Chrysalis awoke in a very familiar, and yet worrisome place. She hadn’t seen it in several months, and not in its current form for several years. Regal tapestries hung from the wall in all their glory, rather than being tattered, improvised bedding. A large, wooden chair covered with royal purple fabrics and cushioning sat a few meters directly in front of her. Above that upon the wall was a painted portrait of her late mother, the previous queen of the changelings, and upon that throne sat the current one, staring at her in stillness. Upon seeing her prisoner rouse from her unnatural slumber, the Queen smiled. It wasn’t sincere.
“Welcome home, my little changeling. I apologize for the rough treatment in getting you here. We would have been gentler, but…well, I did tell you not to look in the closet. Feel free to drop your disguise, it is not needed in these halls. Now, who are you?”
“Where’s Spike?” Chrysalis demanded, very much maintaining her disguise as Twilight Sparkle.
The Queen frowned. “Perhaps I misspoke. That was not truly a request. Drop your disguise.”
“Spike first.” Chrysalis growled.
“You are remarkably brave to go against your Queen.”
“Cut the bullshit, where is he?”
“Hmph. We have little use for children, he has not been harmed.”
“Where. Is. He?”
The two queens stared at each other for a long moment. After seemingly forever, Chrysalis’ younger self relented. “He is in that tree you reside in. He won’t remember a thing when he wakes up.”
“I suppose you’ve replaced me with one of your spies.”
“For now. She has been instructed to bequeath her position back to you, if you return. Now drop your disguise.”
Chrysalis glared for a moment. Knowing how far this place was from Ponyville, he likely had woken up hours ago. Even if she were to leave right now, she wouldn’t be able to get back until partway through the day after Winter Wrap Up, assuming she had been awoken immediately after her arrival and not hours later. On the plus side, it seemed like her past self was at least considering letting her go back rather than just throwing her into a dungeon cell.
“Drop the disguise!” The Queen snarled. “I will not say it again!”
Working against the inner voice that urged her to needle at the one making demands and to vie for dominance, Chrysalis went up in green flame and took on the form of a basic changeling, one very different from her true form. She knew that the one before her would not take well to seeing an older version of herself.
The Queen eyed her from top to bottom skeptically. “This…is your true form?”
“Yes.” She lied evenly.
“What is your name?”
“You wouldn’t recognize it. It would take a very long time for you to get to where I’m from.”
“Then there’s no harm in telling me.” She pressed irritably.
“Chrysalis.” Chrysalis smirked. She couldn’t entirely ignore her inner voice, even if she knew it was a bad idea. She wouldn’t believe her, anyway.
“Do you think you’re funny? I could crush you with barely a thought.” The Queen stood from her throne and her horn glowed menacingly.
“You won’t. I know you better than you might think. You don’t hurt changelings if you can avoid it.”
The Queen’s eyes narrowed once more. Instead of incinerating the defiant changeling before her, she levitated a piece of parchment from nearby and glanced over it. “I suppose that knowledge is a result of your ‘proficiency at intel gathering’, Twilight Sparkle?”
Chrysalis’ raised an eyebrow. That sounded far too familiar for her comfort.
“You recognize the wording. Good. You wrote it after all.” She tossed the parchment to the floor at Chrysalis’ hooves. “Read it.”
Chrysalis recognized the contents immediately, right down to the signature of Twilight Sparkle, and the blood drained from her face. It was one of the scrapped letters she had written, intending to send it to her past self in the hopes of establishing a relationship that she could then later use to convince her to not invade Canterlot.
“How did you…?” Chrysalis trailed off as realization struck. “Skitter.”
It was her past self’s turn to smirk.
“You wished to establish communications with me. Congratulations, you’ve succeeded. Communicate with me. How did you know about the invasion?”
