The scent of the morning bursts into the cabin; it’s pushed by the dawn. A spike of cold from the wind and abrasive bird song want to wake the lovers. This morning shakes off flakes of blue iron light. Shadows are paralysed underneath that overcast sky. They lie there in the damp light, the changeling already awake. Her eyes are open and she would stare down to the rise of his chest. She wonders how much a picture of sunlight and his scent would cost. She wonders if it would tremble, if the very idea of him would move and change in her mind or if he’s the exception to the rule, if he will last forever in her head. Nothing lasts forever. Stop starring Chrysalis.
She stops starring and kisses his forehead. Light trapped between her lips and his skin; she puts something intangible and immaterial into this simple act. His eyes fade from the darkness of sleep to the washed out colour of the waking world. His breath shimmers in the blue dawn, then breaks apart, moves into the damned world outside. He’s a perplexed crumple of boyish looks, a statuesque male that doesn’t know where he is. Then he breathes out and kisses her neck, adds teeth to this kiss, an attenuated bite. He’s hungry for the taste of her, hungry for that diminutive gasp when his teeth brush past her. His hoof parts through hair like smoke from the cabin wrestling with that mangled blue-black dawn.
A great barrier has fractured, something has opened. Something has grown. It’s so alive and forceful that their past lives are fleeting thoughts made of cobwebs. They share this tiny bed while the inconsistent tug of war between day and night continues. The morning would fade and they’d press into each other. The smell of his pale coat, cradled by the strangle-hold of her legs. The dull thud of her heart, scrutinised by his ears buried in her chest. The couple would rest there in the gruff fortress of soft edges and blankets, astonished as to how life can twist so strangely.
He’d kiss her, and then kiss one of her scars. Then they’d both leave the bed, her following, and work the farm for a few hours. The shadow of two bodies pressed into one another.
“What are we?”
Her husky mature voice is stilted with worry. He appreciates her voice.
“A unicorn and a changeling. We’re the good guys.”
“No. What are we?”
A pause that floats in a sea of pointless bird song and wind.
“We’re in love”
“We are?”
“Yes”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Definitely”
“I wonder if you love me like you love this land.”
“No. It’s different. I’ve fallen for you really bad. I can’t stop it. It scares me.”
“I’m scared too.”
They huddle and shuffle together. She still limps slightly. The sound of their movement swallowed by that uncaring dirty blue daylight. They tread on leaves maimed by the immoderate wind, a blanket of forgotten violence stamped into the ground.
“I’ll have to rethink everything. I can’t just force you to farm with me.”
“What.”
“I’m going to marry you. Under a house of Luna”
“Luna?”
“Yes. Luna, true god of the night”
A small roguish smile stretched on his face. It manages to look tired and tender at the same time.
“Who do you think I prayed to?”
“I thought you just prayed to anyone that would hear.”
“No, I prayed to Luna. I prayed for you.”
A question – no, more of a statement hangs there in the air.
“You’re going to marry me.”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Is it like sex?”
She’s old and wise yet certain knowledge eludes her, as well as social etiquette. In the decoloured light her curiosity and ignorance resembles youth. He’s blushing now, bless him.
“No - I mean yes.”
He’s an exasperated foal again, a crimson face because he imagines making love to her.
“So yes. It is like sex.”
“They can be considered the same. It means I love you.”
“I already know that.”
She reaches down, cool lips touch his cheeks. His is love is a feast, it keeps her alive in more ways than one.
“No. it’s not just that. It means I’m showing you how much I love you. It means I’m committing to you. To us. It also means…”
There the taboo in his head.
“We have sex.”
He feels the need to clarify.
“We make love.”
Light ringing laughter spills out, it makes her strong and beautiful. A sheepish helpless flicker in his eyes.
“The Hive wouldn’t like you. You’re weird”
“You like me though, right?”
A crooked teasing smile on her face.
