//------------------------------// // Chapter VIII - Thought // Story: The Roses of Success // by HypernovaBolts11 //------------------------------// Fangheart chuckled as the white pegasus followed him out of the clinic, and whirled around to face Stoic. Walking backwards, he asked, "So... What'd you think?" The former guard grumbled as the supposed halfling fell into step beside him, and, head held low to the ground, said, "Well, you could have warned me about the straps." "They only had to use them because you wouldn't sit still. Really, the more cooperative you are, the more you'll enjoy this life. You're never gonna be happy here unless you learn to take it all in stride. You gotta keep moving, long, fast, and hard," Fangheart insisted, before glancing down at Stoic's newly documented measurements. "Geez! Now I wish you'd been less squeamish when I asked for a meal." The white stallion's ears perked up, and he lifted his head, blushing deeply as he pieced together his intended meaning. "W-well..." he stammered, and pulled his wings tighter against his sides self consciously. "I... Wait, you can read this?" He lifted up his right hoof, and pointed at the vibrant green characters and symbols carved into his shackle. Fangheart stumbled for a moment, and said, "Um... my mom sorta... deciphered them in her spare time." Their bat pony neighbor, who Fangheart had learned was named Honey Moon —seriously— ran up from behind them, and walked alongside Fangheart, asking, "What're you guys talking about! How does their measurement system work? How do I read this?" Fangheart stopped walking, and whipped his head from side to side, checking to see if any changelings were nearby. How the changeling texts were written was a closely guarded secret, knowledge held solely by the queen and a few select infiltrators. Odds were, the very changelings who had been engraving their records in the library didn't even know how to write. They were likely receiving the information on how write from an infiltrator, but had no clue what the actual symbols meant. Well, they knew what they were writing, that it was about the prisoners, but not how to write it. It occurred to Fangheart that he may have been the only living creature in the subterranean city with any knowledge of how the changeling writing system worked. Not even Pick, smart, clever, and skilled mare that she was, had a clue how to read anything other than the symbols on her earring, which she had worn since the day they'd gotten married. He still remembered the look on her face, when he had been allowed by the physicians around her, who were busy checking that her measurements were all accurate, to present the torus of gold to her, and the spark of intrigue that had filled her eyes when the cold metal shackle that she'd worn for most of her life was finally removed. She had been, for lack of a better word, happy. He jumped when Stoic's unicorn partner, Throwing Spear, shook him free of his reverie. "Are you okay?" he asked the halfling. Fangheart nodded, and quickly led his three friends up to his suite, and then shuffled them into his bathroom. Closing the door behind them, he said, "Pardon my choice of venue, but this is the most privacy you'll ever find in this place." He sat down, holding up his right hoof, and rotated it so he could point his other hoof at a particular line of green shapes, which was elevated above the other information on his shackle. He said, "I don't entirely understand how this works, but, when they translate from Equish to Changeling, they put the direct translation of a certain word into some sort of function, and they put the rest of the information they need through it, they get a seemingly random string of Changeling letters, and that's what they write. They do this with most written things, but the prisoners' numbers need to be understandable at a moment's notice, so every changeling should be able to read this." Honey Moon leaned forward, his star shaped pupils widening as he did so. "So... They encrypt their written word," he observed. Fangheart cocked an eyebrow at him, and said, "Pardon?" The bat pony cursed under his breath, "I wish I had my notebook." "You can probably buy one at the market, but wha-" Fangheart began, before the door slammed shut behind the aforementioned bat pony. He shrugged after the stallion, and asked the two former guards, "Do you know what he's on about?" The two remaining stallions looked at one another, before Spear said, "Encryption. I think I remember that from my math class. We were learning about matrixis... matrices." The door burst open, and Honey Moon slammed it behind him as he sat down beside Fangheart. He held a notebook between his forehooves, and a pencil in his mouth. He mumbled around its eraser as he opened the book, "If we use your name as the key, then I might be able to translate it. Or..." He looked Fangheart in the eye, and asked, "Wait, did you say that your mother cracked this?" Fangheart looked down, forgetting for a moment that he wasn't the same Fangheart that Twilight had found on the street, that he was supposed to be another lowly halfling, and not an orphaned drone with an unknowing lover half the continent away. He saw, for a brief moment, his mother's face, and then her eyes rolling closed. He firmly said, "Unless Elysium can spare her a few minutes, she isn't of any use to us here." No one dared to speak. After a long, tangibly thick silence, everyone turned to the alleged halfling, as he quietly whispered in as much a singsong way as a whisper can, "This day has been just perfect, the kind of day of which I dreamed since I was small..." He choked on the words, before storming through the remainder of the verse, as though it was the only way he could ever remember the great being he had first heard sing it. "Every 'ling did gather 'round, said I look lovely with my crown-" He sniffled, and wiped his tears away with a hoof. "-What they didn't know is that I have ruled at all." It was one of his mother's favorite songs, one she had written for the day of her coronation, and had continually modified and amended over the course of her reign. Not an eventful month went by in her reign that she hadn't added to the song. It was, nowadays, the basis for the most sacred of songs in the Changeling world, sung only in small units, a few verses at a time, for it was very long. It