Chrysalis froze in place. This was bad. She hadn’t sent that letter for a reason, and now her poorly planned out mess had come to bite her in the ass. She specifically wanted to avoid mentioning her knowledge of the upcoming invasion to dodge this very conversation. She had planned on working her way into her past self’s good graces so that she could gradually convince her of the folly in attacking Equestria, but that boat had now clearly sailed. Her past self had forced this encounter on hostile terms, and there was no way she would have the chance to get close to her now.
“I’m waiting.” The Queen growled impatiently.
Chrysalis took a deep breath. It was now or never.
“I have seen the future of our people, and the invasion of Canterlot is going to fail. If you go through with your plans, you will expose our race and doom us all to extinction.”
“And how have you seen our future?”
“I…have been having visions.”
“Visions?” The Queen’s tone seemed almost on the verge of derisive laughter.
Chrysalis nodded confidently so as to hide her worry. There was no way this was going to work. She didn’t believe in prophecies.
“Bullshit. I don’t believe in prophecies. I think what we truly have here is a changeling attempting to undermine my efforts to help our people because she doesn’t want me hurting her,” she paused very slightly and spit the next word out in disgust, “friends.”
“They are not my friends!” Chrysalis snarled in denial. “My first concern is and always has been for my changelings!”
“Your changelings? And how many of your changelings do you have in that little town you’ve been holed up in? Clearly you can’t be talking about the ones under my command. Every one of your actions thus far has only put us at greater risk!”
“Of course I am!” Chrysalis said through clenched teeth. She didn’t know what infuriated her more, her current self’s slip in referring to them as her changelings, or her past self insinuating that she didn’t care about them. “You have no idea what I have sacrificed for our people.”
“And you think it can compare to my own sacrifices? You should learn a little humility, little one.”
“I already have, more than you can imagine. You, however, can’t see past your own bloated ego to realize you are going to be responsible for the destruction of our people!”
“I will be the saviour of our people!” The Queen’s scream echoed through the throne room. “You haven’t seen what I have, living out among the ponies as you have. My little changelings are suffering. There’s barely enough love to go around, families are stifled from growth for fear of their new children starving. We live off the dregs of pony society as they live in blissful excess. What I am doing will change everything! We will finally be able to thrive once we have taken Equestria for ourselves! You are threatening that future with every action you take!”
“I—”
“You revealed yourself when confronting Nightmare Moon.” The Queen interrupted her. “I can, perhaps forgive that due to the grave threat that she posed to us all. But what of the myriad of other offenses? You assaulted Celestia’s dungeons in a changeling form! You were spotted traipsing about Ponyville not long after with nothing more than a hooded cape to hide your identity!”
“That was because of poison—”
“Silence! We were lucky that your friends believed it was merely the effects of that plant! Almost as lucky as when one of ‘your’ changelings abducted that pink pony so that you could play hero. Or the time you attacked an entire colosseum in Cloudsdale, right in front of Celestia herself!” The Queen had walked right up to Chrysalis and towered over her with fangs bared. “You’re going to get us all killed! Your friends are on the verge of discovering who you are! I watched as the pink one asked you what a changeling was!”
“You saw that?” Chrysalis tensed. Wait, did she just insinuate that her past self had nothing to do with Pinkie’s abduction?
“You’re lucky that I wiped her memory for you after you left so that she won’t remember you saying you aren’t a pony, or even the word ‘changeling’. Consider yourself lucky I didn’t do it to the others.”
“You did what?!” Chrysalis took a step forward so that her face, twisted with rage, was mere centimeters from the face of the taller changeling. Her horn crackled with energy just waiting to be released into this bitch, tearing her to shreds. Before she could do anything more, a pair of changeling guards stepped forward and pointed spears at her, pressing their tips into her neck from either side.
“I believe what you meant to say was ‘thank you for cleaning up my mess’.”
Chrysalis stood shaking with rage, staring at the weapons held to her neck by her own loyal soldiers. She reminded herself that they don’t know what they do. It’s not their fault. Her eyes locked back on the cold gaze of their current Queen. It was hers. How dare she touch Pinkie Pie like that?
“I may not harm changelings if I can avoid it, but I assure you that I am perfectly willing to destroy you if you try to attack me.”
