//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Falling Stars 
// by Aceofgods 
//------------------------------//

Falling Stars: Prologue
With Fallenstar Nighthoof and Ace Deus Fenrir




Fallenstar woke up once again in the in the dark, gloomy and hopeless room. “Why do I have to be the mutated one?” he asked himself in the darkness as he observed the squalor of his surroundings. “Why couldn’t it be the next egg, or appear in an older ‘ling? Now I am having to deal with the fact that I can’t connect to the hivemind or use magic. Nooo, I only have incredible shifting powers and a high resilience to magic...” he sighed. “I even managed to get the Queen’s attention within minutes of hatching,” 

‘Which of course meant that I had to be quarantined and experimented on to see exactly what had caused my mutations,’ he thought to himself. ‘Which then led to Her Majesty seeking out the darkest hole She could find in the hive, then promptly shoving me into it.’ 

The changeling thought all this looked almost as a regular drone would, though a bit larger than the average ‘ling. A dark, almost black coloring with the usual stripes around the waist, his wings didn’t appear to to be any different at first glance. If one were to look closer, however, one would notice that Fallen was more of a matte black rather than the shiny carapace that characterized his species.

His horn, rather than being the smooth, slender shape that most changelings had, was actually more reminiscent of a Queen’s horn, though he lacked the royal crest. Yet another very obvious difference was that his eyes had a red coloring where most of his species had a completely blue gaze with the same pupils Queens did.

If somepony were to look close enough, they could discern that he did not really have a carapace, but rather a leather-like hide that seemed to be made of the same material as a pony’s hoof. The keratin was arranged similar to a shark’s skin. His wings were a more brilliant teal than the normal turquoise of any known changeling. His mane and tail were less the stylized crest that other changelings had and more of a cluster of antennae. 

“Now that I have mentally assessed my situation once again, let’s see if anything in my little domain has changed...” he sarcastically remarked as he got up.

As he looked around, he noticed that something was different; he could no longer hear the hive actually doing anything. He could not hear the buzzing of wings that passing changelings made as they flew by on various errands. The guards that were usually posted outside his cell, or the clacking of the researchers when they came to see what caused him to be different.

From the corner of his eye, Fallenstar noted that there was an abnormality in the webbing that served as the walls of his chamber. Hidden in the darkness of the shadows was a crack where part of it had dried out.

“Wow, they really need to step up the maintenance, or you might let a prisoner out,” he said with some humor now that a chance laid before him from this new discovery.

Fallen trotted up to the spot, and using the mutation that had caused him to fall into this situation in the first place, turned his foreleg into a bladed club and proceeded to beat and slash his way through as quietly as as he could.

“Now, with any luck that I may deserve after this horrible mess known as my life, this should lead somewhere relatively safe,” he muttered to the darkness of his cage. As he took one last look around the place that had been his home - his cage, his fortress, and his last stand - for who knows how long he could not be happier. “I really hope this is a way out rather than straight into that horse’s clutches,” he said as he started crawling through the dark, cramped, tunnel.

He kept on crawling through the tunnel and started to realize two things: one, he was starting to smell something fresh and clean; and two, he started to feel a breeze that wasn’t made by somelings wings.

’Yes, I think my luck has finally come in because I’m willing to bet that this leads to the outside!’ Fallen thought to himself as he exited the hole.

When he took his first step, he couldn’t think anything other than ’Finally, I’m free. I can finally say I’m free.’