The window soundlessly slid open, and at once the cold night air began seeping into the apartment. The noise of the sleepless city far below could not be heard at this height. Instead, the silence of the room was broken by a leathery rustling as a pair of ragged hooves grabbed onto the window ledge. There was no moonlight to expose the ghastly worm-eaten holes that tunneled through the forelegs. They belonged to a shadow; a shadow that was suddenly joined by more. Their inky, equine shapes filled and darkened the window. Then, with only the faintest scrape of porous hooves against brick, the shadow at the ledge crawled inside. Another followed, and then another, until the window was clear again.
The first shadow’s head slowly pivoted on its neck as it scanned the room. It saw many things that pleased it. Bundles of fabric lined spotless shelves, along with thread, needles, spindles, and all manner of tailor essentials. It flashed a hideous fanged grin as it spotted the silhouette of a sewing machine the corner. The shadow raised a hoof and motioned the others to what it saw. Quick as a flash they rushed past, removed the sewing machine and its table from the corner and tossed it out the window. In another few moments they emptied the shelves of their contents. Every last needle and spool was taken and followed the sewing machine out the window.
When they had finished, the leader turned its attention to the bedroom. The others crept behind as the shadow carefully trod over the floorboards to the door. A sickly green glow began emanating from the shadow’s horn, illuminating a gray, chitinous face. The glow extended to the doorknob, traveled along the edge of the door, and slithered into the keyhole. The tumblers inside clicked compliantly into place.
Three pairs of eyes stared eagerly ahead as the door slowly swung forward. A small bed stood before them; its blankets rising and falling as the pony beneath them breathed. The shadows quietly snuck into the room, each one taking a side of the bed. The leader stood at the foot, and motioned to the shadow to his left. It immediately took hold of the corner and began removing the blanket. But it pulled too swiftly and too hard, and the bed’s occupant came crashing to the floor.
* * *
Coco Pommel’s eyes snapped open as she landed on the floor, her fall broken by the soft white squares of her comforter.
“Crasher! Ye great, stupid git!” screeched a shrill, nasally voice, “Ye’ve gone and ruined everything!”
“I’m sorry!” replied another, somewhat deeper voice, “I dinna kin—”
“Ye dinna kin anything!” snapped the first voice, “I’d bash yer brains in if ye had any!”
Coco froze as she heard the voices. There were ponies was in her room. She immediately sat up and struggled to tear herself free of the blanket to see who they were and what they were doing. She cried out as she felt the comforter tighten for a moment. The earth pony was spun around as it was pulled away; leaving her sprawled out, face down on the floor. A harsh green light filled the room, casting three malformed shadows against the walls. The blood rushed from her face as Coco glanced up into a sneering snout filled with sharp, jagged teeth. She saw her distorted reflection in a pair of narrowed, icy blue eyes.
“Blast it all, she’s awake!” snarled the mouth. Coco cringed as she felt droplets of saliva fly into her face. She scrambled away from whatever had invaded her apartment, trying and failing to get to her hooves. All the while she looked from creature to creature, her frightened mind trying to deduce what they were. They were shaped like ponies, but had a shriveled, almost corpse-like complexion. Bits of plated shell could be seen through their dark, greasy coats.
It was when she saw their tattered, transparent wings that Coco knew what they were. The pony paused in her mad effort to stand up, and she sat on her haunches gaping at the intruders. Her jaw dropped open in a silent scream.
“Would ye care tae tell us whit tae do next?” said one of the changelings, its oily voice sending a chill up Coco’s spine. The smallest of the three thrust a foreleg at the dressmaker.
“Whit we came here to do,” he barked, “Grab the lass and her wares and toddle aff home.”
Coco had been frightened before. Now, as the two larger changelings moved toward her, she was absolutely terrified. She found her legs again and leapt up to run, but by then they were already upon her. A muscular, blunt-muzzled one took hold of her right foreleg, while a tall, skeletal one took hold of her left. She shuddered as their touch. Their hooves were withered and ragged, and felt like ice against her soft skin. Before the mare knew what was happening, she was being dragged across the floor out into the living room.