Chrysalis’ chest heaved with her furious breaths. Why was she so angry? Her past self was right, she had just cleaned up one of her messes. She knew she should have wiped Pinkie’s memories, but she had been too cowardly to do it for some reason. No, she knew the reason, even if she didn’t want to admit it. She closed her eyes and, with tremendous regret, powered down her horn.
“That’s better. You may not believe me, but I would much rather not see you come to any harm.”
She felt the spear points being removed from her throat. She was starting to feel awfully small with all of her failures being dragged out in front of her, both in coming so close to exposing herself and her weakness in being unwilling to wipe the memories of the ponies around her. She had nearly tried to kill her past self over those fucking ponies and risk blinking out of existence or causing some stupid time paradox. What was wrong with her? Her past self was just doing what was necessary to protect her people, exactly as she would have done. How frightened would she have been back then to see a rogue changeling acting so carelessly as to risk everything?
Chrysalis stepped back and bowed her head out of genuine remorse and respect. “I’m sorry for all that I have done. Thank you for cleaning up my mess. Please believe me when I say that the last thing I want is for our changelings to come to harm. That is why I beg of you to halt all plans for the invasion. It will only end in tragedy.”
“I don’t get it. Everything you’ve done screams to the world that you don’t care in the slightest about our people, and yet something about you makes me want to believe your words. That you truly do care.”
“I do, and if you truly care about them as I know you do, you will cancel the invasion.”
The Queen shook her head. “I can’t do that. It would be damning our race to a gradual death. If you truly had seen our future, you would do everything in your power to help us succeed.”
“I can’t do that.” Chrysalis answered with downcast eyes.
“No. Of course not. You choose ponies over changelings.” The Queen said bitterly.
Chrysalis had to face an uncomfortable idea. Was the invasion inevitable? Were changelings and ponies so at odds that the only two long term options were the death of her people, or the subjugation of the ponies? The changelings were too ambitious and desperate to stay in the shadows forever, and there was no way the ponies could accept them into their midst. Something had to give. It was enslavement or extinction, and the time line likely wouldn’t survive enslavement.
“I know it’s hard, but we must persevere. There must be a better path, we just need time to find it.” Chrysalis spoke gently, as if she were soothing a frightened child. She didn’t know which version of herself she was trying to convince.
“And what would that be? Peaceful coexistence?” The Queen shook her head ruefully. “Even you, who are more pony than changeling at this point, live in fear of being discovered. No, there is only one path for us. If you will not tell me how you’ve come to know of the upcoming invasion, or even your true name, I will not force it from you. Even if you reject me, you are still one of my little changelings.”
Chrysalis’ heart sank. She had failed. She should have known from the start that she would not be able to convince her past self to stay in the shadows. She contemplated revealing her true form, revealing that she was from the future. No, she concluded that there was little chance that would work either, just like the last time she had considered it. Without solid evidence there was little chance her past self would believe she wasn’t just posing as her. She was a very public figure in changeling society, nothing of her personal life couldn’t be discovered without sufficient spying or educated guesses. She herself wouldn’t have believed any of this time travel nonsense if Time Keeper hadn’t had Twilight Sparkle’s dead body and a working time machine with him. Revealing the truth, much like with the ponies, could only be a last resort. She needed to find some other way, she just had no idea how.
“You are free to return to Ponyville. One of my scouts can show you the way.” The Queen said as she returned to her throne. The door behind her was opened by one of the guards, and he ushered in a considerably smaller changeling.
Chrysalis nodded and gave a deep bow. “Please take my warning to heart, my Queen. I only want what is best for our people.”
The Queen’s gaze hardened from atop her throne. “Take my warning to heart. Do not interfere with the invasion, or take any more unnecessary risks that could expose your identity. I will not be so lenient next time.”
“Come along.” The small changeling ordered and Chrysalis followed him out of the throne room.
