A bolt of lightning zigzagged across the ceiling of black, rain-pregnant clouds. The sparse gaps only allowed a little bit of dark, teal sky to peep through here and there, but they still provided Max’s keen eyes with plenty of light to see everything she needed.
Like emaciated claws reaching for prey, the jagged spires of the hive rose into the sky and cast long, barely-visible shadows onto the vast stretch of barren land between her hooves and the main entrance cavern. Several spires had collapsed, and she saw gaping craters in the hive’s sloping walls that hinted at the work of siege weapons or cataclysmic sorcery.
Stray drops of rain pattered against her chitin as she buzzed her wings and sped across the Badlands. The cold air was thick with earthy scents and the desperation of critters starving deep in their burrows.
Home, sweet home…
Around the midway point between the start of her flight and her destination, she noticed tiny figures swarming out of the hive like ants, and they gradually assembled at the base of the slopes to form a defensive semicircle. Something about them looked a little odd, though, and the closer she got, the more they convinced Max that getting all touchy-feely with the ponies hadn’t done them any favours. The garish combination of bright colours alone would’ve given Queen Chrysalis a stroke.
Max dropped to the ground roughly a hundred paces out from them and casually trotted the remaining distance, savouring the apprehensive looks everyone gave her. All in all, about a thousand of her siblings had lined up to protect the hive. Two changelings of dignified stature with distinctly thicker chitin, iridescent wings and curved secondary horns strode out of the crowd to meet her.
They did not look very happy, if the frowns and stiff postures were anything to go by, and lesser changelings might’ve been intimidated by their height. But Max didn’t let that dampen her spirits for such a momentous occasion. After all, the time had come for her to exact a little compensation for her humiliating exile, preferably starting with their total surrender.
“Who’re you?” asked the shorter one when she came within earshot.
Max sauntered closer, stopping only when he held a hoof up and buzzed his wings threateningly.
Unfazed, she simply smiled and said, “Me? I’m just a little bug who’s come back to claim her inheritance – maybe with a side of revenge, if I’m in the mood for it.”
“I don’t recognise you,” said the taller one. He then frowned as he appraised her from hoof to horn. “And I would very much appreciate it if you didn’t threaten us like that. I am Prince Thorax, son of Queen Chrysalis.”
Max returned his critical gaze, pausing briefly on his glittering wings, then cocked an eye ridge and said, “Really? You don’t look like her.”
His shorter sibling stomped forward and growled, “Yeah, well, the hive’s under new management, and Thorax’s in charge. You don’t look like anyone important, so you’d better get lost before I personally kick your flank halfway across the continent!”
Max blinked a couple of times, then grinned and pointed a hoof knowingly at him. “You sound like her. You’ve really let standards slip around here, Pharynx.”
“Wait, Maxilla? Is that You?” Thorax’s eyes widened as he gave her another once-over. “What happened to you? What’re you doing here?”
“Oh, you know… I accidentally got myself dragged off on a journey of self-discovery. I got to fight monsters, got turned into a monster, and I got exploded into a dozen pieces… And like I said, I’m here to claim my birth right.” She then flared her wings and gestured imperiously with a hoof to the swarm of changelings standing nervously behind her brothers. “Kneel. Your true queen has returned.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Pharynx quipped.
He ignited with a burst of green flames, expanding as thick, heavy plates grew over his regular chitin and additional legs sprouted from his torso, until he towered over everyone present. His serrated claws dug furrows into the ground as he raised his head and unleashed a chittering roar, and then he lunged straight for her with his spurs poised for crippling blows.
Max simply raised her hoof.
And then the hive collectively gasped.
Aside from the slightest of tremors, Pharynx was perfectly frozen in mid-leap, his spurs barely a couple of tail-lengths away from her muzzle. So perfect was her telekinetic hold on him that he could barely even twitch, and a distant observer might’ve even mistaken him for a statue, albeit one with no pedestal or platform.
She then reached into his mind, slicing through his feeble defences with laughable ease, until she interfaced with his nervous system and wrested control from him. With a simple impulse, she then aborted his transformative magic and shrank him back into his regular form, still frozen in place.
Pharynx stared at her as he strained against his invisible bonds and grunted, “It’s… not… possible…”
Max smiled back and chuckled. “Darling, you have no idea what’s possible.”
With that, she hurled him over the crowd with a flick of her mind. He whooshed through the air in an arc, buzzing his wings and flailing his legs in a futile attempt to correct his trajectory, until he slammed into the hive’s slope and sent up a shower of dirt and stones over everyone below.