“Wha-” Another hoof threw itself over her mouth as she offered protest. Strange and unfamiliar smells overwhelmed her nostrils, all of them stagnant and putrid. Coco tried pulling her face away, but the horrible hoof remained tightly in place. She soon saw the reason for this, and when she did, she screamed into the changeling’s foreleg.
They were hauling her to the open window.
The mare began to kick and pull at her captors as their wings began to beat. Her blows grew more frantic as she felt her hooves leave the floor.
Coco closed her eyes as she felt herself pushed out into the night. The changeling’s hooves drew away, and she went tumbling head over hooves. She dropped like a stone for two stories before she finally came to a gut-wrenching stop. The air rushed from her lungs, and her chest wheezed in and out as she tried to recover. While she ached terribly, there was some small part of her that was glad. Pain meant she was alive, and that she hadn’t fallen all the way to the street below.
The dressmaker dared to open her eyes. She immediately wished she hadn’t.
Coco was hovering at least ten stories above the streets of Manehatten, somehow suspended in the air. Her body bobbed up and down, and tilted uncontrollably in every direction. It was an odd and unnerving situation, made all the worse by the cacophony of ragged wings roaring in her ears. Her ever-changing field of vision spotted the outlines of dozens of twisted, sneering changelings. Coco’s eyes widened as she spotted nearly all of her belongings hovering about in between them, each one floating as weightlessly as she was.
The mare shuddered as she saw three more of the insect-like creatures drop down from her window and take positions at the front of the small swarm. The smallest one took the lead, flanked by his two subordinates.
“Alright ye lot o’ loafers!” he cried, “We’re aff!”
No sooner had he spoken when they began shooting forward, Coco among them. The mare screamed as she was dragged by some mysterious force, her senses becoming blurred together as her captors rose to a ludicrous speed. Icy winds whipped through her mane and skimmed over her skin, chilling her to the bone. The beating of wings had been replaced with a shrieking gale. As she aimlessly tumbled along in the midst of the changelings, she stole brief glances at the ground and the vast collection of buildings that surrounded her. Every other second her captors would turn down a street; rattling and jarring the poor mare’s bones. And all the while, they seemed to be picking up speed.
Coco’s heart fluttered wildly as she heard an earsplitting chime. The metallic clang reverberated throughout ever inch of her body, as if she had been struck by something physical. The luminous face of an enormous clock tower briefly passed before her eyes. Each following ring grew fainter as Coco was carried farther and farther away, until it was replaced with the unyielding howling of the night air rushing past her ears. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes, partially because of the stinging wind, and partially out of the fear and dread that was overtaking her. Her terror grew worse as the swarm began to ascend higher and higher, reaching far above the spires of the tallest buildings. Far below, steel and concrete gave way to cobblestone and clapboard as they took leave of the city’s heart.
As she was tossed and turned in midair, Coco somehow managed to gather enough her jumbled thoughts to wonder why the changelings had taken her. She barely knew anything about them, much less why they’d want to abduct her. Her only clue was the sewing paraphernalia that floated along side her. It occurred to her that perhaps they were in want of a seamstress, but couldn’t she fathom why they would want one.
Coco happened to look down, and her heart nearly stopped altogether. At some point during the few seconds she had been thinking to herself, they’d left Manehatten entirely. Below her now stretched an enormous quilt of fields and farmyards; each uneven square separated by barriers of sparse trees and half-collapsed fences. The mare stretched and strained to look back from whence they’d come. The coastline was no longer visible. All she could see was fields and forests, and even now the fields were starting to vanish from sight. Trees were going thicker and taller beneath the dressmaker, as if reaching for her with their scraggily, bony branches.
* * *
A sliver of wavering green light pierced the darkness of the cell as the heavy iron door creaked open. Something stirred in the shadows of the corner. Rusted chains rattled and clanked as the thing in the corner stirred from its slumber. It looked with dim eyes at the tall, slender silhouette that filled the doorway. The newcomer strode with a confident, almost arrogant air as it made its way into the chamber on its worm-eaten hooves. The thing in the corner hissed as its captor grew closer. Atrophied muscles tensed over its brittle bones. The sight of this drew a sadistic smile from the towering shadow.
