Twilight scratched her head when she saw the wall of goo standing before her. It was seven stories tall and spanned a massive cave dug out by the changelings during Chrysalis' reign. The walls were wavy, uneven, and didn't conform to a 'building code' Twilight was familiar with. Worse were the glowing holes pockmarking the goo in irregular patterns. An occasional buzz came from the uncommon changeling getting some reading material from the slime and flying away with it in tow. The lavender alicorn stuck her tongue out in disgust.
"What is this stuff?" she asked Pharynx.
"This?" he poked the yellowish goop and pulled back a strand of it. To Twilight, it looked like thick mucus. "It's conservation sap. We..." His eyes darted left and right. "exude it through our mouths after eating some mushroom and yellow rocks. Not sure what you call them." He snorted and looked up at the wall with a smile. "This sap is so efficient that many of these scrolls are millennia old." He frowned and shrugged. "Or so we're told."
The alicorn's eyes widened. "Milennia?! That means they're older than the princesses! All the things we could discover that have been forgotten."
Pharynx pushed Twilight down. "Calm down, princess. This is all changeling history and tales that have been shared by scouts." He let go. "We were never good at organizing, so the thousands of scrolls here aren't placed in any proper way. We're not sure what has what or where it even is." The changeling stomped the ground. "Don't know why we'd even need any of this. Everything taught she be from mouth-to-ear! This stuff detracts from defensive and survival training!"
Twilight shook her head at the changeling. "Yeah, and what if somepony deforms the tale? What then?" The mare started scanning the holes with her magic.
Pharynx narrowed his eyes before rebutting. "What of your history? Any one pony could have altered the information."
"That's true, but we have ways of checking the authenticity of something regardless of where it came from." She bobbed her head to the side. "Although it can take several years if no pony is sure of the truth," she trailed off.
Pharynx snorted with confidence. "So we're looking for other hives, right?" Twilight hummed in confirmation. "I really don't see why you want to see them. Like I told you: If they existed, we would have met them already."
"And like I told you, we didn't even know changelings existed for hundreds of years until Chrysalis popped up."
Pharynx rolled his eyes but let the mare continue her searching. It took several hours of combing to finally discover at least one scroll relevant to her needs. Disgusted, the mare dug her foreleg into the goop. She cursed Chrysalis' constant search for antimagic items as bile slowly crawled up her throat. Pushing it back down, the mare ripped the scroll from its resting spot and dropped the item on the floor below. The mare shook her foreleg erratically, screaming in disgust before recovering and setting herself next to Pharynx.
"I'm...I'm going to need my notes to be able to translate what's written on the scrolls," she said as she stifled vomit.
"Oh, don't be such a hatchling," Pharynx berated her. He snatched the scroll from her hoof and spread it out on the floor. "I can read our language just fine. You need it to write down tactics, strategies, and math."
The alicorn frowned and left her saddlebags undisturbed upon her back. Twilight decided to sit down and wait while Pharynx worked on translating what was written. To the alicorn, the words written upon the paper were various vertical and diagonal lines filled with holes, much like the changelings used to be. Was there a pattern to the holes, she wondered.
"Hmmm..." Pharynx hummed.
"What is it?" Twilight asked.
The changeling tapped a side of the unfurled scroll. "There's mention of a unified changeling clan far to the west."
"In Prance?"
Pharynx shook his head. "Just says 'far west'." He looked up at Twilight. "Don't know what that means."
"I don't know either." Twilight looked down pensively but heaved a sigh in the end. "I can't figure it out either. What else does it say about the 'clan'?"
"Well, I only see vague mentions of a single queen with 'princesses' to help her lead a huge mass of our kind."
"Changelings had princesses?" Twilight laughed in disbelief.
"It looks like it...but...if there are other changeling hives, each led by a queen..." Pharynx started.
Twilight's face lost its jovial demeanor. "Then that means that something happened to that 'queen' and these 'princesses'," she murmured. "P-provided it's all real, of course."
"Of course," Pharynx croaked. "Nothing much else in here. Might as well put it back and go look for others."
