Evoli knew hunger as no ordinary pony could know it. This was nothing new—for the whole length of her existence, she had known the emptiness in her chest, the gnawing void that only love could fill. She had listened to her mother and father’s stories of life before that time, of an existence that wasn’t dependent on magical energy, and never believed them.
Well, maybe she’d believed a few years ago. As Alexandria grew, it needed more labor. Changelings could happily provide that labor, so long as they were appreciated and loved in their responsibilities. They needed so many drones that Riley, queen of Alexandria and all its changelings, hadn’t been able to lead them all. She had spawned other queens to take on that responsibility, all of which were subservient to Evoli. When Riley stopped producing new drones, conserving her magic for herself as age weighed heavily on her, Evoli had risen to fill the gap.
It had been an age of prosperity, with ponies increasingly aware of the plight of changelings and willing to take them into their lives. A time when there was enough food to go around, enough to feed several queens.
Then came the Concord of all the great queens, the sacred pact they all swore. Rather than face madness, they would freeze themselves in stasis when their magic ebbed away. And where could be a better place for their tomb than under Alexandria itself?
Evoli was there the day her mother went into the ice. The only queen permitted to be in her company—several of the others were already gone, frozen themselves, or killed after they went mad. The new generation of queens were too young to have earned the privilege to visit this sacred place. “I sense something terrible is coming,” Riley had told her. At the end she had been very thin—Evoli hadn’t known then just how hungry she had been. Yet her mother had demonstrated nothing but aplomb until the very end. She had never been driven mad. What other queen could give up her favorite male, and so much else besides?
Not Evoli, that was for sure.
“Something terrible is always coming,” Evoli had answered, her legs already shaking with cold though she had plenty of magic in her veins that day. Her mother had given her the last of her hoard only moments before—a fortune of glamour the likes of which not even the other queens could’ve imagined. Where she had gotten it all, Evoli couldn’t even guess. “I’ll get us through it, Mother. I’ve basically been ruling the hive for you all this time.”
“I know,” Riley said, reaching out with one hoof. She brushed the mane from out of Evoli’s face. “I trust you with my children as I would trust no other pony.” She pulled Evoli’s head close to her own, meeting her eyes with a fierce glare. “Don’t ever force them to give up what they have. We’ve clawed this far out of the dust—maybe you will take us the rest of the way.”
Her mother said nothing else, ever again. And Evoli left, feeling full, but wary.
What Riley had predicted eventually came in the form of a plague. As with many things, her own kind was immune to its effects—no Changeling got sick, not one. Alexandria’s work-crews kept working no matter how sick its pony population became. But then the ponies died, and suddenly her drones got hungry. There weren’t nearly enough ponies to go around, and they were far too selfishly engaged in self-preservation to worry about the changelings that were their friends, colleagues, and servants.
Many of her kind starved. Another of the great queens went mad, and there was a terrible battle. Evoli triumphed, and put her down, as was her way. But Alexandria just couldn’t be home to them anymore—it had been the target of desperation in the end of the plague, and so the most ravaged by the plague’s refugees. There was no new colony that rose in the ashes, and even if there had been a small population would not have been able to sustain the great size of her swarm.
They began a pilgrimage of their own. Tens of thousands of drones died that year—all those who were not intelligent, Evoli sacrificed. First as individuals—as scouts into new areas, or warriors to fight dangerous beasts or troublesome ponies. But eventually, by thousands, destroying themselves before they could go mad with hunger and starve the swarm even faster. By the end of their great exodus, their great city had dwindled to just under a thousand, with only one surviving queen.
Fortunately for her, the plague did not do so well in the desert as it did where it was cooler. There were survivors down here in their thousands, albeit a mere shadow of the civilization that had once been. They seemed filled with superstition about the end of their world, and were willing to blame anything for the pain they had felt. Particularly her changelings, if they were ever caught.
Nothing like Alexandria was possible in that world, so Evoli improvised. Every servant she had left was an individual, intelligent and resourceful in their way. Not only that, but most of them were determined to gather the glamour necessary for them to get a new birth when they got older—and none of them had personal stores of glamour left after the exodus.
Under Evoli’s direction, her swarm went back to the ancient way of doing things. Since the ponies weren’t willing to let them into their lives, they would have to force their way in instead. They would steal their love.
Still, over a hundred of their number starved before they were established enough to feed themselves. At least a hundred more dispersed, choosing to make their way on their own, forsaking Evoli’s protection in the process. She let them go, mostly because that meant more food for those who remained.
Evoli herself remained in the new hive, located in the ruins of an ancient theme-park. For the first few years she had no children at all—but as it turned out, a hive without drones for the menial labor was a hive nopony wanted to live in. Not to mention how difficult her males became, when she refused to even entertain them.
