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// Chapter 3: Farewell, For Now 
// Story: A Kindled End 
// by Darkevony 
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If life was like a card game, being dealt Queen Chrysalis would have been like that all powerful ace-in-the-hole that instantly won you the game. But it was also the kind of card that came with hundreds of restrictions before you could use it to its fullest potential. And so far, it was the only card you had.

Now look at your opponent's hand.

Not even a few months later and it was safe to say they already had a full deck built, not just a hand. And what a series of cards... From solid defense to relentless attack. To the brim with trap cards, reversals, buffs and debuffs, and even direct attackers. 

The nobles in opposition to the Queen had long since existed to some extent but never had they seen such a rise and growth in their numbers than the moments after your birth.

The Queen was seeing it everywhere now. How they looked at you with cold eyes and addressed you as if you were a commoner leeching off of her highness, with no respect to your crown. The way in which lowly maids spoke of rumors and fallacies in hushed whispers behind closed doors. And how even her advisor would ignore your needs as if you were just a distraction.  

There was a brooding within those ornate halls. And Queen Chrysalis could see, more clearly than anything, how it affected your state of being.

You were, are, a bright child. Your adaptability, curiosity, and sense had shown through spectacularly your first few months. 

You were quick to learn things, and through your already developed empathy, you could somewhat figure out emotional states in others. This was an innate ability all changelings had, but yours was particularly acute. Often you could be seen steering clear of the palace's personnel that seemed to dislike you, eventually making it so that you wouldn’t want to come out of your room. You would try desperately to do as you were told despite not understanding words, leading you to imitate basic gestures and commands. While this alone would've been promising for any child to show signs of cognition so early on, those around you were always expecting more than what was reasonable for a newborn to do. It was never enough and earned you harsh remarks. Finally, you'd often comfort the Queen whenever she was stressed, in what ways you could understand to do without words yet. 

It wasn't hard to do. All you had to show was a smidge of concern her way, and she'd feel a breth of pride and joy. It's always a good sign for a parent to see such a caring personality in their children. 

At the same time, gifted though you may be in some ways, they're none that matter to the royal court and the expectations of the changeling crown. You'd yet to show any signs of magic aptitude at all, and your frail body had caused both the Queen and those attending to you to wait on you hoof over tail.

This made worse the opinion of any who saw this. Was this to be their new Queen? Unfortunately, like all positions of power, it attracted and bred the worst of a kind. Those in the senate of the royal court used their power to further drive all sorts of ill and malcontent within the palace. Lord knows what they were doing on the outside to the public. Nothing good, we don't doubt.

So your emotional maturity at such a young age ended up becoming something more like a curse rather than a blessing. The adults all around you were constantly angry about something. Worse yet, that something was usually you yourself. And you knew that.

The stay at the castle was not ideal, to say the least. The only reprise were the occasional quiet moments with the Queen alone, outside of her duties which seemed to wear her down a little more each day. Partly due to constant worry about you. And again, you knew that...

And though you smiled for the Queen since you came to learn that doing so would make her happy, and she smiled back each time, there was now a sadness inside your eyes and in hers. It hurt her to know you were hurting and putting on a mask. At such a tender age too. How could she have allowed this? 

For all the good a crown was, it didn't allow her to change anything. Her powerlessness, nay, better to say kindness, frustrated her to no end. 

With a heavy heart, she made a difficult decision. The only choice available to her that could immediately help you. This choice came at the cost of having to send you away from the palace.

It's not as bad as it sounds. She wasn't abandoning you. In fact, this was something she should've done a long time ago. It'd been a little hopeful of her to want to raise you herself in your youth, but almost all changelings underwent their first years in specially designed live-in nurseries to be taught the basics. Like learning to talk, write, rudimentary mathematics, and anything you can imagine what children are meant to learn before they go back to live with their predecessors.

Changelings in general break the mold in a lot of ways in which the other races care for their young. What the Queen was doing is not what is normal of changelings "in general", you know. The royal court already knew her pension for sentimentality and had expressed their distaste for allowing those foreign ideas of family and union into her idealisms. They were something she'd adopted thanks to several non-changeling friends of hers over her many years.

