We left a little after sunrise – or at least what should have been sunrise. Celestia could have taken the day off, for all I knew; thick clouds hid the sky, still blanketing everything in a shroud of grey. It wasn’t the best omen as we started on the long walk to the ritzier parts of town along the mountain cliffs, where mansions claimed a monopoly on the good views of Equestria.
I kept an eye on Ruby as we cut through the fog, moving like a pair of ships striking out for the ocean but aware of the rocks lurking under the waves. I didn’t know quite what to make of her. She had proven herself once already, but questions still gnawed at the back of my mind. Why was she helping me? What did she have to gain in all this?
“Why do you still look like that?” I said out loud.
She came to a halt, turning to give me a sharp look. “Like what?”
“You’re a changeling,” I said, watching her eyes narrow as I said the word. “And there’s probably a warrant out for your arrest. You could easily look like anypony you want, so why do you still look like…” I frowned. “Well.”
“Like myself?” she said. She started trotting again, and I had to pick up the pace to keep up.
We went a full block in silence. I was about to mutter an apology when she spoke up again.
“There’s a word changelings have, in… well, it’s not even a language in the same way Equestrian is. More of a series of buzzes and clicks. I can’t even pronounce any of it myself when I look like this. But the idea behind it translates as something like… ‘gone native’.”
“Mmm,” I said. She paid no attention to me.
“It’s what a pureblood hive-dweller calls someling who gets a little too close to their food. When they stop thinking of themselves as a changeling in a pony disguise and start thinking of themselves as a pony in a changeling body. After a while you get to feeling like all the ponies who you live among are the ones who understand you, the ones who love you, not a bunch of squabbling insects back at the hive.”
“And this happened to you?”
“Happened to my parents. I told you, didn’t I? I grew up in Equestria, in a small town up in the mountains. Pa runs the general store. There’s been talk of him being next in line for mayor. Everypony in the county loves the guy.”
“So plenty of food, then,” I said.
“And what’s wrong with that?” she spat, turning to glare at me with burning eyes. “What’s your problem? All we want – All I want is to be loved and happy, just like everypony else in this city. Just because there’s a biological urge tied to it, does that make it inherently evil?”
I raised a hoof. “I’m not saying that.”
“Sure sounds like you’re thinking it.”
I frowned, silent for a moment. “Maybe so.”
“What?” she said, the weariness having replaced indignance in her voice. “What do I have to do to earn a little bit of faith?”
“I’ve had a rough week,” I said, causing her to snort out a half-laugh. “Bear with me. I’ve got a lot to wrap my head around still.”
“Mmm.”
We didn’t say much more as we used the fog to slink through the nice parts of town and slip into the backyard of some rich unicorn’s mansion. The place was done up glitzier than a wannabe social climber at a Grand Galloping Gala. I figured the owner could afford to share his cliffside view with a couple of common folk.
Ponies aren’t exactly made for climbing, and it took a push from Ruby to get me to commit to the plunge down, rope wrapped firmly around my hoof. But the rope held and I rappelled down to the cave entrance not far below. I called up again, and the rope dropped, tumbling down the mountainside. Ruby flew down a minute later. We wouldn’t be returning that way.
The caves themselves were formidable in reputation, a maze of twisty little passages all alike. The chambers were packed with pretty crystals inside, but they were worthless despite their beauty, the wild growth making them entirely too unstable for magic work. I knew of a couple of ponies in the past that had made attempts at mining them for ornamental purposes, but it never lasted long. This place had a bad reputation. Not every pony who wandered in necessarily made it back out.
I didn’t know that I really believed all the things some superstitious ponies said, but it’s also true that we heard sounds as we made their way through. Sounds that could have been water dripping. Sounds that could have been claws tapping against crystal. We didn’t discuss them, just kept quiet and marched onwards through those twisting passages, always taking the branches that angled slightly up.
I was just about to question whether Ruby had gotten us lost when she pulled up short at a passage leading into plain grey stone. She stared into the darkness. “We’re here.”
“You ready?”
“As much as I’m going to be,” she said, ears laid flat as she trotted forward to disappear into the gloom.
I followed, listening for her hoofsteps ahead. I left my horn dark, and after a moment of adjusting, could make out the dim shape of Ruby ahead disappearing around a curve. After that bend, we came to a wall, broken by regularly spaced slivers of light at different heights.
“Here?”
She reached one hoof towards the wall and pulled out part of it. I belatedly realized it was just a floor-to-ceiling set of shelves, tightly packed with cans. We were on the other side of one of the palace’s many storage rooms.
A few minutes of shifting tomato soup later, we regrouped in the dim light of the pantry.
