The Blueblood Papers: Bound By Blood

by Raleigh


Chapter 12

I have made a great deal of enemies over the course of my life, most notably when I was a young and impetuous little princeling who had yet to internalise the most important lesson, that life was a damned sight easier if I could trick ponies into believing that I’m not a completely horrible pony to be around, but I think that even the worst of them, including the hack tabloid newspapers who seem to revel in every misfortune and scandal inflicted upon me, would be moved to something approaching sympathy if they saw the appalling state I was in when I was recaptured by the Changelings. Dorylus is, of course, the exception to that; with the destruction of his camp and his little experiment, he could only take solace in the fact that I, whom he seemed to blame for all of his misfortune despite the rescue and its collateral damage being something that happened to me, rather than something that I instigated, was in an incredible amount of pain and swimming in such depths of despair as my mind and soul had never sunk to before. That it was my own damned fault, over something as simple as not looking where I was going and failing to anticipate that the enemy had planned for this sort of eventuality, only made this failure all the more bitter. Try as I might to pin the blame on Lightning Dust, and if I ever got out of this alive and if there was an Equestria to return to I vowed that I would do everything within my not-inconsiderable power to utterly ruin her, it all fell back to me and my own stupidity.

The drones pulled me up to my hooves and forced me to walk, or limp, rather, back to the burning camp. I could only hobble along on three legs behind Dorylus, trailing a dripping trail of blood up the slope behind me from my wounded hoof, and when I was evidently being much too slow for them I was ‘encouraged’ with a few sharp jabs in the flank from their bayonets. My vision was swimming, and stars sparkled and danced before my eyes; I felt bile rising up the back of my throat, forced down by swallowing only to return again and again. Even though I was not walking on it, the pain from my caltrop-injured hoof was utterly excruciating, like burning needs plunged deep inside almost to the bone.

I must have finally fainted from the pain, exhaustion, or perhaps even blood loss considering how much of it was streaked across the dusty slope, for the next thing I remember was sitting at a wooden table in a dank, dark room. The drones had carried me inside, wherever this was, perhaps some other unseen part of the manor or another Changeling camp in the hills entirely. My injured hoof had been bandaged quite crudely up to my fetlock with strips of white cloth, which had been stained a dirty, rusty red-brown where the blood had dried. The wound was still painful, but it had become more of a throbbing ache, timed with that of blood hammering in my ears, rather than the lance of fire it had been when I first suffered it. My mouth was parchment-dry, and my tongue seemed to stick to the roof of my mouth; and much like a hangover, my brain felt many times too big for its cavity, and had made its displeasure known by inflicting a terrible headache. Though I hadn’t eaten in however long, my stomach was quite ready and willing to throw what little I had back up. I don’t know how long I’d been out cold, and I wondered if the Commandant had ordered me drugged to keep me nice and sedate until the ‘cocooning’, whatever that meant.

It felt warm and humid in this small, windowless room, more so than is normal for this part of the world. There was barely enough room for the small table and chairs, plus Dorylus himself who occupied the one opposite me; there were two other guards, Blackhorns, judging by their uniforms, standing at my sides, and next to the Commandant himself was a small native pony; a young stallion with a handsome face and pale grey fur, standing with his head bowed and his eyes locked to the floor. I could still feel my cap weighing heavily and slightly too tightly on my head, so though I could not very well check with the drones watching my every move, I was at least confident that the secret notes I had made remained undiscovered.

Dorylus was furiously writing on a piece of paper on the tall desk between us, as though he was trying to set fire to it with his quill through friction. The desk was clearly designed with a Purestrain of his stature in mind, and as my vision gradually cleared up and I regained strength sufficient enough to lift my head up to see over the edge of it, I saw that it was covered in paperwork. Without any windows, the sallow green light, barely bright enough to read by, was provided for by a single glowing orb affixed to the ceiling by that malignant, slimy chrysalite stuff the Changelings like to build things out of. Come to think of it, I saw that the brick walls were caked in that stuff, and rather unevenly too, where it collected in the dark corners of the room. With the exception of the desk and the chairs, the whole room resembled nothing like the faux-Trottingham country manor decor of the rest of the camp.

