The Blueblood Papers: Royal Blood

by Raleigh


Chapter 19

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” snapped Fer-de-Lance.  We had only been walking for a few minutes, and that was enough for her to lose patience with my somewhat temperamental special talent.

“Not really, no,” I admitted.  Fer-de-Lance snapped her head around to stare at me, her eyes almost popping out of their sockets and through her gas mask’s eyepieces.

We had stopped in a hallway slightly larger than the ones we had seen before.  Mercifully, there were a few windows here to alleviate at least some of the claustrophobia that was slowly spreading over us like the Smooze.  These were little more than thin slits with the interior portion of the wall cut at an oblique angle, most likely to allow archers here to loose arrows at an advancing enemy, but the meagre light of mid-morning streaming through them, forming golden bars that pierced through the gloom like spears, at least helped remind me that there was a world beyond these dreary, cramped corridors.  On the opposite side was a blank stone wall, interrupted occasionally by decaying wooden doors and large, pony-sized holes that the Changelings had patched up with that strange, unsettlingly organic building material of theirs.

There were still ghostlike tendrils of gas drifting slowly on the faint drafts that disturbed the stale air of this place.  It collected in the corners of rooms and in some places lingered around the level of my fetlocks, and our walking through them sent these wisps writhing in the air like ghostly snakes.  We had encountered a few corpses of Changelings and native ponies along the way, and the effects of the gas on both were very evidently similar -- an agonising death.  As I passed them, sightless, bloodshot eyes stared accusingly at me and blued lips spoke of the horror of their final moments in this world.  I could only hope that their spirits were of a generous, understanding nature, and trust me when I whispered ‘I did my best’ as I passed them by.

“That does not fill me with much confidence.”  Fer-de-Lance stepped forwards and jabbed at my cutie mark with her hoof.  “This is your special talent, no?”

“It is,” I said, pushing her hoof away and then rubbing at where it had left a grimy mark over the already filthy compass rose.  “It’s never steered me wrong before.”

That wasn’t strictly true; my special talent and I would sometimes disagree on precisely where I needed to go, but in the absence of anything like a map we had little choice but to rely on its fickle whims.  The original architects and builders of this wretched place were not the sort to make maps and plans of their creations, and even if they did, it was unlikely that after thousands of years of neglect and a century of Changeling occupation that it would match the current rats’ nest of rooms, halls, and corridors it had turned into.  I had also wanted to find Odonata, though what I would do when I finally found her I had yet to fully make up my mind, so it was all but guaranteed that my cutie mark would get somewhat confused, like a taxi pony with two clients who cannot agree on where to spend the rest of their evening.

Fer-de-Lance, however, wanted to reach the highest point of this castle, which would most likely be one of the towers on each of the four corners of this tall, square structure.  We’d find our way there, raise the Equestrian flag for all to see, and then hopefully I could call it a day and see about finding what passed for a louche bar around these parts in which to drown my sorrows -- the Changelings had to do something for fun around here, and I’d hoped that part of it intersected with my libatory interests.

“Fine,” she hissed, apparently having failed to come up with a better idea.  “Lead the way.”

I did, and at my insistence our going was slow and deliberate.  Fer-de-Lance was impatient to raise her bloody flag on the roof of this building, and no doubt the personal glory and a story to add to her aristocratic family’s long and distinguished military history was merely an added bonus for her, but I, in a rare moment of showing actual backbone for once, overruled her.  I’d been in this sort of thing before, and the sense of deja vu was most distressing; stalking through an ancient fortress crawling with Changelings was an experience that I had not wished to repeat any time soon, or at all, and yet again I found myself doing just that.  This time, however, it was we who were the invading force, pushing forth into the unknown where every door, corridor, room, and even the walls themselves could portend certain, grisly death.

The hallway was a uniform path of stone and light.  We followed that to its terminus at a set of double doors, which I pushed open with a gentle shove of magic.  From here, we plunged deeper into the bowels of the fortress, through twisting and turning corridors, all far from light, that felt more like the burrows and warrens of some underground-dwelling creature.  I lit my horn with a faint golden glow, which illuminated little more than the stones at my hooves, but I daren’t shine it much brighter than that.  The seemingly endless stones receded into darkness.  The corridors were quite tight, but Fer-de-Lance insisted on sticking by my side as though to keep an eye on me.  The both of us being rather tall, and dare I say ‘big’, ponies and the original inhabitants of this castle apparently being stunted midgets meant that we were often wedged together uncomfortably.  The soldiers behind us, however, were content to follow in single file.

[Ponies were even shorter on average a thousand years ago, due to problems with maintaining a well-balanced diet in that era.  I have wondered if the tight corridors that Blueblood describes were designed to keep alicorns such as me out.]

We trudged through those corridors, twisting and turning, sometimes doubling back on itself before veering off into a seemingly random direction.  The sound of laboured breathing, muffled and distorted by gas masks, of iron-shod hooves tramping on ancient stone, and of armour rattling was almost deafening.  Here, the air was even more stale and warm, and the cacophony sounded murky as though the noise had to force its way through the soupy atmosphere.  A thin, faint draft that stirred and chilled the coat on my neck where it was exposed guided me through this labyrinth, past branches and offshoots that descended into near total darkness, as the tingle in my cutie marks told me that this was, despite looking precisely like every other corridor that we had passed, the right way to go.

After an interminable amount of walking that my watch insisted only lasted ten minutes, the maze of corridors opened up into a large, open hall.  We emerged blinking into a dreary, bleak green glow emanating from some sort of pulsating orb hanging by a chain from the ceiling.  This brought scant illumination to this chamber, being about the size of a modest ballroom in one of the smaller of the mansions in Canterlot.  Our intrepid little group fanned out in the room, the soldiers clearly grateful for the space to stretch their limbs and the modestly clearer air to breath.

“It’s a dead end,” said Fer-de-Lance.

