sea of dissipating magic rising up from the ranks as twenty-four horns powered down.
After a second, the middle-left Decanus marched smartly forwards to greet us, smoothly enacting the simultaneous salute and bow the military preferred to use when greeting royalty and sending a curt nod the way of Starlit Scrolls before opening his mouth to speak for the group.
"Your Highnesses," he barked, "how may we be of assistance?"
I responded with equal conciseness, the to-the-point nature of military speech a refreshing break from the sycophantic warbling of the noble elite.
"We need to speak with the prisoner. You know what to do."
"Understood, Your Highness," acknowledged the Decanus, saluting once more before turning smartly on the spot.
He immediately strode back to rejoin his nine Legionaries, unseen communications flitting back and forth between the amassed minds, and after a moment the entire mass of forty armoured changelings split neatly down the middle to allow us access to the miniscule gateway behind them. As we strode briskly towards our final destination, the closest half of the soldiers turned to face the entrance, glaives forming a crescent of blades behind us while their higher-ranking comrades at the front adjusted their own positions to better cover our way in.
The chamber we were about to enter had been constructed by Celestia as a backup in case the Bearers of Harmony failed to defeat Discord, and it must have taken centuries of research for ponies to even lay the basis for such a powerful magical device. The proper name for it was a State-Maintaining Order Field Generator, and it was worth far more than the palace under which it resided. There had always been the very real risk that the near-god draconequus would have found some way to circumvent the Elements of Harmony, and Celestia had known from experience how dangerous he could get; and so she had prepared, and researched, and finally built something truly incredible in both power and complexity.
In appearance, it did not look like much besides a very large, spherical hole in the rock; but if it had been built for the sake of appearances it would not have been sitting as far out of the public eye as it could get, guarded by the best soldiers its possessor could throw at it. Its actual purpose was very simple: fuel it with magic, and whatever was inside would be affected more and more by the order field it created, the greater the sum of magic fed into it. At low power, all it might do would be prevent any sudden movements, spells or other chaotic happenings, but at the power level it had been intended for, with all the Royal Guard's unicorns giving their all, it would be enough to freeze even a near-god of chaos itself like Discord permanently in place, unconscious and unchanging, and feed off of his own chaotic magic to keep the field running.
In short, Celestia had built a prison for a god... A cage which had become hers, unlocked with a key that had become mine. The irony of the situation was not lost on me, but I did not take pleasure in it: I bore my predecessor no grudge, in fact respecting her a great deal for the unwavering leadership she gave her ponies, and the weight of what I had already taken from her prevented any amusement at her expense from taking flight.
We emerged at last, on the far side of the long, narrow cylinder which we had entered, into the vast spherical space of the order chamber and took a moment to sweep our gaze over the room. We could not see much: the material which lined the interior was utterly black to the point where no light at all reflected off of it, lending the chamber a shapeless quality which did nothing to ease our minds, and everything within it was bathed in brilliant white light, which threatened to blind us. The furious illumination did, however, allow us to see the one thing we'd come here to find; suspended in the very centre of the sphere, curled into the foetal position and with her mane motionless and weightless, was the statue-still form of Princess Celestia, the ever-present brightness making her appear to be made of the very sunlight she brought.
Reaching back into my mind for the stolen memory of the magical code required to operate the device, I lit my horn at the various, very specific frequencies which signified each digit of the great machine's shutdown index. As I worked, Starlit watched wordlessly, waves of interest radiating from her like ripples in a pond; Maxilla stared instead to the sun-goddess herself, slack-jawed and enthralled by the awesome sight before her.
The last digit lit in my horn, and at once everything changed: a contracting, spherical tidal wave of chromatic radiance rose from the once-black sphere and sped into the centre, leaving dull green-grey where once had been ultimate darkness. The sphere of light shrank into Celestia and vanished, and moments later she drifted slowly towards the ground, dropping the last five metres to land in an unceremonious heap as the machine's effect died once and for all.
Glancing left and right at my companions, I gave the silent signal and we advanced as one towards the downed alicorn.
II: DETHRONATION PROCLAMATION
She rose slowly, visibly pushing through the viscous waters of her magically induced coma to surface, gasping and disoriented, in the cold air of consciousness.The alicorn's eyes were glossy and unseeing for her first fleeting moments in reality, and she staggered to her feet without truly being aware of our presence.
