//------------------------------//
// Anti-Hangover 
// Story: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life 
// by Venlinelle 
//------------------------------//

Queen Chrysalis awoke.
She hated waking up. In the interest of full disclosure, she hated going to sleep, and preparing to sleep, and being fully awake, and the varying states of consciousness between them all, but it was waking up that drew her ire most. Because, while being asleep might have been preferable in some senses to conscious existence—one could conceivably, after all, dream of a world in which they weren’t hungry—it invariably led like an intractable river right back to a reality in which… she… was…
Not… hungry.
…
She was… dreaming. That was it. Of course. 
It was embarrassing, since she’d learned to fully regulate her dreams after scarcely a century of life, but even a queen could be forgiven a moment of confusion now and then. All she had to do was will herself awake once more, and the waking world would envelop her like stale cocoon nutrient excretions.
All she had to do was will herself awake. 
…
Will… herself… awake.
…
This was usually much faster than this. 
Well… If she was going to be stuck in a dream for a few more moments until her mind caught up with her commands, there was no harm in seeing it. So, Chrysalis opened her eyes mid-roll. 
And there they froze. 
Her mane, rather than the beautiful slimy blue of a polluted swamp, was a bright, shimmering turquoise. Instead of an elegantly uneven tapestry, it was a uniform sheet. Instead of the pockmarked black appendages which ought to have been her hooves, they were a blue so light it might as well have been white. And they were… fuzzy. 
As Chrysalis realized with horror that the white, fuzzy things were attached to her, rather than installed in her bed as a cruel prank (or perhaps a surprise breakfast gift from an overeager drone with a corpse to dispose of), the realization followed, against her will, that it was not actually the case that her bed had suddenly become vastly more comfortable overnight. Instead, it was she who had become more… comfortable. 
The final realization—following its predecessors like the world’s most effective and least desirable hangover cure—was that she was not, in fact, dreaming. 
She was awake. She had Reformed yesterday. She was a revoltingly soft pile of unintimidating chitinous fuzz. And she was… not hungry. 
The world slowed to a halt. 
She wasn’t hungry. 
She would never be hungry again. 
She would never… be… would never…
It took Chrysalis nearly five seconds to realize that the peculiar and gradually-building whine she heard was emanating from her own throat. It took three for her to experience the full breadth of her horror at the discovery that her unmodified vocal cords could make such a sound. And it took one for her to decide that she absolutely, certainly, Celestia-damned positively did not care. 
Squeeeeeee! 
Chrysalis shot out of bed with the energy of that pink monstrosity the Elements permitted to follow them around. Inspired by the absurdity of the thought, she gave into a wild impulse and morphed her exoskeleton into a soft, rubbery material, which, in the more or less spherical position she was curled into, bounced her about the room with abandon. Eventually, she slowed and landed on her feet, chitin restored to… whatever it normally was now. She did a backflip. Then she changed into a giraffe and back again. Then she blew a hole in her wall, and felt barely any of her usual resentment at the sudden intrusion of the horrible wholesome sunshine. 
She realized she was acting like a filly (not a grub, of course; no changeling would be caught dead wasting energy in such a way), but she didn’t care. 
It was a new day, and Queen Chrysalis wasn’t hungry. 
The pain was gone. The numb tingling in the tips of her hooves was gone. The gaping, aching emptiness in her nutrient processing organs that radiated out to her every appendage was gone. The knowledge that all of it would only get worse by the minute until she fed, and then start getting worse all over again, was gone. 
It was all gone. Gone, gone, gone! 
She did another backflip. 
She knew it would be impractical, but she allowed herself to consider, for a moment, spending the entire day going back to sleep and waking up to find herself not hungry all over again. Such a realization was too wonderful to be had only a single time.
Tragically, now that she’d ceased her ecstatic bouncing, that realization brought with it memories, and they were decidedly less wonderful. Her recollections built upon themselves one by one, as if attempting to prepare her for each of them in turn. 
Five days ago, she had launched the greatest and most brilliantly-plotted operation in the history of the changeling species. Nevermind that; every species.
