"Rarity?" Twilight said as I stepped back onto stage from the wings. "A-are you okay?"
I glanced around the room. We were alone. The tightness in my throat incrementally eased; it would be simpler this way. "Jewelbox," I said.
"Oh — right. Plundervine."
I trotted over to her and gave her a wordless neckhug before taking a step back and staring into her eyes. "I'm sorry to have given you a fright, Twilight. I merely had a revelation which startled me nearly to the point of illness." I lifted a hoof to her shoulder. "There's something I must show you. Immediately."
Twilight set her jaw and nodded. "I figured it out, too," she said quietly.
I admit I might have tensed up at that. "You did?"
"It was a setup." She glanced back toward the auditorium door. "That was no disobedient drone. Chrysalis ordered her to feed. She wanted to make a very public point …" Twilight's voice dropped to just above a whisper, and her eyes turned cold above an ominously flat mouth. "She was testing me, just like Celestia said. She tortured her own drone just to see how I'd react."
Oh, Twilight, I thought. So brilliant, yet so naive.
I took a deep breath. "Twilight … I apologize in advance. This will not be pleasant … but you must see this."
I hopped down from the stage and trotted toward the exit. She quickly fell into pace beside me, giving me a curious look but remaining silent as we walked through the frozen streets to Cloud Kicker's house.
As the door swung open, I heard scrambling by the fireplace. The two changelings stood at attention, one giving us a suspicious glare, one visibly miserable. The Crusaders, thank goodness, weren't within sight.
"Whisper Song," I said, marching directly toward the suspicious one as the miserable one's eyes widened. "Stand up against the wall and don't move. Now."
The suspicious changeling glanced at Whisper, then back at me. "How did you —"
The changeling went down with a yelp as I swept its legs out from underneath it. As it tried to scramble back to its hooves, I hooked a leg around one of its fores, jerked back hard, and slammed it to the floor with a cross-pin, trapping that limb high against its side with just enough pressure to make moving a painful idea. The fight went out of it all at once. To my left, I heard Whisper Song scramble back against the wall, letting out an incoherent squeak.
"Twilight," I said, "please cast your alteration-enchantment breaker."
"Why? They're not disguised as ponies."
I looked back at her, tilting my head.
"… Oh," Twilight said as realization belatedly crept in. She stepped forward, horn glowing, then bent down and touched her horntip to the pinned changeling.
The bulky form of the guard wavered and collapsed in a swirl of green fire, leaving behind a spindly, wingless worker drone whose chitin had an uncomfortable number of holes amid dark gray mottling. It — he — was too large to be Whisper Song's age but too small for adulthood; as a pony I would have estimated him in his mid-teens. He looked back at us, wide-eyed in fear, and I could see tears pool.
Twilight drew in a ragged gasp.
"The other one is twelve," I said, releasing the teenaged changeling's leg and standing up. He scrambled to the far corner, cowering. "They are no soldiers. I would wager you every gemstone in Carousel Boutique that not a single one of them is. Virtually her entire hive attacked Canterlot, remember?"
"So Chrysalis …" Twilight's voice grew faint as she took a step back. "Threatened us with children. She broke the leg of a child."
I nodded somberly, then turned back to the cowering changeling. "Speaking of which … I'm sorry, dear. I simply couldn't take the chance that you would attempt to play the hero, or somepony might have gotten genuinely hurt."
"Just children," Twilight repeated. She swallowed, then looked up at me, a new fire in her eyes. "Let's get the others. This ends now."
Fluttershy lifted her hooves to her muzzle, eyes wide and quivering. Pinkie flinched, her mane beginning to droop.
Applejack snorted, stamping a hoof with such a resounding crack that I feared for the crystal floor. "That no-good dung-ruttin' hole-hearted cricket. I shoulda known she'd have somethin' like that up her mane."
"We should have known," Twilight said, voice flat and trembling. "I should have known. She told us that all her soldiers died in Canterlot, right to our faces."
"So what are we waiting for?" Dash said, squinting through eyes darkened by her all-nighter. "That just means they'll be pushovers. Let's go kick their flanks, save the town, and get some sleep."
Fluttershy gasped. "Rainbow Dash! How dare you! We can't go fight innocent children!"
"Children that need to feed on us to survive! They came here to eat our emotions!"