The alicorn refused to touch the slime again, so Pharynx did it himself under the disgusted gaze of Twilight.
"What will you do if we actually do encounter other changeling hives?" Twilight asked.
After shaking the goop from his foreleg, Pharynx pushed out his lower lip. "I'd like to get into a fight with them," he said plainly. "I want to learn about their strategies and just how long they remained hidden." He dropped in front of Twilight with a thump. "What did they use? Is it a hidden cave system? Do they wipe the memory of those that discover them?"
Disturbed, Twilight was shielding herself with a foreleg. "I think you can calm down now, Pharynx," she said.
"Ah. Sorry." He cleared his throat. "Any other scrolls?"
"That one?" she suggested with a hoof.
Pharynx buzzed to a scroll at floor level and pulled it out with another squelching noise that caused Twilight to heave uncontrollably. Ignoring her larva-like behavior.
"Nope," he said as he rolled the scroll back up. "Nothing in here. Just different versions of the same tale saying that we were born around here and have been praying on ponies since they started civilizations in Equestria."
"That's not very detailed," Twilight pouted. "I really wanted to see more about the changelings. Especially with that last scroll."
"Well..." Pharynx looked around, stood up, then spread his forelegs wide. "We have all these hundreds of scrolls to look through."
Clypeus dangled over a sharp protrusion of stone above the entrance of the hall while Pronotum paced back and forth in the gunk. The blue-purple queen was almost hit by a stray drool of the exhausted yellow queen.
"What are you doing?!" Pronotum shouted angrily.
The queen snorted and lazily wiped her mouth. "Relaxing..." she slurred. "Falling asleep without sleeping." She made a long exhale then looked to Pronotum. "What's wrong with you?"
"We have another queen of yet another hive that's already infiltrated the ponies. She's against us!" She whined and paced around more. "Now what? How many others are hiding in plain sight?"
"I don't know and I don't care. I just want to get rid of the abstergo hive and get back to hunting for food." Clypeus looked at a drone from the corner of her eyes standing sideways on the wall. "I think there's a message for you."
"Hm? What?" Pronotum's gaze was brought to the tiny drone landing in front of her. It hissed quietly in her ears then flew away.
"What's wrong?" Clypeus asked.
"Just more intruders on the mountain." She scratched the back of her neck and pulled dry gunk off. "Seems like there's a pair of couples this time." Clypeus salivated at the idea of eating their love, but Pronotum ignored the drool. "And you didn't tell me about the patch of land near the school drained of life."
The yellow queen chittered. "I was told not to tell you," she said quietly. Clypeus looked to the drones hiding in the slime and smirked. "You're more adept at stealth than my hive is," she mused.
"Well, when you're hiding for decades depending on scraps to saunter by your home, you pick up a thing or two," Chrysalis mocked." She walked to the two queens, her hair unkempt and her face disheveled. "Do we HAVE to constantly met in this same corridor?" she complained.
"It's better than hiding in a box or being somewhere with no light," Pronotum said. "I would love to have our same arguments and all that, but I'm really not in the mood right now."
"Why not?" Chrysalis leaned in closer and tilted her head. "Your attempts to destroy Thorax and his merry band of traitors not working?" The queen made a pouty face with sparkly, watery eyes.
Pronotum bared her teeth in rage and wanted to strike Chrysalis down. Clypeus jumped down and held her back. "No need for that. The elder says we still need her alive." The yellow queen looked at Chrysalis from the corner of her eyes. "For now, at least."
"I take it you found another queen or a changeling from another hive?" Chrysalis surmised.
"More or less," Clypeus answered.
"Well, I guess that proves that there's a large quantity of hives out there after all." She shrugged. "Who knows how many of us there really are." The blue-green queen huffed and scratched her chin. "Are we all the way to the east and south? What about the north? What adaptations do they have and what do they know?"
"CAN you shut up?" Pronotum yelled. "You're giving me a headache with all these obvious questions we've all already asked ourselves." She rubbed her temple with a hoof. "This means that there's likely other nearby changeling hives that know about Thorax, and we don't know what they think."