I looked around, following her gaze over the walls of the chamber; there were indeed no doors that I could see.  However, portions of the ancient walls had been knocked through and sealed up with more chrysalite.  Ignoring Fer-de-Lance’s tirade in her native tongue about how I had doomed her and her ‘enfants’ to wander around this miserable Changeling-infested nightmare, I walked a path around the perimeter of the room and traced along the wall with my magic.  The golden aura slid easily across the stones, but where the wall turned to the chrysalite, the cold, firm sensation gave way to a warmer, more organic feel, as though I was dipping my aura into lukewarm porridge.

“That’s interesting,” I said, watching as my aura sank through the Changeling-stuff.  A familiar tingle tickled my cutie marks.

“What is?” snapped Fer-de-Lance, as she marched on over.

“I think there’s a room behind this.”  I demonstrated by slipping my aura in and out of this large patch of chrysalite.

“Did your special talent tell you this?”  Her tone was not so much dripping in sarcasm as it was luxuriating in a bath of it.  Nevertheless, she hissed out a sigh and peered at this area of the wall, squinting through her fogging-up eyepieces.  “Well?  How are we supposed to get through it, then?”

“The Changelings must have a way,” I said.  Lifting a hoof, I touched the wall there, and though my magic slipped through it with only some resistance, I found that against my hoof the surface was much firmer, like, well, a wall.  There was, however, a little bit of ‘give’ in it, having a somewhat spongy texture, but the more pressure that I applied with my hoof the more it seemed to push back, until I might as well have been trying to force my hoof through solid steel.  When I pulled my hoof away, I saw the indentation of my horseshoe imprinted in the wall, and watched with faint amusement as the congealing slime coating it crawled on over to cover the mark -- just as Maud Pie had said, this chrysalite thing was reacting to what was being done to it like a living thing.  It was quite unsettling to watch.

As I was doing that, however, Fer-de-Lance had come up with a much more direct solution.  “Step aside, sir,” she said, just as I saw her horn ignite with a sharp, blindingly bright crimson aura.  I didn’t have time to tell her to stop; in fact, I barely had time to scramble back before she discharged her shot in a single, overdriven blast of magic.  It was like looking into the bright flash of a camera in a dark room; gone in an instant, leaving bright spots swirling before my eyes and a sharp pain in my forehead.  There was the shrill screech of the blunt-force use of magic, followed very quickly by what must have been the peculiar sound of chrysalite disintegrating.  Blinking away the glare, once the dancing spots faded I saw that she had simply blasted a hole in the wall.

Whatever is the technical term for what happens when chrysalite is subjected to a magic blast, it stank to high heaven.  The smell of ozone that normally accompanies such a discharge was overwhelmed, even through the mask, by an acrid, chemical odour that instantly conjured images of gas in my mind.  [It is likely that by this point the neutralising chemicals the gas mask had been soaked in had dried, which was a common problem with these early designs.  More effective masks with filters would become more widespread later, by which point the regular use of gas had diminished with the resumption of mobile warfare, with the exception of sieges on hive cities. Until then, gas masks looted from Changelings became a valuable commodity with Equestrian soldiers.]  A roughly pony-sized hole was blasted into the wall there.  The edges had melted under the heat of Fer-de-Lance’s magic, flowing and dripping like hot candle wax to pool at the now-exposed floor to slowly solidify.  Black, acrid smoke rose from the gap.

Fer-de-Lance looked very pleased with herself as she examined her handiwork, letting out a quiet, self-satisfied hum of approval as though she was looking at a work of art.  I suppose in her mind, it was.  She stepped through the hole she had made, taking care not to step in the congealing, smouldering puddles of molten chrysalite, with a deceptively cheery “Come along!”

I followed, though after a number of our soldiers had passed through so that I wouldn’t be up at the front should we walk straight into a waiting horde of Changelings.  As it happened, however, this next hall was once again devoid of any ravenous, love-hungry drones wanting to rend me limb from limb and drain my body for food for their hive.  Their continued absence, while initially a relief, was unsettling, as it was merely a matter of when we would run into further resistance than if.

This particular chamber was similar in size to the previous one, but where there had been stone walls built long before Discord’s first rampage across Equestria, now it was coated or replaced wholesale with chrysalite, such that it resembled a natural cavern more than a room constructed by hooves and magic.  Half a dozen crates were piled up on the left wall, with a few full sacks leaning against them.  Looking up at the high ceiling, one could even discern stalactites made of the very same Changeling-stuff pointing down at us like spearheads.  The floor, however, was flat and smooth tiles, and descended via a series of steps into a small depression about half the size of a badminton court.  At the very centre was a tall, irregular column like the trunk of a great tree, reaching the ceiling.  From it, about a quarter of the way up from the base, hung a series of five large pods the size of coffins.  One was filled with a sickly green translucent fluid, and through the clear film that held its contents inside the distinct shape of a pony could be seen floating within.

We crept inside, the soldiers fanning out with swords and bayonet-tipped muskets to form a sort of defensive perimeter.  Fer-de-Lance and I stepped down to the lower portion and approached the pod.  There was no gas here, so I gratefully removed my mask again and sucked in the stagnant, damp air of this place; it seemed as though this room had been deliberately sealed from the rest of the castle.

“Auntie ‘Tia was in one of these things in Canterlot,” I said, peering at the peculiar pod-thing.  The fluid inside was the colour of absinthe only just about starting to acquire its louche.  Inside, in this milky fluid, the pony inside floated upside down with his eyes closed.  The other pods were empty, each with their bottom lid hanging open.

“You mean Princess Celestia,” said Fer-de-Lance.  She leaned in close enough that had the pod been made of glass, her breath would have misted on it.  “Poor thing, he’s only a colt.   I wonder how we get him out.”

While we were busy peering at the trapped pony, a few of the soldiers had drifted away to investigate the incongruous collection of boxes and sacks.  They appeared to be having difficulty trying to open the crates, as the lids seemed to be very firmly nailed shut and with no obvious method of opening them.  One suggested prying them open with a bayonet or a sword, having got it into his head that the Changelings must be keeping gold and treasure inside if they made them nearly impossible to open.  While I paid them little attention, instead peering at the strange sight of a colt floating upside down in the cylinder before me, something scratched at the back of my mind.  We had seen such wooden boxes and sacks in a number of the otherwise empty rooms we had passed through on our way here, and although they were perfectly innocuous and unremarkable, the fact that I had seen so many of them seemingly everywhere was starting to make my hooves itch.