“My little piece of the Hive away from Hive,” said Dorylus, a sardonic smile stretching the edges of his mouth. That explained it, then. “I didn’t expect you to come ‘round quite so early, but you, Prince Blueblood, are a remarkably resilient specimen.”

It took me a while to find the words, but eventually I settled on what seemed like the most pressing question: “Where am I?”

“My office.” Dorylus placed the quill down on the desk and leaned back in his seat, looking at me over with a piercing, judging stare.

“I thought I was being ‘cocooned’.”

“My drones are preparing your cocoon as we speak,” he replied. “I didn’t think they would be necessary here, but, well… recent events have forced my hoof.”

I looked at the strikingly handsome young stallion in the corner of the room, so utterly incongruous in this oppressive environment that I could not help but stare at him. One rather unfortunate explanation as to his presence did immediately come to mind, despite the grim situation I found myself in and the persistent pain in my hoof and head, but somehow I didn’t think that Dorylus here, or indeed Changelings in general, would have been particularly keen on that sort of thing outside of base manipulation of emotions for their prey.

“Why do you have a colt in your office?” I asked.

“He’s just lunch,” said Dorylus, pulling a face that implied that he thought I was quite mad for even noticing the poor stallion over there.

“It’s bad form to eat at your desk,” I said, quite snippily; I knew that whatever fate awaited me was going to be terribly unpleasant, so though it might have seemed disadvantageous of me to do so, teasing the Commandant would at least bring me a few moments of grim satisfaction.

The chitinous brow-ridge on Dorylus’ face folded inwards in an expression that I took to be a confused frown. He then shook his head, picked up his discarded quill in a sickly green aura, and carried on scribbling something down on a form in spidery writing; at least stifling bureaucracy wasn’t something unique to the Equestrian military, thought I, as I tried to peer over the edge of the desk to see what he was doing.

“I have a lot of work to do now,” he said snippily, with a dismissive wave of his hoof. “Camp Joy is finished, thanks to you and those cowardly partisans, and now I must answer to Queen Chrysalis for this failure.”

“They didn’t give me much of a choice in the matter,” I said, being quite honest for once, but he appeared to have taken the comment as heroic flippancy in the face of impending horror. At the very least, I felt as though being a mild nuisance while he tried to carry on working would be an appropriate consolation prize for failing to escape. “What happened to the others?”

“They’re being rounded up,” said Dorylus, and though I had no reason to believe him, I did feel my heart sink at the thought of Square Basher and everypony else I had shared this captivity with being caught again as I had, and likely facing the same sort of bleak future that stretched out before me now. Though I hoped that they would all make it to freedom, or as much of it as could be gained by hiding in the hills, a part of me wished that I had somepony here, Cannon Fodder or Square Basher perhaps, so that I did not have to face this on my own.

“The Blackhorns are combing the hills as we speak; they’ll be caught, or the Blackhorns will take out their frustrations on the local population of livestock.” He shook his head with what seemed like genuine sadness. “It’s a stupid waste of food.”

I scoffed. “And you wonder why we ponies weren’t terribly trusting of your promises.”

“We treated you as an honoured guest,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless, “for that is what you were. In truth, Queen Chrysalis didn’t know what to do with you when she learnt that you had been captured. If others in our circle had had their way, you would have been brought to the Hive and tortured. Our surgeons have ways of prolonging a pony’s pain while keeping them alive, and by invoking memories of loved ones as they perform their work upon your flesh they would create in you feelings of love in the depths of pain and despair. The love extracted from this complicated technique is to us what a fine wine is to you, and they would have enjoyed tasting yours.

“It was only Hive Marshal Chela’s decision to send you here, before any other Purestrain could get their hooves on you, that saved you from that fate. Together, Chela and I protected you. You were treated with every consideration, every kindness possible. You repaid this generosity by attempting to escape twice.”

“I didn’t intend to!” I snapped, and Dorylus raised an eyebrow. “I told you that the other prisoners had come up with the tunnel plan by themselves without me, and when I found out I sabotaged it for you! And as for those partisans, I had nothing to do with them; I was stuck in that cell, for Harmony’s sake, so I couldn’t possibly have organised anything from in there!”

“And when the opportunity to escape presented itself, you took it without hesitation,” he replied, and gestured to the mangled hoof I cradled against my chest, “or did you intend to sabotage your own escape by crippling yourself?”

