Chrysalis rolls over on her back as a glassy-eyed stallion massages her hind hooves, and sighs. The slow but steady flow of venom-tainted love from him spreads through her veins, revitalizing her like a good, long rest. She doesn’t even need to be transformed at this point, as the single stallion quickly took to her yesterday at the bar and invited her home in her disguise and let her easily completely dominate his mind already loosened by alcohol.
“Go open the door,” she says out of nowhere, at least for him, but he doesn’t have it in him to resist a direct order, so he does as he’s told.
Two of the hottest fit mares he’s ever seen are standing outside, each only giving him the briefest glance before pushing past him.
“Uh, how can I help-?” he manages to stutter out before Chrysalis says in a voice smooth like honey:
“They’re with me.”
And that’s enough to completely shove any worries he could have had aside, replaced by pleasant warm buzzing inside his brain.
“Good colt,” she continues, her voice reverberating in his head, “Keep it up and you might have a chance with all three of us. You know what? Why don’t you go and get us a drink?”
“Sure thing,” he leaves the living room. When he’s outside, the two disguised warriors transfer all love and lust they gathered throughout the night, barring the barest minimum they need to maintain their health.
Chrysalis takes a deep, relaxing breath.
“Excellent work. Thank you.”
“...” the two warriors stare.
“What?”
“You’ve never-” 68 says, hesitant.
“-thanked us before,” 96 finishes the thought.
Chrysalis narrows her eyes before sighing and saying:
“Hmph, I suppose so...”
Nothing else. Not that the warriors had any reason to expect even the first part of the thanks, so they sit down on the carpet in front of the couch and wait for more orders. When the stallion returns with their drinks, the two warriors take him away into the bedroom while Chrysalis stretches, closes her eyes, and-
The darkness of the hive mind swallows her.
For a normal changeling, the sudden mental pressure would be at least disorienting. For Chrysalis, all this means that whoever has just assaulted her mind is entering the equivalent a Ninja Warrior arena mixed with a minefield filled with claymore roombas, alligators with miniguns, lava moats, and guard turrets manned with so many snipers each that the world’s tetris masters would bow in respect.
“Hmph!” huffs a voice Chrysalis hasn’t heard for over half a millennium, “Not bad for a love-starved amateur.”
“And here was I, thinking I’d deal with your shade on my own terms, mom,” she snickers.
“As if you were capable of dealing with anything, daughter,” says the darkness surrounding her, “Your race is dying, you-”
“No, no,” Chrysalis interrupts the monologue at the start, “I’m not doing this every single time I have to kick one of you out of my head. I already had this part of the conversation with myself, so get to the constructive point and-”
She concentrates.
“-SHOW YOURSELF!”
The oppressive darkness surrounding her disperses, revealing the completely normal darkness of the hive mind along with the silvery circles and lines occasionally marking the otherwise invisible “ground”.
Reality shifts once again, and the majestic changeling queen towering behind Chrysalis forcefully shrinks and appears in front of her.
“Those tricks haven’t worked even before my ascension, mother. Trying them now is downright insulting,” Chrysalis smirks.
Even when shrunk down, Chrysalis’ mother is still at least half a horn taller. She’s slim, without the oversexualized hips of her daughter, and exudes the air of superiority and grace even Chrysalis has to admit to herself she never achieved. Her mane and tail are longer, mossy green, and smooth, as if they had their own group of servants to take care of them at all times, which they likely did in her time.
The first Empress of the Great Changeling Empire, the great part being a perfect descriptor of how much of a failure the entire thing turned out to be. The greatest even.
Despite her being only a shade, the memory of a memory, her horn flashes green and Chrysalis feels a vice-like grip tighten around her head.
“So this is how you want to play it?” Chrysalis grits her teeth, her horn lighting up in response, “Infiltrator queen against infiltrator queen.”
“Are you still calling yourself a queen after running everything I built into the ground? After having your plot handed to you twice in Canterlot?”
“Once again, I’m not going to rehash the conversation with my own shade, and I’ve come to terms with how wrong I was to attack Canterlot again. However, since you’re so set on your Great Changeling Empire, let’s take a trip through memory lane, this time without the poison from the ten queens before you clouding your judgement.”
To Chrysalis’ surprise, her mother starts laughing.