"No," Twilight said sharply. "They're not the villains here. What we're going to do is march straight to Carousel Boutique and kick Chrysalis' flank halfway to the Crystal Empire. Shining Armor can meet us in the middle and finish the job."
The others murmured agreement, nodding with dark expressions. I raised a hoof in silence.
"What is it, Rarity?" Twilight asked.
I stood up. "And then what?"
"And then we march house to house, and …" Twilight trailed off, her face paling. "Oh. Oh no."
Applejack's face likewise drained of color. "When we attack her, she orders a few hundred children to attack an' feed, and we've gotta live with turnin' them all into war criminals."
That wasn't Chrysalis' plan, I knew, but leaving the misconception uncorrected was for the best.
"I think I understand her test now," Twilight said faintly.
"Well, I don't get it," Pinkie said, tapping her chin. "We saw in the square, Queen Meanie can't —"
I hastily overtalked her. "She doesn't have to. Even if her control is slipping, all it would take is a single signal, like a hornburst firework, or a single changeling disguised as a pony and watching the Boutique."
"Well, we have to do something," Fluttershy said with uncharacteristic firmness. "If she gets what she wants and leaves with all those children, they'll grow up just like her."
"D'you think we could get her before she gets a signal out?" Applejack asked.
"We could attack the changelings before going after her."
"Dash!"
"Look, I'm just saying."
"Dash does have a point," Applejack said. "If we can knock 'em out or lock 'em up, they can't attack anypony once she gives the order."
I cleared my throat. "Girls?"
"I'm not hearing any good options," Twilight said. "I hope you've got one."
"That depends," I said, checking my pocket watch. "Chrysalis gave you an hour. Can you get everypony to Town Square within our remaining … forty-three minutes?"
Twilight did some mental math. "If we all work together. Then what?"
I looked up into the eyes of my five best friends — scared eyes, desperate for hope and answers — and almost broke down and told them everything. It would have been so easy to do. It would have eased their minds. It would have been right. And yet … and yet. The truth was fragile, and it would hurt far too many, in ways even I might not be able to predict.
I steeled myself with a breath.
"Then," I said, "I use what I've learned to take care of Chrysalis."
I snuck back to the auditorium as Twilight and the others were getting the word of our upcoming confrontation out, and returned to the dressing room, setting my pocket mirror back down.
I pulled out my compact and eye-pencils, then watched the changeling in the mirror apply make-up. The very idea seemed ridiculous — a master of subterfuge, resorting to mere parlor tricks — but any expert could tell you that sometimes there was no substitute for the unsubtle.
I tilted my head, dropped my spell, and examined my work. A little dusting of rouge on my cheeks, to enhance the glow brought out by the frost. A little extra length in my lashes, to sharpen my expressions for the audience.
The art of makeup was, when it came down to it, the art of misdirection — drawing the eye to the areas the artist wished to emphasize, and concealing truth in the shadows. Even the act of applying it is a ruse, I thought, an ironic smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. What truly mattered now was that, for a few crucial minutes, not a soul knew where I was.
I adjusted the curls of my mane and smiled at my reflection before snapping the mirror shut. Ruse or no, when so much was riding on a single final scene, there was no excuse not to deliver perfection.
When we regathered and walked to Town Square, Chrysalis was waiting — along with her "soldiers", lined up behind her in silent, huddled rows. Across the square from them, a thin white line of Royal Guards stood in front of a hastily-stacked row of boxes. Most of Ponyville stood behind them, holding garden tools and makeshift weapons.
"Look at the changelings," Fluttershy murmured. "They're freezing."
Twilight hesitated for a moment as her hoof was coming down, and broke stride to veer sideways to me. "Are you sure about this?" she whispered. "This just screams 'trap.' Chrysalis wouldn't bring them out here in this cold, against prepared defenders, unless she had a plan."
"She's not the only one," I whispered back. "Remember, Twilight … trust me."
The six of us came to a halt in the center of the square, halfway between the makeshift armies. Chrysalis walked forward with what at first appeared to be slow, stately steps — until I realized that her eyes were fixed on the ground in front of her, and she was planting each hoof before putting weight on it. There were also faint ring-shaped splotches of grey with jet-black centers marring her neck and muzzle. Up close, it was more obvious what those were — she'd found my stash of eyeliner gel and smeared on large patches of it to restore the chitin's shine and mask its lightness.
"Well?" she growled, coming to a stop a few body-lengths away. "You heard my demands. Are you going to give me what I want, or are you going to discover that I always keep my word?"