Thorax squeaked and retreated back a couple of steps, then threw a nervous look over his shoulder and said, “Guys, a little help?”
No one moved a muscle.
A couple of seconds later, Pharynx popped out of the little crater he’d made in the slope, coughing and sputtering. He then ground his teeth when he saw Max and leapt into the air with a roar. “Swarm! Defend the hive!”
That finally stirred them into action. The air positively vibrated with the buzzing of hundreds of pairs of wings, and the ground shook with the thunderous impacts of hundreds of hooves at full gallop. They spread out in every direction around her like the tide around a rock, then converged on her like a cresting wave.
Max sighed. Fine, I could use a little exercise, anyway.
She slammed a hoof into the ground, and the earth around her instantly depressed into a crater that erupted at the rim, staggering her grounded assailants and throwing dirt and stones into the eyes of aerial attackers. They cried out in a chorus of grunts, yelps and squeals, to which she responded with an expanding, telekinetic dome that repulsed them, just like at the failed Canterlot invasion. It left a field-sized circle of wind-swept rock and dirt around her, ringed by a colourful pile of her squirming, dazed siblings.
“Oh, how I’ve waited for this moment!” She took a refreshing breath as the clouds overhead unleashed their torrential rain in earnest. “Anyone else want to have a go?”
To their credit, at least a third of her siblings snarled in reply and lunged at her.
Lightning flashed in the black sky as Max leapt into the fray with the grace of a swan and the unrelenting ferocity of a honey badger. She dodged and ducked, wove and twisted to evade their bucks and bites, even changing shape on the fly to grapple and maximise leverage as necessary. Sometimes she rewarded their efforts with kicks and punches, others she simply grabbed and used their own momentum to redirect or even slingshot them into their allies. She’d learnt a lot from watching Daring Do fight, and she put every second of that experience to good use.
The seconds turned into minutes, and after she’d had her fill of making a mockery of their swarming tactics, Max allowed them to strike her directly. The blows they rained upon her had little more effect than beetles ramming themselves against a glass window, and she withstood them all with a contemptuous grin on her muzzle.
“That all you got? I can do this all—gah!”
Pharynx and Thorax burst through the swarm and simultaneously delivered flying bucks to her cheek. It wasn’t quite enough to knock her senseless, but it did rattle her teeth and impart enough force to make all four of her hooves dig furrows into the ground when she braced herself, skidding as she bled off kinetic energy.
“Everyone, use your magic! Concentrate fire on my mark!” Pharynx yelled.
Hundreds of horns flared to life, forming a sea of green stars before her, and they all converged into one massive beam of crackling energy. With no time to put up a magical barrier of her own, she had no choice but to hold fast.
She braced herself once more and allowed the beam to slam into her.
Its roar filled her ears and its light blinded her, but she had enough augmented brainpower to process the sequence of tasks necessary to mitigate the sheer amount of power levelled against her. Microseconds ticked by as she hardened her chitin, modified her nerves to absorb magic, cast a spell to assess the nature of the rock melting around her hooves, and then burned off the cataclysmic amounts of energy by transmuting the slag into diamond. It sufficed to redirect the vast majority of power that would’ve otherwise turned her to ash.
Eventually, the swarm exhausted its collective might, and the monstrous beam petered out.
Max stood on a disc of diamond, inside a ravine of molten slag. Steam and smoke wafted from the glowing edges of her chitin as she lifted her gaze to meet the swarm’s. The line wavered, their bodies slumping and shaking from the extreme expenditure of love energy. She saw fear in their eyes, in the way their slack jaws trembled.
As soon as enough heat had dissipated for the rain to come crashing back down, she gave them all a toothy grin and whispered, “My turn.”
Her siblings wailed and broke formation as she charged straight into them. Dozens of tentacles sprouted from her back, which she then used to grab and drain them of what little love they had in store before tossing them off like empty juice boxes. Thorax and Pharynx turned tail and ran, but she easily caught up to them, leaping over or barging through anyone in her way until she could grab and pin them to the ground with her tentacles.
She then cackled as she towered over her helpless brothers. “Ready to abdicate?”
Thorax gave Pharynx a desperate look. “You know what we must do!”
“I do?”
“Yeah. We have no choice!”
Max tilted her head and frowned. “What are you grubs talking about?”
Thorax glared at her in defiance and puffed out his chest. “The power of friendship!”
“What?”
