“That can’t be sanitary,” I said, gazing into the modest hole dug through the latrine. At first it seemed barely wide enough to admit even a slender pegasus, but, as I examined it past the outer lip that had been covered by the lavatory unit itself, which I now saw had been deftly unscrewed from the floor, it seemed to be much wider past its relatively narrow entrance. It would have to be, thought I, if a mare as big as Square Basher had been digging it, or if she expected me to go crawling through this crude escape tunnel. “Has it been used recently?”
Square Basher’s cheeks flushed pink with uncharacteristic embarrassment. “Well, sir,” she said, screwing her face up. “It is a toilet, and there have been one or two little… accidents along the way, but everypony now knows not to use this one for its intended purpose.” Her hoof tapped the little cross crudely carved into the open wooden door.
“Just one little thing, Square Basher. You said ‘everypony’; who else is involved in this little scheme of yours?”
“Like I said, sir, everypony. The mares have been digging out the tunnel just a little bit at a time, when they pretend to use the facilities, and the stallions help us by disposing of the dirt outside with their gardening project.”
I had thought it was unusual that Switchblade had suddenly taken an interest in plants that didn’t have psychoactive effects on ponies. There was, however, one thing, and though she had said ‘everypony’ it still left one notable exception.
“Everypony except me,” I said, a little affronted at having been left out. Though, had I been aware earlier, I’d have made moves to put an end to this ridiculous plan before it could even get as far as unbolting the lavatory unit from the floor.
“Well, sir, about that.” Square Basher’s ears wilted as she spoke, and she seemed to find it harder than usual to look me in the eye. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I saw you getting friendly with the bugs and I wasn’t sure you could be trusted. I’m sorry, sir, I ought to have known that you were only doing that to keep the attention off the rest of us.”
“No harm done, I suppose,” I said, which was wrong; a lot of harm had been done, and now I had to frantically think of a way to put a stop to this silly thing without putting myself in danger. “What about Cannon Fodder?”
“No, sir.” She shook her head fiercely. “He would have told you.” There was at least one thing in this world gone mad that I could still rely on, then.
The news left me in a bit of a daze, where I was all but overwhelmed by the onslaught of thoughts of how to deal with this new development, which threatened to completely upend the relatively comfortable life I had managed to secure. Anger and betrayal were first and foremost the emotions I felt; after all, everything I had done thus far since I surrendered my sword was in her own best interest and those of the soldiers who still looked to her for leadership as much as my own sake, but if she saw those feelings through the cracks in my masque of princely detachment she must have taken them for me merely being upset at not being told of her brilliant plan in the first place.
I considered trying to deliberately collapse the tunnel later, somehow, but I would have to do that out of sight of Square Basher and anypony else; when she invited me to take a closer look, and I reluctantly put my head inside the gaping hole and held my breath from the lingering odour, I saw that the construction was of surprisingly high quality and arranging a cave-in would be trickier than I thought. Square Basher proudly told me about how they had stolen bits of wood by selectively dismantling items of furniture in their rooms to serve as buttresses. The hard and dry earth of this bleak and depressing part of the world, while it must have been extremely difficult to dig through using mere cutlery, at least seemed to make the prospect of a tunnel collapse unlikely in my thoroughly uneducated opinion. Besides, I thought, I’d rather not try to engineer a cave-in whilst inside the tunnel.
That left informing on her to Commandant Dorylus, or ‘grassing’ as that stallion of the street Switchblade had referred to that most unforgivable of sins, and that was still a terribly risky proposition. Although it would put a very rapid stop to this plan, and I could in theory do so anonymously if our Purestrain host was feeling particularly generous, the timing would leave Square Basher and her fellow conspirators very little doubt as to who had told on them. If my goal was to survive this benighted war, it would not do to have avoided the prospect of being hunted down by Blackhorn patrols out in the middle of bloody nowhere, only to have been stabbed in my sleep with a dirt-encrusted spoon by a vengeful Sergeant Major who had decided that my loyalty to my Aunts was severely lacking.
“How far does this go?” I asked, after removing my head from the smelly hole in the ground and taking a deep breath of slightly fresher air. Just once, I almost wished the poison gas of so long ago would have taken my nose along with my lungs.
“We’re about halfway there,” said Square Basher. She lifted the lid from the lavatory’s cistern and fished out a small water canteen. Pulling out the stopper, she produced a rolled-up napkin, upon which she, or perhaps somepony else, had sketched out a crude diagram of the tunnel with measurements. “We came up with the plans over our dinners in my room, sir, and everypony chipped in with ideas. Ploughshare did the measurements by walking up and down the lawn and counting his hoofsteps. We take it in turns to dig, just a little bit at a time, when the bugs think we’re in here doing our business.”
