Chrysalis had never killed a changeling before.
This was not for lack of desire; it was just that the only thing she’d sworn never to kill was her own kind. After all, changeling should never kill changeling.
Ponies, fine. Other species, sure. Random wild monsters, yes with emphasis. But never her own flesh and blood.
She hesitated.
Even lurking outside the throne room, waiting in ambush with a few dozen of her loyal rebels, she hesitated. To merely get this far had taxed her heart to its limit, and it still found enough fresh horror to beat faster.
You did not kill your own kind.
Fight a changeling, maybe. Disarm her, if necessary. But kill her?
Then she reminded herself: the Queen of the Changelings was a fake. An imposter. A traitor. A backstabbing, conniving, vicious, un-changeling-like changeling! That smirking parasite didn’t deserve the throne!
Chrysalis would never kill a changeling. Never kill a true changeling.
She kept the Queen’s smirk firmly in mind. That traitor’s smirk. Yes, it was easier to think this way: her target was not a changeling at all.
Her spell began to charge.
Chrysalis loved the idea of wiping that insufferable smirk out of existence. So much so that she channelled her dark, twisted desire around all the poison in her heart, and lowered her horn, aimed the lot, and fired.
The blast echoed back and fled through the maze of hive’s chambers around them. Behind Chrysalis, the rebel changelings groaned under the booms, yet she herself remained braced and firm. No weaknesses. None were allowed in a future Queen.
Her advance guard hurried through the hole in the wall. Green magic glowed beyond.
She waited, eyes narrowed. Their hisses assured her it was all clear. She strode through, horn lowered. The rest of her rebels followed her immediately, fanning out to cover as much ground as possible.
“Ha!” She licked her lips with relish. “At last, you will no longer chain us down! My loyal changelings and I… will…”
The throne was empty.
She glanced around, horn simmering green. The whole throne room was empty.
Chrysalis sniffed the air. Years of watching villages and leaping out at wandering ponies had honed her senses to near perfection. A changeling who couldn’t hear a bounty hunter sneaking up on them was dead. A changeling who failed to smell the dogs on the prowl was chased down and then dead. And a changeling who never trusted her instincts was already a dead beast walking.
Her senses screamed: Trap!
Yet no traps could be seen. Her gaze and her own detection spells cast about, expecting something. Not a glimmer of magic stood out.
Her suspicion glared at the throne. The current Queen had built this one, using hardened saliva and shed skins and the stolen magics which even changelings never used, and such an aura radiated from the throne that anyone could be hiding there, camouflaged by power.
Chrysalis’ eyes narrowed at the holes all over it. Perhaps anyone could be hiding inside.
Silently, she nodded a changeling towards it. The rebel nodded back and crept over, taking six of his fellows with him.
They approached the throne as though approaching a sleeping manticore. Green light spilled out from all around.
Overhead, cocoons throbbed and pulsed under their magical work. The pony victims, dimly visible inside, squirmed.
He leapt. All six rebels leapt.
Each stared into a hole.
They looked back at her, two flashes for each horn. Nothing found.
That “Queen”… How dare she! How dare she!
Chrysalis ground her fangs together. “Rot, wither, and die! Always, you run and sneak and hide like a grubbing coward!”
“Those are called ‘tactics’,” echoed a voice. Harsh. Commanding. Yet quiet as a sword slicing cleanly through winter winds.
The voice. The voice of the Queen! At once, Chrysalis spun around. High above, tunnels led out of the throne room. It could have come from anywhere.
“Queens must consider what’s best for the hive,” continued the voice. “Have you considered what is best?”
“Where ARE you!?” Chrysalis’ glare leapt from hole to hole, ignoring the uncertain buzz growing among her fellow rebels.
Squishy sounds creased in her ears. Looking up, she spotted the tunnel entrances closing all around her. So the hive itself was on the Queen’s side. Just like she’d guessed, and feared.
The hive would not accept her, Chrysalis, as anything but an intruder now. Very well. That meant it was loyal to the Queen. The current Queen. She could yet change its mind…
“I see banishment has taught you nothing, Commander Chrysalis,” said the voice. “Oh, excuse me. Ex-Commander.”
Without a word, Chrysalis’ spire of a horn pointed her fellow rebels at the various tunnels: search everywhere.
Wings droned through the air, and savaging jaws tore chunks away from the blockages. Some of the smarter rebels lit up their horns and grunted and groaned until the blockages glowed in kind and started to shift.
There were maybe half a hundred changelings loyal to her. A force to be reckoned with, sure, but still no match for the entire hive. Everything had been riding on this sneak attack. After all, it wasn’t running and sneaking and hiding if the ultimate aim was to charge and confront and destroy.
And now she had to improvise. How could she have been so reckless? If the royalists caught her rebels before the Queen was killed…
While the rebels worked, Ex-Commander Chrysalis moved to the centre, under all the glowing and squirming cocoons. Even here, she warmed under the magic pumping their love out, making the pony victims inside twitch and spasm.
