//------------------------------// // Memory Lane // Story: Monster or Mother? // by Hivemind //------------------------------// The northern colony…is dead. What?! How is that possible? They were multiplying so quickly! It could have just been the cold that took them…but when we arrived we found weapons and stab wounds on most of the corpses in the hive. Some of them were ponies. How could an insignificant village like the one up north have killed everyone in the entire hive?! We don’t know…they outnumbered the villagers ten to one. …this news is most disturbing. There is something else you should know. We have had little luck in discovering the location of this...ancient monastery you spoke of. The directing spells you provided continue to fail us. Try harder then! I won’t take failure for an answer. The longer we wait…the faster we die. ~~~~~ “I-I don’t know what came over me. I-I-It was like my mind just…took over all of a sudden!” The queen’s ramblings had been going on ever since they left the clearing and returned to the central hive. Roseluck had begun to expect these sorts of uncomfortable conversations long before she bore witness to the power of the mysterious force that was changeling magic. She was no expert on the subject, but there was something about their ways in the magical arts that seemed…off. Granted it was the queen herself who cast the spell, but even Roseluck knew that not even the most talented unicorns in Equestria could bring such harm to a behemoth like the hydra. Such a challenge could only be fit for one of the princesses, or even that famous student of Celestia’s that everypony kept talking about. Sadly, there was nothing she could do about them. She was her love slave after all, and as dirty as that would sound in the heads of less sensible folk she had to constantly remind herself why she was here. It wasn’t because her heart felt that she should be sympathetic towards the outlandish insectoids, but because she knew what would happen if she was never there in the first place. Ironically, she knew that she should consider herself lucky rather than downtrodden by the forces of nature. The young mare’s mind was filled with questions. Her brain could hardly keep up with them all. She needed answers, answers about the world around her, and sitting around all day munching on forest fruits and waiting for a miracle to happen was just downright moronic and possibly bad for her health. She hated to admit it, but she was doing just that. Only an hour after the intense encounter in the clearing, the party of three was spending its time recuperating in the vast space of the central hive gathering hall. Chrysalis insisted that they all take a break to get their heads straight, but the queen of the changelings was doing anything but resting. Pacing around the room at what seemed like a thousand miles per hour, the queen mumbled lowly to herself, stuttering every so often as her disturbed face continued to sag like a bowl of old oatmeal. It was as if she was looking through a two-way mirror into the cell of a madpony on display. Cruel, of course, but this was a special kind of cruel, like the bigger of two brothers forcing his younger sibling to walk barehoof over a sea of thousands of excruciatingly painful, wooden building blocks. “I-I’ve never had this happen to me before…” Chrysalis continued on, still pacing as she went. “You saw what happened, right? Right?!” “For the twentieth time, yes,” replied Roseluck, trying to enjoy her post-terror fruit snack. “Why do you keep beating yourself up over it?” Chrysalis halted her pacing and turned to face Roseluck. “Because I didn’t want to do it! I didn’t want to hurt it like that!” Upon hearing this, Roseluck nearly gagged on her mouthful of fruity flesh. She swallowed what she could and directed her full attention to Chrysalis, who dropped to her haunches and sulked, hunched over like a sad puppy. Deep down, she wanted to express just how perturbed she was in the nastiest way possible, but her usual pony ways barred her from doing so, especially in the presence of a young child, who lay curled up on the ground nearby, calmly sleeping away the terrors he had witnessed earlier. “Maybe it was just out of self-defense,” Roseluck tried explaining, hoping that whatever she said would calm the queen. “Maybe it was…natural that you reacted like that, kind of like a grizzly bear with its cubs.” “I doubt that a simple hunter like that could ever hold its own against a fully grown hydra. Let alone a hydra as rare and vicious as this one.” “Yeah...” Roseluck looked away for a brief moment, thinking. “I’ve been meaning to ask this earlier, but…what was that thing anyway?“ “What was what?” asked Chrysalis, turning her head to face Roseluck. “The hydra, the one with…three heads. That’s sort of weird, isn’t it? Aren’t hydras supposed to have four heads?” “More if you count…uggh, decapitations,” Chrysalis added, shivering. “Cut off one head and two more shall take its place. It’s the same proverb we’ve lived by for centuries. As far as I know no one in the entire world has ever seen what a baby hydra looks like, let alone an active hydra nest. They’re most often seen with just four heads, which is why it’s been universally accepted that they’re born that way.” “I…don’t remember being taught much about the Everfree when I was in school.” “Be glad that you weren’t. They only make their nests in dangerous, hard to reach places such as deep caverns, swamps, and of course, the Everfree forest. We only know this based off the findings of withered or abandoned remains of their nests. This makes studying them almost impossible. They’re so ferocious and territorial that even most dragons would never go hoof to hoof with them. They can smell a drop of blood from miles away, and their strength is the stuff of fantasy! You and I both know that. “ “That makes…some sense,” implied Roseluck. “Pretty scary, though. Something as simple as getting a splinter here could mean life or death for anypony. You seem to be the quite the expert.” “It was just an exaggeration…I-I hope. They’re just things my mother taught me before she passed. I never