She preened even as she recalled it. It was a plan three years in the making. The Canterlot coup had been a hastily-devised scheme, built of improvisation and masking tape (metaphorically, for the most part), but this had been her masterpiece. Three years of research, espionage, simulations, scheduling and rescheduling, requisitioning late-night stimulant rations from Pedipalp in the Hive pantries, bribery, torture, and even certain things Chrysalis didn’t enjoy, all in service of one perfect day. One actually perfect day. That didn’t end with an impromptu hypersonic flight across the southeast portion of Equestria. 
And they’d done it! Every single pony of even remote importance but one, secreted away in the course of scarcely five minutes. No warning, no retaliation, no recourse. Flawless. 
And then that… that… Chrysalis made a strangled hissing noise which might’ve in some world translated to a changeling curse, but which in this one was simply a strangled hiss. Nonetheless, it expressed her thoughts more accurately than any curse could. 
Three years of planning; of double, triple, and sextuple-checking schedules until she could almost hear the voices of Twilight Sparkle and her infuriating foalsitter in her head as she worked. And then that (another hiss) Starlight Glimmer had had the nerve to be. On. Vacation. 
Chrysalis narrowly resisted the urge to create another abstract window in her wall. Utterly brilliant millennium-defining schemes were not something you took a day off from. 
She scoffed at the memory of her conversation—well, her first conversation—with that infernal pony yesterday. Of course she’d intended to foalnap Starlight along with the others. The mare could time travel. But what was she going to say? ‘Hello, yes, I realize you could kill me with a thought if I didn’t have my magic chair, but I couldn’t replace you because you decided to go for a walk with your equally-irritating marefriend’? So she’d insulted her, in the hopes that it would reduce her morale enough to distract her. It had not.
Then, after her single error had naturally proven the downfall of her entire plan, Thorax, that repulsively weak grub with the voice like a bag of nearly-drowned cats, had shown up. And then a number of things had happened in very quick succession. 
Thorax had found himself somehow as hideous on the outside as he’d always been on the inside. 
Her throne room, and its beautiful air of sickly foreboding that she’d worked so hard to cultivate, had exploded. If the interior decorator she’d foalnapped to design it hadn’t been reduced to a husk long ago, she’d have been devastated to see the fate of her efforts. 
Starlight Glimmer had delivered the most brilliantly-constructed speech this side of—
Chrysalis mentally erased the last sentence of her internal monologue, and hoped that her new, fuzzier carapace didn’t show a blush any more than her old one.
…The most infuriatingly irrefutable speech this side of the Discordian era. 
And now Chrysalis looked like this.
And then Glimmer had…
No, Chrysalis decided. That was the end of that recap. She was far from prepared to recall… that part. 
She considered, for a long moment and largely in a circular fashion, how this series of slight upsets should affect her day.
…
It shouldn’t, of course. Chrysalis had gone about her queenly duties in far more unusual circumstances before (this was entirely false, as Chrysalis would know if she allowed her train of thought off its circular track, but such self-reflection was best left until later in the day). Being white and… fuzzy was nothing she couldn’t handle. 
So, with a shake of her new, unsettlingly-heavy wings, she set off to attend the Hive.





Her optimism survived all the way through the door and into the hall. Unfortunately, it shattered like her beautiful throne when she turned to instruct her guards and found an unattended door.
Incorrect. A minimum of two guards were to be stationed outside her room at all times, so that she could be notified immediately in the event of anything requiring her attention. Did her children think that just because the the entire foundation of their society had been thrown out (a brief and clearly meaningless wave of dizziness swept over the queen) that the rules no longer applied? Besides, she’d wanted to talk to them about… Well, that hardly mattered. They should be at their posts.
Face dark, she leapt into a newly-opened corridor she knew intuitively would lead to the pantries. 





Chrysalis slid in an undignified heap onto the floor of the primary Hive pantry, her limbs so tangled that she opted to shapeshift her entire body into a standing position rather than stand up. Her center of gravity hadn’t shifted that significantly, but it was enough to turn her practiced slither through the narrower Hive tunnels into an uncoordinated tumble. 
