Ocellus dreamed of cold ash and sand…of ceaseless wind that drove before it walls of poison and lightning and death. She dreamed of a dark sky hidden by darker clouds, of faded stars, twin shattered moons, and an ugly, cold sun with flames that barely burned a dull orange-brown. She dreamed of a world with drying seas and petrified forests. A world of mutant monsters that hungered for flesh roaming the landscape…the packs of cannibalistic dune-runners, the terrible burrowing worms, the sinister lurking hexarachnids.
And she dreamed of the Hive – the Last Hive, its spires standing resolute against the wind and the ash and the mutants, its edifices crumbling but intact, it’s tunnels beneath the structure stretching for miles and serving as a refuge for the changelings that called it home...
And then she was awake. Consciousness was always quick to come to a changeling, or at least the knowledge that one was no longer really asleep. The body tended to get moving a little faster than the brain, though, so Ocellus’ first conscious thought this morning was that she was gnawing on and licking at the outer edge of her sleeping pod. It didn’t taste good...not that her growling stomach cared that much.
Guess I’m hungry in more than one way this morning, she thought as she stopped chewing on her own bed, or what a pony would have roughly termed as one, anyway. The pod was more of a bowl, with an upper shell that closed down on Ocellus while she slept as an extra layer of protection. She hoisted the shell open and slipped out, stretching her limbs, rotating her joints, and opening her elytra as far as they would open naturally to extend her wings and let them buzz around a little, resisting the urge to shiver at the cold outside her sleeping pod. She was in complete darkness, so she couldn’t see a thing, but the almond-shaped chamber she was in had been regurgitated and molded by Ocellus herself, and she knew it like she knew the back of her hooves. She didn’t even think twice about retrieving her scarf, a gift from Snails, from where it hung on one wall, then trotting forward to the flap of dirt and dead leaves bound together by calcified changeling ooze. From within the chamber, had it had any light, it would have been obvious in appearance, but from the other side it blended in perfectly with the dirt around it, making it look like the tunnel that led to Ocellus’ burrow was really a dead end.
Ocellus crawled the two dozen or so feet from her burrow to the tunnel’s exit, pausing just beneath the fallen log that concealed it and listening - while also doing her best to not shiver again. The days had been getting colder as something that her friend Snails called “winter” approached. Already it was as cold as a night on her home world would be, and Snails has said it might get even colder...
After several long minutes of hearing nothing, though, she lifted the log...then let out a gasp of fright and ducked back down into the tunnel, that shiver she’d been fighting back finally coming to the fore at what she’d seen. Slowly, cautiously, she lifted the log again and peeked out.
White.
Everything was white.
Ocellus crawled from the tunnel with a great amount of trepidation, staring at the forest around her. She realized she had been mistaken: not everything was white; rather, it was more like something white and cold had fallen on everything, covering it to a depth of several inches. Ocellus gingerly scooped some of the stuff up off the ground, looking at it closely, and realized she was looking at ice crystals, countless tiny little specks of powdery frost that has blanketed everything. A tentative lick confirmed that it was ice. Powdered ice. But how...? Ocellus glanced up, but saw only a pale gray sky, no sign of who or what had dumped all this powdered ice everywhere, nor how it had been accomplished.
A chill breeze chose that moment to blow, breaking Ocellus from her reverie and scattering the powder she held. The changeling drone shivered again, and looked around. Apart from the white covering, everything else looked the same. Whatever had happened to the Everfree Forest, it was at least still the same forest she had gone to sleep in. She hadn’t somehow slipped from one world to another like she had months ago after a portal had opened up beneath her on Protea and deposited her in Equestria.
She could ask Snails later for more details. In the meantime, her body flashed green, and she took on what Snails had dubbed her “fillyform”, herself as a blue-coated, pink-maned unicorn filly named Sprite (Snails had chosen the name). Since her fillyform was similar in size and mass to her true form, the Sprite body was easy to maintain, and grew a little bit easier as she continued to practice wearing it. More to the point, it was covered in a pelt of hair and had more body fat than her true form - even though it was almost as lanky as Snails - and so offered better protection against the cold than her true form, even with the scarf. Thus shifted, Ocellus set off to find a meal.
