The news came late in the afternoon, after another routine day for Raptor and Plague and an increasingly anxious one for me. We’d gathered in the royal bedroom as per habit, and were discussing the events of the day when Plague noticed a slight glow coming from one of the drawers in Shining’s nightstand. She went to investigate.
“The communicator scarabs are glowing,” she announced.
“The hive tried to reach us?” Raptor asked. “When? Did something happen?”
“How would I know?”
“It could be that they were simply trying to answer our own hail,” I suggested.
“We should hail them back! First that thing in the morning, and now this… I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, it’s close enough to our normal reporting time anyway,” I agreed. “Might as well do it now.”
This time, we succeeded.
“Where have you been?” Psycho barked from the communicator bubble. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day!”
“We’ve been doing our mission, Psycho, for hive’s sake! What’s so important that you have to whine all of a sudden?”
“Forget the mission! You have to come back to the hive! Drop everything and get here right now - don’t even bother covering your tracks or making excuses to the ponies! Your supports are already halfway here!”
“Whoa, hold up… what’s gotten into Chrysalis? She’s spent too much effort in making this go smoothly, she wouldn’t just-”
“That’s just it,” he interrupted me. “Chrysalis has been overthrown this morning.”
What?! Of all the things I might have expected to hear…
“Come again?” I couldn’t have heard that right! But I must have; why else would Raptor and Plague have jumped out of their carapaces just now?
“You heard me,” Psycho said. “By order of the new king, all missions, ongoing or pending, are cancelled as of hours ago!”
We had a king now? Who would have dared to oppose the Queen? And succeeded?
“Who is this king?”
“Just get here,” he repeated and ended the connection.
Raptor, Plague, and I looked at one another. The news had caught us completely off guard; regardless of how I felt about her lately, Chrysalis had been the only leader the changelings had ever had, she’d led the hive through good times and bad, through every challenge imaginable, never giving up to failures and setbacks, always prevailing one way or another! She’d been the one constant in our lives; no matter what happened, we’d always known she would be there to get us through it, and the iron hoof of her reign had been a small price to pay for her experience and cunning!
And now, she was gone. Whether dead, imprisoned, or exiled, she’d fallen at the hooves of someling crazy enough to oppose her, crazy enough to dare to call himself king! How had he done it? Hadn’t our soldiers tried to stop him? Had he defeated them too? Or had he won them over to his side? And how? What had he been trying to accomplish, anyway? Surely he couldn’t have been so foolish to think he could best Chrysalis at being the leader!
Was he even a changeling?
He had to be, I decided. How else would he have managed to get in and come so close to Chrysalis? There would have been an epic battle otherwise, and Psycho would have said so!
Unless… had the battle been so horrible that even Psycho couldn’t bring himself to discuss the rivers of changeling blood spilled in a futile attempt to protect the hive?
“This can’t be true,” Plague muttered eventually.
“What do we do now?” Raptor asked.
“We go back,” I said after a moment. “I don’t see what choice we have.”
“What about the mission? We can’t just leave! The ponies will figure out what we’ve done and we won’t be able to come back!”
“What makes you so sure that we’re coming back at all?” Plague asked. “Without Chrysalis-”
“Forget what Psycho said!” Raptor snapped at her. “I’ll deal with this so-called king and help Chrysalis reclaim the throne if it’s the last thing I’ll do!”
“And how will you do that, exactly? Chrysalis is… was… whatever… extremely powerful and still got overthrown, therefore this king must be even more powerful than her! How do you propose to stand up against him?”
“Enough, both of you,” I groaned. “Raptor, your loyalty to Chrysalis is admirable, and Plague, you have a point, but that’s not enough to go on, and Psycho didn’t exactly share any useful information, either, and something tells me trying to hail him again won’t accomplish anything. If we want to figure this out, it looks like we’ll have to go to the hive like he told us to, see with our own eyes what the situation is like, and then plan accordingly.”
“So, what, we just drop everything and disappear? Suppose the crystal ponies get wise to our scheme and attack the hive? We don’t even know how many of our soldiers this new king killed or incapacitated in order to get to Chrysalis! We could find ourselves overwhelmed despite the throne’s magic-disabling field!”
