We appeared at the edge of a forest. I was momentarily disoriented by the teleportation spell, but the others didn’t seem affected. It only made sense they wouldn’t be if, as I believed was the case, they teleported around on a regular basis!
Discord was soon looking around intently. He stood in place for a moment, rubbing his chin, then went around, raising bushes and putting them back down, unzipping tree trunks open and zipping them back up, leafing through boulders as if they were books… The rest of us watched him do it for a minute, wondering what he was up to.
“What are you doing?” Starlight finally asked.
“Looking for Fluttershy… but it’s odd! I was trying to take us right to her, and she’s not here!”
So my optimism about him joining our search-and-rescue team had been premature, I realized. Well, at least he’d brought us here in seconds when the trip would have normally lasted days!
He had brought us where I thought he had, right? I turned around to check, and as I laid my eyes upon the imposing structure I’d both expected and dreaded to see, the gravity of the task ahead of us hit me harder than I’d thought it would!
“So you thought she was hiding inside a tree or a rock?” Trixie mocked Discord, unaware of my discovery and the burden it had laid on my heart.
“Thorax?” Starlight noticed me stare into the distance, at the towering spike in the middle of the barren wasteland we stood at the edge of, clearly visible in the moonlight and even more menacing than during the day like the last time I’d seen it.
“What is that?!” Trixie’s voice trembled as she took in the sight in front of us.
“It’s the changeling hive,” I told her. “I’d hoped I’d never have to come here again! But it looks like I will have to! Even if all our friends aren’t there already, some of them must be, and I’m sure the rest will join them soon enough!”
“What are we waiting for, then?” Discord exclaimed, and one flash of chaos magic later, he was in full body armor, riding a flying pig. “For Fluttershy!” With that battle cry, he raised a spear and the pig flew forward… only to vanish a second later, dropping the suddenly naked and unarmed draconequus onto the ground.
“What the…” He shook his head, then sat up, conjured up another flying pig and sent it into the wasteland, with the same result.
“I was afraid this might happen,” I sighed.
Discord sprang up and grabbed me by the throat.
“And you didn’t say anything?” he roared at me.
“I couldn’t be sure! I don’t think even Chrysalis would have known what to expect!”
Starlight teleported me out of his grip.
“Why don’t we let Thorax explain?” She looked daggers at Discord.
“I will, just give me a second,” I pleaded, rubbing my neck, then looked at Discord. “May I ask that you don’t squeeze so hard next time?”
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
“Okay… so… Chrysalis’ throne is enchanted to suppress non-changeling magic within the radius of… well, this far from the hive,” I said, pointing to where Discord had fallen. “I don’t know if it was her doing or someone else’s, I don’t even know if it’s something done deliberately or simply an innate property of the stone the throne was carved from, though that seems less likely because objects made from such stones would have been more common, but none of that matters right now. The purpose is to keep the hive safe, and it works fine on ponies and other magic-wielding creatures, but it was never tested on chaos magic - not until now, that is - so Chrysalis couldn’t know that it would work on you! I was hoping your magic would be immune to this effect, or at least strong enough to overcome it, but it looks like we’re going to have to figure out something else!”
“Wonderful.” Trixie rolled her eyes. “I should have known this wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked with two of you!”
“And what did you expect to do to the changelings with the two of us by your side? Stun them into submission by pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Knock them out with firecrackers?”
“At least my firecrackers still function, which can’t be said for your flying pigs!”
“Oh, please! As if a hoofful of pyrotechnics can stand up against a whole army!”
“You’re right, Discord,” Starlight said. “It can’t. And we were never going to pull this off by barging in willy-nilly and hoping for the best, magic or no magic! We need some kind of plan!”
“You know I’m not much for following rules,” Discord said flatly. “How is sticking to a plan going to be any easier?”
“Grin and bear it,” Trixie chimed in. “This isn’t exactly fun for any of us!”
“Easier said than done!”
“Hmph!”
The two turned their backs to each other and pouted. Realizing she’d get nowhere with either of them for the moment, not even to get them to cooperate, Starlight turned to me.
“You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“Just trying to figure out how to get there.”
“Any ideas so far?”
“Two… but they’re full of flaws, and I’m pretty sure you won’t like at least one of them.”
“Let’s hear them anyway! I have zero, and these two don’t seem very helpful, either!”
“Okay. One, I go in the same way I got out: by flying there disguised as something that wouldn’t put the hive on alert, such as another changeling. I can’t do it looking like myself or the sentries will recognize me and I’ll get captured. But I couldn’t take any of you with me. You’d have to wait here until I get out with our friends, which I expect would be nearly impossible without anyone noticing before we’re in the clear.”
“Can’t we walk there?”
“There are airborne sentries circling the hive, watching out for intruders. We’re too far to see them even if it were day now, but trust me, they’re there all day and all night, and it would only be a matter of time before they notice something approaching, whether or not they could see clearly what, and call for reinforcements. Even if the nights were dark enough to conceal us, we can’t get there in a single night, and there’s no cover anywhere! And you can’t stay here unless you hide really well, because the border patrols would find you!”
