One of them knocks me down with its hoof. I let it.
The rest join in, a crawling mat in the dampness of the old hive. It is the most beautiful and terrible thing I have ever seen, what we were meant to be. They are mute, every one of them, but even with my disconnect I can still decipher, somewhat, the collective hum of their will:
it was short-lived | the success | you promised | was it not | yes | identity | we’ve let you grow so ugly | indeed | your delusions! your LIES!
One of them changes near me, giving me the pain of the rapid transformation.
oh yes | you are no mother of us | what did you give? | oh it’s a joke | where is the love now? here it is. all over you.
* * *
So long ago, the mass had needed a leader. I don’t remember the problem anymore. I have my own mind now, and while the ability to keep secrets is nice, one of the things I try to conceal is that I am truly weak without their shared mind, their collective genius. I have forgotten much.
I volunteered to be the leader--ever since I was small I’d longed for the taboo notion of individuality. Of course, our power had always come from acting as one--a continuous, voluntary lack of any identity was what allowed us to share our minds and to take anypony’s shape or love as our own.
But I still, stubbornly, quietly, wanted to be me. So, to their astonishment, I took up the title of leader--sacrificed the powerful high they all felt through seamless integration with the group--and led them places. Places to lie and cheat, to riddle holes through and replace them with ourselves, assuming new faces, new destinies, stealing new gifts of emotion. The ponies think us utterly sinister. However, with one exception, we go as we came, leaving everything back in its place. Perhaps we leave those who love us listless and with headaches for a while, but that’s hardly anything in exchange for the hive’s survival.
Love--friendship, romance, compassion--cannot be felt among cells of the same organism. Naturally it was what we lacked the most glaringly that we hungered for. Go without transforming and feeding for a few weeks, and the whole would begin to dissolve, break off as I had from it.
Of course, just as it is necessary for a part of one changeling to break off to form another, so it is for parts of old hives to form new ones. But too much separation, and too early, is bad. We don’t want it, and we have to feed at some point anyway.
At first, as the stories all go, I was indeed a good leader. They were impressed. Even as my self migrated away from them, my new, independent mind kept them together.
I grew both weaker and stronger. My power for channeling love increased, and my physical self became larger, more intimidating, and more feminine. I had decided I was a girl changeling, though, of course, such genders did not exist among us. I couldn’t change as quickly anymore, either--couldn’t assume other selves nearly as seamlessly as my old brethren. I grew obsessed, too, with increasingly complex and risky infiltration plans.
Yet even as my plots grew more brash, as I tried to rile them up, still they looked to me. Even as my eyes took on pupils and my head a mane, even as I was no longer anything close to one of them, they quietly followed, taking the love. Not questioning, still acting under the pretense of gratitude for what they had long ago realized was never a sacrifice.
But the failure at Canterlot was too much.
You see, I didn’t think it through: blinded by a new high, the high of being my own individual, of making decisions for my own personal benefit as well as someone else’s, I made the grand Canterlot raid about me when I shouldn’t even have had a concept of self.
Rabid, towards the end, with my own freedom, I did terrible things to the ponies--toyed with them, made them think they were going to lose their country and everything dear to them because of me. I treated the hive like my own personal brood. My children, with my own parent among them. Disgusting. Monstrous. So they kick me now. They extract me from the hive that none of us can call home anymore, crumple my wings and leave me grounded. They fly off, to make a new way somewhere strange, left starved, never again to choose one to lead them.
I sit alone for the first time in my long life, hoping to one day fit in somewhere. A changeling hive will drive someone who does not belong crazy, but now that I am without it, now that I feel the naked sting of isolation here outside my abandoned home, it is almost as painful. It will be difficult even to figure out a way to survive: it won’t be long before I can no longer even transform, and who would love something like me…especially after the incident?
But I am free.
I can tell you my name: Chrysalis.
I gave it to myself when I was young and kept it to my heart. Never told a single soul, pony or hive.
When I ruled them, I tacked Queen onto the front. Now I revile the title. To me, now, it will never mean anything more than a broken, grandiose delusion and everypony who was hurt by it.
I will keep the name to remember the hive. For when I thought of myself as Queen, I believed I was their chrysalis, nurturing them, helping them grow toward a more beautiful future. But now that I realize what I am and will always be, I think it is more fitting to say that they were mine.