I considered this. He was right; why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Okay, we’ll invent some kind of emergency in Ponyville, keep it vague if anypony asks, and we’ll pretend to go there. When’s the next train running?”
“We should be able to catch the last one for the day,” Plague said, “but we don’t have time to check the supports’ cave before we leave, and we certainly can’t pick up any gear they might have left behind.”
“Then we’ll leave it. Who knows, it might turn out to be a good thing that they’ve left some equipment behind, assuming they have left it. Less stuff to carry back if this works.”
We caught the train just barely in time. The ponies had been surprised by our sudden departure, but none of them had pressed for details, and Cadance’s aide had promised to keep the Empire in check until we returned. Plague had drawn some curious glares, though, and it occured to me too late that Cadance and Shining Armor would have left Flurry Heart in the care of her foalsitters rather than take her with them into a potentially dangerous situation. It was too late to change anything about our retreat by then, though, and all we could do now was hope this oversight wouldn’t give us away.
We sat together in a half-empty train car, each of us lost in thought. Even Plague didn’t bother to act like a foal anymore. Would the ponies find it weird? Or would they pick up on Raptor’s and mine sullen mood and assume the same was the case with our alleged daughter? Would they try to cheer us up? I hoped not; though their efforts might give us some love to snack on, interfering ponies were the last thing I needed right now!
Raptor and Plague shared glances every now and then. What were they thinking about? Our mission? Its uncertain future? The state the hive might be in when we get there? Their failure to trick me into showing what I knew about Thorax being here while they still had a chance?
Thorax. The thought sent a painful stab through my heart.
If only I knew who this new king was, I wished. What was his agenda? Would he continue where Chrysalis had left off, or would he start anew? Would her enemies become his enemies as well? Would he demand that all debts owed to Chrysalis were now owed to him?
Would he see Thorax as a traitor and insist on his punishment? Or could he be convinced to drop the matter?
Had he already gotten hold of him? Killed him?
And what about me? Was I walking - riding, whatever - to my death too?
I cast a long, heavy glance through the window of the train car, at the Crystal Empire about to disappear on the horizon.
Goodbye, Thorax, if you’re still alive, and be safe out there. Some day, maybe, I’ll find you.
And if you’re dead, please forgive me - I should have protected you!
The train kept going as darkness fell onto the world.
We got off the train in Ponyville, adapted our disguise when nopony was looking, and boarded an early train to Appleloosa, one of the southernmost towns in Equestria with a train station. Sun was up by the time we arrived there, and the ponies were out and about, but none of them paid us any attention as we trotted further south, through the wasteland and into the jungle.
Once there, out of the ponies’ sight, we dropped our disguises altogether and took to the air as fast as our wings could take us.
We flew in silence for a long while, until Raptor finally spoke up.
“Who’s raising the sun now?” he asked.
“Of all the things to worry about…” Plague retorted with an eye roll.
“I’m serious! Chrysalis took it up after capturing Celestia, but now that she’s been overthrown… maybe even killed…” He shuddered. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sun and the moon went up and down much more smoothly last evening and this morning than when Chrysalis was doing it!”
“I see,” she mused. “You think the king’s doing it now?”
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “And if he is, then he’s got to be really, really powerful to do it that easily! Either that, or Celestia and Luna have managed to escape somehow and could already be back in Canterlot, telling their army what happened. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse!”
“Whichever it is, we’re about to find out,” I interjected, pointing at the edge of the jungle and the barren wasteland that lay beyond, and our hive towering on the horizon. “We’re almost there.”
When we got closer, I noticed something was odd about the hive. It took me a minute to realize what: the central spire was shorter, as if Chrysalis’ castle had been blown up! No, it was blown up: the roof of the throne room was gone, and the current roof had once been the floor of the throne room, if not the floor of one of the lower levels of the castle!
Must have been quite a battle, indeed. I shuddered at the thought.
Closer still, we saw another thing that was new: a large number of creatures, insectoid in appearance much like ourselves, only colorful like ponies, with fancy wings and tails, lacking the fangs and leg holes, and… acting… friendly?
Were these the warriors that had defeated us? They didn’t look at all menacing; on the contrary, if I’d seen them anywhere else, I would have thought them to be utterly harmless! I might have even captured some of them to feed on!