“When this is over,” she hissed, “they will call me Queen Chrysalis, Slayer of Slinks and Slivers like you. No one will even remember your name!”
“Planning to write your own chronicle?” The voice sounded impressed for a moment. “Intriguing. That would imply you have finally discovered how pens work.”
Chrysalis fought not to spit and hiss. The anger, crushed under the hooves of years and the mountains of smug smiles and withering insults and disapproving grunts from every day of every week of every month of every year of her entire life: all fought to attack something, anything. But she dimly knew that if she gave in to it, the Queen would win.
“Show yourself and fight me!” she demanded.
“I have a much greater suggestion,” replied the voice. “Why not come and challenge me? Face to face? Since you are so capable?”
The throne was right there. Nothing could stop Chrysalis from striding over and claiming it. How often had she imagined herself seated on that royal crystal of spikes and holes, barking those orders her fellow changelings needed to hear? Orders she would be honoured to give. Orders she wanted – desired – hungered to give.
But it’d never truly be hers. Like the hive, the throne rejected anyone it sensed was an enemy. Being full of a magic stolen from many nations, it wouldn’t be subtle. It wouldn’t settle for merely sealing up on her.
Even as she watched, a green sheen flashed over it. Daring her to come closer.
So it needed a strong master. Good. She was more than willing. And capable.
“You can’t hide forever!” Chrysalis cursed herself. Her anger wanted to win so badly, it was starting to overpower her desire not to lose.
“Correction: You can’t seek forever. Behold my loyal soldiers.”
Clanking armour hailed her ears.
No… Not now… Not right now…
She listened to the royal regiments marching up behind her, back up the maze and the way she’d come. Marching in lockstep, rank and file: she could tell by the synchronized timbre, by the way the hundreds of hooves harmonized. She didn’t need to look behind her. Her instincts saw through the back of her own head via her swivelling ears.
The army could see her back.
That was why she didn’t bother spinning around like some prissy dancer. She charged up the spell without giving away anything.
Behind her, the Queen’s regiments began shouting, and were cut off.
Her spell had worked?
Only then did she spin round to check. Yes! Perfect. Where the hole had been, a magical, slightly translucent wall now glowed like sunlit glass, showed her the surprised eyes beyond, and then thickened and became a solid green wall. The magical wall muffled all thumps and curses thrown at it.
Safe behind a barrier. For now.
Sure that no one could hear her, she sighed under her breath.
Pieces hit the floor around her. Chunks rained down from those tunnels where Chrysalis’ own rebels finally broke through the blockages. Yet more marching, more shadows came down them…
“Seal those tunnels!” she commanded.
Such loyalty! Lesser soldiers would have asked stupid questions like “What? Why?” or “Weren’t we supposed to open them a minute ago?”
The last wall of green magic smothered the last tunnel entrance before any of the marching royal soldiers could break through, and the last of her own rebels dimmed their horns. Buzzing wings settled down as her rebels landed all around. Waiting for orders.
Despite her first blunder, they still trusted her. Good. She had a chance to recover from this embarrassment.
Chrysalis ignored the thumps and curses from the magic wall behind her. Even if the structure of the hive itself rearranged its tunnels to get around all the green walls thus erected, the Queen’s own regiments were stuck in them at the moment. They needed to withdraw first, or else they’d get caught in the tunnel shuffle. Moving whole squadrons back wasn’t a quick task either.
Time enough yet.
She’d walked into a trap, she’d walked into a trap, how could this be, she’d walked into such an obvious trap –
Anger twisted and writhed inside her, forcing itself to turn into panic. “No –” escaped her mouth too late for her to bite down on it.
“No,” she said again, all rebel eyes beseeching her for orders. “There is a way… I have not come this far to be thwarted by a petty ruse.”
So where would a snivelling coward hide?
Perhaps…?
Wishing she could ignore the muffled thumps and curses all around, Chrysalis signalled to her rebel changelings and hurried around the throne, giving it a wide berth.
Such a monstrosity of design! The Queen must have disposed of the old, regular throne. Perverse, radical, dangerous… and so much better than anything Chrysalis could manage.
Her stomach seethed. Changelings had never needed anything but their own magic, yet the Queen had raided griffon and minotaur and ahuitzotl and unicorn and many other territories, collected as much magic as possible, and forced it together and made it work for herself, right there, in that new throne. An abomination! A betrayal of changeling principles!
And yet…
Chrysalis shook the treacherous words out of her head.
On the other side of the throne, she aimed at the wall. Her fellow rebels did likewise. The air sizzled and distorted under the collective heat.
“On my signal,” she said through gritted teeth, “lower all green wall shields and concentrate fire. Three, two, one!”
Half a hundred blasting spells rocked them backwards, barely out of the way of shattering shrapnel and flying dust. The boom gave way immediately to the fresh sounds of angry buzzing far behind as the magic walls vanished as one.
“Go!” she shouted.