I wasn’t paying complete attention when it happened, but I found out the precise sequence of events later.  One soldier had allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and decided that he would use the tip of his bayonet to poke a small hole in one of the sacks to see what was inside.  The sack, however, had other ideas and attacked him with fangs that, by all accounts, sacks should not have.  It leapt into the air, propelled somehow, opened a fang-filled cavity around its midsection and clamped around the curious soldier’s foreleg.  His scream of pain was what finally alerted me to the trap we had just allowed ourselves to walk into.

A green flame flashed, briefly bathing the room in its malignant glow, and seemingly consumed the sack to reveal the Changeling biting into the poor stallion’s leg.  To their credit, his comrades reacted quickly, and promptly skewered the beast with their bayonets and swords.  However, just as the wild thrashing of the drone began to die down, more green fire erupted from that same corner.  The half-dozen or so drones that had disguised themselves as simple wooden boxes and sacks of grain were revealed, and hurled themselves at the section of guardsponies.

One drone threw itself into the air on buzzing wings, rising above the chaotic, desperate fight.  Our eyes connected across the room, and in its vacant stare I saw a glimmer of recognition.  The Changeling rushed forth, forehooves outstretched, and, before I even had a chance to draw upon enough magic to unsheathe my sword, had closed the distance and was upon me.  Cold, chitinous hooves struck my chest and I was shoved backwards, rearing up on my hindlegs, then falling right on my back with a painful jolt that reverberated up my spine and aggravated those old flogging scars.

Those deceptively fragile-looking hooves pinned me to the ground.  The drone stood atop me and bared its sharp, glistening fangs, glinting in the dim light of this place.  The forked tongue flickered in the air as it hissed, as though tasting my fear.  I desperately summoned magic into my horn just as the Changeling dipped its head to clamp its jaws around my neck, and whatever scant amount I could manage in that time I hurled at its face in a rough, unfocused blast.

The drone shrieked.  My blast had struck its cheek, scorching the chitin but only inflicting superficial pain.  It was enough.  I lashed out wildly with my hooves, forcing it to stumble backwards.  Just as I was about to draw my sword and run it through, I heard the staccato of rapid-fire blasts of magic from my right and above.  One bolt ripped straight through the Changeling’s head, blasting a ragged, smoking hole on either side of its malformed cranium and ejecting a yellow-green mist from the opposite side.  Stinking, smouldering brains splattered on my chest and in my face, and the drone slumped to the side, dead.

Fer-de-Lance lifted me to my hooves, and none too gently either; for a supposedly refined Prench lady she was very strong, though her musculature was more of the cultivated, elegant type that is as much aesthetically pleasing as it is effective, compared with Square Basher’s raw brute strength that is merely a side effect of pure hard work.  The fight, however, was over as suddenly as it had started -- the Changelings were all dead, while three of our ponies suffered injuries that would now put them out of any fights for the day.  The stallion who tried to stab the ‘sack’ had his foreleg brutally mangled by the drone’s fangs and could barely walk; the second had a broken foreleg and would have to hobble on a crutch made out of bayonet scabbards; and the third had suffered repeated blows to the head and was suffering from a concussion.  They would have to come with us, thus slowing us down, until we could find another group of ponies to escort them to the casualty clearing station, wherever that was.  To leave them behind or to send them to make their own way back, even under escort, was to condemn them to another ambush.

“I think I hit the pod-thing when I saved your life,” said Fer-de-Lance once all of that had been taken care of.  I thought about retorting that I had the situation all in hoof and didn’t need her help, but decided to let her bruised ego have this one.

The base of the pod had indeed been struck by Fer-de-Lance’s fusilade.  A bolt had grazed it there, leaving cracks through which the murky fluid within dribbled like a leaky tap.  The colt’s eyes opened, wide with shock and fright as he looked at us through the film.  He writhed about in the pod, his body twisting and turning.  Fer-de-Lance stepped back in alarm, just as the lower half of the pod tore open, decanting this foul-smelling amniotic slime at our hooves.  The colt dropped to the ground.  Shocked, the two of us merely watched as he curled up on the ground in a foetal position and shivered.

He was a young pegasus, probably in his mid-teens judging by his youthful features and lanky stature.  Puberty had stretched his bones but his flesh had yet to catch up.  His bottle-green coat and blond mane and tail were drenched in this peculiar, lime green fluid.  In between coughing and gagging for air, he wailed and sobbed pathetically, and babbled in that bastardised version of Old Ponish their sort speak.

“What’s he complaining about?” said a sergeant.  He was about to poke the colt with the blunt end of his halberd, but I shoved it away with a burst of magic.

My grasp of their tongue was still loose, as it appeared that each individual tribe, clan, group or whatever had their own specific dialects that were only mostly mutually intelligible.  However, since I understood their root language better than most ponies outside of tired old academics who only learnt it from reading books, I was able to understand most of what this colt was upset about.  “He wants us to put him back in,” I said.  “He said he was happy in there.”

“Whatever for?” asked Fer-de-Lance.  She kicked at the congealing slime and pulled a disgusted face as it stuck to her hoof.

I listened to the colt’s whining for a little while longer, and then when I managed to piece together the meaning from the few words I could understand and that all-important context, I translated for the benefit of everypony else present: “He says the Changelings put ponies in these pods if they can’t or won’t pay the love tax, or just when they need more of it.  It puts ponies into a deep sleep and they dream of somepony they love, and the Changelings can extract the love that way.”

Fer-de-Lance squinted at the colt, who curled up tighter into a ball and shivered with wretched sobbing, and shook her head dismissively.  “So we’ve rescued him from this horrible fate,” she said.  “But he looks very unhappy about it, no?”

“These ponies have lived under Changeling occupation for a hundred years, it’s all he knows,” I said.  The colt continued his pained ranting, in between spluttering coughs and bouts of incoherent wailing.  “Now he’s saying his mother died when he was a foal, but the Changelings brought her back in the dream.  He wants to go back.”

