Evoli watched the army assemble outside her fortress with the eyes of a dozen different drones. On some level it pleased her to see that her rivals had not been so blind and helpless as her initial estimates suggested.
Yet they also didn’t take advantage of Evoli’s weakness to come down with crushing force long before the deadline arrived. They had the armies of three great queens, yet she saw none of them. Her new capital in Visuddha’s old hive grew more fortified by the day, alone and unopposed.
Until two months had gone by, and the army started to trickle in.
They came from every direction—drones soaring in dense, organized flights. Marching ponies in columns with their camp followers, and unicorns teleporting in groups. How the great queens had mobilized so many regular ponies to their cause, she couldn’t begin to speculate. One pony for every dozen changelings was not quite enough to sustain an army, at least not if they didn’t break certain taboos.
Evoli would’ve broken them, but she would’ve needed pony allies first, and she didn’t have them. The option wouldn’t be there for her unless this war turned in her favor. Which depends completely on Strand. If we win this, then we can turn immediately and take the rest of the world. But they had to survive it, first.
By the time her third month had arrived, Evoli had done nothing to prepare for succession, and everything to prepare for war. Fortifications lined the valley, with the best weapons she had stolen or bought or salvaged in her war. She kept them all well-manned, even though much of the hive beneath was empty. She had paid a high price for conquest. No matter how many young drones she was trying to raise, it would take time to grow a new army. Unless she stole them.
Every morning Evoli woke wondering whether or not the attack would come. Every day she found the enemy camp got larger, but no troops surged against her gates. She infiltrated the camp several times, searching for the queens whose presence would make her plan doomed, but she could find none of them.
Her enemy was doing exactly what she hoped they would—exactly what she needed them to do. As the weeks passed, Strand continued to brew up her pheromone, preparing whole casks of it for deployment against the enemy. Eventually, he reported that he had what he had hoped for, and that every day more was just a bonus.
“But you have to kill every queen within a hundred miles,” Strand urged, one tense night in the laboratory. “This attack will make the invading army helpless, it will dissolve their bond to whoever birthed them—but whichever queen has the closest natural affinity for each drone will win them.”
“Even if I only got half, I could use them to kill the other half,” Evoli said. “That doesn’t seem so bad.”
“No!” Strand shouted, frustration obvious in his voice. “You will not have enough time. The weight of the swarm will eventually assert itself towards whatever cause the hive-mind supports. Given you’ll be using them to kill their sisters, they will almost certainly weigh against you. Unless you are the only choice. Then their new swarm will settle with you instead, because it has nowhere else to go. Drones crave domination. You must give it to them.”
“What about males?” Evoli asked, eyes narrowing a little. “They can control drones too.”
“A few.” Strand waved a dismissive hoof. “Yes, we can. My lab assistants have been most effective, by the way. But their will is no match for a queen. You could take all my helpers away, and it wouldn’t matter how badly I wanted to keep them. Expect something similar to happen to them.”
“I would rather capture the males,” Evoli muttered. “And the controllers too. They’re better soldiers than drones.”
“Too bad.” Strand did not sound apologetic. “They will temporarily lose their swarms too, be blind and alone… but their connections will return. I’ve already tested it quite thoroughly. Unless you can convince them to join you… but honestly it doesn’t seem worth the risk. The massacre you’re going to bring on their homes, it’s probably best just to kill them. We don’t want agents of the enemy in our ranks.”
“Right.” Evoli turned away. “Keep working then, Strand. You do good work for my swarm.”
“What I can,” Strand said. “But look outside. There are more than changelings waiting for us. None of my poisons will help against prey.”
“I know.” Evoli grinned wider. “I have something special in mind for them.”
Then, on the very day of the deadline, Evoli saw a delegation marching towards her hive. There were less than a dozen of them—drones hefting a wooden palanquin. They marched it to the midway point between her fortress and the war camp, then began pitching a white-roofed tent surrounded by wide flags.