The rebels shot through the blasted hole, straight into the next chamber. Chrysalis waited until the last one darted through, expecting hooves or hot spells to strike her back at any moment – There! She leapt through, spun round, saw the Queen’s regiments pouring out of every suddenly free tunnel, pushed the spell up her horn and focused.
One minute, she saw the throne room swarming and filling with glowering changelings shrieking after her. The next, a fresh green wall rose up to cover the scene.
Thumps met it on the other side. They were too angry for curses, replacing them instead with more thumps. Bits of the green wall cracked. She pushed another wall spell up, reinforcing and fixing it. A couple of her rebels joined in.
Extra thick. Good.
One of her fellow rebels hissed. All clear.
Only then did she turn around.
Eggs. Little enough to crush underfoot, the colour of parchment, the smell of chalk and fresh mint. They hung from the ceiling so thickly it had sagged and become a whole bush full of eggs. Some littered the centre of the chamber, where they’d fallen, ripe and ready to hatch.
Her place of birth.
Chrysalis hesitated. The nursery chamber. Indeed. Only now it seemed much too small and cramped, not like the old days. Why, when she’d been just another larva, the ceiling had risen for miles.
Queen Imago – the true Queen, the one who had ruled before the current traitor had replaced her and made that abominable throne – had been a dark watchtower. Chrysalis shivered to remember the column-like legs, legs with holes she herself could have crawled through. The armoured chest blotting out her world like a metal moon. The expressionless eyes, too high to reach but too fascinating to leave unexplored. And the mouth that whispered secrets in her ear –
“What are your orders, Commander?” said a rebel changeling.
It was Captain Antenna.
Hastily, Chrysalis shook the memories out of her head. Hardly anyone remembered or cared about the old Queen Imago now. Most of them had either allied with the current Queen out of fearful duty or been banished alongside Chrysalis for impudence. And Chrysalis and the current Queen had been among the last of the oldest generations too. No one else knew old Imago like they did –
Chrysalis shook again. Concentrate! Concentrate!
Honeycomb gaps lined the walls of the nursery chamber. Not enough for a changeling to squeeze through, but weak enough for a changeling to break its way through. No sign of violence, though. So…
Very, very carefully, Chrysalis stepped around the eggs of her younger brothers and sisters. She’d set out for the Queen alone. Other changelings were poor slaves and dupes, not enemies.
Her fellow rebels hovered and encircled the sagging ceiling. So they even thought like Chrysalis. Good.
The traitor… What a Queen! Hiding amongst her own children! This was low, even for her!
Yet it was clever. Chrysalis, whatever else she was, would not attack young. If she did, she wouldn’t be a changeling. Rebel, yes, but she wasn’t a traitor. The Queen was the traitor. The Queen didn’t act like a changeling should, as Chrysalis had been taught…
Pah! Did the Queen think she was stupid?
Chrysalis… veeerrry carefully… lit up her horn. Eggs growing out of the ceiling near her glowed in kind. Around her, the rebels followed her example. Soon, the whole bush glowed.
Don’t move the eggs. That would tip the Queen off, lurking inside. They’d have to move fast.
But Chrysalis had spent a lot of time in unicorn country. Her first role for the hive had been scouting, because she was fast and agile, and a scout who was slow and clumsy would soon lack a life to be slow and clumsy in.
There, she’d watched. And she’d learned. She’d learned new spells.
Still, being a changeling helped in a way.
Learning new spells was not easy. Over time, a changeling could do it in their default form. Until then, however, they needed training wheels. A more comfortable form to practice in. Even expert changelings sometimes defaulted to them as a quick aid and a boost.
Chrysalis… changed.
The unicorn that stood in her place gave a signal. The other changelings changed too. Gangrenous fire washed over them… revealing new forms. Unicorn forms.
Unicorns knew how to cast powerful magic. They were built for it. And function followed form.
Teleportation was a hard spell to master.
In a flash, she and her rebels teleported the eggs to the ground. In that brief flash between disappearing and reappearing, she and they fired.
The bush cracked, crumpled, revealing the stalactite at its core before that shattered and blew into grey clouds, which settled over the teleported eggs harmlessly.
Nothing else.
Chrysalis growled. Changed back. She’d been so sure the Queen was hiding there–
“Well, it seems you have been learning after all, little grub,” said the Queen’s voice from afar. “Not just a thug stuck in her ways. But I’ve been learning too. Regrettably, I’ve learned I must kill you first.”
The other changelings changed back too.
Green chunks smashed behind Chrysalis.
Green pieces scattered over the eggs. Chrysalis spun round in time for a hoof to smash through the green wall keeping hundreds of royal soldiers from flooding the room and crushing everything in it.
“Surrender, little grub,” said the calm confidence of the Queen.
Chrysalis froze. An impulse rose up. Hide among the eggs. Take one hostage. Be practical. If it meant not losing –
She growled until the impulse fled. No! Only traitors thought like that.
“There!” she pointed at random.
