Shining Armor offered me a persimmon last night.
Cadance never liked them. She loved peaches, soft, sweet and tangy. Nothing like the firm, subtle, and mellow flesh of a persimmon.
Though I wear her skin every night, Shining offered me a persimmon. As if he could acknowledge that I was not her, and yet he was comfortable with that.
I am not a changeling easily given to emotion, yet still the tears came.
***
I, Formica Chrysalis Cocytus Starspawn Gravian such-and-suchlike (I shall not list all my titles, for I have been bequeathed with many and earned many more) am queen of the changeling race.
I shall show no false modesty for my accomplishments as the ponies doubtless would, for my achievements are rightly great and terrifying. Not only has there never been a changeling queen like me, but there has never been one worthy of the title, any more than a particularly savage timberwolf would be ‘king’ of the Everfree.
Three and six-score years ago, before my first molting, there were no changeling hives. Between the Fecund Circle and the Inner Badlands there were no less than two hundred burrows, the very largest of which could barely support a gross of broodlings. My people lived short lives of desperation, fighting over scraps of food and mouthfuls of nectar, lucky to lure out a single minotaur to feed from their love. As nymphs, my sisters and I subsisted on the thin, flickering love of a mother rat for her pups.
Fifteen years later, I built the first true hive. I had taken a hoof-full of burrows, who could barely stop hating and raiding each other long enough to prevent their slow extinction from inbreeding and starvation, and united them into a clan of sisters who would each give their lives to save two others. We reached sapient societies once more, no longer living in fear of our hosts but blending into them like shadows in the night. The few minotaurs and griffons with the learning to know us and the spite to wish us dead were isolated and returned to the earth.
Thirty years later, there were a dozen hives, and they all called me their queen. We no longer had mere subsistence. We had society. All of our arts flourished, from the delicate cultivation of our myconids to the sweet shell-music of our storytellers. Some sapients even entered our domains willingly, and they fed us their knowledge and their love in return for part in a society that could truly appreciate them, like their own never could.
My people began to worship me as a god, the way the ponies worship their princesses.
I couldn’t help but think the comparison was misplaced.
The Royal Pony Sisters were powerful, true. And for all of their faults, they had done great things for their subjects.
But they came to power over subjects who were already united, who already had roads and guilds and universities. They cultivated Equestria for two millennia to achieve their current state.
I turned my citizens from a feuding mess of starving tribes to a continent-spanning empire in seven decades. The Pony Sisters were powerful beings, but even at their apex, their achievements pale before mine.
It’s strange to think of how things could have gone. If the Royal Wedding had occurred.
Equestria would have been conquered. Celestia and Luna would still have ruled, but as my vassals, ensuring the wellness of their subjects so that their subjects could better serve my subjects. My children would not have been interlopers and infiltrators in Canterlot, Manehattan and Fillydelphia, but nobles and diplomats.
The ponies would have flourished under my rule. Their natural subservience and trust would have been safeguarded by our cunning and our ambition. Their industrial practices and magical knowledge would have been spread around the world, unencumbered by ponies’ fear of the unknown, yet kept safe by our guile. Celestia would not have to play her games of compromise and appeasement with the fattened sons of nobility and the monopolist cartels of the guilds and cities. They respect her, but they would fear me. Between my blades and my spies, they would not be able to greedily hoard their treasure and power away from their fellow citizens. I could have taxed each mare, stallion and foal at a third of their income, and the average pony would still have double the wealth they would have otherwise.
I was so close. Canterlot had been infiltrated at its highest levels. I knew the Crystal Princess and the future Prince Consort of Equestria better than they knew themselves. We had even drilled Cadance’s capture.
And then the Strangest Day happened.
***
It started with the screams.
At the center of Tenthenon Hive, nymphs played in the warm waters of the spawning pools. A shimmer came through the air, and the waters boiled and hissed, turning to acid in an instant. A thousand nymphs screamed in agony as their chitin began to slough off into the waters around them.
Every changeling in the hive ran to the spawning pools, desperate to save them. As they risked their lives and waded into the boiling shallows, they found themselves screaming too. Not in pain — the water was cool under the froth, and the hissing acid was but a tingle. When they lifted their limbs out of the water as they seemingly dissolved in front of them, they found their legs whole and unscathed.