Fortunately, the explosion which had decimated the top floor and spire of the Hive had left the lower reaches and underground caverns entirely untouched. As such, the dozens of softly glowing cocoons hanging from the ceiling, each containing a pony (except for the particularly unproductive one in the far corner, which contained a salesgrif with woefully inadequate navigational skills), remained motionless. 
For changelings, ‘pantry’ was largely synonymous with ‘prison.’ And, as such, it was imperative that it be attended.
Except… Chrysalis licked her lips with her now-slightly-thicker tongue. Every time she entered this chamber, even with 1,089 years to hone her willpower, she had to resist the urge to feed on the cocooned ponies. 
Until today. 
And… if she had no reason to feed on them, it stood to reason that her children wouldn’t either, which meant there was really very little reason to keep the cocoons here at all, let alone guard…
She shook her head rapidly. No. Absolutely not. She was the queen, and even if certain things would be… different, there would be a time to decide that. Not right now. And her drones should still be here. 
With a growing certainty of what she would find—or rather, wouldn’t find—she turned on her hooves and made for the logistics burrow.





The logistics burrow was not an actual burrow, being the second-highest room in the Hive. In fact, if one assumed the word ‘room’ to imply a roof, it was now the first-highest room in the Hive. Either way, it was a crucial space where Chrysalis met with the drones heading the various clusters of the Hive and received updates on everything from food acquisition to infrastructure maintenance—and, of course, noling was there.
Chrysalis surveyed the roughly ovular room. In this case, its emptiness might have been for the best. The explosion yesterday afternoon had shaken a large amount of rock free from the ceiling of the room, and much of the furniture was shattered. She would need to meet with someling about repair. Preferably somewhere besides the logistics burrow.
At this point, she was considering performing a Hive-wide scanning spell, seeking out the nearest drone she found, and eating them as an example to the others. It would be a waste of an enormous amount of energy and a perfectly serviceable drone (presuming the closest one wasn’t Thorax), but it would satiate the growing fury in her decentralized heart, behind which concerns over efficiency took a distant backseat.
At that moment, a changeling entered the room. It was… teal. Chrysalis shuddered involuntarily at the sight, and consoled herself with the expectation of the terror which was sure to overtake the drone’s face the instant they noticed her. Three… two… one…
They noticed her. “Oh, hello!” Tarsi exclaimed, beaming (she recognized his voice, if not his horrifying new appearance). “We’ve been wondering when you’d arrive! We’re in the atrium. See you there!” He picked up a rock from a corner of the room. It didn’t appear to be any different from the other rocks. “Aha! I knew I left this in here.”
And, with a delighted hum, he trotted away. Chrysalis blinked. 
Had he not recognized her? No, of course he had; she was twice the height of any drone (except Thorax, her mind added unhelpfully). Besides, what of the Hive hadn’t been present yesterday would’ve heard the news by now.
Had be been trying to shock her into being unable to tear his head from his body and suck the fluid from his corpse? If so, it had worked, so she supposed she would have to commend his quick thinking the next time she saw him—and his skill at hiding his emotions, in which she’d tasted no deceit. Before she tore his head off and sucked the fluid from his corpse. 
Well, Tarsi had said they were in the atrium. Chrysalis decided that this ‘they’ merited a visit, and a reminder of what the functions of this Hive entailed. 





Truly terrible was the expression of queenly displeasure Chrysalis prepared for her entrance to the atrium—the largest chamber of the Hive, which lay near ground level and in which she addressed her subjects. She granted herself the luxury of adding several extra fangs to her mouth; there was never any harm in reminding your children that you were both more skilled and more capable of violence than they were.
Furiously, she waited for the door to appear in its usual location. When it did, she strode through, ready to perform as much shouting as would be necessary. 
Her first words (I hope I’m not interrupting anything—nothing invoked shame like sarcasm) died on her lips at the sight she walked in on.