“But it wasn’t real,” said Fer-de-Lance, her voice hushed now as even the cold, dismissive mare was moved to some semblance of sympathy.

“I expect it felt real to him, the poor chap.”

[The fluid is a sort of nutrient slime that keeps captured ponies and other creatures alive for extended periods of time, though not indefinitely.  This allows not only the extraction of a more concentrated form of love than by conventional means, but also made governing populations of the enslaved much easier, both as a means to keep ponies sedate but also as a reward system.  The exact process by which Changelings could induce unconsciousness and dreams of loved ones has been lost, but it is believed to have been an intrinsic part of Purestrain magic.  Princess Luna has a number of theories on this.]

There was nothing I could do about it now, stuck inside this fortress with the deranged Fer-de-Lance and her frankly murderous obsession with flying a sheet of coloured cloth from the highest point of the castle.  So I was more than a little surprised when she approached the sobbing colt, unfastened the armour on her right hoof and stepped out of it, and stroked the side of his head tenderly.  It seemed to soothe him a little, and he fell quiet and rather still, though panting for breath.

“Give him food and water,” ordered Fer-de-Lance.  “And wipe that filth off of him.”

Her sergeant retrieved a ration bar, an oat and chocolate flavour one that tasted of neither if I remember correctly, and a water canteen from his saddle bags, then knelt down next to the colt to deal with that.  With the colt distracted with the treats the sergeant took the opportunity to hit him with the Changeling reveal spell, which revealed nothing but a very hungry teenager.  As that business was going on, Fer-de-Lance stepped away, re-buckling her lower hoof armour with her magic as she did so.

“He doesn’t have his cutie mark,” she said, shaking her head.  I peered around her to see that his flanks were indeed as blank as a newborn’s.

“I doubt many ponies living under Changeling rule have the chance to find that which makes them unique and special,” I said.  “What are we going to do with him?”

Fer-de-Lance shrugged, and watched her sergeant trying in vain to wipe the gunk out of the colt’s fur with a hoofkerchief while muttering to himself in Prench.  “It does not feel right to leave him here alone, but we can’t bring him with us and we can’t spare anypony to stay and look after him.”

I might have volunteered to stay behind and look after the colt if it meant excusing myself from the pursuit of Fer-de-Lance’s flag-based scheme, but with the frontlines reduced to mere rooms and corridors in this castle and the indeterminate number of Changelings hiding within them like beasts in a cave, on balance I decided that I was probably better off accompanying the modest number of heavily armed and armoured soldiers even if it did mean plunging deeper into this deadly maze.  With the colt fed, watered, and calmed down to the point of being capable of almost rational and coherent speech, as far as their pidgin language would allow at least, our intrepid little group readied itself to make a move on.  Another area of chrysalite was identified, and the faint tingle in my cutie marks seemed to indicate that was the right way to go.

While Fer-de-Lance was busy blasting another hole in the wall, and taking rather too much glee in the process, I sat down with the colt.  Mercifully, he crawled out of the pool of slime on the floor, though his coat was still covered in it, and was sitting on the steps around the central depression.  The sergeant had wiped the colt’s face dry with a rag, which had done little to stop the tears from flowing from his eyes.  He chewed noisily on the ration bar, spilling crumbs everywhere and smearing chocolate on his lips; if he had been trapped inside that pod for so long then I imagine that this was the first time he had eaten something real for quite a while.  If nothing else, his table manners left much to be desired.

I first inquired after his name, being a good place to start as any, which he said was ‘Saguaro’.  Explaining who I am was a bit more of a challenge, as his uneducated mind and the aforementioned language issue made explaining the complex matter of what a prince is exactly and why very difficult, and I’m not certain that he fully understood it all.  He worked out, however, that I am somepony of some reasonable importance, though I made great pains to point out that there are ponies above me in the grand national pecking order.

I tried to explain to him that he was to stay there until we could come back from whatever it was we were doing or another group of Equestrian soldiers found him, however, the language issue again made this rather difficult.  After all, how was I supposed to explain the complexities of the political situation that had led to an army of thousands of ponies from a nation he hadn’t heard of to come marching into his home and start butchering the Changelings that he and his tribe had called overlords for the past century?  The answer was I did so poorly, or rather, he seemed to be in possession of enough of his faculties to realise that, like me, his best bet of survival might be with the group of armoured ponies who gave him food.

“I want to go with you.”  Even by the standards of these peasants his pronunciation sounded sloppy.  “I will go with you.”

“It will be dangerous,” I said.  “Lots of, ah…”  The natives’ word for the Changelings eluded me for the moment, so I attempted to cross that language barrier by pointing at the remains of the pod he had just crawled out of, which was hanging limply from the pillar and dripping viscous fluid on the floor.  The dead drones had been dragged to the corner of the room and covered with a cloth, and I didn’t particularly feel like drawing the attention of a foal to them.  “The ones who change?” I posited.

The colt squinted at me, tilting his head to one side with one ear pricked and the other tilted down like a confused puppy.  “The Mothers?”

It was my turn to pull the silly face; I thought I had misheard him, but when learning a new language, somewhere after how to say one’s own name but before how to order a martini with three olives at one’s preferred ratio of gin to vermouth (six to one, obviously) is identifying members of one’s own family, and I liked to think that I had picked up enough of their various dialects to correctly identify their word for ‘mother’.  “No, Changelings.”

He shrugged, took another bite of his ration bar, and said, with his mouth full, “They made my real mother live again.”

I would definitely have to work on his manners, and if I could teach Blitzkrieg of all ponies the importance of dining etiquette then I should have no trouble with this one.  “But we are fighting them, yes?  Why do you want to follow us?  Big danger.”

“You are winning?  You are here, that means you are winning.”

That remained to be seen, but for now I nodded in the affirmative.

“Then I will go with you because you are winning, and you are somepony important.  I live here, I can show you where to go!”