Her vision soon cleared, however, and those drooping eyelids snapped back instantaneously in an expression of simultaneous shock and fury. She frowned in concentration, evidently trying to cast one of the many spells she had leaned over her long life, but no change occurred to the appearance of her horn no matter how much she screwed up her eyes and tried to force out some measure of defence against us.
Shock and rage turned to frustration and desperation as she tried and failed to cast even the most simple spell, and from there; with her attention now aimed at my companions and I; to dread, fear and the tiniest hint of betrayal - directed, no doubt, towards Starlit. She took one hesitant step back, faltered and fell onto her rump, and I in turn took that as my cue to speak.
"Save your energy, Princess, you won't be able to use your magic until it's regenerated enough... Which, given that this fine machine of yours drained everything you had, might take you a little while. You must now realise that you are completely at my mercy: I, myself, am powerful enough to defeat an alicorn on my own, something I have already done twice. While perhaps not as experienced as I, Princess Maxilla here is similarly powerful, and the only way out of here is blocked by the very best and brightest soldiers we have. Your palace has become our stronghold, your bedrooms our barracks and your country our dominion. Let that just sink in for a moment, would you, before you try anything... ill-advised."
Her response was nothing more than a weak "No..." and I smiled openly as I assured her that I spoke the truth.
"I'm afraid the correct answer is 'yes', actually. You still don't believe me? Well, riddle me this, Princess: if we had not won, how could we keep you inside your very own god-prison for as long as we have? How come none of your Royal Guard has come to save you? Why has your sister not freed you from your cage? You already have the answer: if we had not won, we could not be having this conversation. Equestria is ours, Princess, and the sooner you accept that fact, the sooner we can all move forward from this."
"How...? Why?!" was the only response the downed alicorn could muster, her voice cracking as the words left her mouth and reflecting a deep sorrow within, which radiated out from her in cloying clouds of emotion.
"How? We had soldiers scattered throughout your entire city, disguised as ordinary citizens; it was hardly a difficult task to have them simply take off their masks and put on their armour. As for lowering the shield... Well, your p-perceptive little student was right: Princess Cadance was not at the wedding, I was, and from there it was not difficult to persuade my new husband to lower the shield and let my people in. The most complicated part of all of that was finding stunning spells strong enough to get past your armour's protective enchantments, so that we could take over without any deaths - although your Guard certainly tried its best to kill our Legionaries."
This revelation seemed as much a shock to her as the invasion's success had been, and for a moment she forgot to look furious, her eyes sparkling with interest.
"You... You didn't kill anypony?" She asked; I shook my head.
"...No. I've lived through enough bloodshed without creating more where none is needed. Your soldiers are imprisoned but safe and will come to no harm so long as they cause no harm to us. We didn't invade out of spite, out of some idiotic desire for power; we invaded out of necessity. We needed food, and Equestria had more than a small surplus in production; so we did what we needed, to get what we needed: no more, no less. We are in control, but we don't need to change the system to better suit our needs when it already suits us fine: the only thing we want to change is whether or not our people starve to death, and we've done all we needed to that end. Necessity, not power."
Celestia merely seemed more confused after this, although quite understandable given her viewpoint.
"If you needed food, then why did you not request it? We are a reasonable nation; we could have made a deal to send your nation food without all this trouble of invading! I do not see any necessity here, merely greed."
"Our nations are gone, Princess. The griffons take what the griffons want, with no regard for bloodshed or morality. They drove us out of city after city, drove us back into the desert to die - that is, if we had not already fallen defending the only homes we have ever had - and then they left again. The land is useless to them; they only drove us out because they wanted us dead. By the time we reached the other side of the desert, we were starved and exhausted and your nation seemed to offer everything we needed. If I had been able, I would have waited for all the official paperwork and treaty-signing and the rest of it to go through, but I did not have the luxury of time. I saw an opportunity to save the majority of my people and I took it, and for that I am not sorry... That said, that we had to damage so much in the process is something I will readily apologise for, and we will endeavour to repair what we have broken."
I finished my explanation and looked expectantly at Celestia for an answer, but she appeared unhurried in her decision, seemingly content to let the silence drag on. Sighing, I tapped my hoof lightly against the cold stone floor and waited.