“…Are we enjoying our stay?” Her voice was dissonant and strange. It was not the voice of a pony, but at the same time more alluring than the most beautiful mare. But it was not so alluring as to draw a reply from the prisoner. The only response was a dull glare from glazed eyes. Behind the cloudy, almost sightless orbs was something dangerous. Its body may have decayed and become useless, but its mind was every bit as cunning and sharp as it had been in its prime.
“I heard you’ve been being…difficult, with the guards,” sighed the captor. She brushed a stray strand of her mane from her face. “That’s really a shame. Especially after how generous I was to you.”
The prisoner growled, flashing the loose, grayed stumps it had for teeth. It snarled something in a hollow voice, but the words were foreign and unknown to the captor’s ears. But the tone carried enough venom to give her some idea of what it meant.
“Please, spare me the insults,” she snorted, “We both know I haven’t a thing to fear from you.” She leaned in close to the thing’s wizened face, a smug, dangerous grin stretched across her muzzle. “But you, on the other hoof…Well; you have everything to fear from me.” Once again, the prisoner barked angry words, rattling its chains and swinging its bony limbs at her. It howled in fury as its emaciated form was suddenly held aloft in an emerald aura, unable to react as it was thrown into the cold, unyielding stone wall. Its bones cracked as it fell into a crumpled heap, where it laid unmoving as the captor broke into hysterical laughter.
“What did I just tell you?” she cried devilishly, “Don’t try to be brave, my dear little jeweler. You’ll only succeed in hurting yourself.” The prisoner did not move. It didn’t even appear to be breathing. But the captor knew otherwise. She could do far worse to it, and even in its wretched state it wouldn’t die. She smiled as she looked over her handiwork before turning for the door.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some business to attend to. I sincerely hope you’ll be more cooperative in the future.” She slipped through the door and slammed it shut, taking the green light with her. The prisoner was left in the black void it had grown accustomed to.
Its eyes opened. They blazed with an intense loathing that went unseen in the darkness.
* * *
Coco wasn’t sure how long they’d been traveling when she first caught glance of the crooked shadow ahead. It loomed in the distance like some enormous, lifeless dragon, splayed out among the forest floor. Half-toppled towers and crumbling ramparts peeked out from the treetops; their weathered stonework as dark and gray as a storm cloud. It was a gothic castle from some bygone age, abused and made miserable by time. Coco stared in abject horror at the monstrous relic as they drew near. It was surrounded by brambles; the thorns long and exposed as if they meant to guard the fortress. Cobwebs of frail, dead vines clung to the walls, wrapping their spidery tendrils around decayed gargoyles and rusted spires. The castle was dead, and would never live again.
But life was still there. Eerie shafts of light poured out of the cracked and shattered windows. Coco saw flickering shadows move back and forth in the opaque glass; scuttling and flittering and crawling like maggots in the castle’s forsaken corpse. The mare cried out as her captors suddenly descended towards a waiting hole in the caving roof. Each one of the changelings landed upon the flaking tiles and swiftly scurried inside, looking like a horde of wasps returning to their hive. Coco was still caught in whatever magic kept her suspended in flight, and was drawn behind the last creature as it flittered down into the ruins.
Coco gaped in stunned silence as she tumbled headfirst into a world unlike anything she’d seen before. A cavernous room as ruinous as the outside walls welcomed her mortified eyes. At one time, it would have been the pinnacle of medieval architecture. Arches and supports, once held aloft in beautiful geometric patterns, had fallen and sagged into crooked ugliness. Chandeliers crafted from iron and plated with silver still burned bright overhead, but their mirror-like brilliance had long ago tarnished, reducing the overall lighting to a fraction of what it once was. Windows that had surely held detailed stained glass were now shattered, so that only a few sharp fragments remained lodged in the lead lining. Tapestries once vibrant with color now hung limp and grayed on the walls; their foul smell of decay intermingling with the stench of mildewed mortar. There were other smells as well, of food both cooking and rotting, and other things Coco could not identify.
