[Following the capture of Hive Marshal Odonata, Prince Blueblood’s direct personal involvement with the continued fighting in the city had come to an end. While the events of the battle are generally well-known, it is necessary to place my nephew’s highly personal account into the wider picture. Accordingly, I have appended an extract from Paperweight’s ‘A Concise History of the Changeling Wars’.]
The storming of Virion Hive was the single bloodiest day in Equestrian military history since the Nightmare Heresy.
A total of six breaches had been made in the city walls, and four of them had been deemed practicable by the Equestrian Army’s specialist Maud Pie. The tunneling operation, performed jointly by the Horsetrailian engineers and a team of geomancers from the Rat Pony Tribe, beneath the castle keep had been completed and the mine laid. Aware of a Changeling war swarm marching to reinforce, Market Garden ordered I Corps to storm the city in the early morning of the 9th.
Two breaches were to be attacked by the 5th and 12th Divisions respectively, and the castle and the breach in the wall next to it was to be stormed by the 2nd Brigade with the Two Sisters Brigade as reserve. The 7th Division was to be held back as a tactical reserve to exploit a successful breach.
At dawn, the mine beneath the castle was detonated, blowing a large hole in the side of the keep, killing and wounding a large number of the defenders and civilians. Equestrian artillery fired gas shells into each of the breaches. The infantry, donning new gas masks that were little more than cloth bags soaked in neutralising chemicals, climbed out of the trenches, the pegasi and griffons took to the air, and the assault began.
However, as the Changelings had discovered with their first use of poison gas, this was not the war-winning weapon that the Equestrian general staff believed it would be. The Changelings, having correctly anticipated that their own innovations would be used against them, had developed effective countermeasures against poison gas. Gas masks with filters ensured that most of the defenders at the walls and in the castle could survive the chlorine gas, though their pony slaves had not been issued with them and many died as a result.
In addition to using gas masks, as chlorine gas is heavier than air the Changelings went against their usual tactics and placed the majority of their forces in the skies. While out-matched in speed and stamina in the air compared with pegasi and griffons on an individual level, en masse they overwhelmed the Equestrian airborne and kept them from neutralising the Changeling defences on the walls. The result was a massacre.
At the castle, the defenders waited until the Prism Guards descended into the crater before opening fire, subjecting them to a murderous hail of musket fire and close-range canister shot that inflicted heavy casualties. Elsewhere, the Equestrian units attacking the breaches came under devastating barrages that hurled back their repeated assaults. Despite this, Equestrian soldiers continued to make frontal attacks against these fortified positions only to be cut down again and again and pushed back. It appeared that the attack was failing, and the losses were so severe on all breaches that Market Garden considered halting the assault without committing the 7th and settling in for the long siege she and the Equestrian general staff had been keen to avoid.
The breakthrough came through the castle breach, where Commissar-Prince Blueblood personally led a Prism Guard assault that captured the Changelings’ cannons and allowed the battalion to enter the keep. From there, they penetrated the city via the castle gates and cleared the adjacent breach of defenders, allowing the battered remainder of the Guards Division to take the breach and enter the city. As this was happening, elements of the Prism Guards cleared the fortress, capturing Odonata, who Chrysalis had promoted to Hive Marshal less than an hour before her surrender. The standard of the Prism Guards was raised on the castle’s roof in triumph. However, though their commander had surrendered, the Changelings defending the city continued to fiercely resist.
When Market Garden committed the fresh 7th Division to the breaches taken by the Guards Division, the fate of the city was sealed. The 7th and the Guards Divisions poured into the city streets, linking up with the 5th and 12th Divisions along the way. The fighting then became confused in the streets and hovels of Virion Hive. It is still contested who started the fires that would consume a third of the city north of the River Vir, whether by Changeling defenders out of spite when they realised their position was hopeless or, as some revisionists say, Equestrian soldiers who had become maddened by the slaughter in the breaches. That wanton looting and destruction of property took place on a limited scale is known, but it is unlikely that those perpetrators who had succumbed to bloodlust were organised enough to start such a conflagration. Indeed, where officers and commissars could maintain order, the Equestrian Army worked to control the fire where possible and evacuate the civilians. Without waiting for orders, the MWC immediately deployed rain clouds to put out the fires despite the considerable presence of Changelings still in the air. For this heroic action, ten Rockhoof Stars were awarded, four of which were posthumous.
[The Meteorological Warfare Corps, despite its name, was made up of volunteer civilian weather specialists from Cloudsdale. The Cloudsdale Assembly had raised the MWC under the strict assurance from the Ministry of War that they were not to be deployed ‘in the face of the enemy’. However, this action and the previous action Blueblood described during the gas attack demonstrates that the volunteers themselves took this edict as a mere suggestion.]
The worst was over, but the fighting dragged on into the late afternoon. Isolated pockets of Changelings would continue to hold out for two days as the Equestrian Army secured aerial superiority and closed off avenues of retreat. Even then, hundreds of drones had escaped to the south where they hoped to link up with the relief column. Yet more Changelings simply melted into the civilian population, taking advantage of the chaos and confusion to prepare for their secret war against the occupiers.