III: THE GREATER GOOD
After some time, she looks up, hesitance seeping out from under her mask of composure to whisper through vibrations on my horn and betray her deliberate appearance of serenity, and finally deigns to answer my unspoken request for some small reduction in her dislike of me.
"I cannot forgive you, but if what you say is true, I cannot damn you for your actions either. As much as I dislike war, in your position I might well have done the same. Now, I doubt you woke me up just to have a casual chat, so go ahead and get to your point... Uh..."
"Hive-Queen Chrysalis De Vespidae-Alveare... And you are correct in assuming I didn't come here to assert my dominance. A particular turn of events has arisen, and I find that you may be able to help in a certain matter of importance."
"I'm listening."
"Your sister, Princess Luna, escaped from Equestria to one of your allies along with a sizeable contingent of Guards. We think she's going to try and take the city back at some point, but that isn't as important as what she herself has threatened to do. With you out of the picture, she is now the only one controlling the sun and moon, and she has stated in no uncertain terms that the moment she so wishes, she will use that control to harm my changelings and I. The sun and moon are enormously powerful, but their ability to affect anything more specific than a region of the country is practically nonexistent - if she tries to kill us with either one of them, she will risk the lives of everyone in this city and very likely kill more of your people than her intended targets. Changelings are quite resistant to extremes of temperature and we can adapt fairly easily to higher or lower light levels... Ponies don't quite have the same luxury."
Her expression became a mix of frustration and disappointment - the first likely directed at me, and the second almost certainly meant for her ever-unstable sister.
"And how am I supposed to do anything about that? If she is as far away as you say, I can't talk her out of this, and I fail to see what I can do from in here, much less without my magic. Did you even think for a moment about how this harebrained scheme of yours would even work before wasting my time with impossible demands?"
Sighing, I continued and explained the plan, heart already sinking at the open hostility from the deposed alicorn.
"In the event that she tries something, we would transfer our magic onto you and you in turn would prevent her plans from coming to fruition. Such a show of trustworthiness might also convince us to let you take a more direct role in the running of the country, should you wish to work alongside me. You have experience that I can only dream of, and if at all possible I would like Equestria to remain much the same as it has been, only with the addition of my people, so any agreement we might reach is bound to be in both our interests."
Celestia's eyes narrowed in suspicion, and I had to resist the urge to express my frustration at her continued skepticism as she spoke her mind once more. "Are you trying to bribe me, Queen Chrysalis?"
"I am making you an offer. It is up to you whether you take it, but you really don't have much to lose right now. The situation with Princess Luna is a worst case scenario, and we would dearly like to avoid such action ever being necessary. I just want your word that if we need you to step in, you will: nothing more and nothing less."
She fell silent again, but it was thankfully not long before she came up with an answer this time around, though the hesitance she was feeling seeped into every word of her response.
"I... I will consider it, so long as I am no longer a prisoner of my own device. It is not a pleasant experience, being drained of your magic, and I can hardly think things over if I am frozen in time, can I?"
I mulled it over, eventually answering her with a concessional shrug. "Fair point. Come, we can find you somewhere else right now..."
"Wait," she says, holding out a hoof in a signalled request for me to stop, "what about my student and her friends? What have you done with Twilight?"
The question caught me off guard, and as a result my answer was far from convincing with its hesitant air and nervous tone.
"She's fine," I say, far too quickly, "Twilight is perfectly alright - they have come to no harm, we're just keeping them prisoner until we can be sure they are no longer a threat."
The suspicious glare returned, but the following bursts of emotion indicated that she had begrudgingly accepted my white lie, voicing her satisfaction with the reply a moment or so later.
"Very well; lead me to my new cell," she said, "I am more than capable of walking, don't you worry."
However, when she attempted to get to her hooves, she staggered off to one side and collapsed back into an awkward crouch. Midway through my reply, I trailed off to look at her in mild concern. The machine's effect should have worn off by now, especially given that she was an alicorn, but apparently even standing was a challenge for her.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," she repeated hurriedly, feigning an unconcerned smile which contrasted jarringly with the sharp stab of confused fear striking out from her. Her next attempt to stand bore fruit, but only for a moment, as with her third step forward her right foreleg spasmed violently before buckling underneath her, her other legs following suit moments later and turning her three-legged lurch into a sudden, hard fall.