Within a decade, nopony was starving anymore. Evoli had learned from her mother—while the insane queens sometimes tried kidnapping and feasting on huge amounts of love at once, Evoli had known that was not sustainable. Her changelings integrated themselves tightly with their colonies, taking skilled roles as they had done in Alexandria. They were doctors, nurses, teachers, anything that might be showered with love from those grateful for their work. Most of them had no use for gold—they just collected their earnings, to fill the coffers of the hive and sometimes buy love its own way.
As the population began to recover, so too did Evoli’s changelings—but it wasn’t to the world they had known. In this world, there were very few refugees still living—the disease was harder on them than their children. What few were appearing were vastly dwarfed by the already-living population. A population that blamed their parents’ generation for the terrible disease that had almost destroyed it.
Not only that, but these new ponies were a stagnant lot. When she was young, ponies had all the salvage they had ever wanted from the old world. Old human machines could be repaired and used to make new machines. But all of that was dust now—the books were all rotted away, and the computers all bits of broken silicon slowly decomposing in the ground. If the cowardly burrowing HPI had even still existed, they made no effort to help.
Evoli watched as the world sunk into primitive subsistence. For a time, her changelings tried to recreate the technology they had known—rebuilding tractors, getting new water wheels and generators made, that sort of thing—but the current generation of ponies didn’t want any of it. With such a small population, and no machinery to speak of, the effort to try and claw their way back just didn’t seem worth it when the changelings wouldn’t be able to eat any of the food they grew anyway. Evoli, like most of her drones, would be just as happy sleeping on a dirt floor so long as her belly was full.
So, they were forced to tolerate this new world, for all that it was the inferior copy of the one they had known. Her changelings learned new languages as that started changing too, with some parts of English consciously rejected, and others breaking down into regional dialects now that ponies rarely left the small areas they were born in.
Evoli was getting old—even then, she had known the hunger of a queen, but somehow the reaper had held back. Perhaps, like her mother, she was somehow immune to the madness. Maybe she was a queen who would rule forever.
Over a century later, her first changelings started dying. A few had the glamour to be reborn, and she did for them what she had done for so many others—so long as a drone remained useful, its queen could replace it. Yet Evoli discovered something else—as the population of her group dropped, the amount of love they harvested didn’t go down nearly as fast as the need for love went down.
Intelligent drones needed tons of love compared to dumb ones, and several of the dead could be replaced with drones without making much difference. Evoli’s intellect by then was tremendous, able to control thousands in complex tasks without difficulty. She became a few different ponies on the outside, then tens, then eventually a hundred. The fewer drones she involved in her work, the more she realized she didn’t need most of the “intelligent” drones.
Her mother had held onto many of them for purely human reasons, she was sure. Her favorite male hadn’t even been an impressive specimen as far as changeling males went—the only thing remarkable about him had been his loyalty. Evoli wasn’t a “refugee” from the mythical world whose traces got weaker every day. Just because she remembered a day when those ruins covered everything didn’t mean they were any more significant in her life today.
It took just over another decade for her to finally remove her first intelligent drone. Her name had been Sarin—a drone who had been a particularly well-loved teacher at a local school, nearing the end of her life. Her position among children meant she had a veritable bounty of glamour to give—as well as enough to pay for her own rebirth.
Evoli took that bounty, performed the ritual… and stuck her egg into the freezer. Nopony asked questions—those drones who had remained were mostly living among ponies at that point, so they weren’t abreast of the affairs back in the hive. Only her males knew, and the one who tried to spread it around, well… he ended up with his throat cut and fed to the fungus lighting the hive.
By the time that year was out, another handful of the most well-placed drones were quietly replaced with herself. And for a while, it was enough. Evoli felt full again, had enough glamour to keep her always-expanding abilities running. She didn’t hurt the eggs or anything—those drones had been loyal to her, and so she would keep them. Until there was more food to go around. They wouldn’t notice the time passing—how could an egg know if one year had gone by or a hundred?
A few of her drones were too clever or useful to replace—some had complex relationships with many people, or interacted with other changelings who would notice the change. When their time came, they would be replaced the correct way, with one of her drones filling the gap only until the revived drone was mature enough to shapeshift again.
As the years passed, pony society recovered. Well… it grew, anyway. The land was good to them, and earth pony magic didn’t take much teaching for ponies to use it to feed their villages. So long as the primitives had earth ponies, they rarely went hungry.
As their population grew, so did the amount of love that Evoli could harvest. As the next century passed, the natives founded many new villages, moving north up the coast, and taking back overgrown ruins. As they went, Evoli made sure some of her own made up the starting population of each new city. Mostly drones, though some of her spare population went too.
Riley would’ve created new queens by then, sending one to the new regions as she had done so long ago. But new queens would’ve meant new ponies to soak up love. Even as her most loyal servants begged for the honor, she refused. They were lucky to get any of what was rightfully hers.
And that worked, for a while. So long as the ponies spread faster than her need for love increased, everything worked out fine. Unfortunately, other changelings had noticed the new feeding grounds.
Nearly two centuries after their exodus from Alexandria had ended, Evoli felt the alarm of panic from her drones protecting the hive. They were under attack.