Market Garden declared victory that same afternoon. Indeed, the Equestrian Army had won a victory: Virion Hive and with it nearly two thousand native ponies had been taken from the enemy, cutting off a vital source of food, and with it vindicating Princess Twilight Sparkle’s reforms. However, it came at a steep cost. I Corps had suffered a total of 2,723 casualties in a single morning, more than the total losses taken in the entire war prior to the siege. Major-General Garnet, upon surveying the piles of dead in the breaches, remarked to his aide, “One more victory like this and we shall lose this war.”
***
“I am appointing you to the post of Provisional Military Governor of Virion Hive,” said General Market Garden. Few statements have inspired more dread in me than this one (except, perhaps, ‘your Aunt Luna is coming to visit’).
I was in a field hospital for the fourth time this campaign, and I was getting rather tired of it all; not of seeing the pretty nurses in their uniforms and the brief respite from the drudgery of bureaucratic military work and the mortal terror of frontline combat, but from the circumstances that kept sending me there in the first place. This time it was for some light burns I had suffered when a large portion of Virion Hive went up in flames and I, an officer, was expected to pitch in and help organise the evacuation and rescue of ungrateful civilians. The alternative for me was to take part in the brutal street-to-street and house-to-house fighting that was still raging elsewhere, and at the time this seemed like the least dangerous of the two. As the Prism Guards were busy dragging the native ponies out of their burning hovels, almost as scared of the soldiers trying to help them as they were of the flames, a length of burning timber fell and struck me square on the flanks like a paddle, setting my tail and coat alight in the process.
A very pretty nurse whose curves filled out her uniform quite nicely was rubbing salve into my flanks when Market Garden came to tell me the good news. I had been doing my damnedest to think of something boring - the weekend sermons in the family chapel; lectures from my physician about appropriate levels of alcohol consumption; an elderly uncle updating me on the latest developments in his prostate - as the nurse massaged her hooves into my rear, before moving to my inner hindlegs where sparks and embers had likewise singed me there. It was very fortunate, therefore, that being told of my unexpected and unwanted promotion thoroughly killed any feelings of arousal, thus saving me from embarrassing myself in front of the nurse and the general.
“Thank you,” I said, being rather stunned but not so much that I had forgotten my manners. “But why?”
“I have to plan our next move,” said Market Garden. “The enemy won’t just stand back. She’ll have no choice but to react, and I must be ready for her.”
“I meant why me?”
“You’re a prince, aren’t you?” Market Garden shrugged. “Telling other ponies what to do is your thing. Besides, you’ve worked with the native ponies before; out of everypony I can spare right now you’re the best one for the job.”
I begged to differ; my previous ‘work’ with the natives ended up with me getting flogged, so I’d hardly call that a success. Market Garden continued: “I don’t want to be distracted looking after an entire city of these ponies while I continue the prosecution of this war. This will be until Canterlot can work out what to do with the occupied territories, then you can go back to your regiment.”
Not that there was much further prosecution of the war that any of us could do in the immediate aftermath of our glorious victory, given that I Corps had suffered what military historians like to euphemistically call a ‘rough handling’, and it would be some time before the yawning gaps in each battalion’s roster would be filled with hordes of volunteers eagerly awaiting their turn for martyrdom. Nevertheless, Market Garden had plenty of ‘consolidating’ to do, as they call it, and thus I was lumped with the job of working out just what we were supposed to do with all of these ponies we had just liberated.
My first thought was to likewise place this immense burden of responsibility onto another more willing pony, and it seemed that Commissar-General Second Fiddle was the perfect choice for such a thing. I say that with the utmost sincerity, for once, as while I have disparaged his qualities as a leader in the field, I truly must admit that his capacity for the tedium of administration, assuming that what he had told me of his prior work with Princess Luna and his continuing staff work with Market Garden was accurate, was where his true strengths lay. He just failed to see it, of course, and kept up his ridiculous lust for glory instead.
Second Fiddle had survived his first encounter with the enemy, I should also point out, by failing to encounter the enemy at all. I had found him again after I had overseen the necessities to put Odonata under secure lock and key, or as secure as one can make a Purestrain, and, having judged that my work was done, retired to wait out the rest of the battle (which didn’t happen, of course, as when the city caught fire I was expected to do something about it).
He had, as I had correctly assumed, simply stood still, paralysed with terror, as I and the subsequent wave of Prism Guard troops stormed the breach, and having been left alone there he slithered off to hide somewhere. Once the dust had settled, the gas had cleared, and the blood on the stones dried in the hot sun, he emerged and told the first lot of soldiers he found, who were stretcher-bearers carrying the wounded to surgery, that he had led the glorious charge into the breach. Unfortunately for him, those ponies possessed working eyes that are connected to brains capable of interpreting the visual stimulus they receive, and they clearly saw Yours Truly leaping over the barricade first as they carried ponies with limbs mangled by shrapnel to face the amputator’s saw. And regardless of that, how he expected anypony to believe him when his uniform was still clean perplexes me to this day.