Muttering incomprehensibly, she tried to drag herself up for a third time but didn't even manage to raise her body an inch off the ground before fresh spasms rocked her body and she cried out in fear and pain, eyelids twitching wildly as her eyes widened and began to roll up into her head. She was shuddering constantly by this point, and her breath had become short and ragged, tears of silent terror rolling down her cheeks.
I needed to act.
The only thing I could think of which might have gone wrong is that her machine might have affected her mind in some way, and in that case I would have to take active measures to stop the damage from taking root permanently. Even in this time of dire crisis, the changeling Code drilled into me from birth made me instinctively ask for consent to step into her mind. Predictably, I received no response, and without a moment's delay longer I cast the spell and took the leap into her mind.
IV: REACHING THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The first thing which struck me when I entered Celestia's mind was the sheer size of it: I could sense it stretching out for what felt like miles, and the scale of what I'd stepped into was momentarily paralytic. The second thing I noticed, looking through the metaphorical window I'd opened into her mind, is how pristine it all seemed; how ordered and even every facet of thought and memory and emotion seemed to be. There was no sign whatsoever here of the damage which should rightly have been scattered across my view like a city in the aftermath of a hurricane strike, and now that I was in there I could sense no fear or confusion from the alicorn.
It hit me far too late that I had been tricked, and I flee back into my own head, mere seconds passing before I felt the window into my own mind shatter with the force of a hundred million hurricanes, my whole world becoming pain and terror and confusion. Everything was blurred, even the most simple thought being squashed and dragged across the surface of my brain like an insect being stomped under a city-sized boot, and I fell back on the most simple mental exercise I could remember. It would not save me from having my mind torn asunder, but it would at least let me check the damage. Focusing myself inwards, I began to list.
My name is Chrysalis Noxa Prasinus De Vespidae-Alveare. I am a twenty-six year old royal changeling and the queen of my people, as well as the current ruler of Equestria. I led my changelings across the Griffonian Desert to escape the griffon army which sacked our cities and killed our kin and, out of necessity, obtained the food the only way I could, by invading Equestria. I have few friends, and none whatsoever outside of my own Praetorian Guard, but I wouldn't trade a single one of them for anything. Twilight Sparkle is dead because I was too slow, too clumsy to save her, so I have vowed to do what I can to bring her back. My favourite colour is navy blue, my favourite smell that of lavender.
It was getting a little easier to think now, the scattered papers of my thoughts finally beginning to spiral back down now that the hurricane of the alicorn's will has passed deeper into my mind. My senses were going haywire, though, and vaguely I was aware that I was falling, the dull pain of the impact rolling through the spell-blocked passages of my mind to arrive belatedly in the shattered throne room inside my skull. I could only guess that she was passing through the sensory part of my brain in the same ruthless manner she had done my conscious thought, but my head was in such a state of disarray that guessing was all I could do.
Finally, I understood why entering another's mind without consent was treated so seriously: even the guilt of Sparkle's death was a far preferable feeling to the sheer, gripping horror of being rendered powerless within my own head while another ransacked everything that makes me who I am. I was afraid, even more than when the griffons invaded and I had fought for my life and the lives of my people in hoof-to-talon combat, even more than when I had thought Twilight Sparkle completely removed from the land of the living, even more than when my mother hung me from the flagpole of our mansion by mane and left me there until the dehydration and exposure had nearly killed me. That was nothing by comparison - this was true terror.
I could no longer feel my body. The detachment hit me like a tidal wave, and I am sure that if I'd had any control left over my physical self I would have curled into the foetal position and cried. As it was, I had no idea what my body was doing, only that I could no longer control it: briefly I considered that if I could not control my body, then maybe my heart would stop beating and my lungs cease to open, but the icy stab of fresh fear was enough to scare me away from that particular line of thought. Eventually, I clawed my way back to a semblance of sanity, and as I finally convinced myself that if I could not change the outcome, then there was no use fearing the inevitable, a peculiar flood of calm rose up and submerged me in its warm waters.
Out of curiosity more than fear now that I had so fatalistically detached myself from the events overtaking my mind, I started to list the same things I had done the first time.
