Celstia Help the Outcasts
“There’s one over there. Swing that way and land in that clearing.”
The Royal Guard sergeant on the chariot picked his spear up off the floor before they landed. The two Royal Guard pegasi driving were as delicate as any drivers he had ever had, but it never hurt to be careful. His earth pony Guard counterpart took point as they began to work their way into the dense woods, followed by the contents of a second Guard chariot that had landed right behind them, and covered in the air by a half-dozen Guard pegasi. The Royal Guard teams out searching for missing changelings after the aborted invasion were taking no chances, this team had already tracked down seven wounded changelings and dispatched them almost effortlessly. So far the casualties across the board for the mopping up were ridiculously low, but the sergeant was taking no chances.
“It’s up ahead. Right there. See it?” Sergeant Cheeze pointed with his spear at an unmoving lump. “The detection spell is showing something fairly strong.”
“Yeah. It’s not moving. Think it’s a trap?” The hefty earth pony Guard kept a close eye on the surrounding vegetation, just in case.
“One way to find out.” The sergeant's orange aura around the spear intensified, and thrust into the unmoving changeling with a horribly loud crunch.
“Not even a twitch.”
“Yeah. Something is wrong. Stay here.” The sergeant slipped forward, taking only a moment to glance back at the four nervous Guardponies before prodding with his spear.
“Come here you little bugger. Come on out and die for your...queen?” The sergeant quit poking with his spear and cocked his head. “That sounds like...” The unicorn vanished into the bush, which thrashed around for a bit and then was still.
“Sergeant? Sergeant Cheeze?”
“I’m fine, wait a minute.” The bush thrashed some more before the unicorn came back out, clutching a tiny squirming bundle in his orange magic. “Stay back!” The sergeant gestured at the other Guardponies before bending down to open the bundle. “I think it’s...phew! Needs changed.”
The small cries of a foal echoed through the forest
Four grim-looking Royal Guard earth ponies carried a palanquin through the hallways of the Canterlot castle, the occupant an aged and infirm-looking unicorn mare with quavering jowls and a horrid orange dress with cloak that bagged and billowed and shook with the Guard’s hoofsteps. Not a word was spoken, the only sounds were the ringing of steel-shod hooves and the raspy breathing of the elderly unicorn, her head laying listlessly on the floor of her transportation. Their destination came into view as the majestic double-doors of the Royal Throne Room swung silently open in front of them, remaining open as the bearers trotted through the Royal Court and came to a halt on the thick red carpet in front of the Dias of Judgement.
The two Princesses of the Diarchy nodded at the interruption of the Royal Court and turned to the Court Herald.
“Hear ye, hear ye. This court is in recess while the Diarchy consults with...” The herald trailed off with a glance at the unexplained visitor still being carried by the four Royal Guards. “their guest,” he finished.
The various nobles and representatives looked nervously at each other while being escorted out the throneroom door by grim-faced guards. It had been only a few days since the changeling invasion, and they were still nearly frantic with panic and worry, looking much like little foals being escorted away from their mother.
“Why chase them away like frightened sheep from a wounded wolf, Celestia?” wheezed the elderly unicorn arrogantly from her palanquin. “Let them stay here so they can bear witness to my shame and your triumph.”
“Wait!” said Princess Luna abruptly. “Sister, she is correct. Our subjects deserve to know who we are dealing with here.” A faint interplay of light from both princesses horns hinted at a conversation the gaggle of court members were not privy to, but eventually Princess Celestia nodded in agreement.
“You are correct, my sister.” Turning to the elderly unicorn still sitting on the palanquin, the Princess of the Sun commanded, “Reveal thyself.”
“It shall be as you desire, ‘Princess.’” The elderly unicorn cast back the hood from her cloak and cackled as green fire arose around her. In moments it had consumed the disguise to reveal a tall changeling queen, who scoffed at the fleeing court.
