The Roses of Success

by HypernovaBolts11


Chapter II - Infected

The crisp, cool night air soothed what of Fangheart's nerves he needed. He walked briskly, his eyes showing rage, blood red rage. Nothing he did was any good, he felt. No one cared for his innocence or actions, because they all focused on what he was, which he hated to begin with.

If someone knew a way to make him into a pony forever, he would have taken that opportunity immediately. He wouldn't have cared for all the bits in the world if he didn't like pony food. Looking like a pony was the only thing that kept everyone around him from locking him up.

There was a rustling sound to his left, and he froze. He looked towards the source of the sound, just in time for another creature to come barreling out of the trees, pin him down, and deliver a swift kick to where his head had just been. He stood up, took a quick look at his opponent, and hissed at it.

A thin, scrawny mass of black and green, with frills, chitinous wings, and vibrant blue eyes, was standing where it had just pinned him down. A soldier, and a fierce one. It hissed back at Fangheart, though in a changeling language, a very simple one, "What are you?"

Fangheart spoke, in the most noble tongue of the changelings, "Your worst choice of a meal." He flared his wings at his sides, and charged at the soldier, the leading edge of his wings glowing green as he changed them, creating sharp, metal blades just in time to swing his right wing at the carnivore.

The soldier ducked, waiting for just the right moment, slipped its head underneath the pegasus, and threw its head up, launching the grey pony into the air.

Fangheart flapped his wings a few times, pointed his body down at the soldier, and dove straight down at the changeling. He pulled up from his dive to slice his wings at the air in front of him, veering away just in time to avoid his enemy's horn.

The soldier yelped as one of its wings was snapped in two, and lit up its horn with a bright blue light. It gripped the pegasus in its magic, and threw him to the ground as he rose into the air, slamming him into the dirt path. It ran forward, and pinned the pegasus down as he tried to regain his breath. It hissed, "You were saying?" It jumped when his prey burst into flames, and turned around to run.

Fangheart snarled, growling. No, this changeling was not getting away. He grabbed one of the soldier's hind legs as it fled, tripping it, and pressed his forelegs down against the soldier's chest. He set the pointed tip of his horn to the soldier's throat, and hissed, "I was saying that you should find someone stupider to pick on, you ungrateful waste of chitin."

The soldier whimpered, and hid its face behind its forelegs. It hissed, "Please... have mercy."

The drone growled, "Mercy! You want to talk about mercy!" He then shouted, "You never cared about mercy! You're a waste of changeling flesh! My mother should have eaten you the day you hatched, you ungrateful, self centered, heartless piece of-"

The soldier kicked its hind legs into the drone's gut, tossing him a meter or so back. It jumped onto its hooves, and tried to run again, but the drone had already grabbed its tail between his jaws, yanking it back with all his might.

He pinned it down beneath his hoof, still drawing heavy breaths to recover air, and said, "Listen. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not as heartless as my mother was."

"Oh, thank you. Thank you," the soldier chirped.

Fangheart covered its mouth with a hoof, and quickly dragged it off the path, hiding them both in a bush. He whispered, "Shush. You're gonna get us both arrested if you keep using that mouth of yours." He pricked his ears up, and leaned towards the path, peaking through a few leaves.

A pony walked past, not turning its head, not stopping, just walking.

The soldier's breathing quickened as the drone turned to look at it more closely.

Fangheart blinked a few times, and his horn gave off a focused green light, by which he examined the soldier, finding dozens of bruises, abrasions, and one cut along its stomach. He sighed heavily, guiding it deeper into the forest, so as to avoid detection. He sat the soldier down on a rock in a small clearing, and asked, "Why are you so far from the hive?"

The soldier hissed, "I was born from a prisoner's brood, and was not appreciated by the Matriarch."

He raised an eyebrow at that, and asked, "The Matriarch? What is that?"

It said, "When the Queen was overthrown, an infiltrator took her place, declaring herself Matriarch. She commanded that all soldiers attend a grand feast, not unlike those the Queen held, but she demanded that each and every soldier attempt to seduce her. When I failed at such a task, she banished me."

Fangheart shook his head. "She does understand that soldiers can't reproduce with changelings, much less infiltrators?" he asked. He slapped his forehead with a hoof, and groaned, "This is why we needed the Queen. She is the only changeling that can produce eggs. Aside from that, she was smarter than all of you put together."

He shook his head slowly, and said, "I suppose it doesn't matter anymore. She's dead, and I've moved on. This is the end of the changelings. This, I guess, is what we here in Ponyville call history, and it's being made around us." He ignited his horn, and, gritting his teeth, began to heal the soldier's wing, which glowed a ghastly green as it grew back from where he'd cut it off.