“Okay, we’re in the administration wing,” Ruby said, her voice pitched low. “We’ll cut across through some back corridors to reach the main palace. But from there on, it’s riskier, and I don’t know anything about the layout of the upper floors.”
“Then we’ll figure that out when we get there.”
The sudden creak of a door cut our discussion short, and I dropped low, pulling Ruby along with me. One hoof pressed down on my on my hat as I started up a spell.
“Who’s there?” a voice called out, as a shaft of light swept across the room.
“Ruby Quartz,” Ruby said, and I felt her hoof knock aside my grasp. She rose up, ignoring the look I shot her.
The pony peering in the door was an pudgy earth pony wearing one of those archetypical chef’s hats. He peered through his round-rimmed glasses and I gritted my teeth, cycling the spell towards completion. Then a broad smile broke across his muzzle. “Ruby! What in Celestia’s name are you doing in here?”
“It’s a long story. But I need some help, Eclair.”
He glanced at me with a flash of suspicion, but sat down his light and motioned for us to head up the short stairs into the kitchen. “Of course.”
“Another changeling?” I murmured, walking alongside Ruby as we headed up.
“A friend,” she said, shooting me a look.
Turns out Ruby had a lot of friends in the palace, at least among the staff. After some quick explanations that left out the more alarming details of our mission, Eclair and several others of the kitchen crew started spitballing ideas to help us get to Celestia. Most of them were foalish stuff, the kind of Con Mane spy-flick nonsense that would never fly in the real world. But the staff wound up being very helpful in detailing the guards in place.
The Chief had been right about the security being tight. I shot down a few clumsy ideas about smuggling us in through the bottom of food carts – any security detail worth its salt would have a unicorn guard scrying for ponies trying to sneak through, and we didn’t have time to figure out any counter-shielding. We’d figure it out ourselves, observe the situation, see if we could just sweet-talk our way past.
The cooks were all for helping with that, too, but Ruby talked them down. No sense in having anypony else take the fall alongside us when things went sour. We stuck with some basic help, Ruby borrowing one of her old aprons and hats for disguise, and one of the chefs providing me with a misplaced clerk’s badge I clipped to my coat. Neither would hold up to scrutiny, but something was better than nothing.
We took the long way through the back corridors, occasionally passing various hoofservants who studiously ignored us. And then we were there, at the entrance to the main building of the palace. We halted at a convenient corner, and I peeked around, getting an eye on the guard post.
I felt a hoof on my shoulder and glanced down to see Ruby’s head below mine, also looking. There were three guards there, a unicorns and two pegasi. As we watched, a servant trotted up, and they immediately snapped into action, one pegasus carefully peering at the badge while the unicorn ran a series of quick magic field tests.
I grimaced. “Okay, so I doubt we’ll be able to bluff our way through. We’ll need something bigger, some kind of distraction that pulls them all away from the door. But we don’t have a lot to work with.”
Ruby drew a deep breath. “You have the documents, right?”
I patted my jacket. “Yep.”
“Do you trust me?”
I paused, taking in the serious expression on her face.
“This is important. Do you trust me?”
I opened my mouth to answer, when another voice boomed from behind us. “Excuse me. What are you two doing? I think you need to show me some identification.”
We whirled around to see a earth pony stallion in a guard uniform, built like a brick wall and, by his expression, with the sparkling personality to match. He took a thudding step forward.
“Do you?” Ruby whispered.
“Yeah,” I said.
In a flash of green flame she vanished, only to be replaced by a beast in black chitin. The changeling let out a hiss that’d strip paint and pounced on me in a flurry of jagged hooves and wicked fangs. I let out a shout of alarm on instinct as the thing bit down into my shoulder.
“Back, back you!” the soldier shouted, bullrushing forward to tackle the changeling. As the bug tumbled, taking a piece of my jacket away in its mouth, I realized the bite had been all show, tearing through the thick cloth without so much as drawing blood underneath.
“Get to safety!” the soldier yelled as he tussled with Ruby. She knocked him back, roaring in a snarling buzz of two clashing tones, setting my teeth on edge. I got the hint, and scrambled away down the hall.
“Changeling!” I cried out. The other guards at the checkpoint had already taken a few steps forward, but at my word they took off, galloping to assist their comrade. I dashed for the door, blowing past the distracted unicorn.
After I made the next corner, I slowed down, catching my breath. I was in.
And it looked like I owed Ruby yet another one.
In any other situation, I would have played it cool. That’s the downside of a nice secure perimeter – get past the guards on the outside and ponies assume that you belong on the inside. The rest is a matter of swagger, acting like you’re far too busy to stop and answer any questions.
But that was a bit harder to pull off with the shoulder of my jacket in shreds. Two long hallways later, I ran into another guard. His eyebrows shot up when he got a good look at me.