I looked out of the window, trying to follow the path on the map in my mind’s eye, and realised that it went the shortest possible distance to the opposite side of the fence surrounding the camp. Directly in the way of the path carved by this tunnel, however, was that small barracks building that I had found during my earlier wanderings. Based on my guesses, informed by my special talent putting the pieces and numbers together for me, once completed, this prospective tunnel would open up a few yards just beyond the wall, whereupon our gallant band would either be instantly spotted by the guards looking out from the upper windows of the mansion, or be hunted down and caught like rats by the patrols that would no doubt infest the countryside once Dorylus found that his camp had suddenly become depopulated. An alteration of the measurement of the length of the tunnel would have it terminate just within the outer perimeter of the camp, and if I was particularly precise with this it could even end directly inside the Changelings’ barracks.
One had to give Square Basher all due credit here; while she might be devoid of curiosity and imagination, both qualities deemed undesirable by the old Royal Guard and beaten out of her by a lifetime within it, and lacked the necessary foresight to understand that her plan was ill-advised and foolhardy in its most generous interpretation, but she was not only stubborn enough to see it through, she was also still very capable of executing her duties as an NCO and organising ponies to work effectively together towards a singular end. It made me feel at least a little bit guilty about what I was going to do.
“I say!” I said abruptly, snapping my head up to look out of the window. Beyond, ponies and drones milled about aimlessly in the grounds. “What’s Switchblade doing out there with that spade?”
I was almost embarrassed for Square Basher that my stupid little ploy actually worked, but as far as she was concerned, Lord Commissar Prince Blueblood, with whom she had suffered, fought, and bled with over the years, would have no possible reason to lie to her. She muttered an obscenity under her breath, then turned and galloped out of the loo, the door swinging shut behind her with a resonant and final thud. Now alone with the plans, I set about discreetly altering their measurements; Lady Luck provided one of her vanishingly rare boons when I found a pencil with a rubber on the end inside the canteen, for I only had a much-used fountain pen in my jacket pocket, which would have made it so incredibly obvious as to who had done it that I might as well have signed my name.
Writing with my mouth was something that I had always struggled with, having a horn and all the magic that came with it, but as Square Basher’s own mouthwriting, for I assumed it was hers, bordered on unintelligible, my inability to be neat with something I’d never bothered to practice was actually a bonus. However, even if I had made such a perfect facsimile, there was still no guarantee that it would be so readily accepted. Even then, the momentary confusion and arguments that would follow might at least waste enough time for them to allow me to come up with an alternative method of sabotage.
I erased the measurement, brushed the resulting detritus into the hole, scribbled in the new one, and dropped the pencil back in the canteen just in time for Square Basher’s return. She gave me a queer look as I stood there with the map, trying my best not to look guilty under her somewhat accusatory stare.
“I need to keep my eye on that one, sir,” she said as she marched on over to me, shaking her head. “He’s a good fighter, but he never knows when to stop. He needs some damned discipline in his life, and I’m going to make sure he gets it. All done with the map, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.” I returned it, and watched with bated breath as she briefly paused and frowned at my hasty ‘correction’, then, much to my relief, simply folded it up neatly and placed it back in the canteen in the cistern.
Progress on the tunnel proceeded as planned over the course of the next two weeks, thereabouts, and it was perhaps the most nerve-wracking period that I had endured for quite a while. Unlike, say, a battle or even the lead-up to one, this was not the sense of mounting dread that builds over the course of several hours and then released in a rapid burst of overwhelming mortal terror, but a constant low-level ‘buzz’, as it were, of underlying anxiety about whether or not I had done the right thing. By ‘right’, of course, I mean merely that which will ensure not only the survival of the mortal flesh I must inhabit, but also my social reputation that allows me to keep filling it full of fine wine and cheese. Nevertheless, the cards had been dealt, and all that was left for now was to make do with the hoof I had been given.
Dorylus seemed not to suspect a thing, and neither did his staff. If anything, he thought we were all being so very well-behaved and compliant, barring the odd infraction that I now had reasonable suspicion was merely intended to cover up the increasingly complex tasks required to keep the escape tunnel a secret. An argument over which variety of olives were best, green or black, helpfully distracted the guards from the bundle of ponies evacuating the ladies’ loo following a lengthy session of digging, for example. I, however, had the additional duty of making sure that he remained completely ignorant of our plans, at least until the moment of truth.