A pinkish-purple glow suffused his chest, getting brighter and brighter until it coalesced into a beam of warm light that reeked of rainbows and sugar sprinkles. Pharynx reluctantly grabbed Thorax’s hoof, and immediately began displaying similar symptoms.
She hissed and backpedalled as more and more of her siblings joined hooves and did the same, but she quickly realised that they had somehow surrounded her and cut off all retreat. When she spread her wings and leapt into the air, she bounced against the mass of glittery, oversized clouds and rainbows overhead and crashed back onto the ground, which had incidentally sprouted a carpet of daisies, tulips and a whole lot of other overly-sentimental flowers.
Warm, bubbly sensations began spreading from the tips of her tentacles, turning the glistening, black skin into disgustingly pink fuzz. Too late, she tried to shapeshift them out of existence, but the warmth had already infected her chest and was creeping into her brain.
“No!” she cried as she rubbed at the splashes of bright green, purple, gold and pink spreading on her chitin. “What kind of horse apples is this?”
“The magic of friendship!” the swarm chorused with broad smiles and heart shapes in their eyes. “Join us, sister!”
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“Aagh! No!” she screeched.
“One-of-us! One-of-us! One-of-us!” they chanted as they stalked closer and closer.
She tried barrelling past them, but the throng of bodies pressed in around her, snuggling and cuddling her until she could barely move. The void in her squirmed whilst the saccharine warmth invaded her chest like tree roots, until it finally broke through and flooded the vast emptiness, drowning it with sparkles and cotton candy. Max felt a smile creep onto her muzzle as it swelled her thumping heart up with so much joy that she could almost pop and not mind a bit. Her holes filled up, and all the sharp edges on her wings and tail rounded out.
They eventually released her, and Thorax trotted up to nuzzle her cheek.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Max glanced down to admire her glittery chitin, then beamed at him and pranced around like a filly, giggling as rainbows cascaded from the clouds above.
“I feel magical! I’m so happeeee—”
* * * * *
“—Aaauughh!”
Max gasped as pure darkness greeted her eyes.
For a minute or two, she could only stare blankly into space whilst images of her rainbow-hued siblings covered in hearts, sparkles and cotton candy flashed in her mind over and over again… Thankfully, those images rapidly faded to the back of her mind as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and her heart eventually stopped trying to break out of her ribcage.
She yawned and stretched, groaning as she worked the kinks out of her limbs along with any restlessness induced by the nightmare. Then, alarm bells went off in her head when her stretched limbs sprang back into their resting positions, almost like rubber bands.
“What the hay?” she muttered.
Once she’d blinked the crustiness out of her eyes, she glanced around and saw the familiar dimensions of her hidden basement, complete with all her favourite posters and shelves of books along the walls.
What was decidedly less familiar about the setting was the fact that she wasn’t in her bed at all.
Thick strands of resinous gum stuck to the ceiling like fungal slime, looping around the upper sections of her limbs and cradling her belly. They felt warm and snug, and their elasticity afforded her limbs reasonable degrees of movement, aside from the fact that she was suspended a good five tail-lengths off the floor and unable to touch anything with her hooves.
Max frowned when she noticed what looked like clusters of glistening soccer balls littering the floor.
Wait, are those…
A chill slithered down her spine when she felt a squirming sensation in her gut. Unlike a regular bowel movement, it felt distressingly large and bloated, and the sensation stretched a lot farther back than the tip of her tail, which defied all scenarios in which she could consider herself safe. When she involuntarily flicked her tail, it slapped against something large, moist and squishy, and worse still, she also felt that slap in the sense that she received it.
Max gulped and bent forward to get a better look at her underside.
Oh. Oh, hayseed…
Her belly looked like it still had its regular proportions, and she could see her hind legs and tail dangling freely. The normalcy ended there.
Two segments of her chitinous plating had parted just past her midriff on her right side, to allow for the outgrowth of what looked like an enormous, bloated maggot.
It hung from the ceiling, suspended by the same resinous webs and strands as she was. She couldn’t see the full length of it very clearly, but it looked at least five metres long and big enough to comfortably house a beach ball at its widest point. The colour of its skin ranged from milky jade to glassy yellow-green, and blue veins branched across its glistening surface, pulsing almost in perfect synchrony with her pounding heart. When she felt another ‘bowel movement’, it coincided with swelling followed by a ring of contraction running across the length of the bloated mass. Then, a sudden flush of relief as something large and round slid out of the slimy tube at the end and glued itself to the floor.
Max whimpered.
A brood sac.
She’d grown a brood sac.