For a pony who had just crawled out of a Changeling pod-thing he was quite astute, and I have to admit that upon hearing that little bit of self-serving cynicism that I took a modest liking to the colt.  He reminded me of me when I was around that age, though without the added sense of entitlement that comes with being a prince of the realm on top of that which being fourteen years old already bestows.  Somepony had to keep an eye on him lest he come into trouble, his instincts being untempered by experience.  Besides, if and when we did run into some drones in this wretched place, I was willing to take the risk that they would be reluctant to harm a source of food.

Our intrepid little team marched on through the hole the Colonel had made in the wall, and I took my previous position near the front with her, albeit this time with the colt taking up the spot where my aide would normally be.  Though it was a meagre, inadequate substitute for Cannon Fodder’s reassuring presence just behind my left shoulder, it was some minor comfort at least.

Corridors and hallways all merged into one seemingly endless maze, but I felt the subtle tug of my special talent pulling me down certain corridors, through particular doors, and occasionally through the walls of chrysalite.  Saguaro pointed these out too, but I couldn't help but think that he was watching me very closely and picking up on whatever subtle signals that I was betraying each time my special talent pointed something out to me, and then pointing and babbling something before I could say anything.  That Fer-de-Lance was quite willing to take Saguaro’s assertion that he could navigate the rats’ nest of corridors and halls with greater credulity than my special talent was somewhat insulting, but I held my tongue.  We found a set of spiral stairs leading up, but after a few flights it terminated in yet another hall.  However, in ascending for the first time we felt as though we were getting closer to our goal.

We encountered a few of our own soldiers along the way, remnants of sections who had gotten lost in this maze.  Some had fought with Changelings, losing a few of their number to ambushes along the way, but from all accounts the greatest threat seemed to come not from the drones inside the fortress concealing themselves as furniture, but from the simple act of getting lost here.  If the enemy’s plan was for the great Equestrian Army to become hopelessly bogged down simply trying to navigate this infernal place until we gave up then it seemed to be working beautifully for them.

“Or into an even bigger ambush,” said Fer-de-Lance when one of her officers pointed out that we had seen markedly fewer Changelings than he had anticipated.  I wish she hadn’t, for every subsequent room, hall, corridor, chamber, antechamber, compartment, cubicle, cabin, cavern, and so on that was devoid of the defenders of this castle simply narrowed down the possible number of areas where they would be lying in wait for us.  Our soldiers, not wanting to fall into that same mistake again, took it upon themselves to cast the Changeling-reveal spell on each and every box and sack they came across, and then stab and/or shoot just to make sure.  While it slowed our progress and after that previous incident none of them were revealed to be Changelings in disguise, their thoroughness did grant me some minor measure of relief from the constant paranoia.  Opening a door or blasting through a wall to find only furniture, empty pods, or boxes of supplies that were then smashed to pieces brought no relief, and only twisted that knot of anxiety ever tighter.

As we pushed further up the castle we ran into fewer Equestrian soldiers and found more evidence of Changeling and native pony habitation.  In one room, which disarmingly resembled a conventional office with a desk, cushions, and a few boxes filled with documents, we found a lone soldier huddled up in one corner.  I shall never forget the haunted, drawn, empty expression on this stallion’s face for as long as I live, however much longer I have left.

In the opposite corner, which he was staring at even as I pushed my way in to take a look, was what I thought was a large bundle of sacks at first glance.  When I brightened the light of my horn to banish the gloom, I saw that they were in fact the bodies of two native ponies lying so dreadfully still in pools of their own blood.  They were a stallion and a mare, huddled together in a final embrace.

“I thought they were Changelings, sir,” said the guardspony, his voice breaking.  Tears streamed down his face, carving clean channels in the dusty fur.  A bloody bayonet was on the floor by his hooves.  “Celestia forgive me, I thought they were Changelings.”

We could get nothing more out of him, not the location of his unit, what happened to them, or even his name, though we found the latter on the tags he still wore under his armour - Star Bright.  Fer-de-Lance’s sergeant major tried to bully, coax, and then bribe the stallion to come with us, but the horror of what he had committed rendered him thoroughly incapable of doing much else except repeat his mantra.  At the time and given the circumstances we had little choice but to leave him there and deal with that mess later.  Experience told me that I would have to deal with quite a few such messes in the near future, should I survive long enough to see them.  

Saguaro wanted to see what the fuss was about, and was weaving around to try and see past me at the door.  A foal shouldn’t have to see that, and neither should an adult pony either, so I barked at him to keep out of our way as I had instructed before.  Ears wilting and eyes tearing up pathetically at being admonished he slinked away, while one of the other soldiers tried to keep him distracted.

A dark shadow had fallen over Fer-de-Lance’s features as she watched, and I could almost see the turmoil taking place behind her cold eyes.  We did what we could, making sure he had food and water, but otherwise were powerless here.  Nopony wanted to talk about this, but the grim, resigned expressions of a horror that was all too inevitable said more than what mere words could convey.  Going into a populated city filled with civilians, we all knew that this sort of deadly mistake was a distinct possibility, especially with an enemy able to blend in with them.  How many more times this scene was repeated throughout the castle and in the streets beyond we had no way of knowing, and it was best not thought about.

Corridor after corridor, room after room, floor after floor.  Our gallant little expedition crawled through this fortress, inching closer and closer to our goal, whatever that was.  By this point it barely seemed to matter.  As we delved deeper we encountered more native ponies, who unsurprisingly fled from the armoured contingent of foreigners invading their home.  No amount of announcing that our intentions were to liberate them from the yoke of Changeling oppression seemed to dissuade them from fleeing, and the sight of us so heavily armed and armoured storming through their halls hardly led credulity to our claim.  However, there were at least a few who were too old and slow to escape and were thus easily and quickly subdued.

Understandably frightened of the tall, scarred stallion in a dusty, brain-splattered black uniform replete with skulls, the natives, also lacking cutie marks, we did manage to capture were not exactly keen to talk with me.  Saguaro, being quite eager to help the ponies he boldly assumed to be winning this infernal war, tried to help a little with some of the more complex words and ideas I was trying to convey.  When that failed, bribing them with more chocolate ration bars encouraged them to share information.