“I couldn’t very well fly over your field of caltrops.”

Dorylus was silent for a spell, and I sat there, nursing my wounded hoof which continued to sting and ache angrily for the misery I had put it through. I knew enough of battlefield injuries that I was at risk of losing the bally thing if it wasn’t seen to, and I could hardly trust the Changelings to know what to do with it. Though, thanks to the war, advances in prosthetics had advanced quite rapidly to the point that losing a hoof or even an entire limb, as Red Coat and Southern Cross had suffered, had become merely an inconvenience that required a regular expenditure of lubricating oil and trips to a mechanic, I was rather attached to this one of flesh and blood and didn’t fancy losing for to one of brass and steam.

The uncomfortable silence was becoming almost too much to bear, and I had one card left to play. It was a damned risky one, but my situation seemed bleak enough already, and I couldn’t see how this particular gambit could possibly make things any worse for me.

“I know about Operation: Sunburn,” I said.

It had the desired effect, at least at first: Dorylus froze in his seat and his eyes widened to the size of saucers, and dropped the quill onto his paperwork with a splatter of green ink. He composed himself quickly, and pulled an entirely false grin. “Two words that you have overhead in passing,” he said, “between indiscreet members of my staff with whom I will have to have strong words.”

“It’s a sneak attack on Equestria’s east coast,” I continued, unable to resist the urge to grin as the Commandant’s expression became increasingly aghast with every word I spoke of his masterplan, “Manehattan, Baltimare, and Trottingham, to be precise, using a fleet of airships launched from Marelacca. Quite daring, I must say. From whom you acquired these airships remains a mystery, but I can make a reasonable guess it’s the same enterprising chappy you bought those muskets from. I can’t imagine what they cost you or what they will get in return out of Equestria’s fall, but I dare say that whoever they are won’t be seeing a return on their investments any time soon. Besides, your Queen Chrysalis hardly seems the sort to share.”

It gave me an immeasurable amount of satisfaction to see the look of dawning horror on Dorylus’ smug face, as fleeting as it was. He seemed to regain control over his lower jaw, and set his face into a grim masque of detachment. “So, you know about it,” he said, and his voice wavered ever so slightly. “I don’t know how, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter anymore. But here you are, the only pony who knows about it, safely back in my captivity.”

Yes, that was the sticking point in my plan, and I certainly wished that I had had the foresight to have told somepony else when I had the chance. In my defence, I didn’t expect to be rescued and I certainly did not anticipate that it would go so badly wrong in the way that it did. However, Dorylus didn’t know that, and all that I really wanted to do here was unsettle him, to rob him of what little feeling of triumph he could muster out of this whole awful affair.

“Am I really the only pony who knows about it?” I said. “Did you really think that I wouldn’t have told anypony else about this? Even if you do round up all of the other escapees and the partisans, the news will have spread beyond your ability to control by now. Equestria will learn about Operation: Sunburn, and your airships will be shot out of the sky before a single drone can land on our soil.”

Dorylus snorted and shook his head. “You’re bluffing.”

I affected a small smile, despite the pain I was in. He was right, of course, but he didn’t have to know that. “Can you truly afford to be so confident about that?”

“No.” Dorylus snarled, and he looked as though he was ready to smash the desk with his hooves and beat me to death with the splintered wood, which made me consider that I might have overstepped the mark somewhat. However, he took a deep breath to calm himself once more, and peered over at the papers scattered over his desk. “Which means that we must now accelerate our plans to compensate. We have come much too far to stop now. The preparations have already been made, and I can’t very well ask our Queen to suspend the operation. Even if Celestia learns of Sunburn, it will already be too late for her.”

At the very least, it might cause them to rush the final parts of their daring plan, and a rushed plan invariably goes wrong when something that was overlooked as a result ruins everything. I might have been captured again, with nothing to look forward to in my immediate future but deprivation and horrific torture, but I could still serve my Aunties and my country by being very annoying to the enemy. Now that, I considered, was something that I could do extremely well, and if nothing else it satisfied the foalish bully in me to see my words stab deeply into Dorylus’ heart when another one of his ambitious plans was burning down all around him.