“Hmm. Sometimes”
“Damn”
He will always remember this sharp cold air, and her teasing smile. He could only remember being touched by the sarcasm and black humour she put in her jokes. He’ll remember how large blue worlds smother the black edges of a withering day. How everything shifts and frays around her. How everything is a false cavernous hole compared to her, because she fills reality with something else. Something pure. Something that’s more of a force then something you can hold. He tries to contain it in his heart, but it melts and spills to his stomach, he feels a winded ravaging in his gut when he looks at her. Fucking hell, it’s good. Fucking hell, it’s terrifying.
“We’ll adopt a foal. We’ll make a family. We’ll make a bigger home on my farm.”
Those words create something inside both of them, as if the home is made already.
“We can have offspring you know.”
A curious set of words that she tosses out without thought, they land next to his daydreams. They are incendiary thoughts.
“What did you say?”
“We can have offspring. They will be changelings, but they will take on the form of their father.”
“How?”
“A changeling changes more then light and darkness. We shape our flesh and mind. Only our souls cling to us. Everything else is borrowed. Everything else is”
A pause and a small scowl. A difficult idea to make in words.
“Ambiguous.”
“Only offspring aren’t ambiguous. They share blood and memories. They are ourselves, but in another time. An extension of us. I can change the blood and memories of my body to nourish any seed.”
She continues to limp on that hard bruised earth. Dew would form pools of dark water that deteriorates the dim blue light. She slowly moves her wings through that dense moist air. For a few seconds everything is a purgatory of overcast blue light and her inescapable words.
“The changeling union monitors all reproduction of its members for the good of the hive.”
There is cavernous shadow in her words. It weighs down on her voice and chokes off inflection. Her voice transforms from uncomfortable, to distant and neutral. Her past slithered and died in that frozen voice of hers. He’s more scared by this then her injuries.
“Females are categorised. There are five castes. I was part of the queen caste. We learn how to have sex with a drone. Then it happens. We are left with a child. Once a changeling is birthed we can become queen of either a splinter hive or nest. I cared for a nest. I report to the union.”
Solid lament that hides in the dull shadows of day. Why Chrysalis? Why these words now? Iron blue light settles in the tired creases on her face. She looks half made.
“We are fed, given shelter and given orders. We become strong without family”
There. A broken lie that’s wrapped in empty words.
“Who do we belong to? How are we made, how do we live? I don’t know if I can make a family, I don’t know who they will belong to. Will they lament me; will they cry out with no identity, with nothing to belong to? It'll go to shit like everything else I tried to do.”
Pain drips from those stale faded words. It drops from unanswerable questions into the dirt and grass underneath her.
“I can only belong to the swarm.”
Less of a sentence. More a stillborn collection of abuse. She’s still walking, but her voice is dead. Left behind in the cold moisture that drips off the vines and leaves. Away from the hive and swarm she can breathe, she can look at a life. She looks hard enough and sees that he lives in her dreams now. He stands next to her in a future. There is his smile and the smell of cave mushrooms. In this delirium she can hold their children, she would teach them changeling and he would teach them equestrian. They would kiss their children goodnight and fend off the darkness together. There is a house made of stone and wood, a small wind chime perches next to the front door. A basket of apples he picks for her, left in the kitchen. A night hides her family in a pattern of stars and inky blackness.
It might never happen.
It might happen.
Her head hangs low. There are no steps left in her hooves. Trembling coughs and stutters follow out of her mouth. She tries to wipe her tears but she’s choking on grief and remorse, her tears ignite into afterthoughts of dusty light. These are not the hot tears of anger and hurt, they don’t trail and pool in a face of rage, don’t slide through an apathetic visage. Its tears that respond to what she wants to forget. It’s a sadness and joy that compacts her face into tired lines of mortality. It’s the birth of a freedom in her mind. The death of those demons stitched to her anger.
Her past is now her past. In an overwhelming rush of clarity, she can see dark memories and un-reconciled conflict where they should be. Far away from the present, far away from the choices she needs to make. For now the oppressive darkness of the past can’t touch her, can’t guide her to a violent conqueror’s end. A watery wail from her chest rides the stammering of her breath, the beating of a heart. It’s the exhausting desperate crying that burns us down and builds us up. If you listen to the sounds of it, you can hear the promise of healing. Broken things remade. Now he’s all around her, an embrace of protection and life. The world turns hushed.