knew it before, but we changelings actually have our own, unique name for a three-headed hydra.” “Really?” Chrysalis nodded, turning her head up to the orange sky above. The evening sun’s light shone in beautifully from the shrouded distance over the ceiling-less chamber. At least the forest’s “natural” beauty was something they could admire, Roseluck thought. She was at least glad that Chrysalis had ceased her downhearted speech of remorse, for now anyway. “We called them Varrens,” Chrysalis started, finding solace in her recollecting by occasionally shifting her gaze between Roseluck, Ditto, and the sky above. “The word itself is ancient, even older than I am. Much older! Whoever said the word is usually referring to a single Varren, as the chances of seeing another of its kind are as thin as a blade of grass,” Chrysalis sighed. “Sometimes, when I was younger, my mother would tell me stories, even though they weren’t always pleasant to hear; war stories and the like. She told me that the Varrens arrived into the world riding on the backs of shooting stars, and that they carried with them all the knowledge in the universe split into each of their three heads. And of course I believed her. I would have believed anything back then.” Chrysalis giggled softly for a moment, then continued. “This led me to believe that they were symbols of good luck. Whenever my mother wasn’t around, I would wander off into the forest to search for one and ask it if it could grant my every wish. Oh how I was sorely wrong when I later discovered that they did anything but. It gave me nightmares for weeks.” Roseluck could not help herself but to chuckle for a moment upon hearing the end result of the best days of Chrysalis’s childhood. “How did you find out?” she asked, curious. Chrysalis smiled, delighted to hear that she was interested. “I was alone when it happened. On a strangely warm summer day, my mother took her best warriors and set off to raid a small village situated along the western edge of the Everfree for its love to feed the rest of the hive. She left me in the care of one of the scouts, trusting that its watchful eyes would keep me out of trouble. Of course, I managed to sneak away, with little effort I might add, but only because its “watchful eyes” were focused more on another changeling who somehow managed to horde a great sum of love from everybody else.” “Really? Is that even possible? Why would a changeling ever want to horde love? You guys need a constant supply of it to live, don’t you?” “S-sort of,” Chrysalis replied, making light gestures. “If a changeling has love to feed on, and it doesn’t feed on it, then it won’t die. It will starve, but not to the brink of death. By carefully absorbing small quantities of love at different times it can keep what’s left stored up in its horn, or deep within its body, essentially giving it the ability to live for much, much longer than the others.” “Whoa…” Roseluck cooed, amused. “It sounds foolproof, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this ability benefits no one…” Chrysalis shook her head, releasing the sadness in the form of a sigh like so many others before it whenever she would evoke upon the gloomy, depressing portions of their species’ existence. “We crave the essence of love. It is the force that keeps us bound to this world…and to our degrading curse.” There she goes again, thought Roseluck. Another minute of mindless, selfless, public misery. As much as she’d rather plug her own ears with vinegar and sandpaper, Roseluck just decided to leave well enough alone. She found it useless to try to calm her down. The title was far from there but she figured that she would do the same for her own friends should they start acting like this. Everypony has their bad moments. The queen sat back and put her hooves to work by smoothly rubbing the temples on her head, closing her eyes as she steadily gathered her mind. “I-I’m sorry,” Chrysalis apologized, her speech coming out softer than usual. “I’m getting off track. What were we talking about before?” “How you found out the truth behind the three-headed hydra,” Roseluck promptly responded. “The… Bear Ends? Air Sends? Something like that.” Thankfully, no new spark of low key sympathy came as a response, and Chrysalis let out another soft giggle instead. “Vare-ens,” the queen corrected, also fortunate enough to find the strength to put on a smile. “And don’t worry. We don’t use that name anymore. We rarely used it to begin with, as the odds of encountering a Varren are just as slim as encountering another hydra in broad daylight. They’re big creatures, but they’re stealthier than you think.” Chrysalis cleared her throat. “Now then, where was I…” She continued to speak. “When the scout caught up with the traitorous love-hoarder, a fight broke out that caught the attention of nearly the entire hivemind, and the resulting distraction was what gave me the opportunity to escape. It was the first time I had ever been out on my own. It felt great, really!” The queen staggered in her breaths, becoming more excited. “I felt like I was my own mother, strong-hearted, courageous, and never afraid of anything! At the time, most of the creatures of the Everfree saw us as a serious force to be reckoned with, and usually stayed far away from our territory, but the bigger, more fearsome predators thought otherwise. They ignored our borders as if they were never there, and continued to hunt as they wished. I never knew that such threats were so close to us.” “If they were invading your land why didn’t your mother do something about it?” asked Roseluck, who seemed to have become even more interested in the queen’s tales of old. “We vastly outnumbered them, yes, but we rarely ventured into the forest. Why walk through it when we could just fly right over it?” “Hmm…good point.” “Thank you. Anyway, I wandered off into the forest to try and find a Varren. I searched high and low, knowing better than to stray from our territory. I found nothing. But then, just as I was about to give up, I heard a loud bang, followed by an even louder roaring sound. I was terrified at first, but I knew that if I was