By way of segue, speaking of his ignorance, there was a lot he still failed to understand about ponies, and it would have been quite funny were he not placed in a position of power and authority over us. I recall one startling moment when he decided that he would host afternoon tea for us, in an apparent attempt to help the soldiers from Trottingham feel more at home. Never mind that all of them were of the lower social orders, and for them ‘tea’ meant stopping work for half an hour for a cup of hot, milky brown stuff and a hoof-full of biscuits, so the ones that deigned to present themselves for this event were rather perplexed when they were presented with a fine china tea set and a selection of cucumber sandwiches. As for me, I was rather a dab hoof at this sort of ridiculously overwrought ritual and so I guided them through the complex etiquette, though it still held nothing on the Neighponese tea ceremony, which held the prospect of familial disgrace if one spilled so much as a drop.
The whole thing was about as awkward as one might expect afternoon tea with a Changeling Purestrain might be, especially under the careful watch of the guards. As with his dinners, the number of guests besides myself could be counted with all four hooves, so all of us together in one corner of a room set out for a much larger party only exacerbated that feeling of intense social awkwardness. Once again, conversation, such as it was, was stilted, slow, and split by long and tedious silences that allowed one’s thoughts to drift into daydreams. Dorylus sat there at the head of this small, cloth-covered table, upon which the tea set and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed rested, and he and a thoroughly bemused-looking drone in a black lounge suit went through the practised motions of preparing the tea and pouring each guest’s cup for them.
I shan’t bore you with the rest of the details; you, dear reader, merely have to picture the six of us, plus the guards, sitting in silence and desperately trying but failing to make some sort of friendly conversation. It was what happened immediately after, as the other ponies wandered out muttering to one another about just how ‘weird’ that whole display was, that the truly interesting thing happened. I was just about to follow them, when I heard Dorylus breathe a frustrated, angry sigh; he had maintained his gracious host persona for so long, largely without fail, and this was the first crack that I had seen. Curiosity got the better of me, and I stopped and looked over my shoulder to see him slumped in his seat, staring at the half-eaten sandwiches.
Dorylus locked eyes with me, and there was a certain look there that I had only seen before on the battlefield when one of his fellow Purestrains was trying their damnedest to kill me, before it faded and his empty smile, devoid of anything approaching true happiness, returned to his face. “They don’t like me,” he said, sounding rather disappointed.
“It’s nothing personal, I assure you,” I said, turning to face him properly. “You’re just the sworn enemy that wants to destroy their country and enslave their friends and family. You’ve something of an uphill struggle to get them on your side, bordering on the perpendicular, I should say.”
“I don’t understand it.” There was a defeated tone in his voice, as one would when confronted with the realisation that perhaps everything that one had been working towards had been critically flawed right from the off. His head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. It was rather startling to see a Purestrain of all creatures looking and sounding quite so vulnerable, but from what little glimpses that I had seen of the world of Changeling politics, his career and indeed his life might very well be depending on the success of this little experiment here. The thought didn’t move me to much sympathy, however.
He carried on, though his staff shared uneasy glances with one another. “I’ve provided everything you ponies could need and want, I’ve even looked into this ‘friendship’ thing that your Princess Twilight Sparkle speaks of, and still you have all been uncooperative and ungrateful of my hospitality.”
An alarm bell ran noisily in my head; did he know about Square Basher’s tunnel and was he merely testing me? “We are not animals,” I said flatly. “Our loyalty to our Princesses and to our country can’t be bought with mere tea and sandwiches, Dorylus.”
“And what of you, sir?” He fixed me with a sharp, accusatory glare. “If your loyalty is so absolute, perhaps it would be better to place you and your ponies in a conventional prison camp and be done with this costly experiment.”
Then it struck me; though I was very much a prisoner here, it became readily apparent that, if my instincts were correct, he was as much held captive by the expectations that his Queen now placed on him as I was by the fence and guards. It was his use of the word ‘costly’ that prompted this revelation, and indeed as I looked around at the opulent surroundings and the absurd numbers of Changelings required to look after a mere dozen prisoners here, I realised that this experiment must have incurred a considerable expenditure for the Hives in terms of money, time, and effort, all of which could perhaps be better spent on waging this war in a more direct manner.