“You won’t tell anypony I ran, will you?” he said, once he had managed to pull me away from the throng of Prism Guard soldiers arguing about what they were supposed to do with their new prisoner.
I was more than a little dazed by that point, having pushed myself past the point of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion merely to survive yet another gruesome fight. My mind was still distracted by trying to organise the events of the past day, like an exasperated clerk trying to file papers written in Neighponese. So I stared dumbly at him, standing there in his absurd little uniform, looking so damned pathetic with that embarrassed expression on his face, like a foal caught with his hoof stuck in the cookie jar. Both hooves, actually. With crumbs and chocolate all over his face.
“I won’t,” was all that I could say.
Second Fiddle sighed in relief and offered a weak smile. “You’re a true friend,” he said, and he trotted off to annoy somepony else. As I watched him, weaving around the soldiers before he was subsumed by the crowd, I wondered if he would ever reciprocate that notion.
I could have blackmailed him by demanding he take this onerous job, or sent a letter to Auntie Luna explaining that her little rising star in the Commissariat is little more than a rank coward. Common blackmail was beneath even me, though I’m not adverse to using it to get myself out of a truly sticky situation, but therein lay the risk of my own hypocrisy being exposed and the risk simply felt too great. I would have to save it for when a dire need arose. Besides, in light of what happened later, which perhaps I should have seen coming, it was probably for the best.
I had inherited quite the mess, frankly, and it’s still a struggle to describe where to begin with all of it. To summarise it all in a single sentence, I was now responsible for the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of some two-thousand odd ponies. That was not necessarily how General Market Garden described it, being simply in terms of making sure that the newly-occupied territory doesn’t become a hindrance in the continued prosecution of the war, whatever on Equus that was supposed to mean. However, looking at the emaciated, tired, and frightened mass of ponies, many of whom also lacked cutie marks, huddling together and shrinking away from the sight of Yours Truly, even when I tried approaching them without wearing that hateful uniform, pushed even selfish old me to realise that something had to be done to lift them out of this poverty. Besides, a happy, healthy population is a sedate one, and looking after their basic needs would ensure that the Equestrian Army wouldn’t have to worry about any nasty surprises taking place in its rear.
That defying all expectations, especially my own, and actually doing a good job of this could mean a nice, safe desk job a reasonable distance away from the front did occur to me. However, if there is one thing that I dread almost as much as a violent, glorious death for Princesses and Country, it is responsibility.
The task was daunting in the extreme. About a third of the newly-liberated ponies had lost their homes when the Changelings, being poor losers, spitefully started a fire that consumed a large portion of the city. To say nothing of the utterly disgraceful behaviour demonstrated by certain Equestrian soldiers whose looting and mistreatment of those natives had only compounded the problems we faced. Now rendered homeless, that portion of the city south of the river that had been left relatively unscathed (and rather too conveniently I might add), was now overcrowded as those refugees sought shelter in already-occupied hovels. Others, apparently rendered incapable of independent initiative, simply huddled in the burned-out remains of their meagre homes.
With much of the city rendered unfit for equine habitation thanks to the fires and the remainder not much better, a series of small shanty towns, little more than collections of tents and the odd wooden structure, was set up beyond the city walls here and there. Most were behind the ridge, offering some measure of cover from possible Changeling counter-attack, while a few more were dotted around the southern slope where a few ponies had taken up residence in those bunkers that had been vacated by the Army. Most of the population of Virion Hive was evacuated to this sprawling tent city, being much more sanitary than their previous homes even before the Equestrian Army kicked down their front door. That at least solved one issue, and from there the rest would follow.
Then there was the problem of their overall health. Their Changeling overlords seemed to be ignorant of the basics of healthy nutrition for equines, and thus raised their sources of food on a monotonous diet of hay and very little else, and in some cases not enough of it. The average Equestrian subject would stand about a head taller than most of these poor wretches. Thin-limbed, gaunt, and dull-coated, they were a desperately sorry sight to behold. Upon seeing them for the first time, a few massed together and staring at the devastation that had come to their homes and the ponies who had brought it, their eyes wide and seeming to almost pop out of their sunken sockets, was enough to move one to despair. These were the massed wretches, largely ignored by the Changelings until it was time to extract love, and who lived apart from those selected for administrative work in the castle like Saguaro, whose collaboration was rewarded with more rations.
“Chronic malnutrition, resulting in cases of scurvy and rickets and t’ like,” Doctor Surgical Steel explained to me that same evening. The old stallion looked exhausted, having pushed himself into working overtime not only to cope with fixing the horrendous injuries suffered by our soldiers in the siege but also in tending to the native ponies. “And their living conditions aren’t helping, either. A lot of them have fleas. Diseases we’ve all but stamped out in modern Equestria are thriving here. It’s like the Changelings just didn’t know or didn’t care.”
“I think they did care,” I said. “Just in the same way a farmer cares about the well-being of his crops before the harvest.”
“Aye. And tha’s got to stop t’ soldiers from giving them chocolate. They just aren’t used to that and it’s playing havoc on their digestive systems.”
