//------------------------------// // Chapter 5 // Story: Courtesans // by GaPJaxie //------------------------------// Double and Cadence lay together in bed. Double was molded into Cadence’s back, with his legs wrapped around her barrel.  She was so much larger than him, that with his head tucked into her shoulder, his hind legs didn’t even reach her hips. But that didn’t matter. She liked being held that way, and her shoulder was warm. Her voluminous curled mane wrapped over Double like a blanket, and their colors mingled on the sheets. They lay there for a long time, alternately sleeping and watching the afternoon sun work its way across the bedroom. Cadence didn’t feel like moving, in part because she was exhausted, and in part because her legs were still stuck together by changeling resin. Double didn’t feel like moving either. He’d enjoyed himself, and as was traditional during a feast, overate. Eventually however, he noticed Cadence’s ears twitching, and inferred that she was awake and alert. He kissed the side of her neck and asked: “When is Shining going to be back?” “This evening.” She let out a long breath. “I should start cleaning up soon.” “He does know about this, right?” “I have his permission if that’s what you mean. But that doesn’t mean I want him to find me with my legs tied together.” She let out a stiff grunt, rolling her shoulder. “Are the… marks on my flanks visible?” “Yes.” “You didn’t look,” she chided. “I know how hard I cropped you. They’re visible.” Double murmured, shutting his eyes and tucking his head back into her shoulder. “But, it doesn’t matter. Let them show. You should be honest with Shining. If you think that sort of thing is fun, maybe he’d indulge you.” “I’m not worried about Shining. I have duties this evening.” She squirmed in place, but did not yet ask Double to remove her bindings. “I can’t hold court with my neck covered in hickies and my hindquarters covered in welts.” “You’re royalty. Show up in court with whipped flanks, and everypony will decide it’s in fashion.” Double smirked. “You’ll have courtiers asking you to sign their riding crops.” Cadence rolled her eyes. “Amazing how I never thought of that.” “Mmm.” Double cracked an eye. “You want me to let you go?” “Remove the resin, please, but don’t get up just yet. I want to talk.” “About this?” Double’s horn glowed, and the resin binding Cadence’s legs together melted away into harmless goo. “No.” Cadence grunted and stretched, taking a moment to think things over. “This was fun. I got to experiment, and I really needed to blow off some stress. And it feels good to know what I’m missing, so I don’t wonder. But I don’t think it’s something I want to do again. Sex really is better when it’s an expression of love.” “Is it better because of the love, or because the pony you’re sleeping with is Shining Armor?” Double’s smirk returned. “Because I hear he’s pretty good.” “Because of the love,” Cadence replied, her tone dry. After a moment she added, “Though he is something special.” “Mmph.” Double shifted in place, wrapping his legs tighter around Cadence’s barrel. “What’d you want to talk about then?” “The war.” Double’s shifting motions abruptly stopped, his body freezing in place. “I don’t want to talk about the war, remember? But I’ll tell you all about art theory if you want. Fifth century painting is fascinating.” “I remember that. But I also remember Amaryllis giving you a direct order that you had to obey my commands and answer my questions.” Silence hung in the air after Cadence spoke, so she nudged with a gentle, “Isn’t that right?” A slight breath escaped Double, and his body remained stiff against hers. “Really? You’re still sticky and sore and you decide this is the optimal time for exerting authority?” “That’s not—” “I don’t want to talk about the war,” he forcefully spoke over her. “It’s over. You lost. You lost badly, in fact. Reliving the details of your humiliation won’t change what happens next.” Cadence refused to rise to the bait, her own tone smooth and calm. “I know we lost,” she said, and she reached up with a hoof to brush his. “But I still don’t know why we lost. Every time I look at Shining, I see an intelligent, thoughtful, capable leader. But I’m not deaf to all the ponies whispering that he’s inept.” “I wasn’t an officer, and I’ve never served under him,” Double’s tone turned snappish. “I’m not qualified to comment on his merits as a commander.” “There are other reasons I need your perspective.” She stretched out a wing, and cracked her joints. “What does Amaryllis want from us, now that she doesn’t need love to survive? If I raise those six grubs as my own, will they be loyal to me as their mother and Flurry as their sister? Or will they be loyal to Amaryllis? Is ‘if I’m ordered to kill I will kill’ something you’re born into, or raised into? If Amaryllis orders her reformed changelings to sack the Crystal Empire, will they even obey?” “You have advisors to tell you all that.” “Our performance to date suggests my advisors don’t understand your hive very well.” Cadence let out a breath. “That’s why I’m asking you. I need to understand your people if I’m going to find a way out of this.” “Talk to Thorax then. I can’t help you.” Double pulled his legs out from under Cadence, and scooted to his side of the bed. With a flash of green light, he ceased to be a he—reverting to her natural form. “But hey, I have some magic that’ll help you hide those crop marks. Comes up a lot in my day job, you know.” Double had just risen from the bed when Cadence said: “Sometimes, Shining wakes up screaming.” One step away from the bed, Double stopped moving. Cadence rolled over to face her. “In the middle of the night, I’ll hear him whimpering. When I wake up and look over, he’s shaking in his sleep. If I shake him awake, he’ll scream like I was hurting him, but I don’t want to leave him there.” For a few moments, Double didn’t say anything. She didn’t look back at Cadence either, staring ahead at the door. “What does this have to do with me?” “When I ask him what he was seeing, he says the same thing. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I think it hurts him to remember.” “It should hurt him. I don’t want to talk about murdering his friends. He doesn’t want to talk about his friends being murdered.” Double spit out the words, her tone turning nakedly hostile. “They’re not the same thing.” “What was it you said to me on the train? ‘Should I be more afraid to die than to kill?’ It stuck with me at the time, though I didn’t realize what it meant until now.” She propped herself up on her forelegs. “Not exactly the sentiment of a merciless soldier, is it?” Before Double could answer, she reached out across the bed. “Double, I know it hurts but… you said you were sorry. That you regret what you did and you never wanted it to happen again. This is where you can stop history from repeating itself. Where you can help me avert a war. This is where you can prove that I was wrong about you and that you do deserve Shining’s forgiveness. “Please. Help me make things right again.” Double stood there in silence for a long time. Then she sat down, and started to talk. To understand the war, you need to understand the changelings that fought it. The way it happened won’t make any sense, otherwise. To start with, we’re a hive species. That’s because, unlike bread, love can’t be stored for the winter. There’s no way to store it at all, except inside a changeling, and once it was inside us it spoiled quickly. No matter how well things went on any given day, the hive was always on the edge of starvation. It got even more complicated when you consider that the amount of love a gatherer could steal from a given pony was not consistent. Sometimes, they found enough love in a single evening to feed hundreds of changelings. Sometimes they couldn’t even feed themselves for weeks on end. You know how we solved this problem. All the gatherers brought their take back to the hive, and the queen redistributed it to ensure everyone got fed. You know that. But I don’t think you understand the implications of that solution. Imagine, every day, you woke up so hungry that your stomach hurt. So hungry that you fantasized about chewing off your own leg. And every morning, you had to go to Celestia and beg for a loaf of bread. Picture that. Picture Celestia deciding if she likes you. If she likes you, you get a loaf of bread. If she really likes you, you get two loaves, so the next morning you can have the absolutely decadent sensation of not waking up starving. If she doesn’t like you, you walk away with nothing. In this scenario you’re picturing, I’m guessing you’re on your knees. You’re saying “please” a lot and crying. You’re telling Celestia she’s beautiful and reminding her of all you’ve done for her, and promising that you’ll do anything she wants if she just finds mercy in her heart. It’s nothing like that. That’s what it looks like when a creature has to beg for a day. Just the one day. The nymphs worship her. They’re stupid—the way all small children are stupid. They’re illiterate, ignorant, and frightened. When I was that age, a lot of us thought she was the source of love, some kind of font of power into the world. We’d make little carvings of her and practice bowing down to them. Whenever she addressed the hive, we’d talk about her speech for hours. If she used big words and we didn’t know what they meant, we’d make something up. Once, she visited my training group, and looked at a nymph who had an uncommonly brightly colored shell. I don’t remember the nymph’s name. Amaryllis said, “This one is very red,” and moved on. We talked about it for hours, whispering to each other as we worked on our assignments. What did it mean? What did “very red” mean? What did she think about red? Then someone asked, did it seem like we got less food today? Terror gripped all of us. Red was bad. We were bad. So after hours, we snuck out of our pods, and hid every red object in the instruction space. Then we took the nymph with the bright shell and beat her to death. I would have been… six, then. Or seven, maybe. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. As we got older and more curious, we learned things about Amaryllis. Things that got whispered from pod to pod. Wonderful things that seemed so fantastic we thought they couldn’t possibly be real. Did you know she’s immortal? I heard that all of us come from tiny eggs she grows inside herself. A worker told me that she can do magic no other changeling can. Do you think it’s true she fought the sun? Eventually, the nymphs realized… we, realized, that we weren’t being stupid children. That all those things were true. That she was more than us. She brought us into this world, she gave us life, and when the time came that we were old and useless and a burden on the others, she would reclaim the last of our energy. She was the beginning and the end and the center of our world. She was the hive. And without her we were nothing. Without her we’d just be insects waiting to die. Later, we were sorted into roles based on our teachers’ assessments of our talents. The idiots become laborers. I was considered gifted, and so was to be trained for field work. That means one of the three castes that works with ponies: gatherers, scouts, and infiltrators. We learned equish, first to speak, then to read and write. It was the first time I ever heard of the concept of letters, since vespid has no written form. The hive’s best transfigurists taught us the art of shapeshifting. And we learned about pony culture, from books and prisoners. One of my classmates in field work training was named Shade. We sat next to each other, worked on all the joint projects together. Changelings didn’t have friends in those days, but she was someone I trusted to watch my back. We knew each other for years. One day, Shade said, “In the books, it says that regular ponies can become alicorns with enough magic, right? Do you think that Amaryllis is a regular changeling who collected enough love? That any of us could be like her?” I was furious. Not only was talk like that a crime, failing to report it was also a crime. I knew that if any other changeling had overheard us, and I failed to turn her in, I’d share her fate. I slapped her and called her an idiot, but she insisted that it was fine. We were alone. We weren’t alone. Three other changelings overheard us. But, I was the first one to turn her in. So I didn’t get in any trouble. I got a little gold band painted on my shell, and Shade... Shade got all four of her legs broken, her horn notched, and then we pushed her into an oubliette with starving wolves inside. I pushed her. Which you knew. Of course you knew. I’m not a very good storyteller. It’s predictable. If I name a character, and it’s not me or Amaryllis, spoiler, they don’t live to the end. I graduated, top of the class. I told you earlier there were three castes that deal with ponies. Gatherers are… were, the most common, and stole love. Scouts acquire information. Infiltrators though, are a purely military caste. We’re assassins, saboteurs, or anything else we need to be. All the field castes can use their shapeshifting powers to blend in, but infiltrators go further. We train specifically to attack targets that are alert to the fact that there might be shapeshifters around. To counter the techniques meant to counter us. That will matter, later in the story. I swore the oath for the first time. If I am ordered to kill I will kill, if I am ordered to die I will die, all that. I believed every word. I was nothing without her. We were all nothing without her. Shade didn’t understand that. Which is why she was dead, the dumb bitch. I’d like to skip my early career if that’s okay. It wasn’t particularly notable. It mostly involved griffons anyway. That was frustrating. Train for years to mimic ponies, specifically ponies, and my first assignment is to go to Griffonstone and strangle some chick. The thing that matters is, this is when you kicked Chrysalis out of Canterlot. That got our attention. The order was not to antagonize you. We canceled a few missions in Equestria, and made sure the others stayed out of your way. We didn’t know how you beat her, and we didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the same trick. It was the same when you reclaimed the Crystal Empire. Our scouts saw you vaporize King Sombra. One of them was too close and got vaporized herself. Tangling with you seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Until you reformed Thorax’s hive. I’m not sure I can really explain the sense of revulsion I felt, the first time I saw a reformed changeling. Imagine a town of ponies all mutated into eight-tentacled beasts that survived by vomiting into each other's mouths, and they said that if you share the food, there’s enough for everyone. The first reformed changeling I ever met was named Dopple. Broke her neck. That was what I was supposed to do. The order was that “reform” was a plague ponykind created to destroy us. An infection that jumps from changeling to changeling. All such ideas were to be censored without exception, and any changeling spreading them would be subject to summary execution. It didn’t work. Thorax’s agents were in the hive. We could kill the reformers whenever we caught them, but there were always more. They talked about how they were never hungry, and how there was always enough for everyone. We… the infiltrators, the soldiers, the skalvadkt, we knew better. These new ideas were nonsense. Or we thought they were. Looking back, there were a lot of reasons. Part of it was that we were exceptionally loyal. Part of it was that we were a higher priority for rationing than the laborers, and so we didn’t feel the sting of hunger quite so acutely. But the laborers were open to persuasion. When you’re actually starving, eating vomit can sound better than eating nothing. Rumors spread and we couldn’t put them down. I was frightened. But then Amaryllis said she had a plan. And when I heard it, I felt better. And we were all reassured. She always knew what was best. You, we’d realized, really were a font of love into the