going to lead the changelings someday I would have to become fearless at one point or another. So, I followed the noises and discovered their source. In a treeless patch of grass I noticed a pack of manticores standing—“ “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait! Those things travel in packs?!” exclaimed Roseluck, blitzed with disbelief. Chrysalis nodded. “Usually they’re solitary predators. Challenge means nothing to them, but impossible odds are a different matter. I assumed that they banded together to bring down something much larger than themselves, but I couldn’t think of anything that would be so colossal as to present a major threat to even a single manticore…” Chrysalis swallowed hard. “Right until its massive head grabbed the nearest manticore and its razor-sharp teeth tore it in half.” Roseluck was stunned. “S-so, what you found was…” Chrysalis nodded. “A hydra, or should I say, a Varren. It was playing dead right there on the ground, waiting for its next meal to wander by. A common form of trickery in the Everfree, but to see one of its most fearsome inhabitants do it was simply mind-blowing! It had no use for such a tactic,” Chrysalis shivered. “With a single move it just…tore that manticore apart! It never saw it coming! I was horrified. I couldn’t believe it was happening, seeing one of my dream idols wreak so much havoc. There were two other manticores in the area, and after seeing their companion get ripped to shreds they tried to escape into the forest. One of them got away, but the other one wasn’t so lucky. Just before it could leap into the trees, the Varren’s middle head lunged forward, and its jaws bit down onto the poor beast’s leg. I was in tears by that point. My dreams were just…crushed right there and then.” Unknowingly, Roseluck’s senses had heightened over the course of the story after her curiosity, which used to be no more than a loaned pair of false ears, drove her to pay even closer attention to the queen. However, this proved to be only poorer for it when she caught sight of a silvery, glistening trickle running down the queen’s face. She focused her eyesight hard and discovered that it was a liquid substance; tears of the effects of a trip down memory lane, kept concealed in the absence of light when the sun above them shifted towards the calling horizon. Despite the visitation of her younger years, Chrysalis somehow managed to smile all the way through. It must have had something to do with what she was currently keeping her vision fixed upon, which, at the time, was her little sleeping prince. “I sat there and watched as the Varren tore its still-breathing prey limb from limb,” Chrysalis sighed. “I ran back to the hive in tears. My mother was already there, having returned from the raid, which was very unsuccessful and lead to the decimation of most of her elite forces. She banished the scout that was supposed to watch over me, and she kept me grounded in her sleeping chamber for days, preventing me from leaving by sealing it with a powerful spell.” A light sniffle mistakenly escaped Chrysalis’s nostrils. Alarmed, she put a hoof to her face and wiped away the rogue moisture trails. Roseluck had nothing to say, thinking it best to let her finish. “I wept for days…” Chrysalis continued, trying her best to sound as calm as possible. “Sadly, what happened next was forgotten with time. I never saw the outside of the central hive ever again...until the day my mother passed, that is.” Chrysalis rose to her hooves and slowly ambled up to her slumbering son. She sat on her haunches in front of him and, using her magic, gently levitated him into her awaiting hooves, cradling the precious cargo. Roseluck decided not to follow, letting the queen have her moment in peace while reveling in the fact that she herself would get some peace and quiet for a short while. Chrysalis sat as tall as she could in her perfect, motherly stance. The smile on her face meant that she deeply enjoyed the silence. She had to, for it may have been one of the last times she would be allowed to enjoy a moment like this. From then on, she would be raising him, caring for him. These would not be her only duties, though. She still had the future of an entire species to think about. Roseluck could only imagine just what sort of mental impact this period of immeasurable disorder would have on the queen’s already-distorted mind. And some ponies thought that the princesses were the lazy ones. Such as any careful mother would to her wondrous gift of the heavens, Chrysalis plainly decided to free herself of all doubts and blackened fears of the heart just for that one, special moment. She was in her own little world now, staring face to face with the unseen magician of fate and silently begging for safe passage in the future with a smile and unexpected attitude calmer than even the stillest waters. “Roseluck?” Chrysalis spoke up softly. “Yes?” the mare replied. “Have you…ever thought about having children of your own?” Such a question brought Roseluck to actually put some thought into it. It was a pretty bad ice breaker, though. As much as she tried to deviate from it, her mind only pushed the bar, forcing her to deliver a hastily thought-of answer. “W-well, I…I thought about before, but…actually finding somepony to be with is just…” Roseluck was starting to sweat a little, and she wiped what she could from her brow. Chrysalis glanced at her and took a bit of pleasure from this, smiling warmly as a result. “I was just curious,” Chrysalis admitted. “Finding the right one would have been…difficult.” Chrysalis’s smile suddenly faded slowly, and she looked up towards the gradually darkening sky. “Huh? What’s wrong?” asked Roseluck. “There’s…something that’s still troubles me,” replied Chrysalis. “What is it?” “That…Varren, the one that attacked us in the clearing.” “Well…what about it?” “Something about its presence disturbs me. Hydras and manticores are a bit of a common sight here, but seeing a Varren come this close to the edge of the Everfree…” “You…said they can smell blood from miles away, right?” “At least I think they can… oh how I pray that my mother was wrong…”