He covered his forehead as his horn sputtered out, and staggered a bit as his energy ran low. He grunted, and said, "Now go, T'ap'arrakan. Don't let yourself be seen. Stick to eating smaller things. The vines in this forest are quite fleshy, and you may be able to live on a few of the beasts that wander these woods."

The soldier didn't go away, but stepped forward to help the drone from falling over, and hissed, "You gave me a name." It repeated that sentence a dozen times as it fled from the growling drone. It couldn't believe what had just happened to it. A name, a name. The prince had given it a name, only the highest of honors a changeling could receive.

When it grew tired, it sat down against a great tree, muttering to itself, "T'ap'arrakan. Wanderer. T'ap'arrakan." It slumped against the trunk of the tree, and shook its head disbelievingly as sleep overtook it.

A figure moved between its body and the rising sun. It considered the changeling at its doorstep, and asked, "What have we here, a lost changeling with no fear?"


The grey pegasus dragged himself back to the library, pulled the door open, and quietly closed it after entering the darkness of the tree. He hauled himself up the staircase to the bedroom, and slipped through the doorway. He sighed heavily as he looked the bed over, noting that it was taken.

He didn't want to assume that sleeping in the same bed was okay with Twilight. She'd said to stay out of it if he didn't bathe, but he didn't know if that meant she was okay with sleeping in the same bed together.

He turned around to face the rug he'd used before as a blanket, only for the floor to vanish beneath him as a purple glow encased his body.

Twilight lifted the blankets up with her hoof as she set him down next to her, and let them fall again as she reached a foreleg around his chest. She yawned, her jaws opening wide as she did so, and smacked her lips quietly. She shifted her hips a bit under the blankets, snuggling up to the stallion more closely.

Fangheart's ears stood up as the recently declared princess held his back to her chest, and he turned his head to look at her as she moved to kiss the back of his head. Their lips met in the quiet, the dim light of the stars, and the middle of the night. They both remained still for a long while, only moving when he rolled over to hug her.

When Spike awoke early the next morning, he found Twilight's quilt over his head. He crawled out from under the blanket, and looked up at his friend. His jaw dropped at what he saw, and he tossed the quilt back over the sleeping couple, a persistent, wide smile on his lips. He went downstairs to get breakfast, and when he looked up at the sound of footsteps, he saw the couple making their way down the stairs, their eyes flooded with glee.


A wretched cry emerged from the Everfree Forest, a horrid, twisted sound. It was like that of something dying very slowly, but with a bit more to it. It held a drive within it, and the speaker itself was driven to one baser instinct. As it hauled itself free of the tree line, it grunted painfully.

It was a changeling. It was a worker. It was in pain. It was not following orders. It was dying. It was going insane. It was so helplessly on death's doorstep. Already the infection had crept from a patch of chitin on its leg to its stomach. Thin, short, white stalks of the parasite had already begun to push through its thick chitin from the inside. Its stomach was covered in what looked like white fuzz, and it burned like all of Tartarus was bearing down on it.

It pulled itself along by its front hooves, careful not to move its hind legs, as doing so had only caused even more pain in its stomach. It pushed its way through a thick, wooden board, and whimpered, "Your highness." Its legs gave out from under it, and it gave out a frantic chirping sound as its stomach screamed pain to its underused brain.

It began to cry, a helpless, dying mass of parasite and changeling. It didn't know anything. It could only hope. It could only hope that the hive mind had not led it to the wrong place. It had been cut from its knowledge a bit ago, but the struggle to get here had felt like a million years of agonizing pain, and it could only follow one basic instinct.

It had to find him. It had to find him. It had to find the prince. It had to find the monarch. It had to at least tell him, warn him to stay away, even if it would soon die. And it would, of that much it was almost certain. It was already contagious, and the mere fact that it had risked killing him by finding him seemed like madness to the Matriarch.

It had been given this one mission, this one final task, this one last quest. It had to fulfill its last command.

It felt something roll it over, then drop it, and screamed.

Fangheart covered his nose with a hoof, held his breath, and backed away from the infected worker. He had already dragged it inside so he could close the door before anyone could see it. He pinned his ears back as the worker let out an ear shattering scream, and realized that he was in his pegasus form.

He darted forward, and covered its mouth with his hoof, silencing it. He bit his lip, and uncovered his nose. He sighed heavily, and hissed in Changeling, "Why do you bring your plight to me now? I am not coming back, so tell your Matriarch that I am not returning to become her concubine."