The rebel changelings magically or physically – depending on personal inclination – grabbed one of the honeycomb holes and pulled it wider. She beckoned them urgently to dive inside, grabbed the edge herself, pulled it back further, and ducked through, spinning round, lowering another green wall, ignoring the battle cries pouring in.
Then, in this new chamber, she fired at the ceiling.
Chunks and dark ooze rained down over her. Someone grabbed her from behind and threw her backwards. She tumbled, righted herself hastily, rose up onto all fours and watched the cave-in block out the honeycomb hole and the green wall plugging it. Muffled anger shouted on the other side.
Good luck getting through a cave-in as well, she thought.
Her breath was ragged, as though jagged blades stung her throat every time she gasped. Her legs weakened along the holes as fissures of exhaustion threatened to grow.
They couldn’t keep this up. This was no way to fight a Queen. If they didn’t find her soon, Chrysalis would drop dead of exhaustion.
How could it have come to this!? How could the Queen have seen them coming!?
Chrysalis heard the others hiss and turned around.
This chamber was long. It stretched into the distance. As did the bookshelves.
The effect was like finding fallen trees in a whale’s stomach. Black ooze dripped from the ceiling – Chrysalis saw the veins and arteries of the hive itself throbbing up there – and the ground underfoot sank and squelched wherever she walked. Now she noticed it, cold clung to her sides where she’d been thrown and tumbled; she ran a hoof over that side, and came away trailing a thin, oily slime, as though she’d rolled on glue.
The stomach of the hive.
Not just the hive in fact. The Hive. The Living Hive.
It was the Living Hive that surrounded her. It was the Living Hive that dwelled in the solid structures and chambers and mazes within the mountainous mound that was their home. It was the Living Hive that opened and closed tunnels on a whim.
It was the Living Hive that watched over all the individual changelings that made up the mere hive without the capital H. It was the Living Hive that observed all with fascination and interest like a baleen whale inspecting a curious diver. And it was the Living Hive that fed alongside the rest of the hive – a guardian spirit that hungered too for love.
Here, it was fed. Here too, it consumed the knowledge of its changelings. Their hopes. Their dreams. Their sweat and blood. Here, changelings had to give it everything, prove themselves by satisfying it. Befriending it. Being trusted and thus honoured by it.
Young changelings trained here. Once they had molted for the fifth year and the fifth time in their lives, changelings learned the tricks from their masters and met the Living Hive for the first, for the most wonderful, for the most awe-inspiring time in their entire lives. Here, they learned the great secrets of their home. Here, they heard the song of the Living Hive.
A gentle moan rumbled through the ground. Bits of the cave-in shuddered.
Chrysalis almost fell to her knees. A changeling never forgot their first time, hearing the Song of the Hive.
Then she quailed. Shook. Trembled with newfound outrage.
A perfectly fine teaching chamber for new changelings, and the treacherous Queen had done this to it? Bookshelves!? Foreign objects!? Sacrilege!?
Several young changelings – too white to be full adults, too advanced in shape to be larvae – watched from various reading pulpits. Many were wingless.
Books! They never had books when Queen Imago was in charge! Trust and words had been enough for any changeling!
“No one move!” Chrysalis’ horn flared warningly. “The first changeling who moves, that changeling will die!”
The young changelings cowered, ears ducking down. That was a bluff; Chrysalis had sworn upon her life that only one changeling would die today. But she could feel the aches and panic ganging up on her. The Queen should have been dead by now. The plan was unravelling.
Next to Chrysalis, one of her rebels saluted.
“What is it, Captain Antenna?” she said.
“Commander,” he whispered. “We are close to the armoury. If we keep fleeing like this, we won’t be strong enough to escape the same way we came in. Recommend we seize the enemy’s armour and stand and fight, Commander.”
Chrysalis’ heart sank. Now the script was being yanked away from her. Standing and fighting: someone – royalist, rebel, any of her changeling brothers and sisters – would be killed because of her mistake.
“Stay your course, Captain,” she replied. “I am… assessing the situation.” Buy more thinking time, that was the key to getting out of this…
She saw the disapproval in his eyes, but he saluted all the same. “Yes, Commander. Commencing our sweep, Commander.”
“As you were, then.”
Captain Antenna led the others down an aisle. Testing for traps, their spells ran along the shelves, floor, ceiling, and any young changeling they snarled at as they passed by. Chrysalis followed them, wishing she could be out in front sweeping the way. A future Queen, though, had to be kept safe at all costs. Even if it made her feel like a wretched coward to do it, duty insisted.
Yet a small part of her whispered, A good thing for me.
Angrily, she hissed until it sank back down. Some of the nearer rebels looked around, suddenly alert, until she waved them off with a curt, “False alarm. Continue!”
Overhead, the echoing voice of the Queen – the traitor – laughed, but as a noble might laugh at an amusing joke by her jester.
