//------------------------------// // chapter twenty two // Story: Changeling Heart and the New Moon // by ambion //------------------------------// Changeling Heart and the New Moon chapter twenty two Wax and Wane were in a bit of a tizzy. In fact, they were in a lot of a tizzy. They paced back and forth...or forth and back, depending which brother one looked to. It was a strange demonstration of their synchroneity, almost comically so, though they felt nothing of humour. “What was that about? It can’t be good,” Wax said. “She just flipped out and left. What was that about?” “I just asked that!” “Well, it bears repeating!” “Right, right,” they said as one, and in unison each held a hoof up to his brow. Their antsy pacing ceased with a single thud of two rumps forcibly hitting the floor. “Luna’s stressed out and flown off,” Wax said, his face scrunching up. “And she’s told us not to follow her,” Wane said, his face equally scrunched in thought. “Very, very specifically told us not to follow her...” The brothers looked to each other, each speaking simultaneously. “We have to go after her.” They nodded and stood, then Wax prodded Wane. “Get your thingy.” Wane shoved back. “Didn’t you see? She took mine. Where’s yours?” Eyes that were presently a dusty fuschia rolled. “Umm...” Wax took a step back. Wane took the same step, only forwards. “Well?” Wane’s own eyes, passing through a gentle rosy pink still managed a withering glare. “She took it.” “Luna?” “No. Chrysalis.” It wasn’t easy, especially with the sunlight streaming in the still-open window, curtains billowing, but the dull coloured Wane still managed to pale. “You let Chrysalis get the thingy that was personally enchanted by Celestia as a favour for us to find our fairest dark mistress first?” “I didn’t let her! She took it. I was drained out, her and the rest of them all itched for a taste.” Wax scowled, but his voice trailed off. “You alright?” “Hmm? Oh...yeah.” Wane seemed to sink into the floor as he spoke, until his hooves were folded up under him and his head was down. Wax patted his shoulder. “Look, don’t worry. It’s nothing we've not-” A hoof pressed firmly to Wax’s lips shushed him. Wane glanced towards the door with an exaggerated motion, then to the still open window. Wax followed the motion with his eyes, then they widened as he followed the meaning too. “The castle’s awfully shiny lately, isn’t it?” Wax said, stressing the word. Wane nodded stiffly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking...” “It’s alright. It’s easy to forget. Maybe even more so for me...” Wane blinked, then blinked a second time. “We’ll have to talk about this later. We’ve still got our lady liege out there.” Wane shivered, not just from dread but from honest cold as well. Whereas his brother, like pegasi usually did, had a good tolerance for it, Wane felt chill in every breeze. Wax threw the windows closed and pulled the curtains shut, and the room changed into pallid moonlight despite the hour. He threw a scarf - one of their mistresses’ own - at his brother, who thankfully wrapped it around his neck. “Right. How are we going to find her?” “I have no idea.” Wane sighed, laying his chin down on the floor. After a mournful moment in moonlight, Cruithne came into the room and nestled down next to him in silence. Beetle never would have considered himself a violent changeling, if he ever bothered to ponder upon such things. It couldn’t be denied that looking to his history, he didn’t have any apparent inclination to cruelty of any kind, though he nurtured a healthy detached apathy that nicely balanced against his constant petty annoyance with most everything in existence. As it was, the shiny black changeling stood guard at the edge of the magical barrier. The changelings were not happy about this newest feature of their time amidst the ponies, especially Beetle, but his Queen had impressed upon them all to keep being passive. Against every natural inclination, by her will, passive they would remain. The shield itself was much the same as they had all seen before. The only real difference was that it surrounded just the one building, rather than the entire city. Beetle touched his hoof to the shimmering light and indeed, he could remember another having been broken under the force of changelings. It wasn’t hard to imagine this going the same way, and on a rare note of the whimsy tapped his hoof against it harder. Not that they were allowed to try, and faithful to his orders, Beetle withdraw his hoof. He stood as he had, every inch the same, if ever so slightly angrier. He didn’t sit, or even lean against the very nondescript crate next to him, the one he certainly wasn’t paying any attention to. Every once in awhile a pair of guards ponies doing their rounds came by and glowered at him. This was fine by Beetle, for he glowered back twice as hard with half the effort. Other than such pleasantries, nobody did anything. He was just one changeling doing nothing, and that was just a box. That was, of course, the point. His Queen had taken one good look at the new shield - keeping them in and ponies out - and laughed. The shield was weak, and not just because, as she put it ‘darling Shiny isn’t happy playing defence anymore.’ It wasn’t just weak by circumstance, but by design. “They want us to break it,” she’d explained, all the while baring the lovely daggers that were her fangs. “Which is exactly why we’re not going to.” Beetle nor any other had said anything, though they’d already muddled the listening spells the guards had cast over their rooms. It was just that when the Queen felt like explaining something, they didn’t need to ask. “We break it, everypony will feel justified with their response, and there is a response. They’re not just waiting on it, they're hoping for it. But as long as we play nice, there’ll be enough secret doubts, enough ponies wondering if we really have changed to stay their hooves and see. Thinking, hoping that Luna really is onto something with us.” Is she? He’d wanted to ask, but a proper changeling didn’t do that sort of thing. He followed his Queen, wherever she lead. Things had made sense before the damn alicorn... He’d already spent a night skulking through half deserted streets and muttering retreats to get in touch with the changelings on the outside; all that risk and work for what had been given to them on printed paper. In a rare instance of breaking from her command, the changeling had fished for any information he could on the vagrant Surreal. There’d been nothing. If he were a pony, he might have spat and grunted in frustration, but he was not. Beetle was a changeling, so he did not. The purposely weakened shield had been clever, or so his Queen had said. If there was anything Beetle was glad for, it was that she was more clever. It was meant to be broken, crumbling like the great shield over Canterlot had done under the siege. Maybe only Chrysalis was insidious enough to think of an incision instead. Something small, unseen, a cut made through the weakened spell, held open by another. A hole, obscured by the crate they’d shoved in front of it.. In a discreet flash of green embers, Chrysalis had shrunk down into a rather ditzy looking gray pegasus. Only the severity of her illusionary eyes revealed the force of spirit behind them. “The ponies really should just get over their scruples and play the tyrants. It would go much better for them if they did.” She’d cackled, a sound terrible and wrong from the little gray body before slipping through the breach and flittering off into the sky. So Beetle stood, watched and scowling, waiting on his Queen’s return. The patrol came around and around again, until a half or whole hour passed Beetle by. He gave half an ear to the voices around the corner of the building, but when he realized one of them to be the scratchy tones of a changeling he blinked and listened closer. Two guards - they were always in pairs, lest changelings bewitch them in secret - had held up a changeling at the door, debating between themselves whether or not to let her out. The gist of it, as much as Beetle caught from this distance, was that the bigwigs had decided on the spell shield, but no order had come through to restrain or even limit the changelings within it. They were already outnumbered and confined within a barrier, why keep them to the rooms? It seemed to Beetle that his Queen was quite right in her assessment after all; they were purposely being given enough privacy and wriggle room to...wriggle, just so the ponies could clamp down on them afterwards. Still, the ponies guarding them were all better actors than changelings, or the shield’s insidious intent hadn’t been made apparent to them. They seemed, by and large, like ponies that were on edge and would rather nothing riotous or rowdy happen at all. The two holding up the changeling shrugged and let her by, and she and the guards shared a carefully blank expression as the dulled flashes and muffled calls of the reporters that pestered the other edge of the shield. Beetle, who actively favoured silence and calm caught himself just in time before almost thanking the guards for sparing them from that onslaught. The changeling caught his eye and rounded the corner, only for Beetle to realize that she was not one changeling, but two. A pair of familiar, shiny foaling eyes blinked up at him from the carrier’s back. “Strange times,” the female said. She took Beetle’s lack of response as an invitation to continue. She rolled her shoulders as if with an itch, shoving the child with her wings this way and that to have it sit more comfortably. For its part, the foaling seemed content to stare with blank amazement at Beetle, who met its gaze. “Strange times,” she said again, apparently liking the sound of her voice. “I mean...all this. What is it?” She looked about surreptitiously and leaned in closer. “What is Chrysalis thinking? And going on about the lost one...and everything with the alicorn...you’d almost think it was our Queen who’d fallen and not-” Beetle huffed. It wasn’t a loud warning, in the same way that a bit of steam from a mountaintop isn’t much warning either. The female skittered in place, glanced away then back to Beetle. “Well? What do you think?” she asked nervously. In the pit of his soul he might have agreed, but to go about flaunting such opinions and doubts like...like a pony, it was disgusting. For all the strangeness