______________________________
Queen Chrysalis watched as the traitor left her throne room. She snorted. It seemed that friendship was like a disease, softening and weakening that girl, causing her to turn her back on her own people. She chastised herself, that was no way to think of the poor, lost child. She was still one of her little changelings and was in as much need of help as any other of her subjects. She would set her right one day and bring her into the fold.
Misguided or not, she could hardly believed that ‘Twilight’ had had the gall to lie to her face like that, and to add further insult by claiming to share a name with her, not to mention refusing to show her true form as she did. She either had to be very brave, very stupid, or very powerful to be willing to do that. It seemed more and more likely that the news she had heard of what had happened in the dead of winter were true. There had been a very interesting tale told to her of a changeling appearing at a party that Twilight Sparkle had been drinking at. A very large changeling, one that sounded suspiciously like a changeling queen. It wasn’t the only instance of a changeling queen being seen, in fact more often than not the sightings involving Twilight were as one, but those instances could be dismissed as mere disguise. However, a changeling could not maintain a disguise while under the influence of alcohol. If the story were true, Twilight must be a queen.
Being a queen would certainly account for the power that she must have had in order to have defeated Nightmare Moon. Perhaps she was from a hive in a far off land that had been wiped out due to her own failed invasion? It could certainly explain the girl’s fear of her invasion failing and leading to extinction. Queen Chrysalis was not her, though. Her invasion would not fail.
If she were a queen, and had a few of her own subjects left, then they may have been the ones to gather information on the upcoming invasion by infiltrating the hive. There must be other changelings working with her, whether they are her own subjects or merely her allies, for Twilight’s whereabouts had been accounted for quite clearly for the entire time she lived in Ponyville, she had had no time where she could have been personally infiltrating the hive, unless it were in the freezing winter, but that letter had come far before snow blanketed the lands.
The Queen rose from her throne and marched from the room. That was all speculation, though. If Twilight would not reveal her secrets willingly, there were always other methods to bring them into the open. Guards bowed low as she arrived at her destination and then opened the door for her. The traitor may have been right, that she wouldn’t harm one of her own kind unless absolutely necessary, but not everyone was so lucky. She stepped inside to find a grey pegasus stallion with a streaky black mane hanging from the wall in chains, and though at first she thought he must have been a changeling too, he was most certainly not. A large, muscular changeling standing next to him turned to face her with a salute.
“Has he revealed anything yet?”
“Nothing of importance, just that his real name is Time Keeper. He is surprisingly tight lipped.”
Queen Chrysalis stepped forward and raised the stallion’s chin with a hoof and smiled gently at the hatred in his eyes. The smile was fake, of course, but she still smiled.
“We don’t get much pony food down here, and what we do have is best served to ponies who cooperate with us. As any changeling could tell you, hunger is an especially cruel torture. Save yourself the pain and just tell us who you and Twilight Sparkle really are, and how you know of the invasion.”
The stallion spit at her, but Chrysalis blocked the projectile with a magical barrier. This was far from the first prisoner she had interrogated.
“That wasn’t very nice.” She mocked as she rubbed the offending fluids into the fur of her captive’s face. “But hardly unexpected.”
She released his chin and stepped back, looking over to the changeling. “Contact me by dragon flame letter if he says anything.”
“Of course, my Queen.” He bowed respectfully, far more sincere than anything that Twilight had done during their meeting.
Chrysalis examined the prisoner once more. Grey fur, a clearly dyed mane and tail, three snowballs for a cutie mark that had been partially wiped off to reveal the hourglass beneath the makeup.
She had personally captured Twilight because she had suspected that she was a queen. She couldn’t have in good conscience sent one of her much more delicate subjects to capture one so potentially dangerous. It would be equally dangerous moving forward to have one of them spy on her, for what would happen if the spy were discovered? She may have rules against harming changelings, but could the same be said for Twilight?
With a flash of green flame, she stood as an exact replica of the stallion before her, except with the snow ball cutie mark solidly in place. She smiled at him as he looked on in horror.
“If you won’t talk, I’ll just have to find out for myself.”