The atrium was full of changelings. A lot of changelings. She wasn’t sure she’d seen this much of the Hive in one place since her speech before the Canterlot coup. More worryingly still, they appeared to be… celebrating.
The Hive didn’t have the infrastructure or supplies for a proper party, thank Faust, but that didn’t seem to be hindering anyling. Most of them were just talking, be it while standing, sitting, laying down, or hanging from the ceiling. A sizable portion were dancing, to a choir of changelings singing (which, in the case of creatures with malleable vocal cords, comprised a truly impressive variety of sounds) what sounded like some unholy medley of a pony folk tune and a victory song she’d written several centuries ago. Some were drinking punch, which, given the quantity and nature of the ingredients which tended to be available in the Hive, she shuddered to think of the contents of. A few were shapeshifting rapidly for no apparent reason. Several were lounging in one of the slime baths in the corners of the room. And a group to the right of the singers appeared to be sword fighting with broken stalactites. 
All had wider smiles than Chrysalis had known the natural changeling form could achieve. Perhaps it was some quirk of their new bodies. 
Every head in the room turned to her as she stepped through the transient door, and she was pleased to hear the singing cease. Initially, the smiles remained, but they began to dwindle as the crowd saw Chrysalis’s glower.
She let them marinate in their discomfort for a long moment before she spoke. “I–” Her tongue was a different shape than she was used to, and it caught in her temporary fangs. Curses. She cleared her throat awkwardly. “What is the meaning of all of this?”
A now-orange drone—Ganglion, she realized upon hearing her voice—who apparently lacked the wisdom to discard her smile flew over the crowd to land before Chrysalis. 
“Your Highness!” she said excitedly. “We’ve been hoping you’d be here eventually. Some of us wanted to wake you, but the others said we should let you sleep in! But now you’re here, so everything is perfect!”
Chrysalis wondered privately if yesterday’s transformations had taken with them her children’s sense of self-preservation. Ganglion worked in reconnaissance, so she wasn’t exposed directly to the queen’s wrath with any frequency, but she should still know better than this.
Still… She supposed she could understand their forgetfulness, to an extent. It wasn’t every day that part of the Hive exploded and left everyling nearby a pastel pastiche of their previous persona. 
So, with a very, very deep breath, she managed to calm a portion of her anger. A small portion. “Why,” she asked delicately, “Are none of you at your posts?”
Ganglion’s smile faltered. “Well, it’s not—”
“Why did I wake up unaware of the location of my subjects?” 
A wave of uneasy murmurs spread across the crowd. “We were just—” began Ganglion.
“And why,” Chrysalis continued, voice cutting through the drone’s like a knife through a pony, “Are you all celebrating?”
There was silence.
Chrysalis buzzed her wings in annoyance. “There is work to be done! I authorized none of this! There is nothing special about today!” Just because she could barely get those words out of her mouth with a straight face was no reason it wasn’t true. “Surely I taught you all better than this.”
The crowd shifted. Many of those standing had sat down, and many of those sitting had nervously stood up. Those residing in the slime pools had clambered out and stood, dripping, at attention. The sword fighters had put down their ridiculous stalactites. 
Chrysalis’s tongue darted from her mouth, tasting the emotions of the room. Disappointment. Anxiety. Some hope, but less by the second. Fear. The rancid sting of unfulfilled expectations. And sadness.
Or… no, she couldn’t taste sadness. She felt sadness, in her own body, and it grew by the moment as she beheld her subjects.
Why was she sad? Did she need to give herself a lecture too? She didn’t even have a mirror!
Before she could rectify this worrying realization, another drone standing near the former singers—Carcin—spoke up. “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to disobey you. And… I guess we should’ve asked before throwing a party.”
What fantastically perceptive drones she had in her employ. 
“But…” Carcin said, voice small. “This morning… Mom, you felt it, right?” A hint of glee, as sweet as frosting, flickered through the air. “When you woke up, and… you know.”