Only a few of her siblings were old enough to remember the last time Queen Chrysalis had produced one, which only happened in times of plenty when their supply of food and love far outstripped the queen’s normal egg-laying capacity. Growing a brood sac dramatically increased the hive’s rate of reproduction at the cost of the queen’s ability to get around, but it was usually worth exploiting the good times before circumstances changed. Max herself had never seen one live – only the dry, shrivelled remains of discarded brood sacs in abandoned sections of the hive.
Max glanced at the globular clusters on the floor and winced.
Eggs.
Her eggs.
She was a mother.
Max racked her brain for any relevant memories, any clues as to how she’d gotten herself into such a predicament. Laying eggs required fertilisation, and this many required an equally bountiful source of love, but she couldn’t recall harvesting anything close to the amount necessary to sustain them, let alone doing the necessary fertilising with a male.
“No-no-no-no, this isn’t happening. Not now. I’m not ready for this!” she cried.
The trapdoor creaked open, flooding the basement with yellow light from upstairs, and then a bleary-eyed Speckle poked his head in and murmured, “Honey, did you say something? Is everything okay?”
Max blinked. “What.”
“Have you got the munchies again? I know you’ve been craving all sorts of things ever since you started laying.”
Max opened her mouth to scream at him, to demand answers, but all that came out was strangled squeak when the eggs beneath her began rocking and pulsating. Then, one after another, their rubbery shells split at the top with wet squelches and peeled back like grotesque banana skins.
Bulbous, horned heads emerged from the eggs, glistening with sticky threads of slime and membranes. They squealed and chittered as they crawled out of their eggshells, feeling their way with tiny, spurred forelegs. Their eyes remained closed, but Max had a feeling she knew exactly what they were looking for from the way they kept sweeping their heads to and fro, sniffing the air and working their empty jaws.
These grubs were way bigger than the ones she remembered in the hive’s hatchery.
Speckle trotted down the stairs and scooped up one of the grubs at the edge of the nest to cradle it like a foal. When he stood up to his full height, it raised its forelegs to reach in Max’s direction, crooning and squealing when it felt nothing but air. He gently nuzzled it, then looked at Max with a proud grin and said, “Look at that, he wants his mother!”
That’s the problem…
Max felt a pit open up in her stomach when nearly every grub on the floor turned their heads up to face her and wailed in unison, displaying rows of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. Something gnawed at her insides, tugging at her reserve of energy, and her jaw dropped when she saw wavy strands of green light leaking out of her chest and flowing into their gaping maws.
She frantically buzzed her wings and strained against the resin holding her in place, but they proved to be just as resilient as they were comfortable, and she only managed to sway and bounce around a little whilst they continued draining her. All too soon, her movements turned sluggish, and she felt as if she had lead weights strapped to every inch of her body.
Meanwhile, Speckle pranced around and sang, “This day is going to be perfect…”
Max hissed at him and screeched, “Hey, how about less singing and more helping your queen control her grubs, you lazeeaa—”
* * * * *
“—Aaauughh!”
Max sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath.
Hundreds of teeth and spurs glinted in the darkness, fading in and out of the boundary between dreams and the shadows of her basement. Her own heart added to the effect, thumping against her ribs like a grub attempting to burst out of its egg.
She grabbed her blanket and hurled it away, dreading what she might find nestled with her on the mattress.
No eggs, no grubs.
Just her, a regular changeling under the covers.
She then peered closer at her belly and frowned as she explored it with her fore hooves. Was she getting a little pudgy? Was that an unnatural bulge underneath her chitin? No amount of prodding could determine the presence of any anomalies, so she reluctantly pushed it to the back of her mind for freaking out later.
However, the scrutiny had at least rewarded her with confirmation of her chitin’s dark colouration. A long sigh escaped her as she sank back into her pillow. No rainbow doodle bug, either, though she did stick her tongue through a couple of leg holes just for extra reassurance.
Phew…
Max lay flat in bed and stared at the wooden beams of the basement’s ceiling, waiting for the passing minutes to wash everything she’d seen and felt into the fading realm of short term memory. Every now and then, she flicked her gaze to here and there, allowing her roving eyes to take in the sights of her favourite posters on the walls and Daring Do paraphernalia stacked on the shelves, all illuminated by the glow of bioluminescent mushrooms she’d cultivated.
This was real.
She slapped herself to be sure.
Yeah, she thought as she felt her cheek smarting. Everything’s going to be okay now.
Her nostrils itched.
Or is it?