I cleared my throat delicately. Twilight glanced over at me. I nodded. She nodded.
I stepped forward with a self-satisfied smile. "You know as well as I do that they never had any intention of submitting to your ultimatum," I announced, circling to Chrysalis' side and sitting down next to her. "Which, I believe, brings us to the day's most important question."
The silence in the square was so profound that I was able to hear one of the ponies in the distance faint and crumple to the snow.
I glanced back up at my friends. All of the color had gone out of their faces, and they were staring at me with identical slack-jawed expressions.
Chrysalis broke the silence by throwing her head back with a cackle of glee. "You should see yourselves right now!" She draped a hoof over my withers, still chortling. "And what would that question be?"
I casually floated my pocket watch up in front of my muzzle, then turned my head to stare into Chrysalis' eyes, projecting from the diaphragm and enunciating every word with clear, crisp diction:
"Did you enjoy our last glass of wine?"
Her laughter died on her lips.
I brought a shoulder to her chest and roughly shoved her. She staggered sideways and lost her balance, sitting down hard in a snowbank. "You're not looking so well, Chrysalis," I said. "You expected your disease — the one you came here to research — to progress more slowly. Of course, you also expected me to betray my dearest friends."
"Kk-k-kk," she said, shoving herself back upright and immediately overbalancing and faceplanting. She bared her fangs, wheezing loudly. "You … triple-crossing … wolfspawn."
The others were still looking a little green at the gills, so I improvised. "Don't worry, I had no intention of killing her before she could stand trial for her crimes. Tincture of ironweed merely induces vertigo and suppresses magic. In her weakened state, it completed the process her illness started." I turned straight to the watching ponies and raised my voice. "She can't control them any longer. The changelings are free."
A murmur rippled through the ponies, echoed by another from the changeling ranks.
Chrysalis struggled back to her hooves. "Y-you'll regret this," she wheezed, backing away, her horn sputtering to life and spewing out a few ineffectual sparks. "Drones! Attack!"
The changelings looked around at each other. None of them moved. Chrysalis turned to face them, wings out for balance. "I said attack!"
That's when Rainbow Dash air-tackled her.
As they tumbled end-over-end, a lasso dropped in and cinched Chrysalis' hooves together. The rope jerked taut as Applejack braced and hauled. With a yelp, the queen reversed direction, skidding out from underneath Dash and across the icy square toward an abandoned market stall. She plowed through the baseboard with a crash, scattering empty crates and Hearth's Warming light-strands, and didn't get back up.
The crowd of ponies erupted into cheers and stomps as Applejack trotted over to stand guard over the unconscious form. Twilight stepped forward, spreading her wings and raising a hoof. "Dash, go give Spike the signal. As for you —" she said to the changelings, before she was interrupted by a yellow hoof touching her side.
Twilight glanced back. Fluttershy held up one hoof, then walked past Twilight and across the square. The pony crowd fell silent again as she approached the changeling in the center of the front rank, then threw her forelegs around the burly soldier in a hug. It lifted one trembling leg and returned the gesture, eyes squeezing shut and tears streaking down its cheeks.
I let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. It was going to be alright.
Twilight cleared her throat. "As I was going to say … as for you, we know that you're cold, and you're hungry. You've been following a leader who thought that your only way to survive was to steal. But with everypony's help, we can show you a different way." She turned to the crowd of ponies. "I know the last two days have been scary, but it should be obvious by now that the changelings she ordered into your homes were just as scared. It's time to give them a new start. Please, help us show them what the magic of friendship is truly about."
"Yay!" Pinkie said, popping up in the center of the changelings and scooping several of them into a hug of her own with a squeak like a rubber toy. "We're gonna throw you the best 'welcome to your new life free of Queen Meanie's tyranny' party ever!"
Behind me, I heard ponies erupt in cheers as they trotted forward, accompanied by the clatter of weapons dropping to the icy street. I, too, walked over toward the drones, and I couldn't keep tears from streaking down my face.
It ruined my makeup. I couldn't have cared less.
The Friendship Palace, as it turned out, did have a dungeon. I tried not to think too hard about that.
I followed Princess Celestia to the room at the end of the hallway, where a still-graying Chrysalis was lying flat on her back on a mattress. There were cold iron shackles on her hind legs, and she was covered by thick blankets. We stepped inside through no less than three force fields.