---
There weren’t a lot of organic things that a changeling wouldn’t eat when hungry enough, but compared to her home world of Protea, even the winterized Everfree Forest was a cornucopia to Ocellus. Dead leaves, buried roots, even twigs and tree branches could sate her physical hunger.
But that didn’t mean that they tasted good, and even after only three or so months living in Equestria, Ocellus had grown a little spoiled. Her first thought had been to plug two holes with one ejecta and go to Ponyville for both her solid food need and her gnawing hunger for love, but Ocellus faced a number of issues on that front. First, she didn’t have any of the small metal disks, the money, that ponies exchanged for goods and services, and still hadn’t figured out how to procure any for herself other than theft. Snails’ own supply came from an allowance supplied by his parents, and that allowance wasn’t enough to give a meaningful portion to Ocellus. Second, skipping the “money” step and simply stealing what she wanted had proven to be disastrous, to say the least. A certain brown-coated, black-maned pegasus colt was no longer welcome in several of Ponyville’s establishments as a result. She might have been able to steal more effectively if she assumed a smaller form, like a squirrel or something, but shrinking down to so small a size was taxing on her magic - and her magic was created from her love reserves. It wouldn’t make much sense to satisfy one hunger by increasing another.
So instead, Ocellus hunted through the Everfree Forest for something palatable. Berries had been her preferred solid food, but none had grown in recent weeks. Pine needles weren’t so bad, but they weren’t very filling, either. There was some mistletoe here and there, which wasn’t bad, but not enough to make a meal out of. There had to be something tasty around...
Come on in the water’s fine...
Please oh please don’t decline...
Ocellus blinked. She knew that tune, had heard it not long after accidentally ending up in this world. Chewing on a few pine needles as she followed the sound, she soon found herself standing by the edge of a forty-foot wide river that ran from the Everfree into Ponyville.
Come and dance on the river’s bed ...
Come on in and join the dead...
Ocellus listened patiently, enjoying the music since she knew it wouldn't work on her. After several long minutes, a green-scaled equine head poked out of the water from near the middle of the river, followed by two more. Their singing didn’t stop, and in fact increased in volume, but Ocellus only smiled. “Still won’t work,” she said.
The singing stopped, and the three sirens’ eyes - one had red eyes, another yellow, and a third teal - narrowed. Finally the red-eyed one rose a little more fully out of the water, snarling with a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth. “Okay, what is it this time?!” She demanded. “Another music critic? Another know-it-all scholar? Another bug?”
“Another yellow pegasus too cute to eat?” Asked the one with teal eyes, his somewhat more angular and broader build making his gender easy to discern, at least to a changeling like Ocellus.
“She was!” The red-eyed siren objected. “All doe-eyed and fluttering...I have standards!”
“Right, for her you have standards,” the yellow-eyed siren spoke up as she too rose from the water. “Anything else you gobble down, but the first chance in months we get to eat something with real meat on its bones...”
Narrow red eyes glared back at the yellow-eyed siren. “I also have brains. If we'd eaten her half the forest would be after us.”
Ocellus sat down, giggling a little at the exchange, though she made sure to keep well clear of the edge of the river. “Actually we've met before,” she said, letting her fillyform disguise disappear in a flash of green flames. She had first met the sirens not long after arriving in Equestria, but before her first meeting with ponies. They had tried to hypnotize and eat her, but something about her being a changeling meant that their siren song didn't work on her. “I was just disguised as a pony because I don't get as cold out here in it.” She took that opportunity to shift back into her fillyform.
The three sirens looked her over, then almost as one rolled their eyes. “Right. Mystery solved.” Teal-eyes said. “Shame. You look crunchy.”