She had a mild ache behind her eyes and inside the bridge of her muzzle, and she’d just noticed that barely any air made it through her nostrils when she breathed. When she snorted in an attempt to clear the congestion, it resulted in her blowing up a pair of enormous snot bubbles that clung to her muzzle like glue. They were so big that they almost completely covered lips.
With a strangled yelp, Max scrambled out of bed and bolted up the stairs into her kitchen, holding her breath to avoid sucking the gunk back into her nostrils or mouth. Once she’d turned on the lights and stumbled up to the kitchen sink, she blew as hard as she could and squinted as two long strands of bubbly, black goo splattered onto the silvery metal.
What the hay? What even is this stuff?
She kept blowing and snorting out more of the gunk. It had so much sticky cohesion that she could feel the strands tugging all the way back into the depths of her nostrils, even going so far as to tickle the back of her throat like a wriggling worm. Choking and sputtering, she kept on blowing until she had cleared most of it and could breathe smoothly through her nostrils again. Even with the tap on at full blast, the gooey mess of black tar refused to wash away whilst she watched and panted, clinging to the edge of the sink.
Max gritted her teeth.
Come on, get lost!
The black goo coalesced into a slug-like mass and vanished down the sink with a gurgle.
She blinked and stared for a couple of seconds until a cloud of steam obscured her vision, and she instinctively reached out with her mind to turn off the hot water.
Not with magic, but actual telekinesis.
Oh, right.
Everything Ydrax’il said about her newly-acquired power came back in a rush, particularly the part about enriched grey matter deteriorating without an adequate diet of sapient brains. He’d neglected to mention that deterioration would culminate in her snorting bits of her brain out her nose in the form of black goo.
Almost three weeks had passed since her adventure with Daring Do, and most of that had seen her with the occasional symptoms of mild headaches and runny noses, but never this…
Until now, apparently.
At least, that seemed the case. There weren’t many other ways for it to come out, and she didn’t feel sick or anything, so she probably wasn’t coming down with some other ailment. Probably. She didn’t feel like dealing with that right then.
Grumbling to herself, Max switched off the lights and crawled back into bed.
And then she came back up when she found that her brain refused to return to sleep. It’d kept on dredging up bits and pieces of her adventure and replaying it for her beneath her closed eyelids, on and on until she could even feel herself slipping back into the underground city, touch its cold, dry walls and immerse herself in the cold, metallic fluid of the biotic engine. Get shot with a crossbow. Bleed out on the dusty ground. Watch a misshapen figure of bone and pale skin sink its fangs into her leg. Swallow a bunch of dynamite and explode—
Argh!
Max prowled through her house like a restless panther as she sorted through myriad memories in an attempt to organise them into a coherent sequence.
Dim, blue light of pre-dawn trickled in through the windows, casting indistinct shadows from her furniture.
A familiar sense of déjà vu set in as she debated with herself on the veracity of those memories.
Then, almost like clockwork, she came across the rune stone she’d placed on the coffee table, and the slightest touch of her hoof was enough to impart some energy to make its rune glow with eerie, green light.
Yeah, it was real, all right.
Daring Do, the adventure, her upgrade… everything.
She could see the slight difference in colour of the floorboards she’d used to replace the ones that had been damaged by Short Fuse’s dynamite.
Not for the first time, Max wondered if staying had been the right idea. Daring Do had undoubtedly made her report to Princess Celestia by now, and even though she had all but promised to keep specific details – like her real name and home address – a secret out of respect and maybe a little bit of empathy, she’d spent the last couple of weeks getting anxious about any thumping noise that might herald armoured hooves trampling through her garden to cut off all exits.
At least she’d taken a few precautions, mainly in the form of digging several new escape tunnels in her basement, too narrow for all but the skinniest of mice to squeeze through. It allowed her to take advantage of her refined shapeshifting, and since two out of five of them led directly into a flooded underground chasm, they’d also need to hire a seapony to chase her through the rest of the way…
Max sighed.
Keep it together, grub. You’ve got this.
After pouring herself a hot cup of tea, she slipped back into her pony form and trotted out the front door. A somewhat chilly breeze rustled leaves in the woods around her house as she plodded over damp dirt and grass to reach her mail box. The birds hadn’t yet come out, and most of the stars were still visible in the deep-blue sky.
A small pile of mail greeted her in the box, and after carefully scanning her surroundings with her eyes and mind – and finding no sapient beings in close proximity – Max grabbed the whole lot and hurried back inside.