The floor was swarming with thousands of changelings, all cackling and conversing with one another. They congregated at makeshift tables made from warped boards stood up on old sawhorses. Coco raised a brow as she spotted several intact picnic tables that looked to have come from somepony’s patio. Not only that, but there were various other things she could see were clearly of modern origin. Barrels and bottles with familiar labels lay strewn about in the corners, and one wall was lined with broken carts and carriages. Coco’s stomach tied itself in a knot as she stared at the wagons. They sat crooked on wheels with broken spokes and shattered axels. But it was not their state of being that she was concerned with. Rather, it was the question of what had happened to their occupants and coach-ponies.
The mare’s thoughts turned to her own safety as she suddenly fell onto the cold, moist stone that made up the floor. Coco ignored the dull pain now coursing through her side and scrambled up on her haunches. The room around her grew unnervingly quiet, and she could feel thousands of eyes trained on her as every head in the room turned in her direction. The pony’s mouth dropped open as she looked ahead.
She was sitting before an enormous throne, elevated above her on a series of stone slabs stacked on top of one another. It was plated with silver and gold, with intricate swirls and patterns hammered around the glittering gemstones inlaid on its surface. Somehow, this single work of art had escaped the decomposition that had overtaken the rest of the castle. But Coco was repulsed all the same when she saw it, for when looking upon it she saw the being who sat in it.
A tall, horribly gaunt figure lazily reclined in the purple velvet cushions. She sat in complete stillness, like a spider awaiting prey to come crawling into its web. Her coat was as dark and dismal as the shadow she cast. Withered, translucent wings glinted in the dim light like cloudy glass. A long, gnarled horn stood out from her greasy teal mane, keeping the hair from completely obscuring her emerald eyes. The eyes were full of greed and cunning. And they were trained on Coco Pommel.
“Ah, excellent,” the figure snickered, exposing two snake-like fangs in a poisonous smile, “Just the mare I was looking for.” Coco shrank back in fear from the hungry-eyed changeling. She knew who this was. Though little was known about the changelings themselves, the name of their queen was renowned far and wide, and struck terror into the hearts of ponies everywhere. The creature in question stared at the cringing pony for a moment before letting out a sinister chuckle.
“Oh, come now, quit your cowering. You’ve nothing to fear from us.” Her sharp-toothed grin told the dressmaker otherwise.
“…I don’t?” The mare’s words were barely a whisper, yet the queen somehow heard them. And when she did, her smile grew wider.
“Of course not,” said Queen Chrysalis, “We need you alive.” She paused for a moment and put a thoughtful hoof to her chin.
“Actually, that doesn’t quite mean you have nothing to fear. We can still do you harm; you just needn’t worry about us killing you.” She tossed back her head and laughed as if she had told a profoundly hilarious joke, and was joined in by the shrill cackles of her subjects. Coco sat dumbfounded in the middle of the cacophony, her melancholy face glancing from the changelings to their odious queen. When at last their horrid laughter died away, the queen turned her attention to the seamstress.
“I’m only joking, you understand,” she smirked, “We could easily kill you and find someone else to do the job.”
“I...I understand,” gulped the palled mare. She didn’t. Coco had no idea what the changelings wanted, but was afraid for her own life. But she was certain they’d tell her sooner or later.
“Good,” said the queen as she rubbed her forelegs together, “Now then, just to make sure, you are a dressmaker, correct?” Coco’s head moved stiffly up and down on her neck.
“Y-yes,” she stammered, “I am.” The queen’s ragged teeth beamed in a smile of wicked delight.
“And I assume that you can also create clothes for stallions as well?”
“Well…Yes, I can,” replied the mare, “I can make clothes for either or if that’s what you’re asking. I-It’s good to keep a wider spectrum of customers, you know?” Coco gave a small, nervous smile up at the changeling ruler.
“Perfect,” said Chrysalis, sounding as enthused as a child. She looked at something to her right. “Didn’t I tell you she’d be perfect for the job, Earwig?”
“That you did, Your Majesty.”