Not only that, their mental development appeared to be just as stunted as their bodies. Only those selected to be administrators could read and write, but even they seemed to be completely lacking in individual initiative and drive. They were all listless and uncommunicative for the most part even without the language barrier between us, and when left to their own devices they would simply stand or sit silently, staring anywhere except into the eyes of another pony. Only the foals seemed to possess any form of vital energy, and as I made my rounds through the burned-out remains of the northern districts I would see a number of them playing little games with the soldiers, who all, despite or because of the hell they had been forced through, seemed drawn to indulging them. I could only assume that this spark within them had not yet been crushed by a lifetime of Changeling oppression.
I had thought to find one of their number in a position of authority with whom I could speak, but I found that the highest level one could aspire to be appointed to while under Changeling rule was merely the head of one’s own household. The administrators were little more than office drones, having been taught only what was necessary for them to complete their tasks and nothing else. The population was entirely dependent upon the Changelings for every essential need, and now that Equestria had rightfully ousted the oppressors we found ourselves in that position of responsibility, albeit with the justified expectation that we do a damned sight better.
There were other minor problems for me to deal with, too, but these were the ones that occupied the majority of my attention at the time. I knew what had to be done in the abstract, but the specifics of how to achieve the goal of lifting these ponies out of their poverty escaped me.
In the short-term, however, the Guards Division, having been mauled severely by being thrust into the worst fighting throughout this campaign, had been granted the temporary reprieve of garrison duty in the city while they wait for the new recruits to fill in the gaps before it’s time to be hurled again into the hellfire of war. They, at least, could be trusted to maintain order in the city, so that was one weight off my mind for now.
Later, as I lay in my cot and stared up at the ceiling of my new quarters, being a small former office in the castle keep, unable to sleep as usual for all the horror that replayed in my mind, it struck me like a sonic rainboom.
Delegation.
That was the key -- why push this job onto one single pony when I could divy out bits and pieces to lots of ponies? That way, I could still claim much of the credit for any successes but remain distant enough to avoid being blamed should it all go horribly wrong. The system of aristocratic power relies entirely upon this concept of delegation. From the highest prince (me) to the lowliest baron, each parcels out the divine authority granted to them by Faust to a chosen set of experts and administrators as and when the need arises. At no point should a noblepony actually be involved in the business of ruling, as that tends to incur personal responsibility and that way violent peasant revolts lie.
The next morning, after I had drunk my breakfast martini and deciphered the scribbled note I’d left myself following my insomnia-induced inspiration, I set about recruiting a team of experts from Canterlot and beyond to do this job for me. That is to say, I’d gotten Cannon Fodder to do it; apparently feeling rather guilty for not being by my side during the storming of Virion Hive as he was still recovering from the gas, he seemed to be trying to make it up for me by throwing himself into his work as my aide. In fact, I had to order him to stop and take breaks at times, usually enticing him with slop from the canteen and those vulgar magazines he’s so fond of. Nevertheless, through him and a few contacts that Drape Cut had dutifully provided for me, the call had gone out to a select civic-minded few in the higher echelons of government - an invitation, as it were, for those who had wormed their way out of volunteering for fighting to still contribute in some way to the all-important war effort.
They arrived in dribs and drabs over the course of the following week, but as I put them to work doing my job for me, the effect was measurable and almost instantaneous. They first set about organising a clean-up of the city and the tent villages around it, using a few volunteers and the now-idle soldiers as labour, then building proper infrastructure so the place could be considered worthy of being inhabited by ponies. And as each one arrived and assumed their duties they identified other deficiencies and called upon yet more of their ilk to take those roles - medical personnel to treat physical ailments; logisticians to bring in much-needed supplies; educators to undo the mental retardation and indoctrination brought about by generations of Changeling oppression; civil managers to organise all of this; and so on.
I had, through sheer laziness and a base refusal to take responsibility, inadvertently created the foundations of a civilian framework with which to administer the conquered territories. That nopony else in Canterlot had considered this, or merely thought that the already over-stretched Army could do it through martial law, was something of a shock to me. This was one of the very few occasions I had done good in the world, and it was motivated by idleness and cowardice.
[Policies had been put in place by the Ministry of War to maintain martial law in occupied territory, but these were often ignored as they were inadequate for the difficulties and complexities of maintaining order in a foreign land. Occupation policies varied greatly between different fronts at this point in the war, according to the measures set up on an ad hoc basis by commissars on the ground in response to the increasingly complex needs of maintaining security. However, as more territory was liberated from the Changelings, Canterlot saw the need for effective civilian oversight and would take direct rule, using Blueblood’s administration of Virion Hive as a guide.]
For the most part I simply left them to it; I find that clerks and ‘professionals’ tend to work best without somepony else in a position of authority breathing down their necks, and I barely understood what it was they were doing anyway. All that was usually required of me was my signature on their proposals, which had been processed and vetted by Cannon Fodder anyway.