“They’re just clerks,” I explained to Fer-de-Lance after I had dragged as much information out of them as I possibly could.  She eyed the ponies stuffing their faces with her battalion’s chocolate bar rations warily, as though they might turn into the Changelings even though they had been struck with the reveal spell (which, not understanding what was happening to them, caused one to faint and the rest to cry).  “This part of the castle is also the administrative centre of the city, so these ponies deal with record-keeping, tax-collecting, censuses, and all of the other bureaucracy on behalf of their overlords.  Apparently, the Changelings like to appoint pony administrators to run their occupied cities.  Something about helping to keep the enslaved population in line by offering a chance of preferential treatment in return for service, I expect.”

Collaborators,” hissed Fer-de-Lance, shooting the cowering ponies a glare that could sour an entire bushel of Sweet Apple Acres apples.  

“They didn’t have much of a choice,” I said, shrugging.  In truth, I couldn’t say for certain that I would not have done the same thing in that situation, but I kept that thought to myself.  

This area of the keep was certainly more ‘lived-in’ than the mostly-empty rooms and halls that we had moved through thus far.  These were disarmingly conventional offices, meeting rooms, archives and the like, and it all resembled the interior of the various ministry buildings that I have had the misfortune of visiting in Canterlot.  That said, amidst the desks and cubicles, break rooms and the like, we found very few instances of the sort of personal expression that bored office drones like to exert as a way of combating the soul-crushing effects of bureaucratic work.  There were no ‘#1 Boss’ mugs on desks, no pictures of families pinned to the wall, and no saccharine motivational posters to stimulate the workers; the absence of such things was unsettling in a rather subtle way, like meeting a foal who is being just a little too polite so as to trigger an unconscious thought in one’s mind that something disturbing lies hidden beneath a benign exterior.

Most ponies scattered before our advance, while others hid under desks or tried to conceal themselves in cupboards.  How much they understood of what was happening to them and their city was anypony’s guess, but I hardly imagined that the Changelings would be entirely forthright with their food source about the reality of a war that had now battered down their front door and making itself at home on their favourite armchair next to the fire.  There were no mobs of pretty, eager mares wanting to thank their noble liberators in the only way they knew how; there was only the fear in their eyes as they cowered from a force that was both shockingly familiar and so thoroughly alien in shape, appearance, and temperament.  With that in mind, terror seemed like the perfectly rational response.

There were no Changelings in the offices, or, to be more accurate, no Changelings that we could find.  How many of the cowering, running, crying ponies we encountered as our little contingent rampaged through their home and workplace, preemptively smashing furniture along the way, were actually drones in disguise, either spying on us or waiting for an opportunity to flee themselves, it is impossible to say for certain.  Our group numbered nine ponies now (including me and the colt I was now foal-sitting, which really meant that it was a group of seven useful ponies), and we had neither the ponypower nor the patience to spare to properly process every single pony we came across, especially if many of them kept running away at the mere sight of us.  I didn’t like it; the thought that every equine we passed could be a drone quietly observing and plotting our demise behind their convincingly fear-filled eyes was a disquieting one, and above all I feared a repeat of what that poor stallion we left alone had done.

“The city will already be taken by the time we get to the top,” sneered Fer-de-Lance when we stopped for a short break.  Wandering around this castle, following the faint tug of my cutie mark, felt as though it had taken long hours, though my watch told me that, despite the leaden feeling of exhaustion deep within me, only one had passed.

This place appeared to have been a dormitory of sorts.  It was a long hall positively filled with roughly-made bunk beds arranged in a multitude of tight rows.  The space between each of these primitive things was narrow, and barely wide enough to allow a stallion of my modest girth to walk through without scraping his shoulders and flanks on jutting pieces of wood.  To say nothing for the ponies in armour, who were forced to squeeze past.  After a few experimental jabs with bayonets and swords confirmed that these were harmless beds, the eleven soldiers [We can assume more ponies had joined their party] who were still with us took it in turns to rest on them while the others stood guard.

An incredibly tall ceiling stretched into darkness, through which a pillar of light descended from a square hole.  So we were close to the roof after all, and if we had a pegasus or a unicorn who could self-levitate amongst our number we could finally be done with this silly venture.  The ceiling surrounding this patch of light, so tantalisingly out of reach, was immersed in pitch-black darkness in a manner that did not seem entirely natural.  Light at ground level, however, was provided for by peculiar glowing growths stuck to the walls with more of that chrysalite slime.  Everything around us, therefore, was bathed in that horrid green glow, save for our small island of golden light provided by my horn.

Looking around, however, amidst the rotting wood and unwashed sheets, while I could see signs of equine habitation in the form of unmade beds and, as one of the soldiers loudly pointed out, the odour here, there were still no personal effects.  Though it was evident that ponies lived here and have done so for a long time, what was conspicuously absent was that elusive, undefinable feature that might be described as the ‘soul’ of this place.  As we rested, I thought to press this further with Saguaro.

“What do you like to do for fun?”

He was eating another ration bar when I asked him, apparently having taken a liking to them.  I suppose if one had never experienced chocolate before, the substitute the military used must have tasted heavenly.  “Fun?”

“Yes.  I like” - Drinking?  Whoring?  Naughty books? - “reading.”

Saguaro stared at me, obviously thinking hard about this strange concept that he hadn’t encountered and internalised before, then giving up with a shrug and saying that he liked the ration bars we gave him.  It was a start, at least, and though it was rather premature to think about these things when it was still very unsure that I would live long enough to see them, I wondered just what in blazes we were going to do with the two thousand odd ponies in this city, or however many of them were left after the Equestrian Army had finished with it.