This realisation only strengthened my resolve in my plan; it was in Dorylus’ best interest that Square Basher’s escape attempt, that I had deftly sabotaged with the aim of getting caught, be quietly swept under the rug. The last thing that he probably wanted was for his model prison camp upon which Queen Chrysalis’ highly ambitious new order would be built, and likewise his future career within it, to have its entire philosophy disproven with a spectacular escape attempt. In this appalling calculation, the course I had set myself upon really seemed the least awful.
“My loyalty to my Princesses and my Aunts is unshakable,” I said, fibbing only a little, “but you have my cooperation only for the sake of my comrades. We may tolerate this better than whips, chains, and having our love forcibly sucked out of us, but I warned you that you should not expect us to abandon all that we ponies hold dear.”
Dorylus rose to his hooves. Some of his old demeanour returned; he was tall, towering, and, despite the practised, easy-going smile and the absurd smoking-jacket-and-cravat ensemble that he wore, there still lay an undercurrent of subtle menace beneath it all. He might not have been the sort of cruel, petty tyrant of most of his ilk by outward appearance and manner, but one did not ascend to the heights necessary to build this ridiculous Trottingham manor house in the middle of nowhere in a regime such as Queen Chrysalis’ without having one’s hooves sullied by blood and ichor. I saw some measure of that as he approached, and stood rather too close for my liking, forcing me to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact in the sort of cheap trick to intimidate smaller ponies that I often used.
“One day soon this war will end in our victory,” he said, with his voice pleasant enough, “and how the vanquished will be treated may very well depend on the success of my experiment here.”
“You’re awfully confident for the losing side,” I said with a casual shrug.
He smirked, and I felt the urge to wipe it from his face with my hoof. “Many a race has been lost when the leading drone believes that they have already won, only for the cunning second to make his move when the would-be victor has spent the last of his energy keeping ahead, and so it is with war. We Changelings have suffered defeat before; defeat after defeat after defeat, only to emerge victorious in the end. Just you wait, Your Highness. Under the guidance of our Queen, we will emerge triumphant in the end.”
“Why, which blushing bride-to-be is she impersonating this time?”
Dorylus’ smug grin only grew wider, and it made the fur on the back of my neck stand on end. He raised his hoof, and I noticed how the plush velvet fabric of his smoking jacket draped over the decaying holes in his long, spindly limbs, reached over, and patted me on the back in what he probably thought was a friendly manner. There was a surprising amount of strength there, despite his slim frame, and he nearly knocked me over. Even then, it took a considerable amount of willpower not to flinch from it, as though it was on fire.
“I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for you,” he said, with a sly wink that only increased my urge to punch him square on the nose. Then, leaving me to mull over his cryptic words, he trotted away merrily to whatever it was he got up to when he wasn’t busy doting on us.
Quite what he did behind the closed doors of his study remained a mystery, and after that strange conversation I found myself feeling uncharacteristically curious about it. I had imagined that running this camp required his full attention, but he spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time completely out of sight and apparently working on something else. Without much in the way of practical knowledge about how the Hives were run, if there was any formal bureaucracy at all, I could only guess that he had other pet projects to work on. I recalled what Odonata had told me, of how Chrysalis herself encourages her underlings to undermine one another to keep them from uniting against her, so I had naturally assumed that he was plotting something to keep himself in her good books.
The only hints that he was working on something terribly important, or at least had the appearance of it, were the daily deliveries of papers and files by a Changeling drone whom I found to be rather less amenable to conversation than the other curiously friendly ones who watched over us. Each day, without fail, he would arrive at the front door carrying his bundle, sometimes containing only a few sheets of paper and other times so large and packed that he strained under its weight, and hand over the precious delivery to Dorylus personally, before trotting off without another word. I had asked the Commandant about them, but he merely smiled, shrugged, and assured me that it was merely boring paperwork. Were it not for that comment about the ‘surprise’, I might have believed him.
Yet there was another incongruous thing that, when I realised it, almost drove me to madness as much as the weight of the deception I had to maintain: not once since we had arrived here had we been harvested of love. I would have thought that a race that was apparently on the verge of starvation, five years from exhausting its own supply according to Odonata, would absolutely leap at the chance to drain us all dry. But they had not, and I could not understand why Dorylus had not subjected us to whatever ghastly and no doubt painful procedures their kind use to extract and store love. In the end, I could take it no longer and had to ask him.
“I want you to volunteer for it,” said Dorylus with the air of somepony explaining the bleeding obvious to an idiot. “That’s the entire point of this whole endeavour.” Then he stormed off to his office, presumably to sulk.
