//------------------------------// // Wedding Crasher // Story: My Little Behemoth: Friendship is more than Food // by Kishin //------------------------------// In a flurry of viscera and green waves of sinister magic, the Queen Changeling shed her false form in front of the wedding invitees and shouted at the true Cadence, "My changeling army will break through. First, we take Canterlot. And then, all of Equestria!" Princess Celestia interjected, "No. You won't. You may have made it impossible for Shining Armor to perform his spell, but now that you have so foolishly revealed your true self, I can protect my subjects from you!" Celestia had flown in the air, and released an epic barrage of solar light towards the Changeling queen, which she had returned with her own emerald beam of magic with baneful contempt. Their power had seemed equally matched as their beams had met and were struggling in a stalemate, but Chrysalis's ominous blast of her morbid energy slowly gathered momentum and collided in contact with the Princess's horn. A horrific explosion of pain and terror struck Celestia as she was literally thrown to the ground by the shockwaves of the resulting magical backfire, as forlorn and helpless as a ragdoll caught in a tornado. Twilight Sparkle ran to her shouting, "Princess Celestia!" "Ah! Shining Armor's love for you is even stronger than I thought! Consuming him has made me even more powerful than Celestia!" remarked Chrysalis. She began to walk towards her opposition for the final blow. Princess Celestia weakly replied to her faithful pupil, "The Elements of Harmony. You must get to them, and use their power to defeat the queen." "Sister? Anypony? IS SOMETHING WRONG IN THERE? WE HAVE BROUGHT A CONTINGENT OF ROYAL GUARDS!" yelled Luna outside of the reception in her Royal Canterlot voice. "We have found numerous Changelings on the streets! I am afraid that we may have to cancel the wedding...." There was only silence, which had replied in Celestia's place with its trademark response. "....Sister? Art thou in there? ANSWER ME!" She shouted again. The moment of silence was interrupted by the Elements of Harmony bursting out of the door and sprinting away from the reception as if lives depended on it. But that's absurd. There shouldn't be any sort of panic at the wedding..... already. "Ah Twilight! Have thou seen-" "No time to talk. Changeling queen. Invasion. Gotta get to Elements. Protect Celestia!" Princess Luna's gaze widened as she looked in the recital and saw its inhabitants subdued and a dark figure looming over her sister's prone body. "CELLY! NO!!!!!" Luna began to charge into the scene of the ruined wedding, but the doors glowed with a green aura of magic and closed shut, and left her outside with a group of anxious guards and an approaching horde of Changelings behind them. "Lieutenant, command thy Guards! Protect thy Princesses and Equestria from the Changeling invasion! Unicorns, with me! We shall need thy magic for this-" She stopped as the image of the doorway began to waver, as if it was a sample of entertainment from a mirror house. "I am truly sorry for this. But it must be done..." a disembodied, deep voice had uttered from the recital entrance. A towering specimen of Changeling had materialized from thin air, its cloaking magic now fading away. Its transparent carapace and massive hoofs glinted off of the sunlight, carved with ancient, foreign glyphs; the monster's leviathan stature, glowing orange eyes, and predator-like countenance had followed in the wake of the spell's cancellation. As soon as it saw the shock in the Lunar Goddess's eyes, a sign of recognition of his visible form, it galloped into a charge and rammed himself towards Luna's mass into a nearby mass of buildings. He smashed himself into the next block of edifices, with bricks, rubble, and debris clinging to his form and slowed himself to contact Luna's body into a barricade of shops and various buildings. The brick had shattered and splintered on contact as the Goddess soon accelerated into beams of construction and became embedded into a wall surounded by sediment of ruin. "THOU DARE ATTEMPT TO HARM THE PRINCESS OF THE NIGHT?! THOU SHALT FEEL THE TORTURE OF A THOUSAND DEATHS, FOUL CREATURE!!!" Luna shouted, undeterred by its charge. Her eyes glowed to a pure white and her horn emitted a column of projectile magic. Luna, calculating that her enemy would be too slow to dodge the attack, had expected the titanic Changeling to absorb and be knocked back by the hit, but to her surprise the luminescent sapphire beam of harmful energy simply glanced the Changeling's side and only singed its chitin-based armor upon impact. She froze. A blast of that magnitude should have knocked