Chrysalis turned her head in my direction and scowled weakly. "Here to gloat?"
"Perhaps a bit," I said, and bowed to Celestia. "Thank you, Your Majesty."
One corner of her mouth quirked up in a knowing smile. "Just let me know when you're done," Celestia said, and nodded to the doctor and to the guards at each corner. They filed out of the room after her, leaving us alone. I heard the solid crystal cell door settle into place with a grinding whisper, and the noises from outside fell away.
I waited. I knew she'd break the silence. I was right.
Chrysalis cleared her throat. "I don't understand," she said, in a very not-sick voice.
"You never did," I said. "We could have avoided this whole charade if you had told the truth."
She laughed bitterly. "That's not what I meant, but no, we couldn't have. We're changelings. All we are is lies and schemes."
"You don't truly believe that. You would not have fought so hard to give the others a fresh start if you did."
She snorted. "What can I say? Hope is stupid. But you? I know how smart you are. You can't possibly believe that if we had walked in and told the truth, the swarm would have survived the winter."
"I confess you have the right of me … and yet, honesty has power, darling. That's why ponies like you and I fight so hard to avoid it."
Chrysalis was silent for a moment.
"What did you mean to say you didn't understand?" I asked.
She rolled over to face me, her chains scraping against the crystalline floor. "Why you helped me after your friend's ultimatum threw my plan off script. I saw the looks on their faces. You chose me over them, and I don't think I could have done it without you."
I shrugged. "I couldn't have refused once I figured it out. After all, I am — or was, before the tree reclaimed it — the Element of Generosity."
Chrysalis set an elbow on the mattress and brought a hoof up, resting her muzzle on it and giving me a penetrating stare. "But there's something more than that, isn't there?"
I felt my face flush. "I'm quite certain that I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You know what," a voice said from behind me, "I think I do."
I jumped and spun around. "Twilight?"
Her form wavered as the cloaking field dropped. Tears brimmed in the corners of her eyes. "The Princess told me there was a valuable lesson for me in this room, but all I'm seeing is a 'friend' who's been lying to me for stars know how long. I trusted you, Rarity."
"Twilight," I said urgently, "please understand that when I say 'comportment', it is a reminder that the greatest composure is required to hear the truth when your heart screams the loudest."
"Oh," she said, horn flaring to life as she lowered her head, "the truth is clear enough."
I took a step back, almost losing my balance as I stumbled against the edge of the mattress. "Twilight, please, don't be hasty —" I said as her horn touched my chest.
A tingle swept through my body. I winced, far too late to do any good, then glanced down. Nothing had changed.
Twilight's eyes widened. "W-what? But you — I thought you were —"
"A changeling in lifelong deep cover?" I said as the light of hindsight filtered in. I straightened back up and smoothed my chest coat down with a hoof. "That's patently ridiculous, Twilight. Why would you think that?"
"Everything!" she sputtered. "Your obsession with appearances! Your reason to help Chrysalis! Your crazy deductions about her!"
"Yes, and if that were true, then I would have died at the royal wedding, like every single changeling in Canterlot."
"Then what was all that about being able to leave and still do your job, if you weren't on Chrysalis' mental link?!"
I held up my pocket mirror. "Espionage. The spell on this allows me to scry through any of Carousel Boutique's mirrored surfaces; it has proven indispensable in many a high-end sale, and it's how I figured out the last crucial pieces of the truth."
"You … but …" Twilight threw up her hooves. "What is going on?"
I turned to Queen Chrysalis. "Darling, there is a time and a place for complete honesty, and I assure you that this is it."
She nodded, then looked calmly at Twilight. "Indeed, the deadliest lie is the wrong half of the truth. Princess, whatever spell you just cast to expose your friend … cast it on me."
Twilight blinked rapidly, her mental gears clearly spinning. Color drained from her muzzle. "No," she said. "Oh no. Chrysalis switched places with a drone. We've got to find her —"
"Twilight," I interrupted, "Chrysalis is dead."
Twilight stopped.
"This is why I didn't tell the truth from the start," the false queen said, glancing at me. "Everypony would have been looking for the hidden plot."
"… 'Every changeling in Canterlot,'" Twilight said quietly. "Every changeling."
The changeling laughed bitterly. "I nearly wrecked the plan five minutes in. Please cast your spell, Princess."