However, whatever retort that I had lined up in my mind would have to wait. The door, somewhere behind me, swung open, and I heard hoofsteps. Dorylus looked over my shoulder at whoever was approaching, and I presently felt a cold, clammy hoof placed on my upper foreleg, my one remaining good one, in a manner that was likely intended to be reassuring but, coming from a blocky, chitinous Changeling one riddled with gaping holes, it was anything but. I gathered the wherewithal to look up at the new Purestrain, who was clad in a sort of white, glossy apron, stained with great splotches and streaks of some sort of green, viscous fluid that stank horribly, and he smiled back down at me with the sort of look a lepidopterist might have before pinning an interesting new specimen to the cork board.

“Come along, now,” he said, giving my shoulder a little pat. His voice was that of a kindly doctor addressing a worried patient about to go in for some life-saving surgery, and given his species’ knack for mimicry, that was very likely from whom he had picked it up from. “Your cocoon awaits, sir.”

“Braconid, about damn time,” said Dorylus snippily. “Remove this idiot from my sight.”

“My apologies, sir,” said the ‘doctor’. “The staff were more concerned about putting out the fire, which had damaged some of our equipment. The delay is regrettable, but necessary to ensure that our guest does not suffer too much.”

Dorylus responded only with a grunt and a dismissive wave of his hoof, which Braconid, whom I assumed was this strange Purestrain’s name, dutifully ignored. A few more encouraging tugs on my upper foreleg coaxed me out of my seat, and I followed along, limping pathetically a few paces behind on three legs. We were accompanied by a brace of Blackhorns through a maze of corridors, all seemingly underground if my special talent was any indication; the air remained stifling, though cooler than the blazing heat of the surface, and thick with humidity, with an odd, organic smell in the air that seemed to emanate from the slimy chrysalite stuff smeared over the walls. There were no windows here, so light was provided for by more of those peculiar green orbs affixed to the walls and ceilings in a seemingly random manner. As we skulked along I tried to make a mental map of the place, and though I had no idea where Dorylus’ office was in relation to anywhere else in Camp Joy, with the distance I had helplessly dragged myself through, I could make a reasonable assumption that this underground complex, apparently directly beneath the smouldering manor house, stretched on for much further than the grounds themselves. That, I thought, would explain why I saw far more drones working in the camp than I would have thought would reasonably fit in it.

We passed a few drones along the way, and most either ignored me or shot me some particularly aggressive glares even by their standards. A few hissed and snarled as I crossed them, which I took to be expressing some sort of upset at our failed escape attempt; I remembered some little comment made in Chrysalis’ meeting with her Purestrains, about how this camp was not only a place to store captured princes and bribe them into compliance with cheap wine, but also where so-called ‘deviant’ drones, which I imagined included that Daring Do-obsessed fellow I’d met before, ill-suited for the sort of brutally conformist society that their Queen had seen fit to impose upon her subjects, could continue to serve her and the Hives in manners that suited them. Far be it from me to sympathise with their sort, of course, but I could only imagine that they, having been promised a way out of whatever oppressive and aggressive means that their government used to enforce the sort of fanatical loyalty that Odonata had described to me, would have been rather inconvenienced by its very clear failure, and no doubt Dorylus had explained to them that the fault lay with me.

“Have you ever been cocooned before?” asked Braconid unexpectedly. He looked over his shoulder where I was limping along behind him.

Stupid question, of course I hadn’t. “Not that I recall,” I answered diplomatically.

“Don’t worry, it’s a perfectly safe procedure,” he said, which was precisely the sort of thing to make me worry about it. “Some of the livestock even enjoy it.”

I didn’t respond; my mood for witty repartee had been drained somewhat with recent events, and unlike Dorylus, this Braconid fellow did not seem the sort to rise to a little verbal sparring. Doctors, as a rule, have always unnerved me; while I’m sure most are motivated by a genuine desire to help ponies, there are many who I suspect are simply in it for the visceral and sadistic thrill of slicing them up and fiddling around with the insides. So to encounter a Changeling example of their kind was all the more worrying, for unlike our lot, these were unlikely to pay the appropriate lip service to bedside manners and the use of anaesthetic.