Not to paint too rosy a picture here, as it was all rather stressful even at the best of times; as much as I could parcel out the grave responsibility over the lives of the two thousand ponies that Market Garden had unceremoniously dumped on my head, by dint of my undeserved reputation for fairness and my royal title, by avoiding my job I like to think that I had, in fact, done rather a good one, and I believe history has vindicated me on this. Very occasionally, however, I would have to resolve some sort of dispute about the allocation of the scant resources that Canterlot and the Ministry of War had allocated us, but as ever, the stallions in suits and the mares with tiaras provided suitable enough scapegoats for me to avoid taking much in the way of blame for most of the difficulties we faced. A few gentle words and the phrase ‘I’m sorry, but my hooves are tied’ helped ease things along.
There was also the small matter of the small number of Changelings who surrendered. Most were sent north to wait out the rest of the war in camps, and were therefore no longer under my meagre, unwanted remit. [Equestrian prisoner-of-war camps were situated in isolated, sparsely-populated locations far north of the frontline, with the furthest near our border with the Crystal Empire. The number of prisoners taken at the start of the war was low, as most Changeling drones preferred to fight to the death than surrender. Conditions in the camps were initially dire, as volunteers offering love to the prisoners were too few in number to keep them all fed. Using distilled love harnessed from the Crystal Heart remained a deeply controversial issue until the end of the war, but it did allow these conditions to improve.]
Hive Marshal Odonata, however, was another matter entirely. We have rules, she said when we captured her, and those laws enshrined in the Convocation of the Creatures constrained what we could do; though I had fantasised at length about having her beheaded, the fact that she was following our rules ensured that we too were honour-bound to reciprocate (incumbent upon her continued good behaviour, of course). She was an enemy officer who was now my prisoner, and with that came certain expectations of treatment, especially when she saw fit to invoke the old notion of parole - in essence, she promised not to escape and to cooperate fully with the Equestrian military in return for preferential treatment. Being a prince, and therefore subject to those damned iron laws of tradition more than most officers, I had little option but to accept her on her word of honour, whatever that meant to a Changeling. That said, I wasn’t about to let my guard down around her at all.
Odonata was kept under watch at all times in a spacious and comfortable cell in the castle within a few minutes’ walk from my own quarters. The frail wooden door, rotted by age and neglect, had been replaced by one of heavy, reinforced steel that was barred from the outside, with a letterbox at roughly eye-height to make sure she wasn’t up to something in there. The corridor itself was patrolled constantly by unicorn guards, should she somehow remove the nullifier ring I’d placed on her horn and blast down the door. However, she seemed singularly uninterested in escaping, which only led me to believe that she was plotting something.
I could stand Market Garden’s constant reminders no longer, and a couple of days after her capture I finally sat down with Odonata to conduct a proper interrogation. To be frank, I’d also been putting it off simply due to sheer nervous anxiety; the prospect of merely speaking with her, even with armed guards for company, filled me with just as much dread as charging into battle. Given our history, I liked to think I was justified in that feeling.
The room was plain, yet comfortable. There was a military cot that looked too small for the cell’s occupant in one corner and a desk and a chair in the other. A few books that Odonata requested were piled up on the floor around the desk’s legs. A small window would have provided the sort of view of the heights north of the city a middling hotel would advertise on a brochure, were it not for sturdy iron bars installed and the force field that filled the space between them.
“Because I want to live,” she said, when I asked her why she surrendered when she clearly had ample opportunity to reduce me to ash.
The two of us sat on lumpy, hard cushions facing one another around a coffee table, steam rising from the two enamel mugs filled with hot lapsang placed atop its surface. It all seemed very civilised, except for the monster sitting before me. Odonata sat on her haunches, rigid and upright, with a modest smile on her thin lips. It was a look that I had seen before, that of an old aristocratic pony trying, and largely succeeding, on suppressing whatever mental turmoil and pain they are suffering. I should know, I’ve done it for most of my life.
“Chrysalis is not a particularly tolerant ruler,” Odonata continued. “I have failed her three times now: my failure to incite a war between Equestria and the Badlands natives; my failure to kill you; and my failure to defend Virion Hive.”
“What will she do now?” I asked.
Odonata scoffed. She wrapped her hoof around the mug’s handle, her telekinesis blocked by the silver ring on her horn, and lifted it to her face so that the steam rising from it resembled wisps of the gas that had nearly choked the life out of me. “That’s all you ponies want out of me, ‘what is Chrysalis’ next move?’. Market Garden insisted I tell her, Second Fiddle tried to threaten me into telling him, and that pony from S.M.I.L.E. tried to cut a deal with me.”
“Wait,” I said. The Purestrain smiled as she sipped her tea. “There was a pony from S.M.I.L.E. here?”
“Yes, she pretended to be from the Ministry of War, but let’s just say that your kind are nowhere near as good at disguises as Changelings.” Odonata grinned wider, showing off rows of razor-sharp fangs. “She was very boring, but I’ll tell you, though” -she then nodded to the two guards standing by the door behind me- “and your friends.