Chrysalis, against her will, recalled it vividly. Before the fury at the Hive’s insubordination, and the confusion of not knowing where anyling was, and the exasperation at her unwieldy new form, there had been…
Bliss. There was no other way to describe it. Even thinking about that moment of realization—and having the same realization all over again, because Faust knew she’d be having to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming all over again every day for the next fifty years—brought the nigh-uncontrollable urge to laugh. To sing. To sword fight with a rock for the sake of it. Because she would never. Be. Hungry. Again. She suppressed the feeling as quickly as she could (a disciplinary meeting was no time to be indulging in baser urges), but she saw from the slight grins of the changelings nearest her that she hadn’t been quick enough.
A somehow-smaller voice arose from scarcely twenty feet away—a voice Chrysalis would know anywhere. 
“We all felt it,” said Ocellus, tiny blue form stepping out of the crowd. “Um, we knew yesterday, obviously, but this morning, it was… real. We didn’t plan for things to get out of hoof, but… we were so happy. We just wanted to be together.” She swallowed. “I think you would’ve too.”
Murmurs spread through the crowd; accusing the queen of hypocrisy, even indirectly, was a reliable way for most drones to be put on reduced rations for a decade or two. But Chrysalis had expected as much. Ocellus was one of her most promising young infiltrators, and had spent more time with her than nearly anyling else outside of command. Of course she would be so bold.
So bold as to point out that Chrysalis had likely been even more jubilant this morning than the changelings at the ill-advised party. Which… she had.
It wasn’t her fault that she’d been out of sorts! The average drone lived only a few decades—Chrysalis had felt the same all-consuming, soul-charring hunger for over a hundred, and having it simply disappear, all at once, in real life, was… was…
Well, it was the sort of thing one could throw a party for. If one were the sort to respond to utter joy in such a way.
Chrysalis shifted her internal structure indecisively. She shouldn’t encourage this. There had been enough upheaval at the Hive over the past few days; allowing her children to skirt the consequences of their actions so flagrantly wasn’t a precedent she could afford to set. Although, maybe she could, now that— No! Shut up.
But… she supposed she couldn’t blame them. And she had never liked lying to the creatures who relied upon her. Lies were for other species—internally, they were an impediment to efficiency. 
So, with reluctance, she allowed the smile that had been fighting its way out of her face to show. Slightly. “...It was quite something, wasn’t it?”
The crowd nodded excitedly. Some cheered. One began singing again before a nearby drone swatted them with a wing. The sadness which had been building in Chrysalis’s soul had the gall to recede accordingly.
Buck it. She’d spent two centuries in a volcano; one day of excess wouldn’t hurt. 
Chrysalis took to the air with her new, shimmering wings. “I,” she announced, “Will allow this… event… to proceed.” This time, most of the crowd cheered. “For one. Day. There is work to be done, and no matter how adorable I’m sure the ponies find your new forms, all of you may rest assured that I will have no more qualms disciplining the lot of you than I ever have before.” She glared at the crowd, willing her sincerity into their minds—or at least their noses. “So I expect you at your posts at the same time tomorrow, and I will not be accepting late reports, lest they be transcribed in the form of your exoskeletons.”
“But…” Ganglion said hesitantly, drawing a thousand nervous compound eyes. “So many of the reports are on love acquisition, or target selection, or, or toxin synthesis, or… I mean, after yesterday… Are you sure we still need—”
“I AM IN DENIAL AND YOU WILL ALLOW ME TO REMAIN HERE IF YOU WANT YOUR HEMOLYMPH TO REMAIN INSIDE YOUR SKULL!”
The wave of fear that pulsed through the atrium was almost worth the humiliation. 
Praying she wasn’t blushing, Chrysalis landed in the most regal posture she could maintain while covered in white fuzz. “Ahem. You may all have the day off to do as you wish.” She scanned the crowd—she would not be taking the day off, and there was someling she regrettably needed to see. “After anyling who knows informs me where…” The name stuck in her throat like a feather from an improperly-cooked griffon. “…Thorax is.”