was the piece into which the vast majority of their many battle cries, poems, and historical texts were built. There were other poems, of course, but none as highly acclaimed or popular as the songs of the queen. He had never been taught the meaning of her words, for he was just a drone. The arts were reserved to be taught to those upon which it would not be lost, such as the soldier caste, and the infiltrators, who definitely needed a diverse set of problem solving skills for their primary job. While his mother had gone out of her way to raise him in a fairly unorthodox fashion for a drone, she had not taught him everything. She had shown him how to read and write the language of the raw, unchanged translations, but not the subjects the soldiers cited as boring, such as higher mathematics and history. He clenched his jaw, now on the verge of tears, unable to think of anything but what he was missing, what he was in the process of losing with each passing moment. Every second that went by, Twilight likely grew less trusting in him, and he would have another world of explaining to do if he ever got home. When he got home, he assured himself. It would happen. He would go home, and everything would be better. He would never leave her side for as long as he lived, not ever again. No force in the world would separate them until death came to their door. No circumstance nor evil conjured in the depths of Tartarus would compel him to leave her. A whole month had passed, and he had not fed in all those days, not in the most efficient ways anyway. Pick had spared a few hours to chat with him, and get to know one another as friends would. He had felt her friendship, refueling him, revitalizing the part of him he needed to simply bear the pain of losing what he couldn't replace. His heart still ached, throbbed with the strain of simply continuing to beat without Twilight's love to empower it. And he had done some good to feed the physician taking his measurements, but that had only drained him, in a way that he was not used to. He was not familiar with the sensation of being used, of being emptied momentarily of his very lifeblood as a pony —or, half of one. As a drone, he had been at the top of a great food chain. Sure, his mother's own social pyramid had always dwarfed his, and sometimes he had seemed more like a stray brick, just barely free of the responsibility borne by every other participant. He had never given up a shred of his gains. He had never been subordinate to any living creature. But, he had, on some level unknown to him, enjoyed the infiltrator's reaction. He had willingly offered his services to it, and it had rewarded him with a good word to its superiors, along with a very fine dirty look. But, no matter how intimately that changeling had touched him, he still felt more distant to it than Twilight, whom he had never touched in an intimate way. They had shared many deep, and heated moments of contact, from a peck on the lips, to a full scale invasion of one another's open maws. They had discussed the many differences in culture, mating behaviors, and sexual habits between their worlds of origin. He had allowed her to take incredibly extensive notes of his distinct anatomy, and even made a few wise cracks that she enjoyed staring at his haunches a bit too much, but they had never done such intimate and primal things as those he would undoubtedly engage in on a daily basis during his captivity. And yet, despite his changeling logic, and his knowledge of psychology and physiology, he was still baffled by his unprecedented connection to the lavender alicorn. He had never shown her the full extent of his experience and prowess in the intricacies of sex. He had never expressed himself to her as he had only ever known how. And yet, despite the lack of such bonding activities, he loved her so much more than he had ever loved anything. He loved her more than the very air he breathed, and he had never engaged in the throws of passion with her. Love didn't make sense, he supposed. He promised himself, right then and there, that if he ever saw Twilight again, he would correct this error. He would show her the full extent of his love, of his undying longing for her. He was a creature of a single cause, of a responsibility as old as life itself, to continue the grand story of life through any method possible. Even if he never sired a single child, even if he never became the father his hive had trained him to be, he would at least do what his body was always designed to do, and he would do it with her, with his love, with Twilight. He felt a soft hoof resting on his shoulder, and glanced at Honey Moon. His promise wouldn't mean a thing if Twilight didn't trust him. If she had moved on, if she had stopped caring, he would be just as lost as the day they met, when his mother had died, without a purpose, without a home, without a reason to live. He stood up, and marched through the door. He had a revolution to start. That was his purpose now. Twilight and tears would have to wait. Fangheart bolted into the mess hall, looked around, searching for Pick. She had said that she had a job later that day, but he still needed to formally discuss his plan with her. It was utter chaos. Changelings piled atop one another, ganging up on prisoners three to four at a time. The air was thick and heavy with the scents of sweat, sex, and pungent, overpowering lust. Intoxicated changelings sat against the walls, passed or waiting out their euphoric highs as the dozen or so prisoners were harvested for all they were worth. So many changelings were gathered in one particular pile, that his search came to an end right then and there. That was definitely Pick, though he couldn't make out her figure against the black chitin of her hungry mob. He rolled his eyes, which felt really strange, given how changelings couldn't move their eyes independently of their heads. He muttered, "Great. She must have used that stupid perfume." He was being a hypocrite, since he was more than publicly known for enjoying the scent, particularly when she went into heat, but this really wasn't the time for it. He froze at the sound of a commanding, authoritative voice, and slowly turned around to face the changeling who sat at his mother's seat, on an elevated platform, with a largely ceremonial table in front of it. The table was only their to