“The very first thing Queen Chrysalis will do is fly into a rage. She will rant and scream about how I betrayed her by failing to die defending her city and how she can’t trust even her most loyal Purestrains. She will immediately order the relief column to retake the city as fast as they can. However, when she has calmed down, usually having the closest general executed, she will realise two things. The first is that her warswarms cannot afford a lengthy battle of attrition, and now that you’re in Virion Hive it’ll be almost impossible to remove you from it. You ponies struggle with offensive action, but you’re damned tenacious in defence. The second is that Equestria now has two thousand former livestock to look after. She will instead try to contain your advance, by stopping you from breaking out of the city or crossing the River Vir elsewhere.”
It was impossible to hide my genuine feeling of revulsion at the term ‘livestock’ to describe my fellow ponies, especially after I had seen the effects of the Changeling occupation on the inhabitants of this city. Odonata shrugged her shoulders, the plates of her armour-like chitin shifting with the slim, withered musculature beneath them.
“The Queen is nothing if not adaptable,” she continued. “Losing Virion Hive and the ponies in it when the Hives are starving is a setback, but she will turn this to her advantage.”
“How so?” I asked. “If the Hives are starving, Chrysalis must be forced into committing to open battle to retake the city.”
“Two years of war and you still fail to comprehend the lesson,” said Odonata. “You must understand that you cannot expect Chrysalis to fight by your rules; she will not engage in open battle unless forced, and she is willing to play the long game. She is planning something, and with each pony you liberate from her clutches, she will be pushed that little bit further to the point where she must accelerate her plans.”
“And what would those plans be?”
“I don’t know the full details. If she told me, then she wouldn’t have risked my capture by appointing me to the frontline.” Odonata placed her now empty mug back on the table with a ‘thud’, and leaned back in a sort of relaxed, louche pose on her cushion. “But I am surprised that you haven’t worked this out for yourselves. She seeks to drag you into an extended conflict; a military quagmire from which your damned sense of pride and honour will forbid you from abandoning. That is why she avoids decisive battles and how she can afford to trade land and drones for time and opportunity, which she will use to infiltrate Equestria. In taking Virion Hive, you have given her one such opportunity in the form of the thousands of ponies you must now look after and the unaccounted-for drones hiding among them.”
My tea grew cold as I sat there dumbly with my mind frantically turning over the implications of what Odonata just said. It was so obvious, but we, by which I mean the Equestrian general staff, had carried on this war under the assumption that the Changelings would fight us on what our generals would consider to be ‘conventional’ terms. Odonata was right, damn her, Equestria had committed to this unwinnable war and no politician or general was going to advocate withdrawal now that we had gone too far. Then there were the native ponies themselves; how many of the thin, emaciated wretches I had seen were Changelings in disguise? We might have had the ability to dispel their illusions, but to process two thousand natives all spread out in the tent settlements and in their hovels with the meagre resources that I had been allocated was another matter entirely.
White Hall’s grim warning that ‘the Changeling will always get through’ no longer felt quite so darkly apocalyptic.
[White Hall was a prominent Equestrian statespony who served as prime minister on three separate occasions. This phrase was part of a speech given to Parliament in support for the Twilight Sparkle Reforms. In isolation, the phrase has been taken to illustrate the futility of defending against Changeling infiltration of Equestria. However, the speech as a whole advocates embracing the reforms and defeating the enemy as quickly as possible as the only means to protect the realm.]
“You’re being very forthcoming with this information,” I noted, once I’d recovered enough of my wits to speak. “But why should we trust a word you say?”
“Because it is now within my best interest that Equestria wins this war,” said Odonata. “Like I said, I want to live.”
“And you’re willing to betray your Queen and your entire race to survive?”
“Chrysalis has dragged the Changelings onto the path of self-destruction. In attacking Canterlot she has awoken a sleeping dragon, and though its waking is slow and ponderous it will be filled with a terrible wrath that will rain down upon our hives. To save my race, we must abandon her folly. And yet…” She sighed, her thin black lips setting into a flat line across the aquiline curve of her long snout. Her eyes were still narrowed at me, but the sneering sense of superiority and arrogance had been washed away to leave something within them that could be taken as vulnerability. “Our race starves, Blueblood. It’s impossible for you to understand the hunger of the Changelings. In five years we will be completely unable to support our population- ah, four and a half years, now that we’ve lost Virion Hive. What other choice did we have but to attack Canterlot?”
“You could have asked!” I blurted out.
And there it was. Odonata was apparently struck dumb by that statement. Her jaw hung loose, as though the musculature holding it shut had suddenly been severed. I could see behind her eyes that cunning and malevolent mind of hers, capable of weaving together the intricate plots of ponies and Changelings, tribes and kingdoms together, struggling to grasp the basic simplicity of what I had just said. In the end, after about thirty seconds of her gazing right through me, she could only say, “What?”
“The Changelings could have asked us for help with the food crisis,” I said.
She seemed to recover from her shock, and adopted her usual cold sneer, as though I had mocked her with a cruel joke. I suppose to her, this bewilderingly simple solution to their little problem must have sounded like one. “I sincerely doubt that ponies would be willing to give up their love to help us.”