The rows of beds terminated abruptly at the far end of the hall, leaving a relatively open space sparsely populated by a few rough tables and chairs to form what I assumed was some sort of communal area.  There were fewer chairs than beds, I noted.  They were all in some state of disarray, clearly having been abandoned very quickly and without care at all; chairs were left askew or knocked over and plates with congealing cold gruel and hard bread remained on tables.  It was likely the enslaved ponies left them in their panic to flee from our advance, I thought, or clearing a space for an ambush…

That intrusive little thought and the subsequent tingling in my hooves prompted me to look up, and I immediately wished that I hadn’t.  Changelings, about a dozen of them, had descended unseen from the hole in the ceiling or through some other secret passage, hidden amidst the all-consuming darkness there, and clung to the walls by their hooves like the insects they resembled.  They perched like gargoyles, and stared as silently as we passed below them.  Only the casual flicker of insectoid wings or the quiver in an alien compound eye demonstrated that they were not incredibly realistic carvings of drones.

I stopped, and the stallion behind me bumped into my rear.  His complaints barely registered as I was transfixed by the sight above, my legs turning to quivering jelly.  The Changelings knew that I had seen them, that much was clear as, despite the thoroughly unsettling compound eyes that each drone possessed, I had made definite eye contact with a number of them, yet they did not descend in a storm of buzzing wings and gnashing fangs to tear us all into thin ribbons despite our very clear vulnerability.  Somehow, that they were merely observing in plain sight, un-hidden and un-disguised as one might expect of their kind, was all the more unsettling for that most primal of questions - why?  Whatever it was, it just had to lead to some horrific fate for Yours Truly, as always.

My shout of alarm came out as a shrill yelp, but that and the frantic pointing upwards with a hoof was enough to alert the distracted ponies around me to the new threat.  Pegasi, particularly Blitzkrieg, will sometimes point out that we ground-bound ponies tend to neglect what’s above us, thinking that our pegasi cousins will always be there to deal with whatever threats would fall from the skies.  That none of our number, aside from me, had thought to look up after our initial search of the room implied a certain level of credence to that belief.

Form square!” shouted Fer-de-Lance.  The effect was instantaneous -- our loose formation snapped together quickly, forming a tight, if rather small, square with her, Saguaro, and me relatively safe in its centre.  Shoulder to shoulder, our unicorns harnessed their magic and aimed heavenwards, ready to fire upon the enemy should their quiet observation turn to violence.  And should any make it through the hail of fire, which was more than likely given our scant numbers, our earth ponies brandished their bayonet-tipped muskets to impale them.

Yet they did not come.  The enemy drones remained perched on the walls, with perhaps the only reaction being a few more excitable flickers of shimmering wings.  I heard chittering, which sounded disconcertingly like laughter.

Fer-de-Lance had raised her hoof, almost ready to give the order to fire, yet as she looked up and around at the drones, who stared back with those coldly vacant expressions, she did not.  Tense seconds ticked by, and all I could hear was the low, heavy breathing of ponies in anticipation of violence and the faint susurration of flickering Changeling wings.  Saguaro curled up in a foetal position on the floor by my hooves and shivered.

“What are they doing?” said Fer-de-Lance, hissing through set teeth.  Neither pony nor drone seemed to want to be the first to blink; the first to shatter this strange, unspoken, and fragile truce.  “Why are they just staring at us?  Why don’t they attack?”

“They’re waiting,” I posited.  Damnation, I almost sympathised with Fer-de-Lance; the incessant, unblinking staring was almost worse than the violence itself.

Fer-de-Lance scoffed.  “What for?”

The door ahead of us lurched open, shoved by a hoof, and swung wide in a grand sweeping arc to reveal a grotesquely tall figure standing behind it.  There was a clattering of armour as our ponies reacted, those at the side of the square facing the door adjusting their stance to meet this potential new threat.  The creature almost matched Princess Celestia in terms of stature, but by comparison to her slender physique appeared thin and emaciated.  One hindleg was visible from the front, bent as it was at a slightly awkward and unnatural angle as it must have broken and then set by an unskilled surgeon.

The thick chitin, like rigid plate armour, seemed almost a little too big for the creature, whose withered flesh beneath it was visible through a number of thin cracks that weaved across the once lacquer-like surface like a cracked glass window.  Its wings were broken slivers of gossamer that hanged loosely from its sides, and, at least according to my thoroughly uneducated views on Changeling physiognomy, should probably have been removed after having been rendered useless.  Save for a thin scar on the right side of its exposed neck, where a year ago the blade of a friend of mine had inflicted a wound that sliced open an artery and should have killed it, its face was untouched by the deprivations that had been inflicted upon its once-powerful frame.  The thick chitin that covered the head like a helmet and the peculiar crest-like shape of the horn was instantly recognisable, as was the expression of cold, sneering nobility that would not have been out of place in Canterlot high society.

“General Odonata,” I said.

“Hello, darling,” said Odonata, grinning directly at me.  It guided a hole-ridden, withered hoof up to the large slab of chitin that covered its chest like a breastplate, where I saw a curious, jagged insignia that resembled a green flame branded there.  “It’s Hive Marshal Odonata now, as of one hour ago.  Her Majesty Chrysalis, Queen of All Hives saw fit to grant me a promotion; she thought that it might encourage me to fight harder.”  Her laughter was low and melodious, but devoid of any emotion akin to joy.

“You know this creature?” blurted out Fer-de-Lance.

Hive Marshal Odonata stepped into the hall, dragging its damaged and apparently useless hindleg.  “It’s been a very long time since that wonderful morning we spent together, hasn’t it, Blueblood?  Have you missed me?”

Fer-de-Lance arched an eyebrow so high that it threatened to leave her face entirely.  “You and this creature have, uh- how you say it?”

Nous avons baisé,” I said.  [Translated from Prench, this means ‘We had relations of an intimate nature with one another’.]  Fer-de-Lance’s eyebrow returned to its normal position, which is to say she frowned deeply.  Though her aristocratic detachment held strong, I could sense disgust a mile away and she was radiating it like a strong perfume.  

C’est compliqué,” I added with a shrug, and she decided that it was best left at that.

Odonata took a few steps further into the room and stopped a scant dozen yards away, and those soldiers on the side facing her flinched, armour plates rattling, with each step.  She seemed to notice this, and smiled with mock-innocence.

“Steady, mes enfants,” said Fer-de-Lance, her voice dry and hoarse but with an undercurrent of steel.  “You are soldiers of Prance!”