My name is Chrysalis Noxa Prasinus De... D'Aelius-Alveare? I am a twenty-eight year old - wait, shouldn't that be sixteen? Or was it twenty-one? I am a... fourteen year old changeling royal. I will never be queen; Tegimen will be king, and even if he doesn't, Cormetit and Tela will be on the throne before me. I suppose that's a good thing: the only orders I give are to my toy Legionaries, and look what happens to them. The worst sorts of winds fly in from the Griffonian Desert; everything gets covered in sand and Mother will just make me clear it up again. I wish I lived where Clover the Clever and Star Swirl the Bearded did, Equestria: I bet they don't have to clear up sand over there. I don't have any friends, but that's okay because Tela says they're only trying to use my power for their own benefit or something. I don't know how they're supposed to 'use my power' or anything, but it can't be good. Besides, who needs friends when you have Legionaries? I get to play with them, and they never call me names or try to use my power. Maybe I'll become a Legionary too, one day, like Daddy. Twilight Sparkle is a funny name. What sort of a changeling goes calling herself silly pony names like that? Weird... My favourite colour is red, like roses, and I love the smell of coffee.
Briefly, I wondered what the point of checking my memory is - how exactly was I supposed to know if I was remembering the right thing if I couldn't be sure any of my memories were right? Still, something about those thoughts didn't seem right. Maybe she was in my memories, maybe she was somewhere else, but for now all I could do was list endlessly until something else happens. And so, I listed on...
After a while, these lists became - although I had no way of knowing at the time - much further removed from the truth, and looking back it is quite easy for me to assess Princess Celestia's ruthless path though my brain. The closer or further she got from my most recent memories, the more I listed what I might have done at those points in time, and if I had had any recollection of what was correct for the present and what was simply the result of dredged-up memory, I would have known ahead of time that the alicorn was growing closer and closer to the one memory which I wanted her least to find.
My first and only warning, had I been in any state to understand it, was my final, increasingly incoherent list:
Her name is Twilight Sparkle. She is a unicorn, personal student of Princess Celestia, and rumoured to be the Bearer of the Element of Magic. She is onto me - I have to deal with her before she dooms us all. She is out of the way now, and unharmed unless she did something stupid like trying to escape the portal sphere. She might be a danger after all - if she frees the alicorn, everything will come apart. She needs to be stopped. She has gotten quite far since I set her down here: I'm impressed - she works fast. She is not, apparently, one with a cool head in a crisis. This is just too easy! I'm almost disappointed... She is... What is she doing? Is she going to leap at me? Is that her plan? Really? She is falling! Shit! I can't let her fall! What do I do?! The silk, of course! Pleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmisspleasedon'tmiss... Oh, thank Phlogiston - I caught her! What just happened? Oh, no, please don't tell me it snapped! It snapped! Buck! She has stopped screaming. She has stopped feeling. She can't be dead. She can't be. She isn't moving. She can't be dead. Please, dear Phlogiston please let her be alive. She can't be dead. She isn't breathing. She can't be dead. She can't be... She can't... She is dead. Oh, Phlogiston, she's dead. I did this. I was too slow. I did this. I failed her. I did this. She is dead. I did this. It is my fault. I did this. It is all my fault. Wait, is that... It can't be... Please let it be... Her heart is still beating! She's not dead yet! I can save her! I will save her! I will... Oh, Phlogiston, it's gone! What did I just cast?! I killed her... Oh, buck, I killed her! Why?! Why did this have to happen?! I could have saved her! I could have saved her! Why?! I'm so sorry. I can't... What did I cast? It wasn't a lethal spell, was it? I wouldn't have... Would I? I didn't! She is frozen, not dead! Not dead! I can still save her! Twilight Sparkle is nearly dead, but I will save her. She is not dead yet. She is almost certainly doomed. She is not dead yet. She has a family that loves her. She has friends who support her and care about her. She has a mentor who is almost a mother to her. She has a life. I will not take that from her, or her from that. She is not dead yet. She is almost certainly doomed. She is not going to die. She is going to live again. I will make that happen. I have to make that happen. I vow to make that happen. Twilight Sparkle is my greatest responsibility. I will not let her down.
It would not have been much of a warning, but I might at least been able to prepare for what was about to happen. As it was, I was caught completely off guard by the first tangible contact I had had with the alicorn since she broke into my mind. She had stumbled upon the memory of Twilight Sparkle's fall, evidently having been searching for information on her student's whereabouts, and was momentarily dumbstruck by what she found. This allowed me to complete my slow slide into lavender-coloured insanity without interruption, and for a split second ponder the sudden silence and absence of movement within my brain.