The Purestrain had me there, of course, and I was about to concede defeat when I remembered that I was hardly representative of all ponies. The old Equestria that I knew, of cold, distant aristocrats obsessed with the mere appearance of honour and duty while they indulged in every debauchery known to ponykind behind closed doors, would not have lifted a hoof to save these foreign creatures. That Equestria, however, was fading away in favour of the new, its decline accelerated by the conduct of its ruling class in this pestilential war that stripped bare that facade and revealed the truth beneath it. Except me, of course, my tendency to be situated near something genuinely heroic happening and getting credit for it gave me some sort of shield against that sort of criticism.
“Princess Twilight Sparkle would have found a way,” I said, and I found myself almost believing it. “This war was not inevitable. It could have been avoided if Chrysalis had just asked for help.”
“If Chrysalis was the sort to ask ponies for help then she would not be the Queen of the Changelings!” snapped Odonata. “To rule the Hives demands a leader with the strength of will to understand the one core truth of this world!”
Throughout her tirade, the two guards by the door behind me had advanced one step closer, wrapping their magic around the hilts of their sheathed sabres. I raised a hoof, halting them mid-stride, but still they stood, ready to come to my rescue. “And what would that be?”
The Changeling grinned horribly, unnaturally wide for such a slender and disconcertingly elegant face. Her yellowed fangs glinted in the tinted sunlight cast from the tiny window, mirroring the malevolent, cruel glimmer in her eyes. She leaned forward as though she was about to impart some dark secret to me, and it was all that I could do to keep my composure and not leap behind the cushion and cower like cornered prey. Continuing her insane screed, her tone was calmer, though fervour of the fanatic lay as an undercurrent in her hateful words.
“That life means struggle. The strong must dominate the weak or they will be destroyed. We Changelings have survived, thrived even, in the Badlands because we accept this fundamental law of nature -- the strong survive and the weak perish. To pretend otherwise would be to invite weakness into our midst and allow ourselves to be destroyed from within by the inferior and the deviant. That is why we would not ask for Equestrian help with our food crisis, because the strong need not ask, they simply take what is rightfully theirs.”
“And you think that this gives you the right to make war on ponies and enslave them?”
Odonata shook her head. “Not the right, but the obligation. The alternative is our decline and destruction.”
“And your drones willingly follow this?”
“That is what separates the Changeling from the pony. A drone is not after the same comfort, safety, and security that a pony uses to hide themselves from that universal truth. A drone knows that there is only the Hive and the Queen who leads it, and each knows that their lives are worth nothing except in service to both.”
I, as you are no doubt well aware by now, dear reader, am hardly what one would call a deep thinker, especially when it comes to the matter of politics and ideology; I quite like the way things are, or were, rather, because they benefited me and my privileged ilk, and should I need to justify that arrangement I would merely direct others to either Princess Celestia or somepony paid to think so I would be left alone to carry on in idleness and indolence. However, even one such as I could see that what Odonata had just espoused was, philosophically speaking, a load of old crock of the highest order - the mere atavistic justification of a bully, which had led to a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that must inevitably culminate in self-destruction. Yet more than that, it offered nothing but a hard life of struggle, danger, and death, with little in the way of recompense to the average drone save for the delusion that their futile life, devoid of harmony and pleasure and all that made life worth living, would serve the Hive. Even my backwards views on the world offered job security and safety in a nicely-ordered social structure, plus an interesting chap at the top whose antics are reported in the tabloid press for the amusement of the peasants.
[By this point, enough Changeling PoWs had been captured and interrogated to disprove the hive mind hypothesis. This ideological framework, the brutal living conditions in the Hives, and what sociologists call the ‘Cult of Heroic Sacrifice’ engendered fanatical loyalty to Chrysalis and a chilling lack of regard for one’s own life that Equestrian military analysts could only explain by way of a hive mind theory. However, as the war developed and the casualties mounted, the Changelings modernised their military to match the Twilight Sparkle Reforms and thus tempered their fanaticism with discipline.]
None of this needed to happen. Few things truly move me to anger, and by ‘anger’ I mean genuine fury rather than the sort of petulant tantrums I was somewhat infamous for. If the Changelings had just spoken to us then this horrid war could have been avoided, but this kind of thought, this so-called ‘truth’, had blinded them to the one very obvious solution to their problems. For that, thousands would have to die.
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I sneered, not really knowing where to begin after hearing that nonsense.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, yet,” said Odonata. “A thousand years of peace has made ponies forget this truth, and as you eliminated each hardship from the lives of your ponies you made them soft and decadent. Yet the old blood that conquered Equestria still flows even in your ethanol-soaked veins, waiting to be unleashed again. In fact, it has already begun; I must admit that I was surprised when you reciprocated with poison gas.”
“I made my protest very clear,” I snapped. “General Market Garden did, too. We can win this without compromising our ideals.”
“Can you?” Odonata leaned closer, so that I could smell her stinking breath and feel its sickening warmth on my muzzle. I heard two sabres unsheathed from their scabbards behind me. Despite the primitive hindbrain screaming that I am prey and this is a predator, I held her stare as best as I could without blinking; those foalhood hours spent being forced to learn to adopt a cold and distant demeanour befitting a prince of the most noble line in Equestria had finally paid off. “When you stand victorious in the gas-soaked ashes of the Queen’s Hive, surrounded by the dead in the shadow of your Princesses’ Royal Standard fluttering in the smoke-filled breeze, will you turn and look at your comrades and still recognise them as the same ponies they were before the war?”