Twilight leaned down to the bed, her horn flaring out. In a flash of green fire, the queen's form collapsed in on itself, leaving behind an emaciated, middle-aged soldier drone with half of one wing missing and a network of gray cracks across the carapace of his back. He clenched his teeth as the ethereal flames died away, then slumped to the bed.
"Alright," Twilight said, sitting down. "Now what's going on?"
"My name is Ember," the changeling said. "I lost my wing in an accident the day before the invasion, but I was too useful to kill, so Chrysalis had me stay in the hive with the dronelings too young for the flight. When all contact with the swarm was cut off, I assembled a scouting party out of the best of us and went to figure out what happened. We found what was left of a changeling corpse over three leagues from the mountain, and pieced the clues together from rumors and newspaper reports. With a pony army closing in on the hive, I gathered the others and fled to the Everfree. We've scraped out a subsistence living since."
"Until this season's storms hit," I said. "They're not ponies, with warm blood and thick coats. They were on the verge of literally freezing to death." I glanced over at Ember. "I'd like to see how much of this I guessed. Correct me if I get anything wrong."
"Alright."
"Help from ponykind was their only chance for the survival of the hive, and they needed a permanent solution. They thought," I emphasized, "that their only bargaining chip was the leader whose body was never found. So Ember pretended to be Queen Chrysalis — then concocted a plan designed to paint her as a tyrant, and the changelings accompanying her as helpless victims. She would land in town and terrorize pony and changeling alike, and we would gradually discover her false evidence that her mental bonds with her drones were slipping and a rebellion was brewing. As we developed bonds with them and helped them cast off the shackles of tyranny, it would guarantee them a home after justice was served."
Twilight looked between us in horror. "You can't possibly believe there's anything noble here, Rarity! He's a monster! He tortured one of the children!"
"Every plan requires sacrifices," Ember said quietly.
I winced — though not for the same reason Twilight did. "His plan required him to be a monster," I said. "If you could hurt one pony to save ponykind, would you?"
"There had to have been a better way," Twilight said.
"I needed genuine shock," Ember said. "That's very difficult to fake — and if any of them had been in on my plan, somedrone would have slipped sooner or later. Not to mention, many of the older ones did believe we could threaten what we needed out of you; when I double-crossed them, they were left with no choice but to give friendship a try."
"Similarly, Twilight, I needed genuine outrage from you over what Chrysalis did," I said, touching a hoof to her shoulder. "You had to remain ignorant to play your part. You all did. If we had shown any hint of going easy on Ember after what he did to the droneling — and don't tell me you wouldn't have tried to save him, too — none of them would have believed your offer was sincere."
Twilight jerked her shoulder away. "What happened to 'honesty has power, darling'? We're your friends, Rarity. Trust is a two-way street."
I flattened my ears. "For what it's worth, Twilight, I am sorry. I trusted you to do the right thing — and I always will — but that was the one thing the situation could not afford."
"Princess," Ember said, "may I ask a question?"
Twilight looked at him through narrowed eyes. "What."
"Would you change anything about the outcome? A village of ponies and changelings celebrating their triumph over a common foe together and exploring a historic fresh start?"
"We would have gotten there a lot differently!"
"With respect, your highness, that's not what I asked."
Twilight fell silent, then turned and walked away … and one final realization clicked into place.
That's quite a lesson, Celestia, I thought, wondering — not for the first time — how much she'd figured out before I'd even exchanged a word with her. Of course the answer is 'no'. And yet, having sacrificed so much to reach this point … telling the truth now would jeopardize all that has been won.
"I …" Twilight sat down, emotions warring on her face. "I'm going to have to think about this."
I put a hoof around Twilight's withers. "Come on, darling," I said. "It's time to go. We have a holiday to celebrate."
The pageant, naturally, was a success.
I stepped to the edge of the stage, facing the audience as the tragically misguided Princess Platinum, and snuck a glance out at them as I took a bow. In the front row, clustered together on a bench, three little fillies of different tribes stomped their hooves. In their midst, a fourth dark figure clopped its forehooves together — looking a great deal smaller, and less armored, than the last time I'd seen her. Whisper Song glanced back and forth between the Crusaders, embracing them delightedly in the warm glow of her very first friendships.
A few seats away, I caught Princess Twilight Sparkle studying them, too. She glanced up at me, and as we shared a look, she chewed her lip and gave me an uncertain smile.
In time, I thought, smiling back.
After all, the morals of the show were meant for those left behind after the play was over.