Then, the screaming began. The suffocating silence which had reigned over my shattered mind for what felt like hours erupted into a cacophony of agony, driving into me like a knife of condensed sorrow. At long last, I was able to sense the alicorn's position within my head, my view shifting to focus on her tiny, glowing avatar as I followed the trail of pain to its source. The micro-Celestia lay crumpled on the cold stone floor of the crystal cavern, sobbing loudly over the broken body of her student and occasionally running a hoof through the mane of Sparkle's corpse.
At some point my own consciousness had coalesced into a miniaturised version of myself, though I did not notice this until I caught the sight of my twisted reflection in one of the remembered crystals, and it was not long before the sound of my imagined hooves clopping across the stone of memory drew the grieving alicorn's attention. Whereas my soul-form was a nightmarish caricature of my physical self, hers was even more radiant than its real-life counterpart; an idealised image of a god-princess forged from the sun itself. This magnificent visage was spoiled quite effectively by the twin waterfalls of tears streaming down those glimmering gemstone eyes, by the posture-less slouch she had sunk into, by the quivering lower lip and by the sobs like miniature earthquakes shaking her once-regal form. Seeing that memory, finding what she had sought, had hurt the millennia-old alicorn more than blades or magic could ever have hoped to; in her eyes was no light, merely the deathly darkness of a mourner's stare.
She stared at me blankly, mouth opening and closing wordlessly, and I once again took advantage of the momentary reprieve to say what needed to be said.
"I will ignore, for the moment, what you did to get here: I think you'll agree the most pressing matter is right in front of us."
She took a deep breath in, let a shuddering sigh back out, but did not speak to contradict me, so I continued.
"It does not end here. There is more to that memory than that fall and that landing.... She is not dead, Celestia; not yet - I can still save her, and I will. Even if I was, somehow, capable of living normally with the weight of her life on my heart, I vowed to save her, and save her I would. A changeling's word is a precious thing; a changeling's vow even more so: it is binding, even sacred, and to break it would be like breaking off a part of one's soul. I will do my best to save her, even if the chance of success is infinitesimal."
She stared at me differently after that, perhaps expecting more, but I had nothing left to say that would be appropriate for the moment: trespasser in my head and mental assaulter as she was, I could not bring myself to let loose my thoughts on that matter. There would be time later for trials and justice; now was for the grievers. Finally, after what seemed like hours, she made her reply.
"I... I am sorry. Truly, I have misjudged you quite severely, and I can see now that my reckless actions in coming here were quite undeserved. I do not expect you to forgive me, but perhaps you can understand why I did what I did. Twilight, she... I love her. She is like a daughter to me, Chrysalis, and your answer as to her whereabouts was less convincing than it was damning. It seemed likely to me, given your invasion and your insidious methods in enabling that act, that you had harmed or even killed her and that you were lying in an attempt to retain the altruistic image of yourself you were creating. I thought you a killer, Queen Chrysalis, and I'm afraid I acted upon that assumption without thought for consequence or morals - the idea that my dearest Twilight was dead by your hooves was catalyst enough for a rage you did not deserve. Again, I cannot stress how sorry I am for what I have done: it is clear to me now that I have lost not just a political allegiance but what might have been a friendship - I saw you as an enemy, when in actual fact we were on the same side all along. I will help you against Luna, should the situation require it, and you have my blessing to rule Equestria in my stead. Again, I do not expect you to do so, but I hope that one day, perhaps, you might forgive me and we can both move forwards from this."
The way she smoothed over the subject of the harm she had caused me as if it were some minor discomfort to be forgotten after a moment's distraction made my blood boil, and all the broiling rage and hurt came rushing up and onto my newly sharpened tongue.
"You are right: I cannot forgive you. What you have done to my mind, no matter the reason, has been the most traumatising experience I have ever had - we changelings have a very strict code of conduct when it comes to mental magic, and you just trampled every rule in that book into dust on the incorrect, shortsighted and downright idiotic assumption that I had killed your precious student. You showed no restraint in your systematic ransacking of my mind, never entertaining the thought that you might be wrong at any point, and as a result I may be permanently impaired - the amount of damage you have done here is incredible! I might never even wake up from this, let alone regain control of my body or rearrange my memories! For all I know, my body is shutting down as we speak and in a minute or so I might be dead - and for what, exactly? So you could make sure your precious little Sparkle was alright? To find proof enough in my mind that I had hurt her to justify killing me? Do you still not understand what you've done to me? Let me put it into real world terms for you, then: you have just enacted the psychological equivalent of beating me to the brink of death and having your way with me whilst I bleed out. Even if I do recover from this, the wounds you have made today will never heal, and all because you are somehow under the impression that no idea in that oh-so-wise brain of yours might be wrong. I will use you if I need you, but do not expect any more than that from me."