“He’s still asleep, I think,” came the high voice of Ocellus. “He was exhausted from yesterday. He, um, hasn’t lived here for a while, so patrol leader Pharynx gave him his room for the night.”
Pharynx? His pathetic brother had always been his weakness. That and paranoia, but that was as good as required for a changeling of sufficient rank. 
Chrysalis nodded, and, with a final glare to the beaming crowd that she knew they knew her heart wasn’t in, she left to search for her least favorite drone.





The quarters of the patrol leader was one of the few private bedspaces in the Hive. Changelings were typically very social creatures, and preferred to sleep together in the communal spaces, but, for important workers, the option of personal space was afforded. Pharynx, being an exception to that typicality, appreciated it greatly. If not enough to refrain from transferring his earned comforts to Chrysalis’s… problem child. 
The queen landed outside the green, slimy door, and raised a hoof to knock.
Then she lowered it. And raised it again. And lowered it again.
And then she began pacing.
Thorax. 
She remembered when he’d left. He’d tried to do it in secret, but, being a changeling of little ability and less knowledge, he’d failed. She’d kept tabs on him initially—a rogue element was not something to be dismissed, even if it did have the disposition of a prey animal—but, once he’d reached the edge of the Frozen Wastes, she’d given up on scrying him. It was a waste of energy on someling who seemed destined for nothing but a meaningless death alone in the snow.
Seeing him yesterday had been an unpleasant surprise. Seeing his new form had been hilarious—up until she received her own, barely-better one. And seeing him treated with such reverential respect by her drones, even if she’d supplanted him almost immediately, had been… spiritually taxing.
She couldn’t kill him. Well, she could, and maybe someday she’d think of a way to get away with it, but right now, he was too popular (Cosmos only knew why), and the Hive needed stability. She needed to work with him. 
Intellectual awareness of this fact didn’t save Chrysalis from spending twelve minutes pacing outside Pharynx’s quarters before she finally, reluctantly, knocked on the door.
“Come in!” came a chipper voice. Ugh. He sounded like one of those ridiculous raccoon creatures she’d discovered after the Canterlot coup. He didn’t even do her the small favor of allowing her to violently wake him.
She stepped through the opaque slime membranes that formed the door. Pharynx’s quarters were austere, and Thorax’s ridiculous new body stood out like a bloodstain against the grey rock. He stood, smiling, by a window, looking and smelling as though he’d expected her.
“Good afternoon! I wondered when you’d stop pacing.”
Chrysalis felt the chitin on her face heat up, and immediately shifted it to a lighter shade. “I’m quite sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Thorax slowly pointed at the wall through which she’d entered. “The room has windows on both sides.”
So it did.
She changed the subject. “You’re rather blasé today, given what you did yesterday. Are you sure this is the level of respect you want to be showing me right now?”
Thorax, to her astonishment, bowed without hesitation. “My apologies, my queen. I did what I did for the sake of the Hive, but I have no intention of undermining your authority, and, if you think it’s best, I will accept whatever punishment—”
Banish it, this was worse than if he’d just argued. Normally, she’d allow this sort of frantic kowtowing to go on for as long as the drone in question could think of flattering things to say, but she knew Thorax was only doing so out of genuine selflessness—she could smell it coming off of him in waves, since the traitor had never learned to properly conceal his emotions—so it might as well not have counted, and she didn’t want to be here for any longer than she had to. She waved a hoof hastily. “Yes, yes, consider yourself warned, never overstep the boundaries of your rightful position again or I’ll feed you to the grubs, you get the idea.” Thorax trailed off and raised his head.
The pair stared at each other awkwardly. Chrysalis noted, with more satisfaction than she’d ever admit, that her horn still extended slightly taller than Thorax’s absurd antlers.
After a very long silence, Thorax cleared his throat. “Was there… Do you need me for something?”
Yes. Right. “I am your queen,” Chrysalis said icily. “I do not need a reason to take up your time, which is mine by right.” Not that she didn’t have one right now. “But, as a matter of fact, yes. I need information.”