He had assumed that the worker was connected to the hive mind, and that another worker would relay his message to their leader. He was wrong, as he quickly discovered, for the worker simply lay there, whimpering like a hurt dog.

Workers couldn't react to pain, he recalled. This couldn't have been a worker, but some other changeling disguised as one. But an infection as progressed as this one would have prevented a transformation altogether, so this had to be a worker. This didn't make sense, and that conclusion was further compounded by the worker when it hissed, "It hurts. Do not return. Do not return to the Hive, your highness."

No changeling was crazy enough to say something like that to the last changeling capable of reproduction.

Fangheart's head swam, and he could only hiss, "Who are you?" He knew that no worker could answer that. Workers were never given the opportunity to become heroes, earn names, or serve the hive in any respectable or noticeable way.

The worker fell silent, save for its timid whimpers, and its helpless crying.

Fangheart didn't know what to do. Nothing made sense to him anymore. The hive was in danger, and already had a decreasing population, and this worker was telling him to stay away, and not to return so he may assist the broken hive. This worker had thought, and done so in a way that acted in the evicted monarch's best interests.

"What happened to you?" he hissed.

The worker covered its eyes with its hooves, and cried.

"Twilight!" he called.


The worker remained as still as a rock, unwilling or unable to move as the water bit at its stomach. It could only whimper in pain as the white fuzz on its stomach released acid onto and into its body as it was met with water. It could only hope that the prince was safe, and that it had not caused him harm.

Fangheart placed a warm hoof on the worker's forehead, and sighed as he dripped disinfectant onto its stomach. He knew that the parasite was of a fungal nature, and that no amount of the fluid he used would get rid of it, but the fungus often brought other infections with it, and anything to prolong or save this worker's life was of value.

He looked over his shoulder as Twilight darted into the bathroom, presenting a vial of noxious purple fluid to him. He nodded to her, setting down the disinfectant on the wall of the bathtub, and took the vial. He carefully dripped a tiny amount of the fluid onto the worker's stomach, watching it carefully.

The worker writhed as the infection reacted to the experimental drug. It gave off a thin, grey smoke as the fluid met its stalks, and the worker whined as her stomach burned all the more.

Fangheart narrowed his eyes at the fungus, watching it appear to fall off of its stalks, only to grow back. He sighed in frustration, and shook his head. He grabbed a blade from a first aid kit, and swept it over the worker's stomach, cutting free several stalks, which he gave to Twilight, who put them in a glass container, and raced back out of the room.

After several hours and vials were spent like this, Fangheart simply inserted a bright red pill into the worker's mouth, closed its maw with his hooves, and hissed, "Swallow." He stroked its neck to help it go down, and sighed as the worker complied. Within moments, the worker was out cold.


Fangheart gulped as he set the nearly unconscious changeling down in the very prison cell he'd occupied just a few days ago. He didn't dare chain it, as such a thing would only cause more pain. He lay it down on its back, and looked up at the doctor, who had come to properly anesthetize it.

The doctor was an earth pony, with a bright white coat, soft pink mane, and blue eyes. She wore a white cap, with an image of her cutie mark on the front. Her mark was a blood red cross with little hearts between the angles of it.

He bit his lip, and watched carefully as the doctor set down a chrome cylinder.

She attached a clear tube to it, and the other end to a big machine Twilight had helped her transport from the hospital. She turned the valve on the cylinder, and set down a mask on the worker's face. She looked into its pained, ghostly blue eyes, and said, "Take a deep breath."

The worker looked up at the pegasus who had spoken the changeling language so fluently before, and did as instructed once he'd relayed the message to it in a way it could understand. It felt its eyes growing heavy, its limbs numbing, the pain in its stomach fading away. And in a few moments, its eyes rolled closed.

Fangheart looked down at the worker's stomach, which rose and fell with each heavy breath, and imagined the pain it should have been in. It bit at some part of him to know that he was helping to deprive another creature of its body, even if it was for the worker's own good. It didn't understand what was happening to it. It couldn't have known.

The doctor said, "Hold the mask on its face while I begin the procedure."

He walked over to the worker's head, and used his hoof to hold the respirator still, and watched the doctor as she made dozens of little cuts on the worker's stomach. He gagged for a moment when his eyes trained on the many stalks of the parasite, and looked away to suppress a reflex he'd come to understand as bad.

He looked down at the worker's eyes, and muttered, "You'll be okay. You'll be okay. You're in safe hooves."