world. And the Crystal Heart was an artifact capable of storing love without letting it spoil. If we possesed you, Shining, and the Heart, there really would be enough for everyone. The hive would never go hungry again. The laborers would all have enough. We’d be strong and prosperous like we’d never been before. And we’d have done it without twisting ourselves into a perversion. We’d still be changelings. But, Amaryllis explained, such a feat could not be accomplished with naked force. That was Chrysalis’s mistake, and her arrogance and incompetence were what brought this plague into existence in the first place. Kidnapping you or conquering your kingdom would bring us into conflict with four alicorns and Equestria’s many allies. We could never hope to win such a battle. Thus, you must be persuaded into giving up your powers and most precious artifact willingly. You and Shining would be cowed by a show of force, and when it appeared that you were entirely at our mercy, we would generously offer to leave you and your subjects in peace in return for your cooperation. We determined that an assault on the Crystal Empire itself was unwise. Firstly, because it would risk the complete destruction of the army by means of the Crystal Heart. But second, because the scouts estimated that a successful or nearly successful assault on the Empire would be an intolerable threat to Equestria, and result in a prolonged war. Thus, to achieve victory, we had to accomplish three objectives. First, your army had to be lured far beyond the perimeter of the Crystal Empire proper. Second, having been baited, your army had to be dealt a defeat so devastating it brought you to the negotiating table. Third, the war had to end quickly—before Celestia and the other alicorns could intervene. You see what I meant earlier, when I said you needed to understand us to understand the war. It makes no sense otherwise. You are already aware of how we accomplished the first part of the plan. Attacking outlying villages, burning ponies alive, nailing them to the sides of their fishing boats, feeding them to their own sled dogs. Things that aren’t a military threat to Equestria, but that would get your and Shining’s blood hot. We also created other problems for Celestia, Luna, and Twilight. We kept them busy. I wasn’t involved with that. The atrocities or the distractions. By then, I was already deployed in the Crystal Empire proper. I met a baker named Sucrose. She made delicious cookies. So I murdered her and took her bakery. She did not die quickly. I needed to know how to run her shop, and I didn’t have time to get to know her properly or arrange some lessons on baking. So I stuck her in a pod, and drained the love and knowledge out of her until she was a lifeless, mindless shell. Most changelings can’t do that, but I’m a wizard. I know a little dark magic. I still remember what all her sisters look like and what house they lived in growing up. It had a big rock out front they all liked to climb on. You remember earlier, I said that infiltrators are specifically trained to counter techniques that counter shapeshifters. Shining was concerned that we would sabotage the army’s supplies, and he even thought about the danger we’d poison the rations. So he had spellcasters stationed at every commissariat, checking for shapeshifters. He also had the supplies sealed in crates before transport, to make it harder for anypony to casually tamper with them. It’s a classic defense. It would have stopped a gatherer. Gatherers are kind of stupid. It would have stopped most scouts. Infiltrators though, are trained to recruit traitors. Traitors are invaluable. Everypony always looks for the telltale signs of transformation magic. They become hyperfocused on the threat of shapeshifting, and forget more mundane dangers. They think that because somepony is actually who they seem to be, they’re automatically good. I recruited the pony who sealed the crates. I told him that I ran a nice bakery, and I wanted to advertise to the soldiers. So every morning, I was going to give him fifty boxes of sugar cookies, with little red hearts and the name of my bakery written on them in icing. It was a gift for the troops, to keep their spirits up. All he had to do was put a few of them in with every ration. Adding anything to the rations that hadn’t been inspected first was against the rules, but I said I’d give him a hundred bits a day if he found a way to work it out. He worked it out. The sugar hid the taste of iodized manticore venom. I wanted something slow. If a pony ate a cookie and got sick, they’d throw the rest away. It had to take at least two or three days for the victims to start dropping dead. I also only poisoned one in three cookies at random. To make it harder to diagnose. The pony who sealed the crates was named Quartz Hammer. I never fought in the actual war itself. The battles. So, this next part is secondhoof. It’s what I was told by my officers, so consider it the changeling perspective. When Shining set out to save the village ponies of the North from changeling raiders, he had a hundred and forty thousand ponies with him. Our entire army was less than a third that size. I’d have felt confidant in his place too. He fought a half-dozen minor battles as he pushed towards our hive, all victories. But I’m not the only infiltrator. Six days after his army left the Crystal Empire, the