“There’s no point,” said Cica, her newest adviser. She was a drone who had woken to consciousness during the war and led her squad to victory. It was good to have a new perspective. “Just kill them, Queen. You aren’t going to surrender. Why speak to them at all?”
“Because they might have something to say they didn’t mean to,” Evoli answered. “And because their queen is there. I feel her…” As she had hoped, there were no other queens within her sensing. Only this strange one, its mind like something sour and burning. She would enjoy killing it.
“The Arbiter will expect you to kill yourself,” Cica argued. “What could you possibly learn?”
Evoli shrugged. “Perhaps nothing. But it will be an excellent opportunity to kill her.”
So she marched out to the delegation—alone, unarmed, unarmored except for her flowing black robe. She wouldn’t need weapons against any kind of monsters the great queens sent. Even Muladhara herself could not win a duel with her now.
Evoli stepped into the tent, taking in the details in one glance. A tray of icy fluid in the back, the one meant to receive her frozen body. Six changeling drones, none looking very old. Not controllers, at least not that she could sense. Then there was the queen.
“What kind of freak are you?” Evoli asked, staring openly at the Arbiter. There was something distantly familiar about her, but she was so strange.
Her general outline still looked like a queen, but a few details were off. There were no more holes in her wings, and the few openings that remained in her leg appeared to be healing. Evoli breathed in, expanding her senses to the invisible. This pony was a changeling, somehow. She still brimmed with glamour.
Evoli stumbled back a step, raising a hoof to block the light. She opened her eyes and found herself tightening her jaw against the strange creature before her.
I thought I had done terrible things to survive the great queens. But I would never have done this. This thing was far more a betrayal of their nature than anything Evoli had brewing in her lab.
Chill vapor rose from the open troth behind the Arbiter. Her escort drones looked on with quivering, terrified eyes. Did they know what Evoli planned?
“You hurt me, older sister. Don’t you recognize me?” She took a single step closer, her strangely crystalline wings glittering in the sun. “I am Lachesis.”
The last. The youngest of Evoli’s blood-siblings, excepting the unhatched eggs hidden in her secret vault. “You were the worst,” Evoli spat, baring her teeth. “Now the reason Riley stopped having children comes to lecture me on morality.” She strode past her under the fluttering canopy, staring down at the strange fluid. It wasn’t water—Evoli didn’t actually know what the suicide-pact called for. She had never really planned on following its terms.
“How many of your sisters did you murder, Lachesis?”
She almost expected the strangely colorful queen to try a few futile blasts of magic. Instead it looked like her shoulders slumped a little. “Six. Clotho, Atropos, Decima, Karios, Themis, and Tyche."
Evoli tensed a little. She vaguely remembered those names—other little queens, all of them dead before they were a century old. In some ways, Lachesis was an early version of her. A queen unsatisfied with her position at the bottom of the pyramid, who wanted to find her way to climb a little higher. “You remember their names.”
“I can still hear their voices.” Lachesis reached forward towards the troth with one hoof. As it got close, the top layer of whatever was inside started to boil away. The heat of her body was enough. When she looked up at Evoli, she noticed her eyes. Round, pastel purple. Agonized. “The specter of the past is with us every moment, Evoli. I think you can hear them too. Their blood cries from the dust.”
Evoli stomped one hoof, roaring in annoyance. Many of her nearby drones growled at Lachesis, though her control didn’t break long enough that any of them actually got violent. Evoli had a great deal of practice controlling her drones. “Don’t romanticize with me, sister. I can’t believe the ‘Great Queens’ sent the Butcher of Missouri to arbitrate my surrender. Aren’t you dead, anyway? Mother sent her pet monsters after you… and your swarm collapsed.”
She gestured past them, at the marshaled army. “What kind of illusion is this?”
Lachesis shook her head, kicking out against the troth with one hoof enough that the whole thing shook. A demonstration of how real she was. “She did send them, Evoli.” Her horn began to glow. Evoli was too slow—they were both swallowed in the illusion.