Funny enough, like most changelings in her kingdom onto that point in time, Chrysalis had heard about families, parents, and unions from one particular pony when she herself had hatched and attended the nursery. That pony was the nursery's matriarch, otherwise widely known as the nursery's "mother". 

And again, it's no coincidence that she was called this. She practically preached those ideas of familial love in the form of stories and other tall tales of her travels to the kids, as she was a well-traveled pony. And those ideas spread like an intellectual contagion amongst the impressionable children, which then traveled further down the vine and to the predecessors too. Thus creating an entire generation of changelings hoping to make those ideas a reality.

Chrysalis just happened to be one of many such children that took those ideas and tried to run away with them. It's just that it's kinda hard to run at all when you have a ball and chain attached to you in the shape of a crown. She was forced to concede and let you go.

It pained her. She was not abandoning you, but she felt like she was and hated it. If you could visualize her worries and anxieties like drips of water into a nearly full bucket, imagine that letting you go was like pouring another bucket full of water into it violently, splashing water everywhere.

Contrary to the norm and placid as she was, the Queen didn't explode in anger or reel back in sadness like you'd imagine anyone else doing if placed in a similar situation. She was a Queen, so she couldn't. Not in front of the Kingdom, and she especially didn't want to do so in front of you.

When the time finally arrived to say goodbye, she put on a brave front and waved you off with a smile that hid any concern. And you? Cursed to know the hidden truths of the heart and the tears we don't show. 

You looked on at her with worry, failing to return that smile. It felt like something had broken. But you couldn't tell what that something was, so there was no way to fix it.

It was just a temporary goodbye, as the Queen would make every effort to visit you every day and night from there on only rarely failing to do so, but at that point in time, there was no consoling you. 

For the first time since you were born, you cried.

You couldn't have known this was a goodbye. All you could understand at that moment was the outpouring sadness in the Queen. The real question then was... which one of you was hurting more, if yours was only in response to hers?

That hug between the two of you at the Nursery's steps was a lot longer than any you'd had before. By seconds? Minutes? Hours? Who knows. You couldn't count yet.

You had hardly used your voice since you were born. A side effect of wanting to disappear from the many scowling faces in the palace, perhaps. Even your sobs were quiet. Hardly a peep except for the sound of your sniffling.

Eventually, and I mean eeevveeentuaaallyy, you managed to calm down. It was mostly due to the Queen coming to terms with it after enough time had passed. To you, almost every day was something new and world-changing, so going to the Nursery didn't seem like that big a deal in a life full of inconsistency.

But coming off of those downtrodden feelings was still rough. It painted your first impressions of walking through the Nursery's doors in a rather grim and grey light.

Crying your heart out as much as you did earlier had given way to apathy, that nothingness where one can't feel much of anything afterward. Just an emptiness in the pit of your stomach. For changelings who are emotionally driven creatures, it is a very dangerous feeling indeed. It quite literally painted the world grey, as an apathetic changeling's very lifeforce diminishes in such a state, and physical changes begin to occur like a dulling of their vision or the loss of rationality.

Your apathy was not nearly strong enough to send you into a true apathetic depression the likes of which are hard to recover from, but it was still strong enough to cause the visual artifact of color blindness.

And so, what might've been a unique experience of meeting kids your age for the first time instead became a sign of things changing for the worse. You didn't care much for the colorful messy walls full of scribbles made by the children. You didn't care for the toys scattered all throughout, which would've delighted any young child's curiosity. And sadly, you didn't even give the Nursery's Mother much of a thought when she welcomed you in with all the care in the world since she understood the circumstances from which you hailed.

All you could do was watch longly at the disappearing back of Queen Chrysalis as she took the color from the world with her, leaving only grey behind after she had disappeared.

Even the earth beneath your hooves, which had long since been in a state of unrest, had become silent and still as if to respond to the muddy feeling in your heart. 

To you, it felt like there was nothing anymore.