So the Queen knew they were coming. Even if Chrysalis and her rebels had burst their way through the hive instead of sneaking their way to the throne and then bursting in, no Queen could have been informed early enough to prepare this trap. Guards on lookout duty told the high command first – the Queen didn’t need to know about every petty invasion attempt. It only became a royal matter if the threat delved deeply enough to be spotted too close to the throne room. Even if the current Queen kept changing the rules, she couldn’t have foreseen…
Unless…
Unless she knew in advance. Had been told, say, one day before, exactly as Chrysalis rallied her rebels and planned out their sneak attack. Had been told, perhaps, by one of the very changelings here, marching among her rebels.
No. Could she think that about her own allies?
“The trouble with you, Commander – apologies, I meant Ex-Commander,” said the voice of the Queen overhead, “is that you know nothing but the joy of the hunt. You are a creature of the outside world. What makes you believe you are a Queen, meant to rest in the hive and brood children forever?”
“Queen Imago was no mere brooder!” snapped Chrysalis. Too late, she tried to stop herself talking, and then gave up. “She fought alongside her daughters!”
“Imago was a fool,” said the voice with such reasonableness that Chrysalis wanted to strangle it. “You see the books around you? Stolen from ponies and cattle and donkeys and diamond dogs and buffalo. Stolen from many more species besides. Knowledge is power. Knowledge enough to show us what we’ve been doing wrong with our power for centuries. What our role in this world must be, if we are to survive. Do you believe Imago would have led us to glory? Would you believe it still, if you knew one-tenth of what I know about Equestria’s defences?”
The Queen had said, “You see the books around you?” And in the nursery, she’d said “little grub” as though at some kind of joke. So the Queen could see them, wherever they were.
How? No one could predict this route; Chrysalis herself had just chosen randomly. Yet she was also sure her rebels had detected no other changelings, not even ones spying through holes. The magic-detection spells would have picked them up.
Far behind, the echoes of bangs told Chrysalis the cave-in was beginning to crumble. The education chamber, the aisle, the walking never seemed to end. Where were they going, anyway?
She smelled the fear among her ranks. Hoping she didn’t smell like that to them, Chrysalis glanced at the books on either side. More abominations. Changelings didn’t need written words to tell them how to be changelings! These shelves were intruders! Why didn’t the Living Hive itself spit them out?
Black drops pattered her chitinous shell. The place wasn’t even built for reading! She remembered Queen Imago drilling them in here, making them fly to one end and back, dodging as many black drops as they could, while all around them the Living Hive rumbled and sang and oozed and digested the love they’d stolen from other countries. Here, the Living Hive itself – the walls and the floor and the ceiling – fed alongside its young changelings. Fed and shared their bond through their collective feast. Fed on love. Fed on knowledge.
The same knowledge. Over and over.
It was stupid.
Far behind, the echoes of bangs changed. Cries of rage followed. A changeling royalist had broken through! She and her rebels hurried their steps without a word.
But Queen Imago had taught Chrysalis here, taught her about the glory of the hive, and the care of the hive, and how to use healing herbs, and how to regrow a lost limb, and how to kill without magic, and a million other things that she could take out into the world as a shield to wield against the ponies who wanted her dead.
It was here she’d graduated from scout to grappler. Grapplers took over; once the scouts told their fellow changelings what a town was like, the grapplers ate that knowledge and digested it. Then they went after the targets.
True, there were official ranks in the royal army. Private, Corporal, Captain, and so on up to Commander. But there were more informal roles too. The ones changelings knew and idolized. Scout. Grappler. Legends in their own lifetimes. Heroes in ancient stories told by Queen Imago.
Chrysalis had burst with pride on her first grappling; she’d wrestled her first unicorn to the ground, out in the woods, where he’d been alone, and had taken his form and cocooned him and sucked him dry and strode back to the town and…
Puzzled the other unicorns. Fumbled her excuses. Forgotten to keep her hunger in check when his son had come to hug her. Been found out. Fled. Fought. Took a blow. Fled for her life.
And she’d come back here, where Queen Imago heard her terrified story and then simply laughed. An excellent start! Every changeling got it wrong first time. The secret, Imago whispered in her ear, was to learn from it. Grow stronger. Grow… not smarter, because useless smarts made you stupid, but more cunning. More ruthless. More efficient, for even this botched attempt had brought back precious food to share, and if she got better, she’d bring more food next time.
Yes, Queen Imago had been magic. She’d turned a newbie’s miserable failure into a triumph. Chrysalis had champed at the bit to get back out there and prove herself properly…
Whereas the new Queen, the traitor, taught them how to use mind spells on each other. Insubordination, in a hive!? To doubt your own side was to not be a changeling. She…
She wouldn’t…
Would she? But then, anyone who thought about spies all day might just try it…
Chrysalis suddenly glared at the rebels around her.
“Halt!” she barked.
As one, the changelings about-turned.
“Captain Antenna?” Chrysalis watched him scurry forwards and salute.
“Commander!” he said.
Carefully, she peered into his eyes. Nothing except the usual purple. To his credit, he didn’t even blink.
Good.
Leaning close, she whispered in his ear, “There’s a spy among us.”