But the water made them scream. It made them cry out in apparent agony. No matter how much they tried to tell the others that the water was fine, that it was a trick, a mere illusion, all they could say was how terrible the pain was and how desperately they needed rescue. Changelings flooded in, and as they tried to rescue the others, they were blocked by more rescuers surging in to help them.
The waters did not kill a single changeling, but the stampede killed ninety-six of suffocation.
Hythacine was one such changeling.
I had known Hythacine since earliest nymphhood. When I slipped into a griffon camp to retrieve my first clutch, she was the only one who dared accompany me.
When I was discovered, and forced to offer my body and my few worldly treasures to survive, she crept in and slew a dozen of them before they had even noticed her presence, saving my children and I.
When we were ambushed by the Shadow-Weaver burrow and a javelin hit my throat, she stayed by my side and licked the blood from my wound so that our companions would not see how close to death I was. Only when she could physically swallow no more did she begin to spit the blood onto the ground. She even snuck into the Shadow-Weaver’s trenches and disguised herself as their broodmother — a taboo which they would have slowly flayed her for violating if she was discovered — so she could risk stealing some love-nectar and bringing it back to me.
When my own brood-mother ordered my execution, Hythacine hid me in her own burrow for sixty days, risking her own life and her family’s lives until we were able to poison the brood-mother and escape. Hythacine was not of my burrow — she was of a burrow ordinarily considered thieves and oath-breakers — but on the day she took me in, I learned the true meaning of family. I would have flayed each of my progenitors a dozen times over to save her once.
Without my Sacred Band of Sisters, the ten naiads, nine drones, three griffons and one minotaur who rode with me from my earliest days in the Outer Badlands, there would never have been a Changeling Nation. I love all of them dearly and could never choose between them, but even among them, Hythacine was one of the closest to me.
She died using her body to shelter three nymphs, none of whom were her own, from the crushing weight of the crowd around them.
I did not have time to mourn her.
***
Within hours my plans of conquest had been abandoned. Not only had the tragedy at Tentheon — and similar events around the other hives — thrown the nation into chaos, but we soon realised we did not even have the worst of it. The Ever-Shifting God, Discord, had appeared, and we were mere bystanders to his wrath.
I never held the pampered ponies in high regard — certainly not compared to the proud, cunning and strong changeling race — but I was still struck by the enormity of the Ever-Shifting God’s actions against them.
Within a week, the moon and sun held the same place in the sky at once, the pony cities were in open revolt, Luna had once more become the Terror In The Dreams, black fire covered Manehattan, and Princess Cadance of the Crystal Empire was dead.
I knew there would be no peace with this new god. I revealed myself to Celestia at the first opportunity, pledging my immediate, full, and unconditional aid.
Would I have reconsidered, had I known how pyrrhic our victory would be?
I truly do not know.
I know in my mind that the path I chose was better than the alternatives, as surely as I know that losing three legs is preferable to losing four.
But if I have learned anything in the months since the Strangest Day, it’s that loss can make you choose what you long for but cannot have, over the barren but possible.
***
We changelings had no words for the tragedy that next befell us, but the donkeys (who have known more than their fair share of tragedy over the ages) did.
They called it a holocaust.
My most elite infiltrators had helped Celestia’s personal agents recover a number of artifacts that could be used against Discord.
By the time that the ponies had made their final breakthrough, Discord had discovered our influence. He had already corrupted the Elements of Harmony — powerful tools of magic that gave the ponies their strength — and out of panic or anger or spite, he meddled with them further.
He altered reality to stop our ability to receive love. He could not block out everything, as our adaptations are many, but when that wave of change flowed through the world, a terrible thing befell my race.
A full fifth of our number died instantly of shock.
Another fifth came down with a severe influenza. The scientists in Canterlot told me later that Discord’s inhibition wave had played havoc with their immune systems and turned the most minor of infections into ones that even the strongest of changelings could not hope to withstand. Of my subjects who fell ill, perhaps one in two dozen survived.
Two-fifths were touched in the mind in some way or another, suffering from delusions and lunacies. Most of them were lucky, and have either recovered or now only suffer from intermittent episodes of madness. Many of them are irrevocably insane, or killed themselves before Discord’s magic could be stopped.
The lucky fifth of our race, including myself, were relatively unharmed. Our only affliction is the guilt of those who live at the expense of others.