I was led into a larger room, and its resemblance to an operating theatre as interpreted through the imagination of a maniac certainly did not help matters. The oppressively dim, green lighting, as opposed to the bright, sterile white of conventional medical facilities or even the warm candlelight of makeshift field hospitals at the front, deepened the shadows so that I could barely make out the array of medical equipment arranged neatly on the walls; I caught glimpses of scalpels, saws, knives, syringes, and so on, along with tubes and pulsating things resembling excised tumours. Drones in stained overalls paced this way and that, checking equipment and poking around at things that I could never guess the purposes of. Where there ought to have been an operating table in the centre was a cylinder of sorts, much like the one I had rescued Saguaro from in Virion Hive, upright and tilted back at a shallow angle, empty of fluid, and with its base propped open in a manner that reminded me of an upside-down can with the lid pulled partly open. The young colt did not seem to have suffered too much from his time inside his cocoon, aside from being obviously distressed when we had wrenched him from the pleasant dream the Changelings had somehow weaved for him, but that still did not make me terribly optimistic about what was to follow.

“If you’d like to pop your clothes on the table please,” said Braconid, gesturing to a slab of solidified chrysalite next to the empty cocoon. “The process is unfortunately messy, and it would be a shame for your uniform to be ruined.”

It was already in pretty terrible shape; the aborted escape attempt aside, having been lived in for a few days in a dank cellar with no access to bathing, I probably stank about half as bad as my loyal aide, wherever he was. Disrobing took a little more effort than I’m used to thanks to my injured hoof, and I was immensely wary of leaving my cap and its precious contents with creatures for whom the concept of individual privacy was as alien to them as standards of personal grooming were to Cannon Fodder. Speaking of him, I thought that this ordeal would have been a damned sight easier with him by my side for moral support, though I could only guess as to what his unique abilities would have done to this whole cocooning business.

Now as naked as a common pony with nowhere nice to go, I was instructed to climb inside the empty cocoon, which I accomplished with all of the grace of a drunken Yak trying to squeeze into a small bathtub. In the end, the drones either grew some empathy and helped me into the chamber, or, as was the most likely explanation, became bored watching me flounder uselessly with my injured hoof and just forced me in. Either way, I ended up standing on my hindlegs in what amounted to a green, slimy coffin. I’m not usually claustrophobic, having spent many happy hours as a foal exploring the labyrinth of dark and tight catacombs under the Sanguine Palace after my cutie mark had appeared, but when the lid sealed shut with a hiss of air, a hefty thud, and an ominous grinding of some unseen machinery, I felt a wave of panic wash over me like a bucket of chilled water over the face. When a foul-smelling fluid the consistency of syrup began to pour in through a series of sluices in the top and collect at the bottom, rising up my hindlegs by the second, I felt the urge to scream.

The front was somewhat clear, so I could still see the room beyond and the Changelings peering in with a sense of routine boredom. With my injured hoof tucked to my chest, I swung my good hoof at this window, only for it to bounce off harmlessly. With little other recourse, I tried again, harder. Though it looked like frosted glass, the substance deformed slightly under my blow, rather than shattering into shards as it ought to. The fluid rose up, over my hips, up to my waist, and showed no sign of slowing down; I knew that it wouldn’t kill me, as I’d seen Saguaro immersed in that same odd-smelling slime before without drowning, but the animal hindbrain, which had warned our primitive ancestors of predators lurking amidst the plains where our species first emerged into civilisation, was loud and could not be silenced by rational discourse.

“Now, now, sir,” said Braconid, his voice sounding muffled and distant through the walls of this cocoon-thing, “it will be a lot easier if you simply relax.”

Of course, any pony told to ‘simply relax’ will invariably do the direct opposite thing, and I was no different. The fluid level was up to my shoulders, and whatever it was made my caltrop wound sting as if acid had been poured into it. The viscosity of this stinking fluid slowed my movements, so rather than punching the clear surface of the cocoon I resorted to pushing with my good hoof, as if I might be able to force a hole in it. There was some give to it, but the harder I pushed the more it pushed back; the fact that the Purestrain and the drones continued to peer in with bored expressions demonstrated that my attempts were both futile and entirely routine for them.