He didn’t flinch. She’d taught him well enough to keep his emotions in check.
“What are your orders, Commander?” he whispered back.
“Inspect the eyes. Someone is letting the Queen use their eyes.”
“Commander?”
Impatience flashed through her. “Only a changeling has eyes here. And the Queen taught us this: some spying spells only work if the changeling gives their consent. She spies on us, Captain. I don’t intend to let her spy any longer.”
“What shall I do, Commander?”
“Prepare the vice spell. I’ll signal you. You’ll know it when you see it.” Then she straightened up, glaring at the assembled company of nervous faces. “None of you move! Don’t even blink!”
One by one, she glanced from eye to eye, while behind the rank, Captain Antenna moved into position. His horn glowed, ready and waiting.
Blue eye, blue eye… blue eye, blue eye…
Far behind, a buzzing closed in. At least one of the Queen’s soldiers must have spotted them. Time, time, why was there never enough time!? Blue eye, blue eye… blue, blue… blue, blue, blue, blue, blue-green, blue-green, blue, blue…
Aha.
She glanced back. The seventh one along. She had a tiny green spot within each eye.
“Corporal Blattodea?” said Chrysalis.
“Yes, Commander?”
She even had the gall to use her title! Chrysalis bent closer.
“Say hello to the Queen for me,” she hissed.
Corporal Blattodea reacted too late. Whatever spell she’d built up shot over Chrysalis’ shoulder just as Chrysalis ducked and seized her and held her aloft. Behind Chrysalis, the buzzing yelped and stopped. One of the Queen’s soldiers had come too close at the wrong moment.
Captain Antenna shot forwards, spiralling around the struggling corporal until they were a green blur, pausing, and then spiralling again until the cocoon became completely solid.
And Chrysalis dropped it as though handling a severed limb. “I’m not interested in your reasons, Corporal. But I hope you prove more cooperative when the new world order is upon you. I have no use for treachery among my ranks.”
She was shaking. A spy, even among her own! Chrysalis was a rebel, yes, but she’d been open about defying the Queen up until banishment. She’d spoken loudly and clearly. This was… this was a dastard’s trick!
Books and spying and trickery and mind games. Queen Imago would turn in her grave, if anyone had found all the bits of her and buried them together. This was no way to rule fellow changelings.
“Commander!” Another of her changelings pointed.
Chrysalis turned to see the army flooding towards them.
The black tidal wave threatened to crash over her. Over everything she’d worked for.
Rage shot up. Rage, and joy, the sheer joy of imagining the treacherous Queen’s face when she got a chance to do this.
Flames sickened the shelves, infected the air, oozed over the books. The army fought not to fly right into it. Covers crackled. Pages blackened. Smoke rose up, overwhelming the royal soldiers who coughed and buzzed and cried out in confusion.
Hungry for more, Chrysalis fired again, at the bottom shelves. Books exploded. Pages flew. Groaning, the shelves on one side began to fall.
Only then did Chrysalis wake up.
“Down, down!” she yelled.
She aimed her horn down, fired, closed her eyes against the splattering black drops, and jumped into the gaping hole.
All around her, the Living Hive screamed.
Even as the shelf of books collapsed over the hole, even as burning books rained down all around her, even as Chrysalis shuddered and stumbled where she’d landed in the chamber below, the Living Hive screamed harder. It moaned and pleaded and broke itself over and over with each octave shattered and each decibel torn apart. She’d wounded the Hive. She had to, but she’d wounded the Living Hive.
“You spying wretch!” shrieked her anger. “You’ll pay for this! I’ll make you pay for all this foul corruption!”
Around her, the other rebels had jumped down too. They coughed and spluttered. Some rolled out flames clinging to their backs. Others brushed comrades who were blackened with ash. A few limped.
To her relief, she saw Captain Antenna beat out the flames on his mane and salute her. “All present –” he coughed a puff of smoke out of his mouth “– all present and correct, Commander!”
“And Corporal Blattodea?” she said.
He coughed again. “All true rebels present and correct, Commander!”
Chrysalis glanced up. The bookshelf had fallen flat over the hole. No sign of obstruction remained. Those shelves had been storeys tall.
Blattodea…
A traitor, yes. But still a changeling. Brainwashed and misled. If only she’d been given the right leadership?
No, this was where everything had gone wrong. Changelings against changelings? They’d never thought like that before. The new Queen poisoned everything with her mind.
So where were they now?
Chrysalis sniffed the air. Then she sniffed again, because too much happened in her nose all at once. Vinegar… and lavender? Golden tints crossed with iron blood? And… another sniff… Cherries twined between old cheese and rotten eggs?
Then she glanced around.
Oh no.
Either side of her, the walls had splotches spaced out among them. Each splotch glowed, some red, some white, many flexed under hues and shades of all kinds. It was as if someone had melted rainbows, mixed them with paints, and thrown bucketfuls of the stuff against the wall before enchanting them to shift and swirl.