That was it. There was no witty retort that I could think of, and it would be wasted on one as closed-minded as Odonata. Not that I didn’t try, of course, as old habits die hard, but pointing out that I would likely be dead before that happens simply felt more like a prediction than a quip. In the end, I could only settle for saying in as level and flat a voice as I could manage, “Thank you, this has been most enlightening.”
With that, I stood up to leave, not having touched my tea but very much looking forward to something far, far stronger back in my office. There was no arguing with a mind that had been already closed by propaganda and trite slogans, but it did occur to me that she would have made an excellent commissar. I reached about halfway to the door, where the two guards had advanced closer, when Odonata suddenly cried out, “Wait!”
I stopped, thinking about just walking straight out to my quarters where Granny Smith’s bottle and the comfort therein waited for me under the cot, when curiosity got the better of me. Not bothering to turn myself fully around, I merely looked over my shoulder and waited for her.
There was an odd look on her face; Changeling face structures might have mirrored that of ponies, but there was always something quite off about it all. Granted, I had only ever seen perhaps three emotions expressed on such a visage - murderous rage, arrogance, and, quite rarely, fear. Odonata’s expression there was approximating in its own crude manner, as though it lacked the necessary muscles and tendons for anything besides those three aforementioned emotions, what I took to be anxiety. The mouth, so used to its superior smirk or snarl of anger, was clenched shut and tight, while her eyes flitted across the room at everything except me and the two guards. Despite everything, it made me curious.
“I am a busy prince,” I said, “and I have a city to run.”
The carapace on her back split apart and stretched wide, like a beetle extending its wings. Hers, however, were broken and useless, and thus fell as limp strands of gossamer by her side. From some sort of strange pouch hidden there, she retrieved what I first took to be a small black cat, but when she held it up I saw that it was in fact a miniature, doll-sized Changeling. I didn’t know what they called their foals, ‘nymphs’ I believe is the modern term, but for some reason my mind settled on ‘larvae’, and I realised I was staring at one. The infant squirmed in its mother’s embrace, held against the cold, unfeeling chitin, then opened its oversized eyes and stared seemingly at me -- eyes that were disconcertingly pony-like.
“Her name is Elytra,” said Odonata, smiling down at her spawn.
“It’s not mine, is it?” I asked. Ice water seemed to trickle down my spine; a paternity scare over a bloody Changeling would be just the sweetest cherry atop this appalling cake of misery I had just been served. I think I’d have rather fathered a mule instead.
“She could be.” Odonata shrugged and began rocking the nymph in her hooves back to sleep. I couldn’t see the family resemblance, myself. “I slept with a lot of stallions when I was undercover.”
“Well, how in blazes did that happen?”
Odonata covered her nymph’s ears with her hooves, lifted her head, and grinned slyly, “When a stallion and a Changeling love each other- wait, that’s not it. When a stallion is tricked by a Changeling disguised as a pretty mare he starts to get certain urges, and-”
“It’s impossible!” To my surprise she actually stopped and allowed me to interrupt. I jabbed a hoof at the tiny, curled-up thing innocently nuzzling into her chest. “Ponies and Changelings can’t… can’t do that!”
“Let’s just say that we’re very adaptable.” Her hoof stroked the infant Changeling’s head affectionately in an almost perfect imitation, I thought, of a mother with her daughter, yet the sight here made me feel repulsed to the core after that appalling speech earlier. “The Queen doesn’t approve of the results of such unions. There’s barely enough love to go around as it is and it can’t be wasted on mixed, inferior drones. But after I crawled out of that ravine and limped back to the Hives and begged Queen Chrysalis for one more chance, after everything I had endured just to survive, I could not do what was required of me and destroy my daughter. That is why I surrendered to you, specifically -- as your prisoner you are bound by your word of honour to protect me and my daughter.”
I stood there digesting this for a moment. “You really thought I would believe all of that,” I said, at length, “didn’t you?”
Odonata was silent and still, staring back at me still with that peculiar imitation of equine emotion on her malformed face. Somehow, the notion, however unlikely, that she was being genuine for once was a damned sight more unsettling than the more probable scenario that this was all deception to serve some greater plot to... well, Faust only knows what goes on in the sick, labyrinthine mind of a Purestrain. I ought to have just damned tradition to Tartarus and shipped her off to one of those camps to freeze and starve, but no, Market Garden wanted her close by for ‘intelligence’ purposes.
I was finished, both with life in general and with this interrogation, such as it was, and there was a cold, sick feeling roiling in the pit of my stomach, a sensation that had always been there since I’d returned to the front but had only grown worse after that little interview, as I stormed out of the door and wondered how in blazes was Cannon Fodder going to write all of this up in an official report for me. Even in victory, things only seemed to grow more complicated.