Thorax nodded happily. She’d preferred him as a coward. “Sure. What do you wanna know?”
Chrysalis began pacing, rather than continuing to stand on the threshold of the room as if she didn’t own it. “I am willing to… pardon your past offenses, if we treat your little holiday as an extended infiltration mission. You stayed in the Crystal Empire and befriended a number of prominent ponies, as well as surviving on your own for longer than almost any changeling in the past several centuries. You will furnish me with the details.”
Thorax looked uncomfortable. “Um, I can tell you everything about my time on my own if you want, but I don’t really want to give up my friends’ secrets without asking them… Not that they’ve told me much, but I’d still wanna ask…”
Chrysalis paused her pacing to stare incredulously at him. “I’m not sure you’re comprehending the position that you’re in. You committed treason. Multiple times. Your organs should be painting the walls of the hatchery by now.” She always liked giving the hatchlings something nice to look at. “You will tell me everything.”
Thorax scuffed a hoof nervously, but he shook his head. “I’m not gonna give up anything I…” He mumbled the last few words.
“What?” Chrysalis hissed.
“I’m not going to tell you anything I think you could use to hurt my friends,” Thorax said, resolute despite his clearly shaking legs. “Besides, you don’t need to know anything they wouldn’t just tell you. They’re our allies now, right? We don’t have to hide anymore.”
That pathetic, gluttonous, slime-sucking… “No,” said Chrysalis, with the patience of a saint. “We don’t. For now. But we might, because things change, and I don’t want to risk everything on your friends.”
“They wouldn’t…” Thorax took a deep breath—a largely performative motion, since changelings could breathe through any part of their bodies, but, then, the whelp hadn’t been around his own kind in years. “I learned from them that part of being friends is trusting each other. Even if they might betray you, sometimes you have to… accept that. And I trust them. Even if you… don’t.”
Chrysalis stood motionless for several seconds. Then, she turned to the back of the room, lit her horn, and blasted an enormous hole where a rudimentary closet had been. Thorax quivered. 
She couldn’t kill him. Not yet. No matter how much she was enjoying imagining shifting her hoof into a lance through his skull. What could she do with him? What use could she possibly have for this evolutionary mistake of a drone, and what punishment could possibly suffice?
She looked out the smoking hole in the wall—already beginning to seal, thanks to the natural magic of the Hive—and suddenly she knew. 
“You,” Chrysalis said, “Are going to be our ambassador to Equestria.”
Thorax gulped. Chrysalis’s gleefully vindictive tone could make a shopping list sound frightening. “...What?”
“As soon as we finish… restructuring,” Chrysalis said, liking this idea more by the second, “You are going to get out of my sight and take up residence in whatever saccharine corner of Equestria you please. You will serve as the point of contact between myself and the Princesses, and you will send me regular reports on everything.” Thorax raised a hoof to protest. “Everything legitimate. I have more competent drones than you to deal with more sensitive matters.”
Thorax nodded slowly. “I… okay?”
“The proper response is ‘Yes, my queen.’”
“Yes, my queen!” he yelped. “But…” Oh for the love of Cunabula, what now? “...Am I not being punished?” 
Any changeling worth their chitin would know better than to ask a question like that—if someling forgot to do something that was to your disadvantage, you didn’t remind them of it. But Chrysalis hadn’t forgotten, and she smirked. “Oh, you are.” She began to pace about Thorax, narrowly resisting the urge to snack on his anxiety. “You will be our ambassador, and, accordingly, everything you do in Equestria will be official. I’m told you’ve gotten rather cozy with the Princess of Food recently?” He nodded again. “Well! Do let me know if she remains quite so talkative when she knows that you’re working directly for me. Ponies will trust a rogue changeling—one of the good ones. We’ll see how they feel once you’re the public face of the Hive that foalnapped their children.” She smiled in an insincere pastiche of genuine pride. “But I’m sure you’re more than up to the task, aren’t you?”
Thorax had resumed quivering. “My friends trust me,” he said. “Nothing will change just because I’m working for you.” 