“It’s okay”
He cradles these words like he cradles her. Another sob leaves her and the emotion is a melancholy that was denied from her a long time ago. It’s the consuming weeping that she could never find, but always wanted. She’s remade in a torrent of unsuppressed mourning. She can hear the voice of a future in between frenzied gulps of air. You can live Chrysalis. You can be free.
Puffy green eyes open. There is salvation and redemption in the caged space between his hooves and her body. Memories destroyed, memories saved, memories made.
“We belong together here. You belong to yourself and your dreams. I belong to you”
His savage feeble tumble of words. The exposed honesty is touching. A weakness which is strength. Their foreheads touch and the pale heat of their breath collides and crashes in that moment. He kisses her and those words escape again.
I belong to you.
A collision of lips.
I belong to you.
His mouth on her neck.
I belong to you.
Then she holds him so tight a small breath leaves them both. She feels that tight coil of ribs underneath his skin; it’s frightening how much affection she can feel. With this moment an intense empathy, it agglomerates among the blood and muscle in his heart. A reckless smile eclipses on his shattered face. He is just as ragged and depleted as the queen that’s shackled to him.
I belong to you.
Less of a mantra more a gladness to be alive. Now they share that fragmented genuine smile, and a laugh of heart-breaking victory, of realisation. The laugh sways and buckles in that sky, weighed down by all their hope and dreams and promises. Those words that can only spill and dance in their joy. They say it together, laughing at how strange it is to be alive at all. They stand together just washing their souls. For a stolen moment heaven isn’t far away.
And that hushed sacred sentence he gives her is the same one that is etched in her mind.
Our children will belong to us.
*************************
The guard is unhinged and distant.
Carved out memories and promises from a vanished life. Dark water slipping off dark fragments of armour. He dwells in the hollowed out part of his mind, away from the cold and hunger that consumes his body. The guard releases a pinched dirty cough, a symptom to his dishevelled living. His hooves ache from the traps he’s made and the conscious he wrestles with. He wrestles because they said they belong to each other, because those words are more truthful then this thin empty world and his strained spirit.
Injustice heaped on injustice. The guard resents her. She fucked up equestria then fell in love. The unicorn loved her back. He would care and comfort a tyrant and conqueror. If only their love could be torn up, if only indestructible things can be destroyed. A lack of real sleep and shelter has released something demented and abhorrent in the guard. It uncoils in the guard’s mind, stokes the unspoken ideas of hatred and justice. The guard nods off then wakes alone in a pool of feverish memories. Its all memories.
Lessened the guard stands amongst the dark drops of dew. Fearless hopeless thoughts crawl through his brain and sleep in his flesh. They jitter and cry things he doesn’t want to understand. It’s all gone. I don’t know why but it’s all gone. I can’t go home. When I kill her I will then be so far from home that I can only watch it from a distance. I can’t sleep in my bed because I murdered and promised to murder. I can’t eat those ostentatious cakes on the corner of Sugar Street and Victory Street. I can’t hold him. Oh Celestia my heart. My heart.
Sharpened plates of armour. A shard of metal. Matches.
The guard lights a match. The fire is rabid and hungry, it consumes the tree and the kindling the guard set around it. A tense determined hour is all it takes to see large gashes of smoke rise from the tree’s charred flesh. There is a finality in the crackling and snapping that dominates the vacant landscape. Soon she will die along with something in the guard’s essence. The guard moves a hundred paces in front of the fire. The apple orchid hides him in a blur of red, green and darkness. A feather from the guard breaks free, drifts amongst the embers. It lies there amongst the green and specks of dirty ash like a guilty conscience.
Its all memories.
This line starts the comment
Sorry for the wait. I went camping for a week and fell down a cliff. Surprisingly it only hurt my foot. Thanks for the comments and favs. If anyone could tell me how to get this to Equestria daily I'd be glad. You should follow me because I have another idea lined up after this one, an idea involving our favorite deities. There will be a chapter sometime next week. There will be tragedy.
This line ends the comment