“Oh daughter, do you think a changeling as skilled as I am wouldn’t be able to contain their influence? Pleeease,” she waves her foreleg dismissively, “Most of them were warrior queens. The only thing you need to block those from influencing you are ear plugs.”
“Geez, I completely forgot how arrogant you were over the seven hudred years.”
“Prove me wrong, daughter,” the mental pressure increases.
As much as she’d looove to just punch the daylights out of her mother, Chrysalis knows that the mental battle between infiltrators isn’t about that. It’s about which mind can use the resources of the body they inhabit to greater effect. Since there’s only one body in this case, words are the real weapons.
“Can’t,” Chrysalis shrugs, “Old warrior queens were dumber than a sack of rocks, I concede that.”
Her mother smirks. The first step to victory and gaining a body to restore changelings to their glory.
“The problem is,” Chrysalis keeps smiling, “That history proved that all of them put together still caused less damage to us as a race then you did.”
Her mother’s grin turns into a snarl:
“You were defeated at the height of our power, the power I BUILT!”
“Not really. You were building a house of cards on quicksand. The Great Changeling Empire was doomed to failure from the start. It was a wild shot in the dark, our chance to either gain or lose everything. The problem was that you didn’t understand your odds.”
“I brought Equestria to its knees,” her mother grows a little despite Chrysalis’ efforts and looks down on her daughter.
“You remember it that way? Iiiinteresting,” Chrysalis keeps her cool, though, “I myself would call it a ‘prelude to pissing off every single race on the face of Equus’.”
“Changelings are the pinnacle of evolution,” her mother rolls her eyes, “All other creatures are just cattle. We can harness the abilities of all other pony races, we can have the strength and fire breath of dragons, we survive all diseases better and we can thrive in climates fatal to others. Even after our death, none of our knowledge is lost. We are the ultimate beings. That’s why we should be on top, not because of some old hags dwelling on past grudges.”
“Yes and no. We need love to do any of that, and to do the really interesting stuff, we need real love. I know your plan was to enslave and breed all other races and keep them cocooned as food. The problem with that was that doing so would give us just barely enough love to… live. We wouldn’t be awesome, we wouldn’t be able to do anything you mentioned. Besides,” Chrysalis sticks her tongue out, “Diet love or fast food lust. Bleh.”
“As opposed to the nothing your hive has now?”
“Well, there’s one thing I must give to you, mother,” Chrysalis spits the word out, “You managed to unite the world. Too bad that it wasn’t under us but against us. Besides, it’s not as if the old queen’s haven’t tried it before, especially the warriors. You never learned that ruling with an iron hoof always ended up the same, you just always thought it was them doing it wrong and that you would do it better.”
“I DID IT BETTER! YOU WERE THE ONE WHO RUINED EVERYTHING!” her mother’s eyes blaze with fire.
“I hate to break it to you but some of my generals used to be yours, and they were halfway ready to split off into their own hives even during the time of my ascension. They knew what your ambition would lead to, they knew what this led to before. Isn’t that why you restricted full access to the hive mind only to the top ten and above? So that no more high ranks would realize that over half of the queens tried something like that and failed?”
“Had I done that earlier, you might have succeeded during the first invasion of Canterlot before the traitors split off and left your hive alone to face Celestia.”
“Nah,” says Chrysalis with a rather amused expression, “They’d have just left earlier. The hatred of the old queens blinded them just like it did to you, no matter how little you’re willing to admit it, and it was the only thing stopping them from seeing clearly how nonsensical your actions were. Before, there was always somewhere to hide after a forceful attempt at taking part of the world over failed. With how far your Empire wanted to reach, there would be no hole deep enough to hide in.”
“So remind me, daughter, how did those oh so smart traitors fare after deserting you?”
“Do you even need to ask?”
“I just want you to recall what happens to changelings who don’t have a strong leader.”
Chrysalis facehoofs.
“Moss, hunted down ny ponies after Canterlot. Cryo, frozen somewhere in the north. Shadowstep, chased into the Griffon Empire deserts and killed. Vulcan, killed by Cryo. Annelid, executed by yours truly. Gossamer, killed off the coast of Zebrica. Burrow, found and executed by my number One. Quake, scorched by Celestia during our retreat. Trance, killed by the undead in the undiscovered west. That one took some serious searching,” she faces her mother, stone faced.