she’d lead them into, Chrysalis was as much his Queen as she’d ever been. What he thought was that of the two females, the little foaling watching him was the better, more interesting changeling of the two. “You’re holding her wrong,” he said with heavy hoofed disapproval in his voice, not waiting a moment before lifting the bundle in his magic and setting the foaling down upon his own back. Sufficed to say, the other changeling skulked away and was forgotten as quickly. Beetle’s thoughts turned to the foaling and her kin - six in all - caught up in this strange venture. Canterlot was as heavily inundated with love as ever, shield or no, but even Beetle could not help but wonder what kind of influence such would have on the young ones’ development. He got so far as considering the sheer, overwhelming presence of guards ponies and what the consequences might be for the foalings growth before shutting his eyes and scowling. Such was the kind of thing Surreal - weak, little Surreal - could make sense of, not Beetle. If only to himself, he admitted that he missed her and in the secretest, privatest corner of his changeling heart hoped Chrysalis was right. He didn’t want these changes; he didn’t want to stop living the way they’d always lived, but if Chrysalis could bring a fallen changeling back...he could welcome that much change, at least. So he stood and waited much as before, except that a tiny, holey hoof rose up with ponderous slowness and touched his wing. In the space of fifteen minutes, the dog went from being Wax and Wane’s greatest idea to their biggest disappointment. Three of these minutes were the initial realization that Cruithne was a fluffy, loving dog. Surely the clever canine would be able to track down their mistress and, when Luna’s inevitable anger turned on the pegasi for going against her instructions: the twins could blame it all on the dog. It was foolproof, which was another way of saying that the other twelve minutes were spent chasing the dog and apologizing to the denizens of the gardens. The twin pegasi shoved Cruithne back inside, both muttering. The one corner of the gardens they’d not inadvertently searched was also the most forlorn, the most empty. Flowers and leaves of all shapes and colours gave way to rigid, trimmed labyrinthine hedges, and the fauna stayed well away from the solemn stone that stood eternal watch. One statue towered above all others, and as the day turned gray with a temperamental overcast sky, the wind shushed the twins of their agitated banter. Wane shivered and pulled the borrowed scarf tighter about himself. “She’s not here,” he said, his gaze flitting over the hard edges of the various statues, all but the greatest. “I’m almost glad for that.” He too shivered, though not from chill. Wane flapped his wings, as if to beat the cool air away, all the while trying to retreat into the scarf. He paused, and smiled. “I just thought of something weird.” “Oh?” “Yeah. We can talk more freely around big old Leftovers’ statue there than in our lady liege’s own chambers.” Wax blinked. “That’s...actually really sad. I think I’m starting to see why it all gets to her the way it does.” The brothers leaned against each other, sighing with the wind. Discord had as much to say as any other stone. A few drops threatened, but decided raining wasn’t worth the bother. The need to search on called to them, but something stayed their hooves and wings a while longer. Time itself seemed to halt and stand a while with them in silent witness. Then the moment broke, and Wane heaved a sigh and his head hung low. “I’m tired,” Wane said, his heavy voice hinting that it was not a thing to be cured with a simple good night’s rest. “It’s been a busy few days. Luna’s got everbody worked up. Herself most of all.” Wax patted his brother tenderly, but Wane shook his head. “It feels like more than that. I don’t know...it’s...I feel drained.” Wax grinned and punched his melancholy brother’s shoulder. “Enough of that, there’s enough of it to deal with coming from our lady mistress. I’m always here for you, and love you much as ever. Got that?” It proved quite the infectious grin, as soon Wane had most every symptom. Wind and silence came back once more, but seemed to keep a respectful distance this time “We should get back in the air. We take our time and she might just come back with a herd of windigoes.” Wane gave Wax a look, who in turn shrugged mischievously. “Tell you what. Our lady liege does that, and I’ll spend every last bit of mine to get you the thickest, warmest coat I can find.” Wane paused, considering the offer with mock severity. Wax had to stifle his laughter. “I’ll help you make an igloo as well,” he managed to say through the giggles. “Deal.” The brothers were just about to fly off when their wings were firmly shut with magic, gentle but insistent in defying their wills. Overhead the rain broke free of its tumultuous gray constraints, falling in fat, cold droplets. Falling on everything but the good captain, kept dry from the downpour by a translucent lense of magic. Wings still bound, Shining Armor walked closer, the spatters of rain on the ground parting before him and closing in his wake. “We need to have a talk.”