The fluid rose up to my neck. I tilted my head back, straining on my hindlegs to keep my face out of it so I could breathe, but it continued to flood in through the sluices. It rapidly covered my head and I was completely submerged in it. I managed to take a deep breath first, but for some reason that still escapes me, panic probably, I tried to breathe; the fluid went into my throat, stinging my nostrils, and it forced me to cough. What breath I had taken bubbled away before my eyes, which, still open, felt the horrible caress of this foul stuff - cold, itchy, burning, and all distinctly unpleasant. Everything appeared to have turned murky and green, and the tall figure of the Purestrain observing me with the typical dispassionate gaze of a seasoned doctor appeared like a monstrous shadow lurking just on the cusp of emerging from a fog. My lungs burned, and with the viridescent murkiness obscuring my eyes I was all but transported back to that gas-soaked slope outside Virion Hive.

I was going to be fine, I told myself; Dorylus wanted me alive long enough to watch Equestria burn, as it were, but that primal instinct still would not abate. I continued to thrash my hooves uselessly against the walls of the cocoon. The fire in my lungs demanded air, and I could stand it no longer; the sharp, burning sensation, like being gassed again, was agonising enough to utterly overwhelm the pain in my hoof. Against all instinct, I breathed in this putrid liquid, and felt it fill my lungs.

[Though the way these pods worked has been lost to history, it is known that it was standard practice to sedate ponies before being placed in a cocoon to avoid panic. As was the case when I was cocooned in Chrysalis’ attack on Canterlot, Changelings motivated by either haste or sadism sometimes skipped the sedation until after the subject is immersed and restrained in the fluid.]

The pain ceased. In fact, all sensation faded into nothing; the sickly feel of the fluid all around me and soaking my coat to the skin, the lingering ache in my damaged hoof, and the solid bottom of the cocoon itself under my rear hooves was gone. My vision clouded around the edges, darkened slowly, and turned to blackness. This, I fancied, before I slipped inelegantly into unconsciousness, was what it must feel like to finally die.

***

Clearly I did not drown to death in the cocoon, otherwise I would not have been able to write this save via seance and a team of very patient and very literal ghostwriters. I remember little of being inside the cocoon itself, having spent much of my time in it in a coma of sorts and dreaming vividly of various things. Saguaro had told me about the dreams the Changelings had made for him when he was in the cocoon, and as I recalled these were seen as something of a reward for good behaviour for particularly industrious slaves, so I had some inkling of what to expect. However, whether due to problems with the cocoon itself, whatever warped version of Princess Luna’s dream magic they employed, or my own muddled psyche, these dreams didn’t quite take and I found myself waking up periodically. How much time passed between each awakening and, indeed, how many times I did wake up is impossible for me to say for certain, as remembering the entire experience is much like trying to remember a particularly surreal dream immediately after waking, and the little details slowly fade like the lingering after-image of a camera flash in one’s eyes.

The first time, however, I do recall with some clarity; I had woken up again to find that the fluid level had dropped mercifully below my neck so that I could breathe normally once more. Still, my first few breaths were accompanied by a violent fit of coughing that brought up splutters of foul-tasting green gunk through both my mouth and nose. When that was over, it was still a tremendous relief to be breathing air, though the air was stale, warm, and stank of both that disgusting fluid and Yours Truly after a week without bathing. That I was still alive was a pleasant, albeit painful, surprise. My hoof still ached, but it was the dull, itchy throb of an awful wound healing than the sharper agony that I imagine the likes of gangrene and infection would feel like. My entire body felt tired, and it was that very peculiar sort of exhaustion that comes with sitting in one place for too long. It was likely that I had been here for several days and hadn’t moved at all in that time, save for the usual sort of subconscious twitching and fidgeting that comes with sleep.

There was some gunk in my eyes, so I blinked that away as best as I could. My hooves were still immersed in the viscous fluid, so using those to wipe them would only have worsened the issue. However, as my vision returned I saw the face of that Purestrain Braconid peering back at me, like a specimen ready for some ghoulish experiment, and I let out a sharp scream in surprise.

“Dear, oh dear,” he said, his voice muffled by the clear-ish surface of the cocoon but still understandable. “This sometimes happens,” he continued absently. “It’s nothing to be worried about, though; sometimes the equine mind rejects the reality that we have created for it. Do you remember what it was? It would be very helpful for my research.”

