//------------------------------// // Still Starving // Story: On the Road to '63 // by niBBoi //------------------------------// Chrysalis gazed at her morning meal of bread rolls, cereals, and sweet milk and started digging in. It had been quite the journey for the past decade. Chrysalis still remembered the day she and a personal retinue of guards and palace staff boarded a destroyer on the ports of Ditrysium ten years ago and set sail for Greneclyf as they fled the brightly burning ruins of her collapsing changeling realm. She still remembered the roar of naval artillery as they ran headlong into an Olenian blockade while the destroyer crew steered them through a hail of enemy fire. She still remembered the ship lurching upwards into the sky as they hit a massive wave whilst braving through an icy storm. Everything went black after that. When Chrysalis woke up, she found herself lying in bed inside a small, dark room. A changeling soon entered the room and spoke with her about what happened while she was still out. The destroyer and everyone onboard made it to Blosmport intact. However, it appeared that the Equestrians got to Greneclyf first and struck a deal with the local government as the very moment the destroyer crew and Chrysalis' retinue stepped off the ship, they were immediately set upon by local forces, arrested, and took into custody. Afterwards, Chrysalis had been put into detainment inside the very room she was in, her title as queen holding no power where she was despite all her protests, while the Greneclyfian government figured out what to do with her. Of course, she immediately began looking for a way out of her situation. As the weeks passed, however, Chrysalis had gone to realize that she had to come to terms with the fact that she would likely be at the mercy of the Greneclyfians for as long as she was held in that island. She did almost succeed at escaping once, but at that point, she had little love left in her body, and it was hard to swindle a boat from its owner without a proper disguise. Even worse, the changelings who came with her to Greneclyf had all either accepted the Thoraxian regime and returned home or had integrated with the local populace and settled down - all effectively abandoning their queen in her eyes. Chrysalis distinctly remembered thrashing her room one morning when she had learned of it, and it still left a bit of a bitter taste in her mouth to that day. Out of options, Chrysalis waited and waited. She waited some more as the weeks turned into months and the magically reinforced walls and wooden door of her tiny room became covered in marks and stains. At certain times of the week, Chrysalis was allowed to roam the world outside those walls under the watchful eyes of the guards. The first time this happened - a couple days after her arrival - was when she found out that she was in a castle. Ancient and mystical with a unique dash of Greneclyfian changeling architecture, Chrysalis soon learned about the occupant of such a household - Queen Gytha. Sometimes, they met each other, and they would have a few conversations, but they never went too long before Chrysalis inevitably had to go back to her room. Eventually, Chrysalis was given more freedom. She was permitted free reign to explore the castle and the town nearby provided there was a soldier or two who followed her every time she went out. Some areas were off-limits, but all in all, it was way better than being holed up in a small, dark, and damp bedchamber for days at a time with nothing but herself and the three meals a day of stew and bread she was served to keep her company. A short while after that, Chrysalis was even given her own house - a tiny cabin in the woods - to live in as well as a job of her own since being effectively the queen of nothing gave her, well, nothing. She was given the task of being a sort of ranger of the royal woods, and she quickly earned a reputation as the tall and mysterious changeling lady of the forest who sometimes spoke a different language, scared off teenagers, and was rumored by the locals to have once been a queen of a great kingdom. And so there she was sitting in a log cabin eating bread and milk. Chrysalis supposed it could have been worse. She could have been captured and tortured to death by Daybreaker's soldiers, or she could have been rotting in an prison camp somewhere in the Crystal Mountains or the Tzinacatlian jungles. But at the same time, that ambition inside of her remained stubborn. She told herself she didn't deserve her current lot in life. She told herself she deserved the world. And so when Chrysalis got out of her glorified jail cell, her first objective was Gytha. She tried all she could to influence the curious little queen, and for a moment, it looked like it was working. However, nothing happened, and after a while, it was obvious that the changeling had already picked a side long ago. Unfortunately for Chrysalis, it was the Equestrians' side that Gytha picked. It was the Equestrians who seemed to mock Chrysalis every time she saw their agents and officials visit Blosmport as if to gloat at her about how they controlled her fate and how they could have had her executed years ago but didn't as if they knew that being resigned to obscurity in a remote island filled with changelings who believed in the very antithesis of her ideology of strength would be a fate as terrible as death to her. Even more unfortunately for Chrysalis, they were almost right. The Equestrians never explicitly indicated any of that, of course, but the former queen swore that she smelled it from them. Whether or not it was just her mind giving her delusions didn't matter, however, as her frustrations at her situation grew until, eventually, she gave up. Well, Chrysalis didn't entirely give up, of course. Even then, she was way too proud for that. She knew though, at the back of her mind, that she practically had at that point. There was no way out, and the only way forward was to finally lay down her sword and take up the plough instead. Like hell she would, but what else could she do? Giving her thoughts a short break, the changeling put down her bread roll after taking a bite from it and looked at a nearby mirror. Chrysalis saw herself. She saw her body full of holes and her head devoid of a crown. Every day, Chrysalis asked herself if she regretted the war, and every day without fail, she said to herself that she didn't. She didn't because she didn't want to. Chrysalis looked herself over in the mirror again. Her body betrayed her real condition. While she could feed her physical body with enough food, the bare amount of love she got every day had left her magically weak and vulnerable, and the symptoms were visible. Because of this, on the uncommon occasion that she ventured out to go to the nearby town's market, Chrysalis always stared at the changelings whose bodies had no holes and whose chitin shined and shimmered. They shared love with people they knew, regardless of race, like it was as natural as breathing, and so Chrysalis couldn't help but wonder about the members of her retinue all those years ago who settled down in Greneclyf. They moved on and were living normal lives filled with friends and loved ones. Then there was Chrysalis. Alone and still starving, there was Chrysalis, and she had no one to blame for it but herself.