[The subject of the Changelings' restraint at Camp Joy became a hotly-debated topic among Equestrian propagandists and military leaders for years after the fact. The supremacist camp maintained that any idea that the enemy could restrain themselves from parasitising ponies for food for so long would be a scourge on morale, encouraging ponies to naively see them as victims, a narrative the Changelings constantly tried to push. I, and many war-weary ponies besides, saw it as an encouraging sign that some cooperative solution could yet be found.]
The days and weeks passed in much the same manner. I had considered fixing the ‘correction’ that I had made to Square Basher’s plans so that we might escape for real, if only to spite Dorylus, but I thought better of it. Spite might have been one of my more powerful drives, but self-preservation always ended up winning that mental debate overwhelmingly, and though I’d started to fear what he might do to me when this escape attempt was foiled, it must invariably pale to the hardship I would suffer should we actually pull it off. It was too late anyway, and the evening when Square Basher announced that the tunnel was complete had crept up much too quickly for my liking. Such is the way of these things; one imagines that something set to happen in the far-off future might never come to pass, right up until the moment it does and one is forced to deal with it.
It was an evening like any other in this ridiculous place. I had dined with Dorylus again, to give the illusion that nothing untoward was taking place, and it took all of my foalhood lessons in regal decorum not to allow the trepidation gnawing in my gut to show through the masque. Again, there was another peculiar balancing act involved, for I had to pretend to engage with his stilted conversation without the appearance of doing so to cover anything up, and while I think that he bought it completely, the thought that he somehow knew continued to take up an awful lot of space in the back of my mind. However, it was steadily becoming too much for me to bear, and so I retired early that night, citing the need to get a good night's rest in preparation for the tennis tournament our host had arranged for tomorrow.
I spent the next few hours before zero hour, so to speak, pacing about in my room, trying to work off the growing anxiety or distract myself by reading any one of the racy novels I had collected from the library and left on the bedside cabinet. Dear Faust, this was insanity -- pure, naked insanity. Any number of imagined outcomes flashed vividly in my mind, each with a worse end for me than the one before; being caught in the act was the entire point, but when I considered what must invariably come after, the niggling little thought that I had made a very grave misjudgement here refused to leave my mind. The possibility of talking Square Basher into postponing this escape attempt until ‘the right time’ had come to mind, but that would merely be a case of prolonging the inevitable, and perhaps it would be much better to simply get this unpleasantness over and done with now rather than later.
Finally it was time, and though the long hours had felt like an eternity as I endured each one after the other, when the appointed moment came it felt as though they had passed much too quickly. It was around midnight, and even Changelings had to sleep, so there was only a light guard presence around at this time. Cannon Fodder and I left our rooms and wandered downstairs, passed bored, tired guards who, apparently having been lulled into a false sense of security with our reasonably good behaviour, barely seemed to acknowledge us. There was no curfew here, so ponies going about on nocturnal perambulations was not an entirely suspicious occurrence for them. What would be considered unusual, however, was for all of us to have done so simultaneously, and so, in another surprising display of intelligence from the Company Sergeant Major, Square Basher decided that we would all mount our escape in waves, not only to avoid suspicion, but in the now-certain chance that our little prison break was to be discovered, only a few would be caught directly in the act.
We lingered together around the library until the corridor to the lavatories was unguarded, and then took our chance and darted into the ladies’ together. There, Square Basher, Switchblade, and two other ponies, both mares, were already waiting for us, each with their lithe, slim bodies covered in muck and dust from the digging. The door was open, the toilet unit placed to the side, and the tunnel open for all to see, and it seemed to recede into an oppressive blackness as though I might fall into it as a bottomless pit.
I felt as though I should say something profound, and after a brief second’s thought I gave up and trotted out a fatuous comment: “Well, everypony, I suppose this is it.”
“Indeed, sir.” Square Basher nodded gravely. “Just the last little bit left before we come out the other side.”
“Jolly good, then. Sterling work, all ‘round.” I looked past Square Basher’s head, through the window, to see the dark outline of the Changelings’ barracks building silhouetted against a starry night sky, and it occurred to me that, assuming my own estimates were correct, the occupants of that shabby little outbuilding would be rather shocked at the appearance of escaping prisoners bursting out of their floor. What I was counting on was a quick admittance of failure and an easy surrender, to ensure that the worst we would receive was a slap on the hooves and a stern talking-to, but given that the Sergeant Major was unlikely to react with that sort of sense and grace, it would unfortunately have to be me. “It’s probably best that I go first, just to make sure it’s all clear.”