Remembering the ‘reality’, as he had put it, was tricky, as recalling the details of a dream just after waking tends to be; it certainly felt very real when I was immersed in it, feeling the cold marble of the Sanguine Palace beneath my hooves and breathing its ancient, stale air. Everything was as I remembered it, and I imagined that, much like dreams, it was assembled using bits and pieces from my own memory. The vast halls, the forbidding statues of long-dead ancestors glowering in judgement from their pedestals, the legions of quiet, industrious servants in their endless battle to keep the entire place clean; all were replicated with perfection as I stalked from room to room, corridor to corridor. And yet, even then there was something off about it that I can only see now upon waking, for having been assembled by memory it appeared that different parts of the dream palace had been selected from a variety of different points in time - the rather charming and gargantuan bust of a pony with his throat slit that a distant ancestor of mine had installed over the main entrance to the palace, which had also been connected to a fountain that sprayed red-dyed water over visitors to symbolically bathe them in ‘blood’, had been removed on my father’s order after a torrent of complaints over ruined clothing and because normal ponies visiting thought it was just too damned disturbing for an entrance hall. Yet, in the dream in which I was an adult, it was still there. However, that was not the discrepancy that had brought me out of the ‘reality’ of the dream.

“My parents,” I said. My voice was strained, and it hurt my throat a little to speak.

“Ah yes.” Braconid nodded his head. “The cocoons also harvest love from you, and they’re much more efficient than the usual methods. Having a few figures you love in your dreams helps us extract as much love as possible, so your parents are an obvious choice.” I saw him squint at something just out of sight, obscured by the walls of the cocoon. “That’s very odd; I’ve never seen an extraction rate so low before. All ponies love their parents.”

“Not this one,” I said. “And vice versa; they would never have told me that, even if they did.”

Braconid hummed thoughtfully, and tapped on whatever machinery that was telling him the opposite of what he wanted to hear, as though it might somehow change. “It’s an alien concept to we Changelings anyway; with the exception of some deviant drones who insist on doing it themselves, nymphs are raised communally away from their birth parents.”

That was certainly not the impression that I had gotten from watching Odonata doting on her - our - daughter, Elytra. Though even back then, it was my suspicion that the current state of affairs in the Hives, as dictated by Queen Chrysalis and her cabinet, was not the natural order among the Changelings, but rather a cynical subversion of it based on her twisted ideology. Increasingly, I saw instances of individual Changelings going against not only our own base propaganda that they were mindless, brainwashed beasts beyond redemption, but theirs too, and I could not help but consider if perhaps those deviants were less of a minority than we had all first thought.

It was then, as I was musing on just that, I noticed the room beyond the cocoon was not the same one as before when I was first forced into it; the grisly medical instruments adorning the walls were gone, and it was certain that I had been moved, while asleep and dreaming of the sort of perfect family life commoners got to enjoy but I missed out on, into some sort of storage area for these things. Behind Braconid I could see other such cocoons lined up against the wall, but I could not make out if they were likewise occupied. I had an unhappy suspicion that some, if not all, of my fellow escapees had been rounded up and put inside those cocoons, and if Lightning Dust was amongst their number then that delicious irony would go some way in making up for her betrayal.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Hm?” Braconid looked up from where he was fiddling with something on the cocoon’s outer shell. “You’re in the hold of a ship.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why? Where are we going?”

Braconid looked annoyed. “I think it’s time for you to go to sleep now,” he said, and the level of fluid began rising once again. If the first experience was uncomfortable, the second go was no less unpleasant, and once again I slipped into unconsciousness and another dream.

Subsequent ‘realities’, the ones that I can still remember, that is, tended to be variations on the first one -- a pretended simulacrum of an idyllic family life, and only the ponies involved seemed to change. Twilight Sparkle featured quite heavily in a few of them, most memorably when, as I had explained to an increasingly exasperated Braconid, who must have tired of my mind’s continued rejections of the dreams he was somehow creating for me, that the Princess of Friendship was very unlikely to be the one to offer that particular Maretonian indulgence to me without much in the way of prompting and/or pathetic begging from Yours Truly.

[While certainly enjoyable with a willing partner, no amount of begging would convince Princess Twilight Sparkle to engage in that particular sex act with Blueblood.]