She dumped them onto the coffee table and found that they consisted mostly of bills, advertisements and the usual newsletters for her favourite comics and book series. But one envelope stood out from the rest, bearing the wax seal of some noble house or fancy club she didn’t recognise.
The sealed message was written in smooth, confident strokes of the quill, but with unnatural adherence to the proportions and separation of letters in block printing. If she had to guess, it looked like the sender had taken pains to avoid putting out recognisable mouth or hornwriting.
Dear M,
I am sorry.
Father has been keeping my hooves tied helping with the family business ever since I came back empty-hoofed from G’s failed venture, and he is right to do so. I had been hoping for something or somepony to magically give me everything I wanted in life when I should’ve been working for it instead.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but now that I’ve had time to think through everything that happened, I am not so sure if there really was anything between us. And even if I wanted to make the attempt, I now have responsibilities that will keep well in the public eye, which our mutual acquaintance tells me is something you want to avoid at all costs. Anyhow, Mother always said that secrecy and lust alone make poor foundations for a relationship.
I’m still glad that we met, even if we were on opposite sides of the board at first. If you and D could take us to Tartarus and back with G hounding you all the way, then a little work won’t hurt me.
If we ever meet again under better circumstances, I’d be happy to get to know you better without certain doom hanging over our heads.
But for now, I suppose it must be farewell.
Yours sincerely,
S.
Max sat on the couch and sipped her tea whilst she pondered on the letter’s contents.
Once their flying caravan had made it to the nearest Equestrian town, they’d pretty much just scattered to the winds and gone their separate ways. Daring had contacts to meet and pass on the armour for safekeeping, and Speckle had left with a mixture of confusion, awkwardness and homesickness clouding his mind.
Not that she would’ve said no to having around an emotionally dependent stallion who had the hots for her, but if she was honest with herself about his wellbeing, he had very little to gain from attaching himself to her like that. Daring had probably said as much to him, and hayseed if Max didn’t want to stay in her good graces with regards to how she treated her companions…
She snorted. Gah, being a good guy is such a hassle.
Then again, if she wanted to avoid ticking off the princesses, then not abusing their subjects was the smart thing to do. Somewhere down the line, she might even have grubs of her own that she wouldn’t want ponies to mistreat…
Because if they do, then it’s into the harvest pods with everypony!
Max then froze and stared at the crumpled letter in her hoof. A quick check with her hoof to forehead and temples indicated normal temperature and no physical trauma, so where had that sentiment come from? It was way too early to be developing motherly instincts for non-existent offspring! She hadn’t even gone through the necessary intermediary act yet!
Options were available, though. It could work out. Speckle might make a decent candidate, if she gave him a little more time stewing in hard work to grow more of a spine. A good, steady harvest of love from him and maybe a few others if he was willing to share… especially if she could find Ydrax’il again to fertilise her eggs and maximise the genetic potential of her offspr—
“What the hay?” she shrieked, before dashing to the sink and dousing her head with icy water.
She then plugged up the sink and allowed the rising water to submerge her face when her brain decided to flash an image of Speckle and Ydrax’il, grinning as they trotting towards her with dozens of voracious grubs floating in their magical auras to give her a group hug – and possibly devour her very essence to the core.
Air bubbled out of her nostrils in fitful bursts as her lungs realised the gravity of the situation, but she held fast and refused to transform to provide an alternate airway. The world got darker and darker, and all noise took on a muffled quality that bobbed back and forth between obnoxiously loud and irritatingly silent, until gravity itself seemed to lose meaning, and her lungs burned with fire.
Only then did she deem her brain sufficiently chilled and starved of oxygen for its transgressions.
After turning off the water, she tottered back onto her couch, downed the rest of her tea in one go and stared at the ceiling whilst her vision swam. The ticking clock soothed her with its steady rhythm, and she soon found herself drifting on the edge of consciousness, riding the waves of sleep as it carried her through the dawn, intermittently reminding her of the passing time with subtle changes to the hue of light seeping in through the curtains.
The pleasant semi-obliviousness didn’t last forever, though.
By the time the sun’s yellow beams were strong enough to warm her on the couch, her brain had recovered to full wakefulness, and Max groaned as she stretched and squirmed around.
That’s your self-pity quota for the day. Time to get back to work.
With a final yawn, Max hauled herself off the couch and headed straight for her writing desk in the study. Personal crisis or no, she was way behind schedule on publishing the next chapter in her fanfiction, even more so than usual, and she absolutely had to have it ready in time for the next Daring Do convention. Her fans were probably getting a little antsy.
And as AK Yearling said, Live by the fan, die by the fan.