Ocellus didn't hold their desire to eat her against them, at least not as long as they didn't have the ability to back up their desires. If she were hungry enough she'd probably eat them herself, after all. She did, however, let her tongue shift back to her natural changeling one, and stuck it out of her mouth a little, tasting the air. Her tongue was what she used to eat emotions, and she could taste that these three were frustrated...but she could also taste their cameraderie. It wasn't love, she couldn't live off of it, but it was tasty...and so would be their satisfaction from getting a meal...and those tastes mixed with the right solid food tastes might...
“Thay,” she said, then remembered her tongue. She slipped it back into her mouth and changed it back to a pony one. “Say,” she tried again. “If I were to help you get something to eat, would you let me eat some of your emotions? It wouldn't hurt, I'd just sit nearby with my tongue out.” She had, last time they'd met, brought up her dietary requirements with them, not that they'd seemed to care.
The three sirens had been discussing something among themselves - probably trying to come up with some way to lure Ocellus into the water - but stopped at her suggestion. “Hey...” Teal-eyes said. “That could actually work! We don't follow the river into Ponyville since the ponies would strike back, but you can change your shape, so you could lure a pony into the forest and - ”
Ocellus let out an un-equine hiss at that, prompting startled growls from the sirens in return. Ocellus shifted back to changeling form so that she could have her fangs and let her wings buzz angrily, which prompted the sirens to bunch up and undulate around one another, lips curled back to expose their sharp teeth and fins stirring the river water. The threat displays between the predators continued for several moments before it was clear that neither were going to attack. Flicking her tongue back out, Ocellus tasted concern and unease but not aggression from the sirens. She'd startled, but not scared, them.
“No,” Ocellus objected at length, stamping a hoof, still annoyed at the suggestion she threaten her food. But she tucked her wings away and lifted her ear-fins, trying to look a little amicable - while also trying to ignore the cold that her carapace just wasn't good at keeping out. She fought back a shiver. “Ponyville is where I get all the l-love I need. If ponies start disappearing f-from it and they start feeling fear instead of love, then where w-will I eat?”
The sirens' undulations slowed, and they hid their teeth from plain view, backing down themselves. “Alright. Fine.” Yellow-eyes said. “So what was your plan, then?”
“You can only h-hunt up and down for stuff n-near the river, I'm g-guessing,” Ocellus said. Food territories re-established between them, she shifted back to her fillyform, grateful for the pelt and the body fat. She took a moment to re-tie her scarf around her neck, since it had gotten loose from the shape-shifting she'd done. “Probably mostly squirrels and raccoons and turkeys, right?” At the sirens' nods, Ocellus leaned forward. “What if I could get you a boar?”
It really didn't make much sense for an aquatic species to be able to salivate, but Ocellus was pretty sure she saw drool in the mouth of the red-eyed siren. “Ohhh, it's been awhile since we had red meat,” she said.
“But where will you get a boar?” The yellow-eyed siren asked.
Ocellus nodded her head upriver and to the north. “One of the streams that feeds into the river - too shallow for you to swim up - a few miles up it, there's this boar's territory. He chased me around not long after I got here. I could get him to chase me downstream and to the river, close enough for your song to snare it.”
The sirens looked to one another. Teal-eyes held up a hoof as the three dived beneath the water, but kept the hoof up and out of it, letting Ocellus know that they were still there. Probably they wanted a private conversation. Most likely they were discussing some way of getting Ocellus to also end up in the water, where they'd have an advantage - even if Ocellus shifted into a siren form herself, she wasn't familiar with swimming at all, while they were.
But, one of them would point out that even if Ocellus didn't end up in the river, if she got the boar close enough to hear their song, they'd get that instead. The boar Ocellus was thinking of was actually nearly as large as her, very territorial, and her every attempt to communicate with it had failed, so she was pretty sure it wasn't a fellow intelligent creature.