Square Basher raised her eyebrows at me. “Are you sure, sir?”
“Well, you’ve all done the hard work so far and I feel a little left out,” I said, telling one almighty whopper of a lie there. “I’d like to do the last bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Very well, sir.” She gave me the look that non-commissioned officers and servants alike have when their officer and/or master has a strange idea, but they still have to go along with it regardless. With a ridiculous flourish, she presented the weathered, dusty, chipped stainless steel spoon to me as though it was an ancient relic from the times when the world was young and the Royal Pony Sisters were still eating mashed peas. I accepted it, and as I approached the hole in the ground it occurred to me that without my magic I had no idea how I was supposed to dig through that last bit of earth between me and alleged freedom.
“The ground is dry, and it comes out easily in clumps, sir,” said Square Basher, apparently sensing my ineptitude with this sort of thing. “You just need to stick it in your mouth and poke the dirt until it breaks up. Just remember to close your eyes.”
Again, that sounded less than sanitary, and I wondered if the lack of magic and the reliance on hooves and lips to hold things had anything to do with greater sickness rates for earth ponies and pegasi, but as I was about to go crawling through a tunnel dug through a latrine it seemed like a moot point. As undignified things go, this one ranked somewhere near the bottom, and I wondered perhaps if it was still too late to try and talk my way out of it. Well, I couldn’t speak clearly with my mouth full of stainless steel anyway.
“So much for a silver spoon in the mouth,” muttered Switchblade, apparently thinking that I couldn’t hear.
Getting through the hole proved a little tricky. My head went in fine, and my shoulders required a little bit of wriggling to slip through; quite how a mare as tall and broad with muscle as Square Basher got through remained a mystery to me. I then discovered that over-indulging on the readily-available food and neglecting my exercise had resulted in the expected effect, and my hips were stuck. However, a few forceful shoves from somepony, presumably Cannon Fodder, and I popped right through like a champagne cork.
I fell a few feet down a sharp slope, and managed to arrest my fall with my hooves just before I collided with the bottom. It was almost pitch black, save for the scant amount of light that streamed in from behind me. My eyes struggled to adjust, but I could feel with my forehooves that the tunnel continued to slope down a little more and then gradually level out. The walls were rough and pitted, which made sense as they had been dug out by a single astonishingly well-made spoon, and in parts were supported by planks of rough wood.
[According to Square Basher’s version of events, as recorded in a few interviews made after the war, the spoon was not the only tool used to dig this tunnel. A variety of whatever cutlery and small gardening implements they could steal from the Changelings was used, however, the ‘Spoon of Freedom’, as it came to be known, would endure as a symbol of the escape attempt. It’s unlikely that Blueblood would have had that detailed information, or cared to ask.]
Cannon Fodder followed me into the tunnel, and collided into my rear legs and flanks. I crawled forwards into the empty blackness to give him space, and the ground and the walls scraped awkwardly against my front and sides. There was the sound of a match being struck, and the space immediately in front of me flared into a dull orange glow, which gradually brightened as my aide lit a small candle. Well, that, at least, was some help, I thought.
I’d come this far now in this ridiculous scheme of mine, so I ought to see it through to the end whatever the outcome. Crawling on my belly like a snake, or like a worm, rather, I inched my way through the tunnel. It was desperately slow going, and every second that I spent down there, dragging my ungainly form forwards one hoof at a time, I felt the urge to leave grow stronger and stronger. I don’t usually get claustrophobic, having spent some of my youth exploring the ancient catacombs and crystal tunnels beneath my palace, but here the horrid thought of the great weight of earth above me burying me alive simply would not leave me. At least I could stand up in those aforementioned places, for here there were parts where the tunnel narrowed to such a degree that I needed my aide’s assistance pushing myself through it. In places the ceiling scraped against my back, still scarred as it was with the latticework of year-old flogging wounds, and the reminder of that awful moment did little to improve my bleak mood.
However, the fact that you are reading this now should indicate that no such eventuality occurred, and I made it safely to the other end of the tunnel. I felt such relief as I had rarely ever felt before when I sensed that the tunnel was sloping upwards, for it meant that the end was finally in sight. The gradient grew steeper with each drag forward, until it reached what I estimated to be a forty-five degree angle. The going was harder, having to work against the natural force of gravity that affects prince and commoner alike.