“Changeling,” I gasped out, not having to fake the adrenaline pounding through my veins. “Back at the guard station.” I floated the folder out of my jacket. “Trying to get this. I need to deliver it to Princess Celestia, where is she?”
The guard’s head jerked back between me and the way I had come before he came to a decision. “Throne room. This hallway all the way down, then left.”
He took off galloping, and I prayed that Ruby had figured something out and I wasn’t just sending more trouble her way. But I had to keep moving. I headed the way the guard had shown, my hooves clattering on the marble flooring.
The throne room was pretty obvious. The doors were solid gold, each by itself probably worth more than the entire city block I lived on. A red carpet ran right down the middle, with stained glass windows on either side that I ignored as I stumbled in, nearly knocking over a farmer standing in the long line of petitioners up to the throne. “Sorry!” I yelled out. “Emergency. Have to talk to Celestia, matter of national security.”
Then I looked up and saw her and everything froze.
You’re not prepared, you know? You see pictures, but in person it was something else. I didn’t even notice my knees hit the ground. It’s nothing about the individual pieces, the ethereal mane or the graceful horn or the way she towers over the common pony. There’s just a kind of presence, something that reaches down deep inside of you and grabs ahold and says “Hey. Listen up, kid.”
I don’t know how long that lasted. I only tore my eyes away when the guards closed in, shouting. They, at least, had done their homework, and recognized Canterlot’s newly most wanted criminal. Hooves came at me from all sides, pinning me down, pulling me back. The line of ponies waiting to talk to Celestia scattered as they pressed up against the walls, yelling and shouting in confusion.
I snarled. “Wait! You don’t understand. I’ve got to talk to the Princess, I’ve got—”
“Guards,” she said softly, and even without bothering to raise her voice it cut through the confusion like a teacher calling her class to order. “Please. I believe this stallion would like to have a word with me.”
One of the more medal-bedecked grunts opened his mouth for a response but one stern look from the Princess shut him down. I found myself being hustled up the red carpet, just as roughly as I had been previously dragged back. A pair of earth pony guards stood on either side of me, making it clear I wouldn’t be going anywhere they didn’t want me to.
“What’s your name, my little pony?” Princess Celestia said. Her voice was soft, friendly. And apparently completely unconcerned about the possibility of me being a threat. I didn’t disagree with her assessment.
I swallowed, staring down at her hooves. “Straight Slate,” I replied. “Ma’am.”
“Ah. Detective Slate. There has been much talk of you as of late.”
“It’s not true,” I said. “But it’s not important either. Look, I’ve got— You need to—” I clenched my teeth, and drew a breath in through them. “Princess Luna is plotting against you.”
That drew some gasps from the room. The guards at my side put a little extra pressure into their holds on me and I let out a grunt. I looked up to see Celestia looking down at me, her eyes unreadable.
“That is quite a serious accusation,” she said, having lost the warmth in her tone.
“You think I don’t know?” I said. “I have proof. I—” I grimaced, pushing against the guard to my left, reaching into my jacket. He tensed to hold my hoof back, but when Celestia nodded, he let me pull out the documents. “Here. It’s all here. Princess Luna has been secretly using operatives in the Department of Equestrian Security to target ponies, falsely frame them as being changelings, and then send them to the stars. And not just any ponies. Important ones. All of them connected to the protection and maintenance of Equestria. I think… I think she’s planning a coup.”
A golden glow covered the folder and it floated effortlessly over to Celestia. The silence in the room was as loud as any thunderstorm, only broken by the rustle of papers as she opened the folder and flipped through the pages within.
“I see,” she said, after the longest minute of my life.
“Look, it’s all there. You have to believe me.”
She paused, pursing her lips. “I do, Detective Slate. I do.”
Murmurs broke out all around us, the ponies who had all gathered to ask Celestia for some favor or complain about some petty problem suddenly being witness to something of far more importance. The guards didn’t know quite what to do, confusion written plainly on their faces as they stared up towards their leader.
I let out a breath, sagging in the grip of the earth ponies still holding me.
“Stonecastle,” Celestia said, glancing over to her side. “Please inform my sister that I would like to speak with her.”
I looked up to the pony she had spoken to, a pony I hadn’t noticed. He was a pegasus, light grey in coat and wearing a small pair of spectacles, and he stopped staring at me to take flight out of the throne room in a hurry. But the glimpse I had caught of him sent a twist in my stomach.
“Detective Straight Slate, you have performed a great service to Equestria this day,” Princess Celestia said.