It was a new chamber, not included in the old hive. All the walls and ceilings and floors squared off instead of curving naturally. Everything that wasn’t flat was a corner, or an edge. Chrysalis grimaced at the sight.
Square rooms, neatly organized into galleries: that was pony thinking.
The gallery wasn’t there to be looked at, though.
Chrysalis sniffed again, and her nose met strawberries and cinnamon, dancing and tingling along her nostrils before a needle of spice hit her.
The Smell Galleries.
Queen Imago would never have approved. Art wasn’t for changelings. They didn’t need to tell the world what it wasn’t. They just needed to feed. Smearing the walls was a waste of time and valuable energy.
Yet as she passed, Chrysalis sniffed, and strange visions rose up in her mind. Visions of summer, where the bluebells blossomed and rotted under the oaks raining pollen. Dead logs, full of the wet stench of slugs and the crackling little tingles of crawling insects – useful snacks for a changeling, if love was in short supply, but not particularly rich or tasty. After all, insects hardly felt anything, much less love.
This was insane. She was in the hive, a place no insect or bluebell would dare to be found. Smells were supposed to tell a scout or a grappler what was out there, what they could do about it, what was real. Why make the smells lie?
“Chrysalis,” said the voice of the Queen, perfectly calm and collected. “I see you remember your training from the old days. You can be so much more intelligent than this. Why persist in being a throwback?”
Chrysalis threw all caution to the winds and raced through the galleries. She tried not to smell anything, held her breath at first, but the aches spiked her limbs and the smoke clung to her lungs and she had to snort and suck the air if she wasn’t to drop dead, and then they came all at once.
Smells flashed past, carrying tales of sweat and fear and strange things that tried to force her mind not to think, but to feel, to act like she was in a swamp, then a city, then a gas-filled cave. Gag reflexes fought urges to flee, which scrabbled against the survivalist’s freeze response to a dangerous scent, which in turn held fast against the scent of a superior, pheromones forcing her muscles to slow and stop and bow.
She gave up, gasping, shepherded between too many colours. Her head wanted to vomit, her stomach wanted to spin. Up was down, darkness was light, the ground under her hooves threw her back to the ceiling. She willed herself to overcome it.
“What are you doing to me?” Chrysalis demanded.
“Nothing you haven’t done to yourself. You don’t learn, Chrysalis. You don’t adapt quickly enough.”
“I outsmarted you!” Chrysalis almost threw up, but that wouldn’t do for a future Queen. Something trickled out of the side of her mouth.
Weakly, she added, “I found your spy.”
“A temporary setback. Do you think I’d settle for only one means of spying on you? I had a second pair of eyes cloaked and watching, just in case you found out poor Corporal Blattodea.”
“I won’t lose! I can’t lose! Not to the likes of you!” Where was the Queen? Over there, in those shadows that hadn’t been there a moment ago – no, they were gone now. Or over there, where the meadow and the bakery – the smells of the meadow and the bakery came to her.
She was going to die, she was going to die, she was going to die…
“You killed Imago!” Chrysalis shook and slapped her own head, forcing the smells and their worlds to make sense.
“I had to. Queening isn’t what it used to be, Chrysalis. We can’t simply wait for the next changeling to retire and let the Commander take over. That’s a stupid rule. It means the prize goes to the biggest muscle, not the smartest brain.”
“You killed her! I would have at least let her live, if I’d ever wanted to be Queen. That’s our tradition, you worm!”
Somewhere among the papery smells of Fillydelphia’s streets and the feathery choke of Griffonstone’s nesting place, she heard the Queen sigh as though at a backwards pupil.
“But you killed her!” shrieked Chrysalis.
“Listen. I’ve been watching our hive for a long time, Chrysalis, since long before you were even born. I saw how the world saw us. I looked for other hives and found nothing. Then the truth came to me: We were going to drive ourselves extinct. Because we do the same things over and over, and we expect that to keep working. Imago never thought about that.”
“Liar! Imago knew every trick in the book. But she trusted you, and you killed her!” Chrysalis clung to the statement, because if she didn’t, the voice would sweep her mind away. Reason threatened to drown her on all sides. The voice was reason. But it belonged to a traitor who killed.
“Imago knew the small tricks. She was a genius in that area, I grant you. What she didn’t see was the bigger picture. Our place in the world. Have you ever heard the term ‘sustainable ecology’? I hadn’t, until I infiltrated a library. Before then, I believed Imago too. I believed we were the dominant species.”
“We are!” Chrysalis closed her eyes and covered her nose. How was she supposed to think? Her mind kept thinking she was in fifteen different places all at once, and every new smell threw her across the world until she landed in a bog or on a hill, or in the middle of a fortress full of iron.
“Then why are we the last of the great hives? I built that throne to protect us from as much magic as I could find. If we die, the ‘dominant species’ dies with us. So we must adapt! We must learn from the ponies, and other species too.”
Chrysalis fought against the doubts invading her mind. Hadn’t she secretly noticed that too? Hadn’t she asked Queen Imago about it once, when she’d been promoted to Commander and had finally felt brave enough to try?