“Yes, flee you disgusting little vermin. Run screaming out into the street. There is no love in your hearts, only envy and hate. I would rather eat the carpet from under your hooves than feast upon your black, blighted hearts.”
In moments, the throne room was empty. Even the four study earth pony Royal Guards who had been carrying the disguised queen left at the gesture of the two princesses, and the great doors to the throne room closed with a dull thud.
“Queen Chrysalis,” said Princess Celestia, standing up and nodding slightly in the direction of the changeling queen. “We are alone now, you may drop your disguise.”
“Why Celestia, how in the world did you know I was still carrying a disguise? Could it be that the most powerful Princess in Equestria can detect it now, and yet when I walked these very halls disguised as your niece, you were without a clue?”
Princess Luna stood and took her place next to her sister. “We had our suspicions, but you were always one step in front of us. Always with the silver tongue and the cunning plans, but we have now passed the knowledge of how to detect you foul creatures to every corner of our domain, and sent the same information to all races we have contact with, both friend and foe. There is no place your race can hide now.”
The Changeling Queen laughed, a low evil chuckle that rose until interrupted by a coughing fit. “Oh, my dark princess, how little you know. You wish to see me as I am, without my disguise? Well then, I shall grant your wish.” A ring of sputtering green fire surrounded the queen again, slowly washing across her body and revealing a horrific sight. One chitinous foreleg was warped, almost broken with a fringe of greenish fragments around the fracture. Her chest was compressed nearly flat, with dozens of green clotted lines indicating places where chitinous plates had cracked and broken. Her wings were dry and flaking, a series of ragged scrapes went all the way down one side, and the very tip of her horn was broken cleanly off. The faint -plup- -plup- of falling green blood echoed around the throne room and Chrysalis leered at the two Princesses.
“Are you happy now, little moon princess? Does my form please you, now that I have dropped my disguise? Perhaps you should call your court back in, so they may rejoice at the downfall of their hated enemy, I can feel their anger and wrath even through the wall. Let them trample my body beneath their hooves and let them find some small joy in my death.”
“An admirable idea.” Luna turned her implacable face to her sister and nodded. “So she has requested, so let it be. Perhaps we can find one use for your horde of sycophants and flatterers that doeth not turn my stomach after all.”
“No, my sister.” Celestia continued to look down upon the changeling queen with her unchanged expression. “Queen Chrysalis. You went through a great deal of trouble to be captured alive. Why?”
“Why? You dare to ask? I am a defeated threat to your ponies, Oh Princess Fair. You are the Law of the land, let your Justice be swift and unyielding, like your sister, the Dark Princess. Oh, you don’t like that?” asked Chrysalis sarcastically, looking at the angry Luna. “Do you know what your subjects call you when you are not looking? I assure you, that is minor compared to—”
“SILENCE!” Princess Celestia took a step forward with a face like death. “Speak your piece, but know that your trial has already been held, and judgement pronounced. Treason in our lands has but one punishment since even before our times, there is no escaping your fate. Taunt my sister again, and I shall call my Royal Guard to have you removed. Now, I ask you again. Why?”
“Why what?” The changeling queen gestured around the Royal Throne Room before stopping and laughing, a long low chuckle that seemed to draw cold fingers up both Princess’s flanks. “Oh, the irony. A few days ago, I had you at my mercy, my drones falling upon your city in endless droves. I was standing where you are, and you were stuck to the ceiling in a cocoon, right about here if I recall correctly. Stuck. Helpless.”
The changeling queen heaved herself up onto her hooves and dripped, green blood having matted the bottom of her carapace into a sticky mess. “You never were helpless. You were awake in there, and watching me. Analyzing. Calculating. Passing all that you saw to your little sister who hid from my drones. Figuring out my disguise, learning all you could so that when I was defeated, you would be able to defeat all changelings everywhere. And even if you were defeated, your sister would then have the tools for revenge.