a manticore off its feet. So it was going to come to this.... "GUARDS! APPLY SUPPORT WHILE I PREPARE FOR AN OFFENSIVE SPELL!" she commanded. As Luna freed her limbs from the wall, and aimed a buck towards the monster of a Changeling's head, Unicorns from the Royal Guards rushed into the ruins and provided an artillery wave of magical strikes. Pegasi Guards had dropped from the sky and proceeded to charge at the Changeling. Their combined efforts drove the monster out of the ruins and forced it to stagger onto the cobblestone boulevards of Canterlot. The Changeling kept a wary eye on the recital entrance, and satisfied to see that no pony was attempting to forcibly enter, he turned back to view Princess Luna's location. And her appearance was far from cheerful. Scuffs and bruises had permuted her cobalt blue coat, and her eyes and mouth were emanating a pure white glow as rifts of dark magical waves circulated around her. Her celestial, night-sky hair was no longer blown by gentle cosmic winds, but were furiously rippling and fluctuating about as if they were a lively blue blaze. Princess Luna uttered in a distorted screech, "WE WILL GIVE YOU ONE LAST CHANCE! SURRENDER, OR SUFFER DIRE CONSEQUENCES, FOUL BEAST!" The "behemoth" of a Changeling fixed her with an exasperated stare and calmly stated in reply, "My fool of a Queen demands I serve until the end. I am afraid I cannot abide by your wishes." "THOU DARETH HARM OUR CITIZENS AND OUR SISTER, AND YET THOU ADDRESS US WITH SUCH UTTER ARROGANCE?" bellowed the Princess of the Night in her Royal Canterlot Voice-harmonized rage. "SUCH INSOLENCE WILL ONLY BRING FORTH MORE SUFFERING FOR THOU!" Her opponent vaguely acknowledged, "I will not mind suffering by your hooves, Princess. As long as my Queen will not allow others of my caste suffer for my failure, my demise will be welcome." Luna almost flinched at its remark. It was almost if the creature was trying to tell her something, as if it was in a predicament itself. Its statement was solemn, yet she couldn't believe that a Changeling would fight for something else besides himself or its Queen. Recalling him use the term "fool of a Queen", as if the Changeling had emotions of abhorrence for Chrysalis, she had begun to lower her guard for a split second, only to resolutely change her mind in an instant. It's getting in your head, Lulu. Celly is waiting for us.... The mere thought of her sister brought her back from her recollection of thoughts, along with her fury. "Thou hath been warned, beast!" She hissed in a deep, monotone voice full of hatred. She unleashed her magical attack with a whisper of an Ancient Equestrian incantation, and soon a stream of pure lunar magic erupted from her horn towards the immense Changeling. The stream soon grew in magnitude mid-velocity into a mushrooming crescent blade of energy and sped towards the creature. Luna's attack of offensive magic struck and enveloped the Behemoth, and drove him back with its hooves firmly grounded into the boulevard. Luna's attack spell heaved apart the cobblestone road in the Behemoth's direction and was beginning to disintegrate its organic chitin armor. The Behemoth, overcome with pain, fell to its knees. Luna had stopped her barrage to find the Changeling quite damaged. It's greenish-blue blood was oozing and coagulating from its joints and whole sections of where its natural armor once was were dissolving away, revealing its raw wounds and internal anatomy in its damaged body and carapace. The membrane on one of its eyes, or in Changeling terms its visual receptors, was cracked in a spider web fashion, allowing precious orange chemicals essential for capturing light, and therefore for its vision, to leak out of its socket. There he was, injured and partially blind. To add insult to injury, the Behemoth had enough volition to try to get back up on its hooves, but was interrupted during its feeble task by the spears thrown by nearby Pegasi Guard plunging into an exposed joint on its left foreleg. Thinking the creature to still be dangerous, as it was still moving, they flung themselves at the injury and bucked the Behemoth's already skewered leg into an awkward angle. A sharp crack signaled its exoskeleton positioned on its leg could no longer handle the abuse, and had broken. The limb now useless, meat started to pour out of the injury. The Changeling bellowed in rage and pain. With a final push, it lifted itself up with 3 of its forelimbs, rose up, and stomped on the ground, creating a severe tremor that had collapsed almost all buildings in the vicinity and knocked the Guards and Luna off their hooves. Viewing that its distraction had succeeded, the Behemoth began to tug at the useless forelimb with its