feather flu broke out among his pegasus scouts. Then the crystal ponies started to develop gemcutter’s disorder. Soldiers would be fine one hour, and vomiting blood the next. We gave him two more little victories. Just to string him along. On the tenth day his hundred and forty thousand were less than a hundred thousand effective. Twenty thousand so sick they couldn’t walk, and another twenty to carry the wounded. Before you judge him too harshly, remember that up to this point, he’d only fought scattered raiders. He’d been sabotaged, yes. Sabotaged quite heavily. But everything he’d seen was consistent with a small, weak force, hoping to drive away a larger one with harassing tactics. On the eleventh day, he woke up to find he had less than eighty-thousand soldiers who could stand. His communications with the Crystal Empire and Equestria had been cut off. No new supplies had arrived to replace the tainted ones. And our sappers had destroyed the bridges and roads behind him. That was when he realized how much danger he was in. The retreat started that afternoon. The order was, Shining’s army was to come under some significant form of attack every twenty minutes, twenty-four hours a day, without interruption. If they ever showed signs of making camp or ceasing to flee, the wounded wagons or other vulnerable units were to be attacked in force immediately. That may seem strange, but circumstances made it possible. I don’t know who did it, but spreading the feather flu among the pegasus contingent was a masterstroke. Brilliantly executed. With nearly all of Shining’s air support in the wounded wagons, and most of his unicorns watching out for shapeshifters or tending the sick, we could conduct air raids with impunity. And we did. When there were easy targets, we struck in small forces, or at night. When there weren't, we bombed them from high altitudes. His shield spell protected the army from the worst of it, but that required him to stay awake, and it didn’t protect them from the need to march. His soldiers didn’t sleep for four days. The ones who weren’t sick would pass out mid-step, and lie in the snow. He wasn’t willing to leave them to die, so even more wagons and resources became occupied carrying them. Finally, less than a day from the Crystal Empire, Shining realized he had to stop. He’d covered an incredible distance in a short time, driving his army harder than anypony thought they could be driven. Over destroyed bridges and wrecked roads, the army had covered an eleven-day trip in barely four. But the infantry had been on a forced march for eighty hours. They weren’t passing out in the snow; they were dropping dead. So he made camp. And we attacked, when nearly everypony was asleep. That’s the actual battle most ponies think of, when they think of the War in the North. The one that everypony saw, when ponies fled back to the Empire and dropped their weapons as they ran. Two days later, I heard that Shining would be going to negotiate surrender terms. That was my cue to abandon my disguise and rejoin the army. I was feeling smug. Flush with victory, you’d say. Then I saw a reformed changeling in an otherwise normal infantry unit. And six more, in a support unit. A group of workers carrying supplies that had more reformers than normal changelings. There was one in my queen’s entourage. I told myself that it was fine. She had everything under control. Once you surrendered, our power would be limitless. Then we’d kill all the deviants and traitors and live in plenty. I don’t know what Shining said to her. To change her mind. To get her into bed. To connect with her. I don’t know what happened. I guess you do. Later, she called me into her throne room. By name. I didn’t think she knew my name before that, but I got the impression it wasn’t personal. A lot of changelings were being called in, one at a time. She had a list. I’d changed, by that point, and she commended me on my loyalty. On my flexibility. I served her in the old world, and I’d serve her in the new. “Have you been embodying our new values?” she asked me. “Are you displaying friendship and forgiveness?” I told her that I was. That just the last day, another changeling had stepped on my hoof, and I’d said, “my bad” instead of screaming “watch where you’re going, moron.” She said that was good. That this was a difficult time for us all, but that the skalvadkt had always been there to provide an example for the rest of the hive to follow. That other changelings would need my help, in the months and years to come. To understand this new world and these strange new feelings. Even she was having to make some adjustments. Then she checked her list and said, and this is a quote: “I’m sorry I made you feed your best friend to starving wolves.” The story lapsed into silence. Double laughed. Cadence was staring at her with wide eyes. Finally, she worked up the nerve to ask: “Then what happened?” “Then I moved to Canterlot to study art and the school stuck me with this self-absorbed bitch for a roommate.” Double shot Cadence an irritated glare. “What the hell did you think happened?” “No, I mean, what did you say to Amaryllis?” “I didn’t say anything!” Double’s voice rose to a shout. “Drones don’t speak in Amaryllis’s presence unless asked a question, and ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t a question. I bowed my head to the floor, and then I left.”