"Then why not just ask them and found out? It shouldn't be hard for someone who never took risks," Chrysalis mocked.
Pronotum groaned and sat on her rear whilst rubbing the sides of her head. "I'm getting a migraine from my exchanges with you."
"Well, you surely knew that this would happen," Chrysalis said condescendingly. "I just want to get rid of Thorax and recover my hive. I don't give two pony souls about who gets hurt or killed in the process."
Clypeus snickered. "And so we arrive at the point where we must once again speak of the red hive."
Chrysalis rolled her eyes. "Not again," she groaned. "I GET it. They're evil. Leave it be."
Clypeus chuckled and walked slowly towards the blue-green queen. "Oh, sure. They're 'evil', but because we discovered each other's existence, we now know that they're somewhere out there, but why they're here is a mystery to us all."
"And we don't know if the legends passed down to us from our mothers and grandmothers are real or not," Pronotum added. She huffed in pain and opened one eye towards Chrysalis. "We thought we were the only hives, but we still believed in the possibility of other queens existing."
The yellow queen grunted. "It's ironic that we learn about the existence of other hives because of one queen going out of her way to try and take over a city. Just ONE did all this."
Pronotum turned to her. "Maybe Chrysalis brought the interest of the red hive?"
The queen in question dropped her face into a hoof and shook her head. "You keep talking about the red hive without explaining who and what they are. Just 'Oh no. Am big bad. Muching the scares!'," she mocked with wide eyes and twirling fore hooves. "Just...TELL ME what you think you know or shut up about them!" Chrysalis bellowed.
Pronotum grumbled but conceded anyways. She readjust herself to face Chrysalis. "From what we were told, the Red Hive still feeds on emotions like we do, but instead of just draining the prey and leaving them to grow for another day, they take everything from them and leave them to die." She cleared her throat. "They're also the most aggressive of the hives and actively attack families in their homes, leaving a nasty scene behind after their drones..." She rubbed the back of her neck then turned it, letting it crack and relieve her of the painful pressure. "Well, they torture to get as much as possible, and they don't care who or what gets in the way."
"Like squeezing a fruit to get all its contents and toss the dried husk aside?" Chrysalis wondered.
Clypeus scoffed and pushed Pronotum away with a jab from her hips. "That's not the story! The red hive takes their food from other emotions, specifically things like anger, hate, and jealousy. They incite it in villages where everything is peaceful and feed themselves from the chaos that ensues. They're attracted to other hives and feed on us too!"
"Cannibals?" Chrysalis asked.
Clypeus nodded. "That's right."
The blue-purple queen smashed the side of her head into the yellow's, prompting the two to force against one another whilst hissing and baring their teeth.
"That's not the true tale!" Pronotum shouted.
"Yes it is! It's the one my hive has been told since its birth!" Clypeus countered.
"Then your hive has always been stupid since its birth!"
"Says the one who hides in its vomit!"
Chrysalis let the petty, pupa-like anger engulf the two queens while she put the two tales together in her head. "So even the elder fears them, but none of them have an actual concise tale between the two." She scoffed quietly. "This is just a pony urban legend by changelings. They've not found proof of their existence, and if they're really attracted to war-like scenarios, they would have appeared already at Thorax's hive."
Pharynx dropped on his belly. "I'm exhausted. I can't find anything on the existence of other hives yet." He yawned and stretched his limbs. "What about you, Twilight?" When she didn't answer, he called for her again. "What are you doing?"
The lavender alicorn was surrounded by stacks of old scrolls, her whole being engulfed by the contents that were alien to her.
"I thought you couldn't read our language?" Pharynx said.
"I can't," Twilight confirmed. "But I like to see how the letters were written and what patterns are within them."
Pharynx shook his head, but he didn't have time to relax. His wings and horns started chittering loud and rapidly. The changeling shot to his hooves and looked around, carefully observing his surroundings. Twilight took notice from the sounds and began to feel unease herself.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Pharynx looked up at the darkening ceiling and narrowed his eyes. "Something here...doesn't belong."