***
I held Shining Armor in low esteem before these tragic events. He was strong, disciplined, and driven — for a pony. He still seemed as pampered and naive as the rest of his race. We changelings had grown amongst the wastelands, the burrows, the minotaurs and the griffons. A fighting pony was nothing more than a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
He did not collapse when he found out his love had died. Instead, he went into the chaos maelstrom of central Canterlot and began to rescue ponies. He had dragged forty-four ponies out of the melting streets and into the relative safety of the outer boroughs by the time I saw him. He had been blinded in one eye, his left ear was torn and half hanging off, and he needed magic to support a broken leg.
He put on an eyepatch and crunched his knee back into the socket, and then went back in to save another forty-four ponies before a healer could attend to him.
I saw Hythacine’s grim determination in him that day. Shining Armor was, and is, a pony. Soft and pampered by civilisation. He did not grow up in the Badlands.
But I feel that if he had, he would have fared well.
***
It was some time before I took Cadance’s form. Though taking the form of those that have been lost to comfort the survivors is a sacred duty in changeling society, I knew it was a taboo elsewhere.
It was only when I spied Shining Armor testing the strength of the ceiling beams in his palace bedroom, seeing if they could support a grown pony’s weight, that I intervened.
We talked of love, and loss, and guilt. Of regrets.
He lamented all the things he had wished to say to Cadance, but never had, and now could not.
I took her skin.
I thought he would push me away, at first. I thought he would strike at me, and curse me for insulting him and insulting his love’s memory.
He put his chin on my shoulder and wept.
I had seen him stoic and fearless, unwilling to let his emotions put ponies at risk. I had seen him empty and listless, unwilling to truly contemplate his emotions and risk breaking down.
This time, he bared himself to me completely.
He told me everything. The twenty-three ways he wished he’d told Cadance that he loved her. The names he’d thought up for their future foals. His dreams with her. His most twisted desires. Things he wished he had cooked for her. Places he wished they had visited together.
I had never felt love as pure as he gave me that night.
I held him as his sobbing quietened. He wished to make love to me, but I did not let him. Not in her form, not while he was in this state.
Instead, I took him to a changeling nesting house nearby. There were nymphs there that had survived the flu and the madness, but were still deathly weak from lack of love. I poured his love into them. It was more powerful than I could have predicted. I told my children that the love of the ponies had saved them, and bid them to repay the ponies in kind.
And thus, I showed Shining Armor that even now, Cadance’s love could save lives and mend bitter wounds. And that his love for her memory would keep her good deeds alive.
***
We lay together a week after that. His skill and endurance were impressive, and he only cried a little before asking me to change into my true form afterwards.
For some time, we kept this up. I learned of Cadance the best I could, not only the mannerisms I remembered, but what I could glean from her writings, her friends and her family about her. Her little ‘pet hates’ as the ponies call them. The things that made her coo and sigh. The things that made her moan and lift her tail.
When Shining needed it, I was Cadance again. He never had to lose her. And when the weight of it was too much and crashed down on him, I was there to hold him up.
When he first asked me to keep my green eyes as we made love, I thought it was guilt, that he was forcing himself to keep Cadance and I separate in his mind.
Then he started nuzzling me the same way he did Cadance even when I was in my own form.
Little things began to stay the same, and my two personalities began to blend. As they did, his actions towards me blurred even further. And further.
And further.
Last night, I wept with him as I ate the persimmon.
***
Today, we will visit her grave. It’s tucked away in the palace garden, surrounded by cherry trees and covered in pink spring blossoms. Shining will leave gifts and keepsakes, and talk to her. If it becomes too much for him, I will take her form and comfort him.
Today, I don’t think I will have to.
I think I have learned much about ponykind in the last two years. As fragile as Celestia is now, I know that many things I saw as abject weakness in her were nothing of the sort.
And from what I’ve seen of her protege and the other Element Bearers in the last two years, I see that many things I considered strengths were anything but.
As I have tried to keep my subjects and Celestia’s subjects safe, and somewhat ironically, in harmony as of late, I feel I have learned something of Celestia’s methods. I criticised her for being slow, for being content to let things work themselves out naturally, for not constantly and aggressively pushing herself and her race for betterment.
But as I reflect, perhaps there is a level where pure drive and ambition cannot sustain you forever. In the old days in the Badlands it was simple: we pushed forward because behind us was death and misery. A leader risked everything because there was so little to lose and so much to be gained.
It’s different here, I think.
Here, comforts don’t make you weak.
Sometimes, they are all that keep you going.