There were none among them who hadn’t heard of the stories of the abominations that led the vast armies of monsters they fought.  The somewhat fanciful tales told by veteran sergeants to terrify their meek recruits into obedience held at least some core of truth within them; a Purestrain’s war magic was crude but immensely powerful, their skill in shape-changing was second only to their dark Queen herself, and through them a vast army of creatures so fanatical in their devotion that they could scarcely be considered sapient was hurled in our direction with no fear or concern for losses.  The callous evil of Chrysalis’ regime was personified entirely in the figure standing there, a mere dozen yards away, and it was smiling.

In the right forehoof, the Purestrain held up a stick about as long as a rolled umbrella, and a sheet that looked so crisp and white that it just had to be unnatural was tied to its top to form a primitive white flag.  

“I think it’s time that we discussed terms of surrender.”

“The Prism Guard dies before it surrenders!” roared Fer-de-Lance, her voice filling the hall and echoing off the walls.

Odonata arched an eyebrow.  Well, Changelings don’t have eyebrows per se, but her face pulled an expression that, had she an eyebrow, it would have arched.  “Ah, yes.  Your precious Princess Twilight Sparkle was too queasy to come here herself, so she sent you instead.”

Fer-de-Lance made a deep, bear-like growling noise in her throat.

Surrounded on all sides, and with possibly even more drones lurking unseen elsewhere, not to mention a Purestrain among them, it was unlikely we’d all survive.  I had no intention of ending my career in a suicidal blaze of glory, and while it might make a very exciting anecdote for officer cadets to share by a roaring fireplace in the mess as they sip their evening drinks, I’d at least like to be alive to enjoy it too.

“Let’s talk about this first,” I said.  The expression of subtle disgust that Fer-de-Lance pulled was much more severe than when she learnt of my indiscretion.

“Idiots,” spat Odonata.  The creature waved the flag, the cloth wafting limply in the hot, stagnant air.  “I meant my surrender.  Although-” the flag stopped waving, and the grin grew unnaturally wide to show far too many yellowed fangs “-if you are offering to surrender to me, I would be willing to consider it.”

“This is a trap!” Fer-de-Lance shouted from behind her wall of armoured ponies.  “More Changeling trickery!”

“This could very well be,” said Odonata with an all-too-casual shrug.  The end of the flagpole was placed on the ground and the shaft rested against the Purestrain’s broad, armoured shoulder, with the white cloth draping down over its back like a cape.  “But you are Equestrian soldiers and you have rules to follow.  You even write them down in a big book for everypony and everyling to read and enjoy, and we distinctly remember the part that frowns on abusing surrendering enemy combatants.  If you want to kill me, then I shan’t try to stop you, for it will be a more merciful end than what the Queen will exact upon me for failing her for a third time.  The question, ponies, is can you live with yourselves?”

Fer-de-Lance was silent as she stared hard at Odonata.  Her powerfully-built frame was tense, muscles tight under her armour, as though she might at any moment leap over her troops in front of her and tear the Changeling’s head off with her bare hooves.  She would, of course, be dead before she crossed the halfway point between us and the newly-minted Hive Marshal, either blasted to ashes by the Purestrain’s magic or ripped to shreds by drones.  Her jaw worked, and I could see the muscles in her cheek bulging as she clenched and unclenched.  I could have said something, and I probably should have, but somehow it felt more appropriate that the Colonel here make the necessary call.  If I didn’t like her decision, which would be whatever would lead to further violence, I could always overrule her.  In fact, I was entirely prepared to when she said the precise opposite of what I was expecting to say.

Merde,” she snapped.  “Fine.  Hive Marshal Odonata, I accept your honourable surrender.”

“Most gracious of you.”  Odonata dipped her head slightly in a sort of bow.  “However, my offer of surrender is only to the Black Prince.”

There was only one prince here, unless Saguaro turned out to be descended from some sort of native chieftain, but ‘black’ eluded me until I realised that it was in reference to this ghoulish uniform instead of the colour, or lack thereof, of my fur.  But there was still that unanswered question - why me in particular?

Of all the sobriquets that I have accumulated over the years - ‘Blue Balls’, ‘Mr Blue-Buddy’, and ‘coward-cad-bully-and-thief’ to name a few - the Black Prince has probably been the most enduring of them all, probably because it was bestowed by the enemy and thus held an aura of mystique.  The term seemed to carry with it an undercurrent of fear and respect, in contrast to the other nicknames that I have picked up over the years.  For Odonata, I could only imagine that surrendering to me as opposed to Fer-de-Lance, who was just yet another Equestrian officer but with an amusing accent as far as the enemy was concerned, held some sort of symbolic weight.  We had something of a history, after all, and, if anything, I could look forward to having some questions that had been playing on the back of my mind finally answered.

I can’t say that this nickname ever truly sat right with me, really, for I much preferred that ponies referred to me by my name and title, or merely ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Sir’, but when voiced by our adversary there, it implied a certain sense of recognition that extended beyond the increasingly anonymised approach to warfare.  It meant that I had earned a reputation even within the enemy’s hierarchy and thus singled out for special attention, which was never, ever a good thing when it came to war.

“I accept your surrender,” I said, at length.

“Thank you.”  Relief was evident even in that cold, autocratic voice.  Odonata placed the white flag gingerly on the ground, whereupon it flashed briefly with a startling green flame as the Changeling that had been forced into such indignity returned to its original form.  It looked almost embarrassed, if drones were capable of feeling such a thing.

“Is that it?” said Fer-de-Lance, sounding almost disappointed.  “It’s over?  We won?”

Odonata pulled a face that I took to be an attempt at an apologetic expression, but it certainly didn’t come off that way on a Changeling’s face.  Any sense of relief that I felt at ‘it’ being ‘over’ was instantly and thoroughly crushed into atoms.  

“I said my surrender.”  Odonata swept a hoof in the direction of the drones still clinging to the walls above us.  “And my staff, too, but the Changelings formerly under my command-” the hoof was pointed in the general direction of the row of windows to our right, through which I saw black pillars of smoke rising from a city on fire “-may not.”