“You had no idea, did you? The great Celestia, all wise, all knowing, just as much a fool as the queen who tried to defeat her. What knowledge did you have to be so assured in your victory, and yet so ignorant of your opponent? How long do you think I was in your city, plotting my plan?”
“One month, two weeks, and two days,” replied Princess Celestia without changing her expression. “I should have realized it that first night.”
“Oh yes.” Chrysalis chuckled grimly. “That first night we attended ‘The Hunchback’ in the Canterlot Theatre. I laughed.”
“Thy explanation for thine outburst was most convincing.” Princess Luna said, her jaw set in a rigid line. “There are times when I have acted most inappropriately in social situations since my return. The disturbance was brief, the performers resumed their song and continued quite well, as I understand. What did you find so amusing about ‘God Help The Outcasts’ that you could not restrain your instincts?”
“Mercy.” The changeling queen hobbled to the window that overlooked the bustling city of Canterlot, still clearing the debris of the invasion of just a few days ago. If any of the ponies on the street looked up at the castle to panic at seeing a tall changeling in the window, there was no sign. “Pity. Compassion. There is none of that in a changeling hive. The thought of an outcast from society begging some omnipotent deity for such is laughable. And yet, here I am. Ironic in the worst possible way.”
Luna nodded grimly. “The workings of the universe are beyond our comprehension. Perhaps it is indeed enjoying a jest at your misery. Good for her.”
Celestia nodded too. “I have always suspected she had a sense of humor.”
The changeling queen turned to look back at the Princesses with a raised eyebrow. “Theists? I had thought your view from the top of the food chain would preclude such.”
Luna shook her head. “Nay, my sister and I hath long known there are things far greater than us, and those things have greater than they, and so on. What, did you think it was turtles all the way up and down?”
Chrysalis shrugged painfully and turned back to look at the city. “If I had known what was going to happen, I would have cried instead of laughing that night.”
The changeling queen took a deep and painful breath. “What little do you know of my kind, and how we procreate and grow?”
Celestia answered coldly, “The changeling queen flies with a number of drones until they find a place to make their nest. Once there, she mates and lays eggs, from which hatch a full new set of drones. Over the next few years, the nest sits like a cancer upon the land, sucking the love and joy from the whole area. Traveling drones kidnap any creature they can find and imprison them within the hive, drawing the love out of them until they die of a broken heart. Finally when the land no longer can support life, a burst of new young queens emerge from the hive, take the drones, and spread out to find new areas to torture. Yes, I’m fully aware of your race’s life.”
“Do you know then what happens to the old queen?” Chrysalis rearranged her wings with the sound of brittle chiten. “Once the young queens have established their new homes, they kill the drones of the old queen for sustenance. They drain them to empty husks, and lay a new set of drones, who hatch and take care of their new queen. As the old queen’s drones die, so does she.”
“Why do you think I sent my Guard out with the orders they had?” said Princess Celestia. “Slay them all, let not one escape.”
“And yet here I am. As well as my daughter, safely tucked away....where?”
“Safe.”
The changeling queen turned to the window again. “You are soft. You do not know the sacrifices that need to be made when all that you care about is in the balance.”
“I sacrificed my own sister to preserve the lives of my subjects, and all life in Equestria,” said Princess Celestia with a voice as cold as the arctic wastes. “It is only by the greatest of fortune that I was able to see to her return and the purging of the evil which had devoured her.”
The changeling queen leaned against the window pillar and drew idly on the wall with one hoof, using thin green lines of nearly dry blood. “When my hive burst and I traveled out into the world, there were only three of us in the hatching. Two died of starvation, I had the fortune of landing near a small family of earth ponies out in the forest. We queens can sense others of our kind over great distances, I could feel my hatchmates die of starvation, as I could feel the deaths of other queens much farther away. We held that family of ponies carefully, always cautious not to draw upon their love too much, and they lasted for many years before their inevitable demise. During those years, I felt all of the changeling queens die throughout the land, one at a time, until I was all that remained. They had died starving for love. I thought them fools. They exposed themselves by gorging on their prey until they were driven into hiding, instead of exercising caution as I had. Even while I drew my plans for your invasion, I had no idea of my pathetic ignorance.”