The uncertainty, though, was as clear in his voice as it was in his emotions. That was good enough for Chrysalis. Besides, she did need an ambassador, and Thorax would require far less training than her other options; he was already familiar with pony culture. Were it that it were otherwise.
“Oh, I’m sure!” She beamed—sincerely this time. Cruelty had a way of brightening one’s spirits. “I believe that’s all I require of you for now. Join your ridiculous siblings in the atrium if you want. You will await further orders until I provide them.” She walked to the door.
“...Mom?”
Her step faltered. She shouldn’t turn around. She was done here. And she shouldn’t let that… particular form of address… override her common sense.
She turned. Banish it all. “What.”
Thorax was actually looking her in the eye—they were compound, yes, but she could always tell—and his nervousness had grown sourer. “Did you know?”
Chrysalis paused. “What?”
“About… this. What we could become. Did you… know?”
Did she know.
She felt a spike of outrage. How dare he. The accusation, the implication, by all that was noxious and cognitohazardous the mere thought that she would ever keep her children in starvation willfully was enough to make her hemolymph boil, and, from the look on Thorax’s blurry face, he knew it. How dare he. One thousand and eighty-nine years of devotion to the singular cause of her birthright, and he had the gall to question her sincerity?
She nearly disintegrated him then and there.
But… Had she known…
The events of yesterday floated across her mind. She hadn’t believed Thorax, in what used to be her throne room, when he’d said he’d found a better way. Not for a second. But then she’d seen it. And she’d tasted the baffled happiness the transformation had sparked in her subjects. 
And she’d still almost left. She’d still come so, so close to allowing her fury at Starlight Glimmer to push her off the Hive and away from her children forever. 
She hadn’t, of course. And, after a night’s sleep—and everything else that’d happened in the past twenty-four hours—she felt a twinge of revulsion each time she recalled how close a thing it’d been. But Faust, had it been close. 
She might’ve been the only creature in the world who could do her job, but she wasn’t perfect.
So, with a great deal of effort, she calmed her body, and, to a degree, her mind, and replied: “No. I didn’t.”
Thorax, now emanating marginally less cold fear (cold wasn’t a conventional flavor, but then, love wasn’t a conventional food), nodded so quickly he looked like a spring. “Right. Of course. I knew that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Thorax winced. “...No. I didn’t.” At least he could be honest when it didn’t matter.
She nodded with satisfaction. Now she could leave, and do… anything else. It was a day off, after all; she didn’t get many of those, and she hadn’t scried through Celestia’s mirrors in ages. 
This time, her muzzle had made it through the door when Thorax spoke again. 
“I’m, um… glad you stayed.”
She refused to turn this time—this was already more of Thorax than she would wish upon anyling in a single day, let alone herself—but she couldn’t let that stand unquestioned. “Why?” 
She tasted bafflement, insultingly enough. “Well… I’m happy for you? You’ve always lived here, and maybe I don’t love everything you’ve done, but I don’t want you to be alone.” Now a hint of the same glee she’d tasted earlier in the atrium. “And, well… Doesn’t it feel amazing?”
…Of course it did. But she wasn’t going to admit that to him. Doing so earlier in the atrium had been difficult enough, even if she had been shamefully tempted to join the others in their hedonistic excess. 
“Bah,” she muttered.
Thorax’s optimism, like an evasive mosquito, was not deterred by the hostility of its environment. “Besides, it’s not as important, obviously, but I think we’d have… a hard time. Without you.” Respect—reluctant respect, but respect. “And, um… Aren’t you happy you didn’t… leave?”
Chrysalis, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said “Bah” again. Thorax trailed off awkwardly. 
She’d crashed weddings—several weddings—to more comfortable silences than this. Morbid curiosity kept her frozen on the spot, but Thorax remained resolutely (or more probably involuntarily) silent.
If there had been a clock, it would’ve been ashamed to be heard ticking. 
“...Yes,” Chrysalis muttered. She leapt through the door before Thorax could say another word.
She had punch to drown herself in.