Confined to darkness, cramped but not daring to move, Queen Argent waited.
She was not in a tunnel. All the ventilation tunnels – the air tubes of the hive – eventually ended up here.
Inside, the core of the hive was where all the chambers and rooms were nestled safe. Outside, a thick wall of congealed changeling mass protected them from their enemies. In between, there lay the honeycomb labyrinth.
A honeycomb layer that ran like a padded blanket around the margin of the cone-shaped hive. Insulating. Warm. And the perfect hiding place.
Every scent, every trace of magic ever cast, even every sound: all of them soon came through the honeycomb labyrinth. Here, the Living Hive breathed out, and pushed out everything. Fresh air would then be breathed in through the pores or through secret back tunnels elsewhere to replace it.
If a changeling was patient, they could wait here and detect everything that happened, wherever it happened in the hive.
If they were smart, they could throw their voice through the tubes.
Argent hadn’t started out smart. She’d seen the great libraries of her enemies. She’d resolved to become smart.
Her horn felt the slight shake of magic in the air as, a few combs away, Chrysalis reappeared. Teleportation spell. Took her long enough.
Argent steadied her breathing. There would be no pleasure in this, she told herself. Nevertheless, her face grinned. Sheer overexposure to this hunt was making her adapt to it. She was finding pleasure in this grim duty after all.
She crept closer.
In the distance, she heard the hammering and retching of changeling repair workers. The honeycomb labyrinth broke easily, but changelings took great care of the one thing keeping their hive fresh and aerated.
“Leave!” commanded Chrysalis. “You’re in danger! Flee!”
Hidden in the dark, Argent’s eyes held back the risk of tears. Danger? From her, the Queen? She hadn’t meant to hold that cleaner hostage. It had been a bluff, she insisted. Anyway, her life had been threatened. Chrysalis would have killed her, she knew. Too much hatred. Too emotional for her own good. Such reckless use of the Suicidal Sting – inside the hive no less! – proved enough.
With relief, she heard the workers buzz away. Chrysalis had the voice of a Queen, to her credit. Argent herself felt a slight twinge in her knees and wings.
Instead, she crept on.
Poor Chrysalis sneaked around a few combs below, completely ignorant, and precisely where her scent caught on the current blowing up to Argent’s hiding place. The rage burned through her nostrils as Argent sniffed quietly at the scent. Rage… and the sweat of too much pain suffered. A zap of fear. And… rotting sadness. Even Chrysalis knew she was a dead soul walking. The nurse in Argent pitied her but kept quiet.
At least Chrysalis was sneaking now. So the thug could learn too.
Then Chrysalis disappointed her; she spoke.
“Argent!” she cried through the combs. “You miserable wretch! You won’t use my fellow changelings as mere pawns again! Show yourself! Let’s settle this one on one!”
Rolling her eyes, Argent crept closer. Her magic detector, her sense of smell, the sound of Chrysalis’ voice: all told her the prey was just a few yards below. Behind that bit of comb.
Well, if that was how it was going to be…
“Very well,” she said, loudly but not too loudly: Chrysalis would suspect an obvious trap. “Since the great hunter of ponies must surely have no problem finding one lonely changeling.”
Then she scuttled behind another comb nearby and listened. Scuffing hooves: her prey climbed up, heading right for the spot where Argent had spoken. Clever tracking. Stupid tactics.
She could almost see Chrysalis’ silhouette on the other side of this comb she hid behind, see her rising into view. Not that she actually could. Only the other senses fed her imagination with what it needed to guess.
A few more feet.
Shimmering, Argent raised her green sword.
It wasn’t iron. Iron resisted magic, but when Chrysalis’ sword had swung towards her, Argent hadn’t bothered using magic directly. She’d used a proxy. Sheer heat spells focusing on her defensive sphere like an overheated amoeba had done the job. Heat was heat.
Problem was that iron also resisted heat; melting and bending it enough to break could sap the energy clean out of a changeling. The cold presence had confused her mind. So she’d hidden, and thus waited for her strength to return.
Enough to summon a new weapon. A sword conjured entirely from magic. No earthy, heavy metal with its cumbersome physicality. Just clean cutting power, the essence of blade.
She’d summoned it early, well before Chrysalis had even teleported close. Magic conjurations would tip her enemy off if she was close enough to sense it. Even a dullard like Chrysalis would notice the shift in the texture of the air.
Argent would have preferred to slash with her own horn – a horn was just a long, sharp thing, at the end of the day – but that required getting close. She didn’t want Chrysalis up close.
So she backed off slightly, aimed where she thought the heart was going to be in a few creeping seconds –
Noticed Chrysalis falter.
Had she realized?
Suddenly, Argent sensed something. Magical attention. Through the comb.
On her!
Panicking, Argent stabbed!
The glowing green sword cut right through the comb, but no blood flecked it as she pulled it out. Chrysalis was already scrambling away.
Curses! The devil had spotted the trap in time!
Fury pushed Argent through. She slashed, caught a retreating leg. Heard the scream of Chrysalis in pain rake her ear to the nub.
Stabbed! Stabbed! Stabbed again! Slashed!
All missed.
Argent chased the retreating shape.
Something green shimmered on a comb as she rushed past it. Blood! Chrysalis was wounded. Now! She couldn’t get away now!
Chrysalis fled upwards, through narrower and narrower gaps between the combs. She shouted and swore as she went, flecks of green dripping behind her and almost plopping into Argent’s eyes. Up ahead, other worker changelings cried out and buzzed out of sight.