Queen Chrysalis leaned against the window frame and drew one hoof down the drapery. “The love our hive had gathered from that one family of ponies invigorated our eventual hatching. Over a dozen young queen pupae were in the nursery when I set off on our invasion.”
All emotion washed out of the changeling queen’s face as she turned to look at Celestia. “I killed them. With my own hooves, I crushed their bodies and murdered them. All but one.”
“Why?” gasped Princess Luna. “They were your own children.”
“Do you even know how special your kingdom is?” asked the changeling queen in a voice as dry as death. “Your kingdom flows with love like a raging river, we changelings have survived on mere trickles for generations ever since our fall. Had I been successful in my invasion, and allowed all of my children to hatch, they would have grown to adulthood inside a year even more nourished and powerful than I. Their broods would be larger, and tens of hundreds of queens would spread out across your lands, devouring all the love and multiplying like flies. In the end, they would have devoured every scrap of love throughout the entire kingdom, and millions would then turn upon themselves. It would have been a horrid death for my children, ever more horrid than what I did to them myself. They would be condemned to a war of starvation that not only would destroy my entire race, but yours as well.”
The queen looked out into the city from the throne room window. “It was my hope that I could raise my daughter to restraint. We would rule your kingdom as benignly as possible, taking only that which we needed to survive. As I passed on, she would then hatch out a daughter who she would raise in the same way. Perhaps eventually my race would be able to break our damnable curse, and return to what we were before the fall: a race that lived on love from each other. I had no idea the corrupting influence of power. I thought I did, but I was wrong, oh so horribly wrong.”
Chrysalis looked sideways at Princess Celestia. “Tell me, oh Princess. Do you have any desire, any whatsoever, that you cannot satisfy from your lofty throne above your kind? An exotic desert, the warmth of a lifetime companion, power or wealth? Imagine being only able to sip the smallest drab of that for your entire life, and then being suddenly immersed into it until you could drown. The love your niece has with her husband is like a raging river out of its banks with flood, when I had only tasted water by the drop in the desert. I lost my mind with the onslaught of love, I could not think, all I could do is desire more and more of it until I was sated. And I never was. Even when we fought, I still desired more. Even now as I feel the end of my life approaching, I would do almost anything to immerse myself in that flow once more.
“I can feel the last of my drones die even now, he has dragged his body into a hollow log and his breathing is labored. His thoughts are only of me, as all the drones have always been. He cares not that his life ends, only that his queen is safe. Without me, he cannot live. Nor I, without him.”
The changeling queen turned from the balcony and plodded slowly towards the throne, dragging her body as if it were decaying away. Behind her, a thin line of green droplets traced her path, growing smaller as she walked as if there were simply no more blood to release. She knelt before the two Princesses, and placed her head upon her hooves in supplication.
“I am a danger to your land and your ponies, I will not beg for my own life. Instead I implore you, I beg your mercy with all my heart, do not let my race die. There is yet hope for us that we may become what we once were, and it lies within my daughter. She needs a strong mother who will teach her right from wrong, and how to control herself as she grows into her inheritance. And if she is still a danger to you and your kind even then, she must be slain, and our race will pass away into history. Slay me, but save my child.”
Princess Celestia and Princess Luna stood impassively above the changeling queen as the pool of green grew more pronounced. They spoke not a word out loud, but the glow of their horns flickered back and forth as if they were arguing. Finally the throne room doors were opened with two auras; one indigo and one yellow, and the considerably less enthusiastic court was allowed to return to their designated places. They all stood in silence, watching the queen of the changelings lie on her face in a spreading pool of green ichor before their Princesses.
Striding together as if they were one, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna stepped forward, one on either side of the defeated Chrysalis.
“Our decision has been made.”