I became aware of the dead end when I jabbed my horn into it. By that time, I was already exhausted and more than a little on edge in this horribly cramped and dark space. Lying there on my belly, entombed under the earth like my ancestors in the family mausoleum, I traced over the surface with my hooves, and squinted to see the rock wall in the flickering light of the sputtering candle behind me. That there might not be much in the way of air down here had occurred to me, so I wasted little time. I wanted out, as fast as possible, and whatever it was that Commandant Dorylus might do to me, including packing me off to be Queen Chrysalis’ chew toy, seemed to me to be an improvement on my current predicament.
As digging implements go, the spoon seemed like the least ideal, but I was hardly the right sort of pony to make that sort of judgement. With the handle between my teeth, held steady with my lips, I did as Square Basher had advised and jabbed the business end into the earth above. It was hard and dry, but after a few strikes it came away in great clumps that landed directly on my face for the most part.
How long this took I hadn’t a clue; it could have been mere minutes or it could have taken hours, but it certainly felt like a damned sight longer than both. No wonder it had taken them this long to dig the tunnel, and here I was, probably holding up their precious tight schedule with my usual ineptitude. Well, I thought, the more things that could go wrong with this already ill-advised escape attempt, though surprisingly well-executed it was, the likelier that it would dissuade Square Basher and her loyal cadre from any further endeavours. I carried on chipping away at the wall, pausing to blink the muck out of my eyes and wipe my face when the sensation of dust tickling my fur became too aggravating. My limbs ached, my jaw had become numb, and my thoughts strayed and drifted to how if only I had stayed at home instead of attending Fancy Pants’ party those long years ago I could have been at home in bed with a mare, plumbing the depths of a much more welcoming hole instead.
Finally, the last few inches of the earth gave way; a hole, not much larger than my hoof, crumbled into clumps of dirt and dust over my face, and warm, dim candlelight streamed through it. I say ‘dim’, but after an interminable amount of time in that dark hole, the meagre flicker of a dozen candles might as well have been staring directly into Celestia’s sun. Blinking away the spots in my eyes, I widened the hole by shoving both hooves through it, and then used them to force my head and shoulders out.
The Changeling drone who must have been curiously observing the hole forming in the dirt floor of his barracks flinched back from me and chittered in alarm. Within seconds, a ring of bayonets circled around my head, which poked out of the hole, and the blades glinted in the faint orange light. The drones seemed more surprised and entertained than anything; I distinctly heard laughter in the background, as one told another to go and fetch the Commandant to deal with this, and though the drones had levelled about half a dozen sharp bayonets directly at my head, they each seemed unwilling to actually follow through with the threat.
I felt Cannon Fodder shoving at my rear hooves, and so I got him to stop by kicking back lightly. I imagined that quite a queue had formed behind me, and very shortly we’d all be forced out like water from a gardener’s hose.
“Oh dear,” I said, and the drones chittered again. “This doesn’t look like Canterlot.”
[We can assume he spat out the spoon before speaking.]
The drones grabbed my forelegs and pulled me out. I offered no resistance, since this was merely part of my plan; they weren’t too rough, either, and helped me up to my hooves once I was free of that blasted hole, where I could finally stretch my stiff, aching limbs. While a small argument broke out amongst them over who should go and investigate the hole, I took stock of the room I’d found myself in -- it turned out that my special talent was right on the money, for once, and I had emerged right in the centre of the barracks building, and it was astonishingly ‘normal’. I wasn’t sure what I expected, truly, but it might have involved cocoons, ominous green lighting, and that chrysalite gunk splattered everywhere. Instead, however, there were rows of bunks and lockers, and, as with Equestrian soldiers, each had tried to personalise theirs in some way with trinkets and even posters. One depicted a drone, presumably female judging by its rather attractive curves, presenting her flanks to the camera with a vivacious wink.
“Prince Blueblood, what are you doing here?” one of the drones asked, and in the dim light I didn’t recognise him as Musca until he stepped closer and I could see the distinctive mark on his face.
“Escaping, of course,” I said with an easy smile, despite the anxiety still knotting in my gut; I thought I might feel relief at having been caught, but I would still have to face the consequences and hope that Dorylus was in a forgiving mood. “Better luck next time, I suppose.”
By now, Cannon Fodder had emerged from the tunnel, and the drones menacing him with their bayonets gave him a suitably wide berth. He sat in the corner with his forehooves in the air in a gesture of surrender, and watched the proceedings with his typical lack of interest as, after much more cajoling from the others, one of the drones crawled into the hole to investigate.
“A shocking bit of bad luck, eh?” I said again, trying to keep the mood light, though, if I knew anything about the common soldiery, I imagined that the drones here were more upset at having their off-duty time interrupted by this ridiculous escape attempt than by the escape itself. “Right in the middle of the Changeling barracks. Who would have thought it?”