Despite being exactly what I wanted, or rather what my file told him I wanted, I could only assume that the reason these failed to ensnare me as expected was that my psyche struggled with a reality free from at least some form of misery, however major or minor, physical or emotional, inflicted upon me as a just reward for whatever sin I had committed. When presented with pure happiness, my subconscious had apparently detected that something was terribly wrong with the world and chose to reject it, which, as I think about it now, is not exactly a particularly heartening thought. Of course, the simpler explanation might have been that the Changelings had gotten it wrong, and whatever sort of perfect dream that would keep me nice and sedate so they could harvest my love was of an altogether different nature than what the files he consulted from had said. They would probably have had far better luck if they had simply repeated the rare happy memories I that still have of spending summers as a foal with Princess Celestia, or even of Twilight Sparkle if they could refrain from utterly butchering her character or misunderstanding why I found that strange mare so damned alluring.

At any rate, this continued a few more times, and Braconid was getting increasingly exasperated with his apparent failure to extract any meaningful quantity—not to mention quality—of love out of me. After a few more goes, the waking up and getting immersed in fluid again became thoroughly routine.

“What is it this time?” he would say, peering in through the transparent window in the cocoon.

I would shrug my shoulders and explain: “I didn’t really have that many real friends growing up,” or “You’ve never met my Auntie Luna, have you?” or “Drape Cut is an excellent gentlecolt’s gentlecolt, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Then he would sigh, try and tease out a few suggestions on what he could do to make it finally stick and be done with this madness, and repeat the process again, over and over.

I wasn’t exactly helping him with my prompts, of course, as, in my own rather juvenile way, I thought to sabotage his efforts in whatever minor way still within my meagre power to do so. Of course, he at first rejected the notion of forming a dream for me involving a Prench boudoir, a dozen soft, plump, pretty mares each with an advanced knowledge of equine anatomy, and enough champagne to drown a dragon on the notion that lust is merely a poor substitute for love, rather like comparing hayburgers and hayfries to a nutritious meal of fresh grass and salad - it would fill up a Changeling, but would leave them feeling rather sick. However, I think to avoid having to deal with me again for the duration of the rest of the trip, for it was clear he was getting rather annoyed by this and his friendly old family doctor routine was starting to wear quite thin, he finally gave me what I wanted, and muttered bitterly something about having to clean out the cocoon later.

When I woke up in the cocoon for the final time it was immediately obvious that something was wrong -- Braconid was nowhere to be seen and the world beyond my little cocoon had changed from the dank little storeroom to what looked like a jungle, with a multitude of thick and exotic foliage, that was also partially on fire. The fluid had again drained down to the level of my neck, and looking down, it seemed that there was some sort of leak out of the bottom. I tried to peer through the murky, translucent membrane, and saw only the vague shapes that hinted at trees with vibrant green foliage and dancing orange and yellow flames licking up dark, thick trunks. Figures moved, but I could scarcely make them out. I could hear muffled voices, shouting and yelling in that unmistakable timbre of a brutal fight to the death.

Great, thought I, yet another silly rescue attempt. Just what I needed. Still, I had better make the most of it, and so I raised my hoof, the one that hadn’t been punctured by a caltrop, and struck the cocoon’s wall in front of me. Or that was my intention, for the damned thing felt as though I was wearing a heavy lead boot and failed to reach the required height to even begin hitting the side of this hateful tube. For some damned reason, though my muscles made a valiant effort in doing something that I knew I was perfectly capable of, so capable that it’s precisely the sort of thing that doesn’t require any thought whatsoever, the entire damned limb abruptly seized up and afflicted itself with a dull ache as though I had hopped an entire marathon on it. I had been lying almost perfectly still for several days, at least, if not longer, so I ought not to have been surprised that I had the strength of a newborn. My only option to attract attention was to bash my own head, horn first, against the wall, and if I was lucky the pointiest part of my anatomy might even puncture it. That didn’t hurt any less, but it made a satisfying ‘thud’ noise.

“Hello!” I shouted, though my voice was raspy from days, perhaps weeks, of not being used. “I say, hello! Is anypony there?”

A head popped into view immediately, and I could have cried with joy when I recognised it. “I can’t seem to get you out, sir,” said Cannon Fodder, looking none the worse for wear. “But hold on. I have a plan.”