And it would have been a feast, I realized. Love radiated from them in droves, not as strong as the love in the Crystal Empire, but no weaker than the love of any earth pony, unicorn, or pegasus on the happiest day of their life!
Weirder still, they were mingling with the few changelings in sight, and the changelings weren’t fighting back; they didn’t seem to be furious, frightened, or threatened at all!
The three of us exchanged glances. What had happened here? None of us understood! This wasn’t the kind of behavior one would expect from belligerent sides!
We were almost at the hive when a changeling and one of the mysterious creatures flew up to meet us.
“You’re back sooner than I expected,” Psycho said.
“Never mind that!” I snapped. “What’s going on? What are these things?”
“They’re changelings,” he said with an amused smile.
I stared at him. Changelings? Our own kind? Well, if they were in disguise… but why would they have disguised themselves at all in the hive, especially as something this ridiculous? Such beings didn’t even exist, for hive’s sake!
“Why do they all look like that?” I asked finally.
“The colorful ones? They learned to share love and went through a metamorphosis.”
“Shared love? Ridiculous! No changeling would ever give up love willingly!”
“But they did! So many of our kind have given up Chrysalis’ ways and become peaceful!”
I rubbed my temple.
“I can’t believe it… but assuming you’re not messing with us, when did it happen? And how? And why?”
“Because the king inspired it.”
Oh, right. The king.
“Which reminds me, I’d like to have a word with this king.”
“He’s expecting you,” he nodded, then turned to the greenish-and-orange… changeling… by his side. “Hornet, could you get Raptor and Plague up to speed while I escort Pharynx?”
Wait, Hornet?!
“Sure,” she said. “Why don’t we sit down somewhere? This could take a while.”
The three of them descended to the ground, and Psycho led me further up, presumably to whatever they were using as the throne room. We passed several changelings - I still couldn’t believe that was what they were - and though a few flinched at the sight of us, most of them gave us a smile and a wave. I didn’t know whether to cringe, or to yell at them to stop the charade and pull themselves together, or to try to wake up. Okay, I had tried to wake up several times during the journey back and failed every time, so this probably wasn’t a messed-up dream.
“You still haven’t explained how this happened,” I tried to coax a more detailed recounting of the events out of him.
“I’m sure the king will do that,” he replied with a knowing smirk.
What was I missing?
“And I’m sure he has more important things to do! Who is he, anyway?”
His smirk turned into a chuckle.
“Him!” We were finally at the plateau on the top of the tallest spire, formerly Chrysalis’ castle, and Psycho pointed at the figure sitting on the floor next to a pile of rubble with some scrolls on it, reading another scroll.
He was similar in appearance to some of the colorful changelings I’d seen, green with purple eyes and elytra, only much bigger, probably as tall as Chrysalis, and a pair of large orange antlers adorned his head. He hadn’t noticed us land.
“He’s here,” Psycho announced, attracting the king’s attention.
I’d had several theories of what the king would do if and when I met him. At best, I’d hoped he’d be indifferent enough to Thorax and me to allow us to return to the hive unpunished; at worst, I’d feared his wrath would turn out to be much more horrible than anything Chrysalis could ever imagine.
None of that happened. Not even the king’s physical appearance matched my expectations, let alone his behavior!
He cast a soft and benevolent gaze upon me and his face brightened instantly; he grinned widely, dropped the scroll from his magical grip, sprang to his hooves - indeed, he was as tall as Chrysalis - ran up to me and, as if I hadn’t had enough surprises already, wrapped me in a firm hug, holding on as if the universe would fall apart if he allowed himself to ever let go. A surge of love from him hit me harder than a hurricane, and it took all my discipline to hold back from feasting on it.
“Oh, Pharynx, I’m so glad you’re back and alright!” he whispered in a familiar voice.
Too familiar.
Startled, I looked at Psycho and a couple of colorful changelings standing close by. They smiled - grinned, even - and gave a nod in reply to my unspoken question.
Seriously?!
No, impossible…
It couldn’t be…
I pulled myself out of the hug and stared at the king with all the incredulity in the world.
“Thorax?!”