Coco’s ears pricked up as she heard a monotonous mutter issue out from the pile of refuse to the right of the throne. It was only now that she realized there was a changeling sitting atop a warped crate among the garbage. The mare tried to hide her oncoming grimace of disgust. This particular individual appeared to be of great age, if his wizened, leathery face was anything to go by. Likewise, his body was overgrown with crusty plates, looking almost like a suit of rusted armor. Two long, withered antennae grew from his forehead, projecting at odd angles like the branches of some stunted tree. He gazed at Coco with dull, clouded eyes and a blank expression.
“Greetings, Ms. Pommel,” he sighed halfheartedly, “Welcome to the home of the horde.”
“Temporary home,” huffed Chrysalis as she waved a dismissive hoof at the elder changeling, “Don’t interrupt when I’m interrogating the prisoners, Earwig.” The ancient creature bowed his head and said no more. “Anyway,” continued Chrysalis as she turned her attention back to Coco, “Now that I’m certain you’re fit for the task, I shall explain it to you.”
Coco took a step back as the queen hurled a moldering cardboard box at her hooves. The grimacing dressmaker glanced down at the battered receptacle to find it stuffed full of brightly-colored papers. She lightly paged through them with a shaking hoof, her eyes widening in confusion. The mare was staring at images of models dressed in splendid gowns standing alongside stallions in stylish suits. They’d been ripped from fashion magazines, some surprisingly recent, others dating back to a few years before Coco had been born. She looked up at Chrysalis with a questioning frown.
“You see, Ms. Pommel,” began the queen, “I’ve been waiting for a very long time for the Crystal Empire to return, and now that it finally has, I intend to make it mine.”
Coco’s blood turned to ice in her veins as the queen stood up from her throne. The earth pony fixed her mortified eyes upon the changeling’s twisted, bramble-like horn as it was enshrouded in lurid green fire. In another moment Coco found herself yanked up off her hooves again. She shrieked as she flew forwards, stopping only when the space of a few inches stood between her and the queen’s oily complexion.
“I made the mistake in my last campaign to only hide myself in Canterlot,” she rasped, “A single changeling is harder to detect than an army. It would have worked had it not been for that miserable bookworm.” Chrysalis’s face simmered with spiteful fury, and the aura enveloping Coco left a nauseatingly bitter taste in her mouth. “But this time, I’ve come up with something so devious and despicable that not even The Princess of ‘Friendship’ herself can see through it.”
Coco swallowed the growing lump of fear in her throat as the changeling pulled her even closer. She couldn’t help but contort her face in revulsion as she unwillingly sampled the queen’s breath. It had the same acrid, pungent smell of Deadly Nightshade.
“We have everything we need to begin,” Chrysalis rasped, “Except for one thing. And that, my dear, is why we need you. My plans fall on the night of the Crystal Ball, and we need someone with your talents to provide the appropriate garb for the occasion.”
The dressmaker cringed at the cat-like look that came to the queen’s eyes.
“And I sincerely hope you perform better than the first pony we brought in for this task. You’re already doing better than her. All she did was scream.”
The edges of Coco’s mouth twitched, as if she were about to scream herself.
“Well,” said Chrysalis as she clapped her hooves together, “I suppose we shouldn’t waste any more time.” Coco followed the queen’s gaze as she eyed three changelings standing before the throne.
“Crawler, would you and your brothers please escort our guest to her quarters?”
The short changeling that stood in the middle gave a curt nod.
“Aye, yer Majesty,” he barked with a salute. He and his two brothers advanced toward Coco. The mare yelped as she was let out of the queen’s grasp, dropping to the floor. In another moment the three changelings roughly set her up right, with Crawler in the lead, and the two others flanking her.
“Aright lass, come on noo,” said the largest one, offering a gentle push to her shoulder. Coco cringed as his hoof brushed against a rapidly forming bruise. It was more than enough prompt needed to get her moving forward. Ahead of her the sea of changelings parted, forming a straight path to the massive oak doors that hung crooked. Their decrepit hinges shrieked out in a rusty chorus as they opened, revealing a black maw beyond.
"Be sure to see to it that she’s comfortable,” the queen called out as they began their exit, “She’ll be staying with us for quite some time.”