“So, strong leadership or death,” she smiles, victorious.
“Eeeh,” Chrysalis shakes her head, “I believed it, I believed it right until the point when I faced Celestia myself. Have you ever fought her?”
“Battle of the Sundered Gulch. She summoned a hail of fireballs scorching the earth as far as the eye could see. Vulcan’s hive, with their resistance to fire, was crucial in taking over the pony trenches.”
“No, I mean her. Have you fought her directly?”
“No, I have not.”
“I have, and at that point I understood. Unfortunately, the hive revenants were still inside my head so I couldn’t analyze what happened. She’s not a great mental magic user and I used that against her. What I felt...” Chrysalis pauses and shakes her head, “You will never understand how lucky we were that we lost. We never pushed the alicorn of the Sun to her limit, and that in itself was our only success.”
“What are you yammering about like a terrified larva, daughter?”
“We were never a real threat to her. You can’t be a threat to someone who can evaporate this entire world with a flick of her horn. Even as she lay there in front of me, she hoped she wouldn’t have to go all out. She wasn’t fighting me, she was fighting herself. When I broke into her mind, I understood that if she let go even for a moment to get rid of me, a second or two, she would turn the entire mountain into glass, if not dust. I have no idea what would have happened if her sister was awake for the invasion on top of everything else.”
The pressure on Chrysalis’ mind weakens as her mother hesitates. Being only a living memory inside Chrysalis’ head allows her to see that her daughter isn’t lying.
“Alicorns...” she growls, “Speaking of those, daughter, did you discuss your plan with Scream?”
“I did, she encouraged it and told me about the weakness of ancient Canterlot magical wards. Without her knowledge, my forces would have never been able to break through the barrier in the first place.”
“Hmm, and she didn’t warn you about Celestia’s true power? As the alicorn of Lust, she could have had a clue.”
“You don’t think...”
“Our patron and ‘savior’ encouraged forming the Great Changeling Empire as well.”
“Maybe she only wanted us to prosper?”
“Daughter, you said yourself that my plan was doomed to failure, yet from the beginning I had Scream’s support and guidance. She never acted directly but her knowledge and future sight allowed us to win impossible battles. I don’t claim to know the limits of her clairvoyance but I would assume she would have foreseen… something.”
“Damn...” Chrysalis breathes out. The pressure draining her love disappears completely, “It’s hard to believe that Scream, the alicorn who saved us, our patron deity, would be the one encouraging our downfall.”
“She fed and stoked the anger of those before me, and she allowed me to grow as powerful as I did. Am I correct in assuming you’re going all the way through the chain of memories up to… him?”
“I am, mother. I need to clear my head. The revenants of all the queens inhabiting the hive mind have disappeared, and things feel vastly different now. The original sin, the birth of changelings… I need to talk to him about it, whatever little of a memory is left.”
“You know...” her mother lowers her head and, to Chrysalis’ shock, nuzzles her neck, “He was the only one who never hated Celestia for… us.”
“Well, he allowed her to do this, he allowed her to spread the curse to his entire race. He has no right to tell us who to hate or not hate.”
“Hmmm, is it you speaking, or is it what you learned from our ancestors?”
“Alright, mother, what do you know? Everything would be a lot easier if you were less cryptic.”
“I wish I knew myself, but in light of what you told me, and with the revenants gone, things aren’t as clear as I believed them to be. After our little conversation, I’m somewhat willing to admit my mental state wasn’t as stable as I thought. Be wary of Scream, my daughter. You have generations of failure to fix, you might not have any allies to call upon anymore, and even our gods might not be who they claim.”
“Moth-”
She’s gone. Chrysalis is alone inside the hive mind again, feeling a little lighter just like before with her own shade.
“...could have given me one last hug, you old hag...” she mutters.
When she opens her eyes in the real world, she instinctively connects to the two warriors now ‘taking care’ of the stallion in the bedroom.
“And here I was thinking I’d just have to deal with my own failures, not the entire history of our race...” she sighs, “On the other hole, maybe it’s a good thing it’s left to the only competent queen.”
Ecstatic Scream, the alicorn of Lust. Patron and somewhat of a guiding deity to the changelings since queen Shroud.
Was it all a lie?