Starlight recoiled upon hearing that and looked around frantically for any uninvited guests. Trixie and Discord cast me a startled look too, having decided this new bit of information was more important than pouting.
“You couldn’t have said this sooner?” Trixie scolded me. “We need to hide!”
“Yeah, we probably should,” I agreed. “Any of you know any concealment spells?”
“Gather ‘round close,” Starlight called to them.
They did. She formed another of her magical bubbles around us.
“That should keep us safe for the moment. Thorax, I suppose you can’t carry us there in cocoons, either?”
“It may or may not work with you and Trixie, depending on how well-known you are in the hive, by which I mean how much of a threat your magic would be considered without the suppression field and how influential you are in pony society. But I couldn’t take Discord without a very good explanation of how I managed to trick and defeat someone as powerful as he is!”
“Trixie doesn’t like the idea of being cocooned anyway,” Trixie muttered.
“Besides, once your cocoons are in their possession, I would have no say in where they would put you, and they might get suspicious if I were to follow them, so I’d most likely have to go looking for you three as well as the others, which could take a while, and I can’t promise that nothing would happen to me before I find you.”
“I get it, we can’t get in there like that without at least raising a lot of eyebrows if not giving you more work and putting you in unnecessary risk,” Starlight sighed. “You said you had one more idea?”
“Yes. We dig our way in.”
“Dig?” Starlight and Discord frowned in unison.
“Does Trixie look like somepony who carries a shovel around to you?!”
“The rest of you don’t have to dig if you don’t want to; I can do it myself!” I reassured them. “That way we can all get in, and something tells me we’ll need to work together once we’re there! But it will take time, and we’ll have to figure out how to disguise the entrance to the tunnel so the border patrols don’t find it, and how to avoid detection once we’re inside.”
They gave it some thought.
“I don’t suppose we can keep our magic while underground?” Discord asked.
“I don’t see how!”
“I might have known you were going to say that,” he groaned. “Though, if I create an air pocket directly underneath us where my magic still works, I could take us inside and we can start digging without leaving a trace on the surface! I’ll even add a pointer or a compass so we’ll know where the hive is!”
“Will that be good enough? I don’t want us to realize we’d missed our destination by a hair when we get to the opposite end of the suppression field and notice our magic is back!” Starlight voiced her concern.
“It should be,” I reassured her. “The hive has an underground part that is much wider than the one above ground.”
“If you say so!”
“How deep do you want me to go?” asked Discord.
“About half or two-thirds of the height of Princess Twilight’s castle,” I suggested.
“That deep?” Starlight asked.
“I don’t want the tunnel to open onto the surface in case of a cave-in,” I explained.
“Okay, that covers getting in, I guess. What do we do after that?”
“Well, our friends would most likely be kept in the throne room, being as important as they are. That’s at the top of the hive, so-”
“Wait, all the way up?! Trixie didn’t sign up for this!”
“I’ll be glad to send you back to your little wagon in Ponyville if that’s what you want,” Discord offered.
“As appealing as that offer may be, the Great and Powerful Trixie must keep her friend Starlight safe from harm! With the added bonus of Trixie’s presence annoying you!”
Starlight sighed and shook her head.
“Well, since we’re going there anyway, we might as well try to destroy that throne while we’re at it,” she suggested. “Please tell me that will get our magic back!”
“It might, but I can’t promise it. It’s never been done, you know.”
“If it’s like most other enchanted objects, then it should. At least I hope so!”
We sat there in silence for a minute.
“Well, that’s that, I guess, “I said eventually. “We’d better get moving!”
Discord snapped his claw again.
“The air pocket is ready. And the pointer,” he announced.
“Ready?” Starlight asked Trixie.
She shrugged as if to say, 'what choice do I have?'.
“Thorax? You?”
I took a deep breath.
“No, but let’s get it over with!”
One snap of a draconequus’ claw later, we were underground. Starlight and Trixie lit up their horns, and Discord created a number of upside-down flying candles. I sat down, dizzy again. Did Discord’s magic normally have such an effect on changelings? It had never happened with pony magic! He wasn't doing it deliberately, was he?
“Couldn’t have this been any bigger?” Trixie protested upon taking a look around. “I don’t think we’ll have enough air to last us all the way to that… that…”
“Relax, I’ll add more as we extend the tunnel! I’ll even remove the excess dirt if you can bring it to this end where my magic works!”
“Good. And you’re sure the changelings won’t figure out what we’re doing?”
“Would I lie to you when Fluttershy’s fate hangs in the balance?”
Both mares rolled their eyes. I might have, too, if my eyes weren’t still rolling themselves after that last teleportation.
“So what are we waiting for?” Trixie was getting impatient. “THORAX!” she yelled in my ear, causing me to fall over in apprehension.
“Okay… okay…” I said, getting up. “Here goes…”
I transformed into an oversized mole, bigger than my friends but not as big as a maulwurf, wanting to retain as benign an appearance as possible. My friends were on edge already; no need to frighten then even more by making them share a hole in the ground with a monster!
I got to work.