teeth. Its incisors crushed and pulled at the hoof, and with a brunt of a scream, the foreleg was disconnected from the Behemoth's body. The unfortunate changeling gently placed the barbarically amputated forehoof onto some of the Guards. "Do not worry. I bear no grudge for what you did, and your lives will be spared. But this may leave some bruising." Leaving behind the group of writhing Royal Guards, who struggled to free themselves under the sheer weight of the discarded mass of muscle and chitin, the Behemoth slightly hopped towards the direction of the recovering Princess Luna. Using up the last remnants in his emergency reserves of love, the Behemoth sprouted with considerable effort a new foreleg out of the stump he had for a left foreleg. It was tired, ragged, and heavily wounded, so it sincerely hoped that its efforts to regenerate his limb was worth the energy. Spying the Behemoth regenerating a new limb, Luna mentally gasped in surprise and poured her concentration into the attack spell once more. This time.....the monster shall not rise again. Her destructive spell once again struck the Behemoth, tearing away its exoskeleton, and soon its flesh, even further. The Unicorn Royal Guard recovered from the violent tremor also and concentrated their magical barrage at the sole Changeling. The Behemoth bellowed, and overwhelmed by the magical bursts directed at him with deadly accuracy, began to stomp on the ground again. Its desperate action had once again inhibited the Guards and tossed them into the air with the tremors, but the Princess remained steadfast and unwavering to her task. Ignoring the inferno of burning pain within her horn, Luna pressed on her attack and intensified her efforts. The Changeling Behemoth struggled against the wave of Lunar magic cutting across its carapace, dissolving and obliterating its chitin exoskeleton piece by piece, molecule by molecule. Yet the thing's impulse to give one more glorious charge forced its failing limbs to move forward towards the source of the magical current, agonizing step by agonizing step. The Behemoth's already-crippled vision in its remaining eye began to blur and shunt the light towards the center of its vision, almost as if it was in a tunnel. A very, very painful and resistant wind tunnel that was trying to destroy the Changeling with a cyclone of magic. The Changeling was mere meters away when its muscles ceded to the magically-induced pain cutting against it. His hooves dropped, and its center of mass soon followed, the stinging ache finally reaching down to the bare layer of the Behemoth's exoskeleton. Luna, seeing the Behemoth collapse, ended her spell, and walked with a fatigued droop in her step up to the corpse- no...the still-twitching body of the Changeling. Before her banishment, Luna led regiments of the Equestrian Military on violent campaigns of bloodshed. She had maimed, crippled, injured, but she could never bring herself to kill.....on purpose. So she granted the Changeling some respite to die peacefully and trotted past her defeated enemy to begin rallying the Royal Guard for another attempt to breach the locked doors of the Royal Wedding recital. She helped the Guards struggling to escape the weight of the Changeling's disconnected foreleg get back up by removing the rotting obstruction, and heard that beast mutter. "Celestia will still be alive. The Queen has plans for her and her fellow subjects." "Thou art still alive? We had hoped that with thy defeat and the end of thy life, thy arrogance and deception would have ended as well." The Changeling ignored the insult and painfully chuckled and choked on its blood, "I had hoped so too. But fate has yet to bestow upon me the mercy that you have just given me. For that I am truly grateful." "Thou mock us with false intentions! Thou shalt-" "I assure you that your sister and citizens will be safe. Changelings feed off of love, not corpses. They need living subjects to fulfill their hunger." "What art thou attempting to suggest?" The Behemoth could no longer feel its limbs. The utter pain that had once seized its nervous system were numbed by the cold grasp of death. "Do me a favor....make that dirt beetle of a Queen...have a taste of her own medicine. She owes me that much," the mutilated Changeling whimpered pleadingly. Its head had slumped onto the brick-laid road as he no longer had the strength to hold its own head up. A hardened tear had formed on the fringe of the Behemoth's ruined eye. It uttered with enough finality to project his words to every being it remembered or met, whether they were dead or alive. Its chilling words would have to compensate for the damage it was and had been responsible for its entire life. "I'm sorry."