The worst-case scenario was Ocellus somehow messed up and the boar got her. The best-case scenario was that both Ocellus and the boar ended up in the river. In any event there was no threat to them, and so no reason not to agree. Ocellus wasn't surprised, then, when after just a minute or so beneath the water, the sirens came back up, nodding as one. The red-eyed one detached from the other two and swam up as close to the shore of the river as she could while still leaving herself deep enough to swim away quickly. She had to use her two pony-like legs to lift herself out of the water instead of being able to float, then held forward one of them. “We have a deal.”
Ocellus grinned, recognizing the gesture as one Snails had taught her. She trotted forward and into the river just a bit, biting back a gasp at how cold the water was - how did the sirens stand it? - and tapped her hoof against the siren's own. “Deal,” she said. “Oh, by the way, my name's Ocellus. What's yours?”
The siren rolled her eyes as she pushed herself back into deeper water. “Years we've been in this forest and finally something asks us. Allegro Gleam,” she said.
“Cantata Gloom,” the yellow-eyed siren added.
“Chorus Glow,” finished the teal-eyed one.
Ocellus stepped back out of the water, shaking her hooves to try and get the wetness off. “From what I hear you try and eat anything that could ask,” she pointed out.
Cantata waved her hooves at Ocellus. “Details. Now shoo! Get us a big fat pig!”
---
Ocellus had learned, from practical experience, that boars were temperamental, territorial, and dangerous. She'd watched the particular one she was hunting scare off a small pack of wolves all by itself that had gotten too close to what it considered its territory. It had only failed in goring one of them because it had spotted Ocellus - at that point in time, still starving from lack of love - and given chase to her, nearly catching her before she'd been able to work up the strength to get lift from her wings and fly out of reach.
But that was only a few weeks after she'd been stranded in Equestria, when her love reserves had been running low, when the gnawing void of hunger had felt like it was trying to consume her body. Now, with her daily trips into Ponyville in disguise, feeding on the plentiful love of ponies...Ocellus had never been this full back on Protea. She was still stingy with her magic, just in case, but every now and then she allowed herself an indulgence.
Thus, getting the boar to chase her to the river had been as simple as changing her fillyform to have pegasus wings - and no horn, just in case some pony was wandering the Everfree and spotted her - finding the boar, and throwing a rock at it. It had not like that, squealing with rage that she didn't even need her tongue to taste and giving chase. Ocellus took to the air and flew off, staying close to the ground so that the boar could see her. In order to make sure it didn't lose interest and remained furious, she would occasionally throw something else at it, but she never let herself get within reach of its tusks or hooves.
It made an awful racket, so Ocellus didn't have to worry about making sure the sirens knew she was coming. After about ten minutes of chase, the siren's song began. Ocellus stopped her flight and landed in a nearby tree at that, watching as the song worked its magic over the boar - she'd never seen it do so before, after all. At first it hadn't looked like it was working, but gradually the boar's anger began to abate, its squeals becoming less and less insistent. Flicking out her changeling tongue, Ocellus could taste the emotions draining from the boar's limited, animal psyche as it began walking to the river. It wasn't at all dissimilar to what would happen if she completely drained a creature of emotion, actually, right up to the boar not even hesitating, as Ocellus watched, to step into the freezing-cold water where the sirens waited by the shore in water barely deep enough for them to swim in, teeth glistening, definitely drooling, circling around the boar and getting into a kill position.
The sirens, to their credit, struck fast, not drawing out the boar's end - they were hungry, not sadists, and besides they needed to act quickly once they stopped singing their hypnotic song. Teeth flashed, bit down, and tore open vital arteries and veins before they darted back into deeper water, since the boar could still be dangerous even as it died. Ocellus made sure to keep her tongue firmly like a pony's and her mouth clamped tightly shut until it was over. As good as the sirens' immediate predatory satisfaction would taste, she didn't want to also catch the last emotions of the boar.