Imago had squirmed. She’d just repeated the old mantras. We are the dominant species. Changelings were meant to rule. One day, we will triumph.
They were dying. Chrysalis knew why she was one of the last of her brood. Almost everyone else had been found out, or made mistakes, or gotten lost. The old ways were all she knew, and they were killing her.
Chrysalis was too tired to reply. She was going to die. She’d barely believed it when this rebellion started, but as soon as she saw the throne room empty of Queen, the belief had crept up on her mind. And now her mind was everywhere, breaking her across Equestria and beyond, and somewhere in all that, she was going to die.
“I should be on that throne…” she managed to blurt out. “It’s my right! I earned it! Not you! Runt! Has-been! Stay-at-home fool! You were just a wet-nurse to grubs!”
“It’s over, Chrysalis.”
“NO!”
“It’s over. Your fellow rebels will not be harmed. They can be re-educated. But I see now you are beyond hope. Perhaps it will comfort you in your dying moments to know I am planning to send a message to Princess Celestia, announcing our surrender.”
Chrysalis’ mind fell away, pulled in too many directions at once –
Leaving rage. Leaving pride. Leaving the beast.
She snorted out every confusing smell. She was in the gallery. The square walls, the odd colours, the lying smells – WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
“Surrender!” she screeched. “Surrender!?”
“It is for the best. We will need love, but I am sure the princess can be reasoned with and we can come to a mutually beneficial –”
“SURRENDER!?”
“Commander Chrysalis?”
She met the relieved gazes of her rebels, who flew into the gallery and joined her. Captain Antenna led the force.
Chrysalis held the beast back just long enough to say, “Where is she?”
“Below us, Commander! We widened our detection spells. There’s definitely a presence in the chamber below us.”
“You’re sure?”
“Affirmative!” Captain Antenna saluted.
Chrysalis seized him and glared into his eyes. Nothing but purple. It was too late to check the others.
“Who detected this presence?” she barked.
“I did,” said Captain Antenna, squirming in her grip. “Shall we charge, Commander?”
Chrysalis held her breath. The beast wanted so much to charge right in, but the rest of her didn’t forget the confusion of smells. She’d always been the keenest of the changelings under Queen Imago’s rule, right down to her nose. But Imago had taught her: never let the nose lead. Noses could be wrong. A changeling trusted her senses, true, and then she did the leading for them.
Besides, in the distance she could hear buzzing wings closing in. The army would not be long.
“Self-cocoon, now!” she shouted.
As one, her little army and she faced outwards in a circle, mouths bubbling over. Heat oozed up her own throat, joining the blood rushing down her own horn to meet and froth behind her mouth.
She belched out a river of sparkling green. As the emerald width of the falling water splashed on the ground, it rose up as though filling an invisible mould. Other rivers rose up around her. The rebels piled up the stuff, Chrysalis tilted her head back, and she aimed her jet of changeling ooze. Soon, the rising mould met at the top, sealing them inside a pure green dome.
No one could see in or out. She glanced down at the ground beneath her hooves and scanned it instantly. Whatever presence lurked below, it wasn’t near enough. Perhaps it could sense vibrations, though? After all, some wet-nurses learned to detect the tiniest rumbles when dealing with thousands of little bellies and little mouths.
“Whisper,” she commanded.
Captain Antenna nodded. Quietly, he said, “Permission to speak, Commander?”
“Yes?”
He saluted again. “She’ll be expecting an attack, and with all due respect, you need your strength back.”
“My strength is fine!” Chrysalis rose, overbalanced, and stumbled. Some of the smells still tugged at the edges of her brain.
“With all due respect, Commander. Only remember the Maulwurf campaigns in the Badlands? Remember when they had us blocked in one of their tunnels and we couldn’t break through without them chasing us?”
“No.” She pulled him closer, despite his cowering eyes. “Wait. Yes, I remember. That was weeks ago. Well?”
“Might I make a suggestion, Commander?”
“You!?” Chrysalis seized the beast rising up and she forced it back down. Her pride wanted to make the plans. This was her rebellion! She’d got to get them out of there, or what kind of a Queen would she be?
Hooves and horns struck at the cocoon around them. Muffled again, as before, but this close the noise made half the rebels jump.
On the other hoof – however much Chrysalis fought against the idea – Captain Antenna had years’ worth and countries’ worth of fighting and spell-casting on his side. And hadn’t Queen Imago once said that out in the field, it was never a bad idea to listen to what others had found, in case you found it too?
Some of the dome began to crack.
Chrysalis realized she was holding him by the neck, and she let him go as graciously as she could without overbalancing again. “Very well. What do you –?”
Then she remembered to whisper.
“What do you propose?” she whispered.
“Listen carefully, Commander.”
And as she did so, she saw what she wanted to see: Captain Antenna, his smile breaking through, his purple eye gleaming with the malicious joy of the hunt. A true changeling’s eyes.