Evoli saw through the queen’s memories. Somewhere dark, and a corridor of corpses. A strange creature, looking a little like she did, and a bat with a glittering knife. They’d killed hundreds of drones, maybe a whole swarm.
“Ezri and the Dreamknife gave me a choice, sister. The same choice I give you.” The vision dissolved, replaced with a gnawing, empty tear in reality. It was the void, that unreal place where monsters came from. The old stories said changelings had come from there once, long ago.
“It’s in you, Evoli. It’s in all of us… a sliver of the abyss. Our ancestor tried to escape from it, to banish it from our lives. But she died before she could finish. You know the story.”
Evoli growled again. She could shatter this projection if she wanted, but still she hesitated. Not because she actually cared what her youngest sister had to say, so much as she wondered if she might accidentally reveal something useful.
I can endure her moralizing for a few more minutes.
“There’s another way.” The projection changed, the broken crevice down to nothingness replaced with a brilliant light, a distant glow. It burned—Evoli could barely look without screaming. It was a place of order, the place that made the laws. A place of feelings she hadn’t known since she was a child. Before she had known power.
“Ezri captured me. She kept me with her for years. Every day, I thought she might kill me. But she didn’t. She showed me the cure.”
The illusion vanished from around them, and Lachesis stood only feet away. “Forget about the ice, Evoli. Forget about ruling the world. Forget about your hunger. I can take them all away.”
For a few seconds, she could almost feel it. There was something there, a rope thrown down to her in the mud. A hoof willing to lift her up.
She sounded so much like Riley. Evoli’s eyes narrowed. “I hope you’re being honest with me, little sister. All this…” She waved a hoof towards her. “This stuff about peace and ending hunger. Because my scouts have already reported to me. You’re the only queen for hundreds of miles. And for me to destroy this army, I need to kill you.”
Lachesis met her eyes fearlessly. She didn’t move, didn’t tense, didn’t ready a spell. “I hoped I might be able to… to convince you. I thought that maybe if I did, it might make up for some of what I’ve done. Some of the lives, I…” She shook her head. “Wishful thinking. The others thought so too. But I owe a terrible debt for everything I’ve done. If this is how I pay it, then…” she smiled, meeting Evoli’s eyes again. “Maybe my sisters will forgive me.”
That was more infuriating than anything she had done so far—how much like Riley she looked standing there. Not so tall as Evoli, not so powerful, but so proud, so self-important, so insufferably convinced of her own virtue.
“I’m going to destroy everything our mother ever made,” Evoli hissed, baring her teeth as she advanced on her. “By the time I’m done, no changeling from one end of the world to the other will dare mention oaths or pacts again. When I’m done, I will be god, to changelings and our food. They will worship me, and I will have the glamour to live a thousand years.”
“You shouldn’t.” Lachesis did not retreat from her, didn’t look away even as magic seemed to boil from around her. “I don’t know as much about war as I used to. Forgotten most of it, I guess.” She laughed weakly. “Maybe you can. But you shouldn’t. I’m the first queen of the future. If you turn away from this… we could make something better than Riley ever did. A future where no drone ever goes hungry again.”
Evoli couldn’t take another minute of this. She reached out with her magic, screaming in fury that shook the whole valley. She tried to rip away the queen’s glamour—but it was out of reach. Like she could see the meal in front of her, but it dissolved like smoke when she tried to touch it.
“I forgive you, Evoli.”
Evoli blasted the drones all around Lachesis to smoldering ash, and wicked green flames spread over the white canopy of the peace tent. She smashed into her younger sister and slammed her head down into the boiling ice. She yanked her out a few seconds later and brought her slamming into the side of the container. Her head shattered like an ice sculpture, and her body fell still.
Bits and pieces of dead queen rained down around her even as the ash began to boil. Evoli could hear the rage from the invading army. She stormed out of the peace-tent, leaving the corpse of Lachesis, ‘queen of the future’ to burn with her servants. It was time to win a war.