But it was over quickly. Ocellus hopped down from the tree, resuming her unicorn shape as she did so, but shifted her tongue to its changeling form and tentatively tasted the air as the sirens swam back up. The boar's emotions were gone...but the sirens were filled with satisfaction, anticipation, and happiness that only increased tenfold as the sirens dug in.
She'd prepared for this. Keeping her changeling tongue, she found a nearby bush with a few dead leaves still stuck to it and dug in. And she discovered that she was right: the emotional satisfaction of the sirens overwhelmed the taste of the dead leaves and twigs she ate, making them far more palatable. She let out a slight contented hiss as she ate her fill of solid food, then returned to near the sirens, tongue lapping up their ambient emotions. The sirens eyed her approach as they ate, but she kept well clear of their kill - she could eat meat, but it tasted bad so without the perpetual undernourishment of Protea she'd resolved to avoid it - so they didn't have a repeat predator standoff, and once it was clear she wasn't going to try and grab a bite they mostly ignored her.
Eventually, the boar only a quarter eaten, the sirens relented. “Oh, that hit the spot,” Chorus intoned, putting a hoof to his stomach and letting out a loud belch. “No feathers, no bones taking up most of the body, leftovers that'll last for weeks...”
“Especially in this cold,” Allegro confirmed, grabbing the “leftovers” and pulling them into deeper water.
“Weee was achin',” Cantata sang as she lay back in the water, lazily swishing her tail so the current didn't carry her away. “Forrr some bacon...iiit's a big pig...and we were all big pigs too. Hoy!”
“Kinda' wish we'd had some crunch to go with it,” Allegro noted, eyeing Ocellus.
Ocellus grinned. “I'd shift into a fish before I died,” she said.
Allegro blanched at that, one hoof going to her mouth, and Chorus and Cantata looked a little queasy as well at the thought of eating a fish. For some bizarre reason, none of the three could stomach the taste of seafood - they'd mentioned that the first time Ocellus had met them. “Not right after we ate!” She insisted.
Ocellus giggled, and she felt a familiar, welcome feeling spreading through her. Cameraderie. Allegro, Chorus, and Cantata weren’t really all that different from changelings, motivated by hunger as they were. It could get lonely in the Everfree Forest, being the only changeling in it, and the three sirens also had a perspective on ponies and other creatures that was perhaps a little closer to Ocellus’ own. She would never eat a pony...physically, anyway. At least not as long as there were other options. But they were food nonetheless, to her, and to the sirens.
She bit back a hiss at that last thought. Ponies were her food, not theirs. As long as the sirens were in the Everfree, they’d be a threat to that food...but Ocellus was just one changeling, and the sirens never left each others’ side...
“We should do this again sometime,” Cantata ventured, swimming closer to Ocellus. “The Everfree is huge. There’s boars and bears and wolves and manticores...”
“And Steven,” Allegro said, red eyes flashing as she licked her lips.
“C’mon, no, I like him,” Chorus said. “Only way I get some guy talk.”
“Okay, we’ll leave Steven alone,” Cantata continued. “But stick with us, bug, and we’ll never go hungry again.”
“And we’ll leave the ponies alone,” Allegro offered. “Especially the cute pegasus.”
Ocellus’ ear-fins rose in interest. That was certainly a solution to her problem. Recognized food territories and mutual aid. The sirens could even tell her who this “Steven” was. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “Every few weeks? I don’t get hungry for solid food that often, and I want to leave room for some pony food.” She paused a moment at the sly, predatory grins from the sirens. “I meant stuff like cake and sweets!” She objected.
“Blegh. You’ll get fat,” Chorus said.
“Changelings dream of getting fat,” Ocellus countered.
“More for us one day, maybe,” Allegro said. “And yeah, every three weeks or so. We digest slow, especially this time of year, and we don’t want to over-hunt the forest. We can snack on squrrels or whatever in the meantime.”
Ocellus nodded. “Okay. See you later!” There was an extra bit of spring to the faux-unicorn’s step as she trotted from the river and headed for Ponyville. With one hunger satisfied, it was time to deal with another.