Chrysalis, Queen of the Changeling Empire, bitterly reflected that she probably should have been scheming, planning something nefarious to get back at those accursed equines. Unfortunately, her current situation didn’t lend itself well to planning—being a mile up didn’t lend itself well to anything, even screaming—the speed sucked the air straight from your lungs.
Not that it hadn’t stopped her from trying. After several minutes of whipping through the air, though, it grew tiring. Now, she was simply waiting. Hopefully, she’d be able to slow down before she hit the ground, or otherwise there would be a nice splotch on the ground somewhere below.
After another couple of minutes, she noticed a city ahead, its spires dangerously close to her height. As they passed on either side, she knew it was time to brake before she got any lower and hit a tree or building.
Gingerly, she spread her wings into the rushing wind, feeling herself begin to slow as the extra friction began to bleed the speed off. But then, a gust caught her wings and snapped them fully open. Chrysalis had just enough time to swear before they strained, bent backwards—and broke at the wing joints.
The agony was like nothing she had ever experienced. It struck her like a tidal wave, drowning any thoughts she might have had regarding slowing her fall. Out of control, tumbling in slow spirals downwards, her eye caught a rundown apartment complex just in front of her half a second before she hit it. Everything went white with pain and then quickly black.
In the end, only the fact she had recently gorged on love saved her from perishing instantly.
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Sometime later, the changeling Queen returned to consciousness with only one sense available to her—pain. The light from the hole in the upper wall hurt her eye (she couldn’t open the other), the rough floor aggravated the breaks in her near-shattered carapace, and her wings—or rather, what little was left of them—throbbed with white-hot spears of agony.
Finally, her eye grew acclimated enough for her to open it, and she cast an eye over what pieces of herself she could. Her legs were twisted at unnatural angles, and she could tell multiple bones were broken in all four. She began to try to number the breaks, but her fuzzy mind gave up past two dozen. Her tail was gone—something had ripped it entirely out of her rump, leaving only a patch of chitin oozing blood. By the feel, the same thing had happened to her mane.
She could see the blood already beginning to pool around her from the cracks in her carapace, which she couldn’t manage to count. Her wings were simply gone, only bleeding stumps, facing the wrong way entirely, remaining, with a few tatters of wing membrane hanging forlornly from them.
Her horn was broken, just over half of it missing entirely, and the rest protesting violently its loss. Magic sparked out of it as it valiantly began to rebuild its magical conduits, but its effort only increased the torment her body felt.
As Chrysalis tried to groan, something hot and bloody flopped out of her mouth, along with several teeth and one fang. For a moment, she stared at it in disbelief.
Half her tongue lay on the floor; she had bitten straight through it unintentionally. She could taste the copper from the stump of her tongue. It filled her mouth, but she couldn’t manage to cough; the most she could do was a weak spit, spluttering green blood onto the floorboards in front of her.
This was it, she knew. It would have been barely possible to recover from injuries like these in the hive itself—provided, of course, she wasn’t deposed while she was weak. But in the heart of Equestria? While the populace was on high alert for changelings? The chances she would be able to find any source of love—or any positive emotion at all, for that matter—was slim to none. She had no energy left to shapeshift, even further reducing her chances.
And that was before she was presumably arrested and thrown in a dungeon to rot for the rest of her (short) life.
It was over. She was going to die here, in this pitiful excuse for a hive. She held little hope that any changelings had fared better than she had; she was the toughest and most powerful of her species, and if she had fared this badly, her children would be much worse off. Only a few would live to see the sunset, she knew in her heart.
But that was all moot, anyway; she was the last Queen of the Changelings. The other hives were gone, destroyed by disaster, invasion, or wars of succession. When she died, there would be no more queens, no more eggs. When she passed away, so too would the changeling species.
In defeat and despair, she closed her eyes and let the black take her.