I realised I was overdoing it a little, so I decided to keep quiet until this was resolved. The drones directed me to sit in the corner of the barracks with Cannon Fodder, under the watchful eyes of two drones, while the others pottered about trying to work out what to do here. There was something strange about the way they behaved, and the reason for it would not become readily apparent for a while, though I would have plenty of time to ponder this conundrum; they did not operate with the sort of single-minded efficiency that had once led many of us to believe in that discredited hive mind theory, but more like a group of raw recruits trying to figure out a complex order before the drill sergeant forces them to do push-ups in the rain again. Perhaps, I thought, they were merely drones who had thought themselves lucky to have been selected for a simple and easy task, and thus having avoided the nightmare of frontline combat to instead foalsit a prince and his ungrateful ponies, they could afford to let standards of discipline slip somewhat.
Sounds of shouting, muffled by the earth, could be heard from the tunnel, and I thought for a moment that what I’d hoped would be a peaceful little capture would be ruined by a pony refusing to accept failure. However, the drone soon returned unharmed and Switchblade emerged behind him, swearing profusely the entire time. Apparently, the message that this plan had gone spectacularly wrong had travelled down the line, for no further ponies were dragged from the hole. Outside, I could hear some sort of commotion going on, but from where I sat I could only make out dark, drone-shaped shadows moving past the windows.
After a while of this, sitting there while the drones milled about and chatted uselessly, the door to the barracks swung open violently and slammed into the wall with a sharp, resonant ‘thud’. Commandant Dorylus strode into the room, and the inane chatter ceased immediately. He looked, for once, as a Purestrain probably ought to; he was out of his dressing gown and cravat, naked in his armoured chitinous hide, and stood there at the door with that all-too-familiar domineering sneer on his face. The drones scrambled with a hideous buzzing noise to their bunks and stood to attention in less than a second’s time, and as he passed them, down the aisle between the rows of bunks, to approach me, he made absolutely no indication that was even aware of their presence.
“Alright, you caught me fair and square,” I said as I rose clumsily to my hooves, hoping to cut off any potential thoughts of severe punishment.
Dorylus stopped, glared down at me with an expression that might have chilled the heart of any other pony who hadn’t been subjected to far worse from Princess Luna, who remains the unquestioned master of such things, then breathed a heavy sigh. Just like that, his masque returned, and he pulled what he thought must have been a sympathetic face, and shook his head softly.
“I’m not angry,” he said, though the tension that lay under his clipped voice told otherwise. “I’m merely disappointed in you.” Dorylus tapped his hoof on the ground, and two of the closest drones scrambled up to him. “Put Prince Blueblood in the Box for me, will you?”
The two drones looked almost apologetic as they seized me by my upper forelegs and dragged me away. I heard Cannon Fodder argue with Dorylus, just as I was removed backwards from the barracks, and the door slamming shut cut off the entire conversation. Whatever my aide was saying, and it was most unusual for him to say more than a single sentence at a time, was unlikely to sway the Commandant.
“Come along, I don’t think this is necessary,” I protested, pulling at my forelegs in a half-hearted way to try and free myself. “I can damn well walk.”
“Orders, sir,” the drone on my left muttered. “Sorry.”
I heard the creaking of a door open, and I rolled my head back to look ‘ahead’, as it were, and saw that a cellar door in the side of the manor, one that had appeared to be concealed in the brickwork just like the entrance to the secret passage we’d discovered, had been opened. Stairs receded into pitch black darkness, and I was dragged down there into a dank, slimy cellar with a low ceiling. There was no light, save for the pale white glow of the moon shining wanly through the open door, which illuminated only the steps down and a square of grey stone slick with dew. The drones released me in the middle of this room, which, as my eyes adjusted to the foreboding gloom, I saw was rather small, about the size of my Canterlot apartment’s lounge, utterly devoid of furniture save for a bucket in the corner whose purpose would become readily apparent soon, and even lacked a door or any other sign of egress save the steps leading up.
It was eminently obvious that I was to be left here as punishment, and inwardly I seethed at both Square Basher for creating the situation that resulted in this predicament and me for not taking more proactive steps in stopping it. Still, I thought, they wouldn’t keep me here for too long.
My guards left me, and Dorylus himself appeared at the cellar doors, peering down at me standing gormlessly around in the dark. Silence descended for a spell, until I could bear the tension no longer and said those immortal words: “I can explain.”