I had never seen the pegasus before. I couldn’t even have picked him out of a crowd. But his foreleg was bandaged and splinted. He had broken it, and from the look of the bandages, recently. I didn’t bother guessing what the chances were that it could have been a coincidence, what the odds were of a pony administrator having taken a tumble down an awkward stair somewhere. Maybe it was pure chance. Maybe the changeling I had left with a magic-induced reminder of my displeasure had already skipped town.
But in my line of work, coincidences don’t happen.
The tiniest possibility crept into my mind, a fragile crystallization of paranoia. They called it a false flag operation, when an army changes uniforms and insignias to disguise their true leaders. It’s a griffon thing – they’d been busy cooking up new ways of making war even back when we ponies were still grazing pasture to pasture. It was a nasty sort of business, where disguised operatives would even attack their own people if necessary.
It’s all about the optics. Making sure you’re the one attacked, and thus the one wronged. Creating an impeachable justification to go to war. Manufacturing a perfectly good excuse to remove a troublesome rival from power.
“A great service to Equestria indeed,” Princess Celestia continued. “And that is why what I’m about to say is so difficult.”
My head jerked back up. “What?”
“Detective Slate,” Celestia said firmly. “You must agree that the source of an accusation of this magnitude must be carefully considered.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You are familiar with changelings, are you not? What do you know of ‘sleepers’?”
“Sleepers…” I shook my head. “Changelings that don’t even realize it? That’s nothing more than movie glitz. The Marechurian Candidate, the unwitting changeling-as-pony programmed only to reveal themselves when they’re triggered somehow. It’s all nonsense.”
“No, detective. It is not.” A frown crossed Celestia’s face and I could feel the weight of centuries behind it. “Tell me: have you ever been magically confirmed as a pony?”
I blinked. It took too long for me to grasp her meaning, and when the realization hit it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Celestia simply stood there, towering over me as she awaited my response.
“What are you implying?” I said through gritted teeth.
“I asked you the question first.”
“I…” My lips twisted. “No. I joined DEqSec before the test even existed. Normally we check all new hires, but I was grandfathered in. But I’ve lived in Equestria all my life. You can’t honestly think that I’m a changeling.”
“Of course not,” Princess Celestia said. “But we must make sure. We must do everything clearly and publically. There is too much at stake.”
“You can’t be serious.”
She turned to the side, looking away from me. “I will arrange for you to be held in one of the waiting chambers until an officer from your department can—”
“No,” I said, voice shaking. I screwed my eyes shut, forcing myself to resist the impulse to just go along with her smooth words. “Cast the spell yourself. Right now, in front of all these ponies.”
“What exactly are you saying, Detective?”
“I’m saying you’re right. This needs to be clear and public. What better way?”
Silence stretched out. I opened my eyes again to see her gazing down at me impassively. “Very well.”
She raised one hoof slightly, and the guards stepped away from me. I was left standing, legs shaking, alone on the red carpet. Ponies – guards, petitioners, court servants – watched us wordlessly, their eyes wide.
I have to admit I considered fleeing. Or attacking. But with Princess Celestia in front of me…? As soon as her horn came aglow, the thundering currents of raw magic underhoof twisting to her will, I realized it was all futile.
All I could feel was the magic she was shaping. She was making no pretense of subtlety, roughly grabbing strands of mana and weaving them into the tapestry of the spell in a manner that every unicorn in the room – heck, in this entire wing of the palace – could see. It was obvious. It was overwhelming.
I stopped trying to think of an escape route. That was wasting time. Nothing made sense to me anymore. I was standing on the precipice, staring into the long fall down, and I couldn’t help but feel I was about to be pushed. What does a pony do in that situation? What can a pony do?
Celestia breathed out. The final element of the spell slid into place and a green glow bloomed all around me.
All a pony can do is pull somepony else down with him.
A green aura lit up around Celestia too. I raised a hoof to doff my hat, displaying my hornglow to the room.
Celestia took a half-step back, shock written across her face.
It worked far better than I thought it would have. Any foal out of magic kindergarden can cast a quick green mist spell, and maybe that was my point: to show that anypony can fake a positive. But I wouldn’t have expected Celestia’s magic signature to be so overwhelming that nopony could even tell what I had cast, exactly. And I certainly didn’t expect Luna to take that moment to burst into the room.
“Sister!” she shouted at a deafening volume. “What is the meaning of—” Her mouth fell open. My eyes were drawn to the chains dragging from her forelegs, the guards in the hall behind her hastily running to catch up. Somepony had attempted to hoofcuff her, only to find that you might as well try to put a puppy muzzle on a manticore.
Yeah. It all worked far better than expected. One final kiss-off, out of spite.
But what I never considered possible, not in a million years, not in my wildest dreams, was for Princess Celestia to light up in green flames, staggering back as her disguise failed and her snow-white coat reverted to a black, chitinous shell.