She seemed taken aback by that revelation, and her next words made as much abundantly clear.
"I... I had no idea I had done so much damage! Please believe me, I never meant to cause you any harm - I just wanted to know that Twilight was okay. I thought I was just poking my snout in where it didn't belong; breaking your personal privacy. If I had known what I was doing I would never have... Oh, heavens, I am so sorry!"
My mouth set in a grim line, I shot her fumbled apology down with a dismissive wave of my hoof. "I wish I could believe that."
Fear, real fear this time, filled her eyes and she began pleading as if her life depended on it: "You have to believe me, please! I didn't mean to-"
"I don't have to do anything, especially not what you tell me to. Whatever respect I had for you was shattered along with the rest of me, and all I see when I look at you is a detached, amoral sociopath with no regard for the lives or cares of others besides those she fixates her unhealthy obsessions upon. You say she is like a daughter to you, but she has no need of a second mother, much less one as cold and far removed from equinity as you. I will not tell you twice: get out of my head, before I take your body and trap you in the crippled shell of mine."
"I-I... You wouldn't-"
"We reap the seeds we sow, Princess, and from where I stand you are due more than a little harsh justice. You have ten seconds before I pay you back in kind for what you have done to me."
"I'm sorry, Chrysalis-"
"Nine..."
"-please believe-"
"Eight..."
"-I never meant to-"
"Seven..."
"I swear, I meant you no harm!"
"Six... Five... Four..."
"I'm sorry!"
"Three..."
"If there is anything I can-"
"Two..."
"-do to make it up to you-"
"One..."
"-I will do it."
She disappeared before I could finish my countdown, her parting promise echoing in the shattered husk of my mind for several minutes after her departure. But now that she had gone, taking her stabilising influence with her, my mind began to chaotically piece itself together however it could, with shattered bits of memory and consciousness fusing into a demonic collage of young and old, new and ancient, good and bad, and I felt my own conscious thought merging with the discordant, confused mess.
Thought and memory swirled like the tumultuous tumbling of the river at the bottom of a waterfall as my bubble of consciousness fused into place amongst the poorly reassembled pieces of a lunatic's jigsaw puzzle, into the Frankensteinian bastardisation of thoughts and memory that had once been my mind. Feeling rushed back into my body, the reunification of body and mind nearly complete, and with a sickening feeling of sudden acceleration I lurched awake, eyes opening involuntarily and remaining pinned back as wide as they could go, my newly regained vision swimming with tears and lurid, blurring colours. I was conscious, at least, but I was still damaged beyond the limited capabilities of my self repair - I had thought Celestia's mental invasion more terrifying than anything, but this nauseating blend of familiarity and alienation within my own body produced its own kind of horror.
Even as hooves touched my body and voices rang incoherently in my ears, I was alone, my barely-functioning husk of a body my only companion, a companion whose usual comforting responses had disappeared completely in favour of fresh nightmares of twisted sensation and shattered comprehension.
Even as those same hooves lifted me, the voices asking what, exactly? Could I move? No, no I could not, despite how much I might crave the return of control over my body. And so, as the stone corridors passed in a dizzying blur, I did the only thing I could: I cried for everything I had lost, and tried to ignore the humiliating sensation of hot liquid trickling down the insides of my thighs, yet another bludgeoning reminder that I controlled nothing in this horrible new reality besides my lungs and my tears.
When, at long last, we stopped, I took a long, long time indeed to notice it; lost as I was within the broken labyrinth inside my head, and no longer caring about the world which no longer belonged to me. Voices; calm, soothing, but still incomprehensible, cooed this and that and tried to soothe the unsootheable. I was right in the middle of one in a series of fragmented, raging rants about their - to me, incredible - inability to do anything of use besides talk, when I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my left foreleg and the world turned to still, comforting blackness.
Unconsciousness enveloped me like a blanket, and I flew into its embrace with open hooves. For now, at least, the nightmare would be over.