As Argent followed, slashing at Chrysalis’ tail, she spotted green sparks flailing around the cut in the wounded leg. Healing spells. Well, healing wasn’t going to save Chrysalis. What a fool! To have blundered into such an obvious trap, blinded by her own pride, as if Argent was stupid enough to just reveal her location. And then to waste her restored magic immediately on a healing spell –
Then Chrysalis flipped round and fired.
But Argent thought quicker. Moved quicker.
The hot spells bounced off her protective sphere and smashed into the combs on either side.
Whatever confidence had stayed Chrysalis for that last attack vanished: Chrysalis had enough experience to know how advanced the defensive spells of grapplers could be. She’d wisely chosen to flee.
Then the debris smothered everything.
Dust bloomed from the smashed combs on either side. Argent waved the plumes aside using the flat of her sword. Dratted things! She couldn’t see what was going on.
So she fell back on the other senses. Chrysalis’ magical signature had faded slightly – after all, Argent was below her this time, upwind as it were, and the changeling was running away – but her smell left a slight trace on top of all the other ones funnelled up this high. Fear, and sharp pain on the scent.
Argent followed it.
She left the sphere spell on. If Chrysalis tried another magical attack, she’d be ready for it.
As she climbed, however, Argent found it harder and harder to focus on Chrysalis. Sight was near-impossible in the tight spaces as the combs narrowed nearer the peak, and bright light shone down to blind her. Smells from all over the hive converged up here in total confusion. So did magical traces. All her effort was spent focusing on the retreating locus of power that was Chrysalis fleeing for her life. A few flecks of sparkling blood showed the way.
Soon, they’d be at the chimney. A chokepoint.
Argent frowned.
A trick. It had to be.
She readied the green sword.
It all ended in seconds. Time slowed. Everything became magnified in importance. History held its breath.
Chrysalis shot out of the chimney at the peak of the hive.
A few shots of magic singed her tail as she darted around and landed on the side, out of view. Argent had gotten impatient.
Sparks of magic fled desperately from Chrysalis’ horn to the green gash on her back leg. She panted under the effort. Changing into a pegasus would have been faster and easier, not to mention it would have made her far more agile, but she didn’t want to lose Argent.
All the breath of the hive boiled the quivering air above her. Every puff of life came out here.
Horn aglow, Chrysalis had ducked down north of the chimney’s hole.
So she shimmied east.
Then she stopped sending out sparks to her leg. The “gash”, the “wound”, the fake “blood” faded like tricks of the light. There was no wound. Chrysalis had merely faked the pain. Faked the blood. Faked the healing spells too.
She held the locus of all her power on the tip of her horn, and then made as if to give it to another changeling.
Held it there, on the east side. Left it planted there.
Shimmied south.
And Argent shot out of the hole, slashed down, impaled the glowing green dot on the east side.
Turned south immediately, suspecting a trick. Just as Chrysalis shimmied west.
Chrysalis lunged.
Horn first.
Her head juddered. Flesh and bone squished, tore, cracked, wrenched itself, and then went suddenly limp, all in the blink of an eye.
No earthy metal. No magic. At the end of the day, a horn was just a long, sharp thing.
Time sped up. Returned to normal. History relaxed.
After the weight became unbearable, Chrysalis braced her hoof against Argent’s shoulder and tugged her horn free. Not cleanly. Argent’s head broke off and tumbled down, down, down the slope to the rocks far below. Argent’s body – everything below the neck – slid back inside the chimney.
She heard it thump and rattle for a long time, sounds blown up to her by the breath of the hive, until the distant patter died away.
Only then did she summon her magic back to herself. The shock of return made her gasp.
Long live the Queen.
She almost said it. But Chrysalis found no energy left to gloat. She could barely stand upright.
Instead, she stood on the peak of the hive and surveyed the domain around her. The sunset bled through the sky. The forests hid their nightly dangers from her. The circle of dead stone around her hive showed where the changelings had, hidden on this tiny dot of the world, taken back something of their lives and claimed a home in defiance of the rest of creation.
Up here, the winds blew from Equestria.
If she squinted, she could pretend that country waited for her on the horizon. Lurking, looming, a dark tidal wave coming.
It didn’t matter that she planned to meet it on its own waters. The tidal wave was always there in her mind. She held her breath just thinking about it.
Chrysalis felt numb.
This wasn’t exhaustion. She’d felt that before. Exhaustion was where you wanted to go on but found nothing to travel on. This felt like a complete loss of everything: wanting things, having somewhere to go, travelling under any kind of steam. She looked inside herself, but there was no name. There was no story where she fitted in. There was barely a hive out here to stop her mind from expanding into oblivion. There was just her body, an empty husk, about to fall over.
Something surfaced, though.
A flicker of pride.
Queen Imago’s memory, beaming.
Before Imago had died, she’d rewarded Chrysalis the highest honour: the role of assassin.
That was who she was! Scouts were just test cases. Grapplers were backup thugs. But assassins topped them all. They became legends among legends.
Assassins went out in secret to eliminate the worst enemies that menaced the hive. Anything that threatened the hive but was too difficult to just grapple aside or run away from, the assassin had to face it. No exceptions. Assassins had no truck with exceptions. They did every job they got, or they gave up the title.
So they had to be cautious, and they had to be cunning, and best of all they had to not only tolerate their dangerous work, but to delight in it. An assassin lived to see a crucial job satisfactorily done. They had to love it. Embrace it. Feed on it. Breathe it. Only the most devoted and skilled of all changelings could be trusted as assassins. Almost always, they went on to become Queen.
The highest honour.
By the time the first changelings found her, Chrysalis had watched the sun fall and die. She hadn’t smiled once.