give the queen a choice between sporting her ovipositor or preserving what she had, for lack of a better word, called dignity. An infiltrator, with ghostly blue eyes to match those of every other changeling alive —not counting him— leaned forward over the stone table at the back of the room. Its right shoulder was adorned with two white stalks, one twice as long as the other, and was wrapped in a bundle of thick cobwebs. It looked old, like the other members of the elite, as the softer chitin around its eyes and joints was wrinkled with age, and that around the holes in its legs had cracked. It narrowed its eyes at him, and spoke in such fluent Equish that it caught him off guard, "Halfling, a halfling has chosen to attend?" He then realized that everything had stopped. Not a changeling moved, and all eyes were directed at him —aside from the prisoners whose respective pony piles got in the way. He gulped, and bowed his head low to the ground, figuring that he was probably talking to, if not the Matriarch, then someone of incredibly high status. The infiltrator cocked its head to the side, and said, "Halfling, come, speak." He reluctantly stepped over incapacitated workers and soldiers, making his way along the wall to his left, and up the short staircase to the nobility's deck, whereupon the rampant orgy resumed in earnest, all at once, as if every changeling knew exactly when to continue. The infiltrator running the whole affair watched him as he stepped towards it, biting his lip, examining his ragged indigo mane, and misaligned grey feathers. It patted the ground beside his mother's throne with a hoof, and, when he sat down, dug its nose into his mane, inhaling deeply. It drew its head back, and stated, "You smell familiar." He tried not to let his flat expression change, and instead glanced down the length of the grand dining room. It was nearly twice as long as it was wide, with the only exits located along the wall to his right. He said, "I have been here before." It reached a riddled foreleg to his right shoulder, and gently ran the cold pad of its hoof down his spine, causing his wings to bristle against his sides, and his tail to flick. It said, "You have heard of me." He nodded, and said, "Yes, Matriarch. I heard you were unwell, when I was recaptured." "The plague is not undefeatable. I am strong, one of the many reasons I possess my current position," it said. It then sighed, pulling the end of his left wing towards it, spreading his avian appendage with a single motion. "Alas, others have been less fortunate, and even I did not escape unscathed." It turned its head to face him, and pointed its left hoof at the bandage on its right shoulder. "So I've heard," he nodded. "My personal physician says that you were a rather grateful patient, a uniquely... willing participant," it said, fondly running its hoof along the leading edge of his wing. "I was also informed of your... peculiarities." He looked straight at the far end of the room, and said, "I'm sure I don't know what you mean." Its tattered wings began to hum, vibrating back and forth in a display of mild amusement. It smiled dryly, which was as good a smile as an infiltrator could produce, and asked, "May I see your numbers?" He nodded, and, without shifting his gaze, raised his right foreleg across his grey chest, presenting the cold metal binding that fit snugly over the leg below his ankle. "I have not yet begun my service to your... administration," he told the Matriarch, and allowed his gaze to shift towards the group of six or more changelings who all staggered back from Pick, visibly exhausted. Its humming stuttered, as though it was chuckling, and it said, "Funny. I'd like to call it an administration." It leaned towards him, and whispered into his ear, "But I've barely had the guidance Chrysalis enjoyed." He flinched, and turned his head to look at the infiltrator. Speaking the queen's name was only done in times of necessity, such as to distinguish between queens, but not in daily conversation. It was wrong, it was blasphemy, it was disrespectful. It wasn't a punishable crime, but it wasn't the kind of thing a plebeian did without expecting some backlash, without implying that the leadership was weak. "Ah..." it said at length, gently running its hoof through the feathers on his now erected wing. "Forgive me. I was not certain of your relationship to the queen. But she is no longer sacrosanct. Our slaveholder is gone. We are free." He still wrinkled his nose at the idea, that one could simply speak the names of gods without worry. He had been the queen's confidant, and even he had only ever spoken that name once aloud under her care. He had been understanding to Twilight for using the name out of naïveté. He didn't hold ponies to the responsibility of understanding his culture. "You must be hungry," the Matriarch told him, and licked its lips suggestively. "Why not take a bite out of your friend, that delightful gem?" It lifted a hoof to point at the dwindling group of soldiers about Pick, and added, "She was the prince's only concubine. You'd be missing out if you didn't at least try." He nodded, understanding by the tone of its voice that it wasn't a suggestion. "Yes, your..." he asked, leaving the title empty. "Motherliness," she told him, and added, "I'll be watching. My bed always has room for a more... seasoned meal." "Yes, your motherliness," he said, folding his wing at his side, and licked his lips, trying not to think of how this infiltrator would be watching him indulge his friend/former concubine, from his mother's seat at the table. He had to consciously suppress his gag reflex at the thought. He wasn't new to the concept of being judged on his prowess. It was what a drone did: show off, charm the queen, buck until her brains fall out. That was that, but now he was performing for a common infiltrator, an old one, and a powerful one, but a plebeian nonetheless. He reminded himself that he was currently of a lower status than Pick, which had never been true before. Not only was he a new, inexperienced prisoner, but a halfling, a simple, bland halfling. Some halflings did have their own flavors and flare to show, but no one knew if he had any such gift, not even him. Grinning as he made his way down the stairs onto the mess hall floor, he decided that he'd just have to find out. Orders were orders, after all.