Bad Mondays

by Handyman

Chapter 46 - Away with the Faeries

It was colder than he remembered, though still hotter than hell in comparison to the wintry landscape of Equestria. Handy was not prepared to find out that the ponies’ weather control extended to straight up climate control. Exiting a cold snap in Equestria into the dusty, sun-kissed, dry, cracked ground of the Badlands was an awful shock to the body, especially on a train.

He stepped off the train onto the bleached wooden platform, much to the surprise of some of the frontier ponies. It was small comfort he was not wearing his armour, because between his patchwork robes and his hood, he was still sweating his bodyweight due to the heat.

“How you holding up there, mon ami?” Jacques asked smarmily, now sporting a beige hat he had won off of some foolish old donkey at cards on the way to this little slice of nowhere. Oh, and talking donkeys were a thing now. Handy felt just peachy knowing that even more of his reality kept getting fucked over. If he found talking cats, he swore that he’d just kill them. It was bad enough he had had to slake his thirst on some poor bastard’s unfortunate pet cat before they left Brightshowers. The scratches on his face healed, true, but it was still amongst the foulest blood he had ever tasted, and there wasn’t near enough for his weekly needs, but at least it had taken the edge off.

“As well as can be hoped,” Handy muttered. “I’m done with the old man routine; too hot for the extra bother.”

“It’s not that warm. It’s winter, remember?” Jacques remarked as the pair walked down the steps, avoiding the main terminal building of the train station. The ponies they passed only gave the slightest of passing stares to the strange minotaur and his cavalier pony companion before going about their business.

“It’s warm for me,” Handy retorted. “You still could’ve warned me about the train transition.”

“You never asked. I thought you’d know.”

“Last time I was here it was summer. Everywhere was warm. I never went from freezing cold to open air oven so suddenly before. I thought I was catching ill.”

“Oh stallion up, it’s a learning experience.”

“So is my boot up your arse.”

“Tsk, you are testy this morning.”

“I have every reason to be.” Handy’s mood didn’t improve as they made their way over to a sundry goods store. It was a little trade depot at the very end of the Equestrian rail track, five miles from the officially recognised borders of Equestria and over the edge into the Badlands.

Most kingdoms had claims on the Badlands—the ones that bordered them at least—Concordia and Equestria being the biggest stakeholders. As a result, almost all of these realms had settlers and settlements loyal to them just beyond their borders, but not much farther than that, as well as various freeholds. There was nothing in the Badlands worth fighting over: no arable land worth a damn, hardly any large bodies of water, no rivers, nothing mineable beyond the few measly deposits found close to borders. What was extracted from the earth was usually brought from settlements to little depots like this to get goods and luxuries from the more prosperous and happy lands beyond the borders.

Hence why Handy and Jacques were there now.

“Bonjour!” Jacques chirped happily, accompanied by a little bell that rang as they entered the store.

“No solicitors!” a gruff voice answered from behind the counter. Handy could vaguely make out a bald—well, bald for a pony—brown head behind the broadsheet newspaper the storekeeper was browsing.

“Oh no, mon ami, I am not selling anything.” Jacques took off his hat and placed it on the counter before he wiped his brow. Handy turned and looked around the shop, leaning on his staff more than he’d like. It was exhausting in the heat at the best of times, but swaddled as he was and having to maintain ridiculous balance on false hooves, his energy wavered constantly. “Rather, I want to buy.”

The storekeeper lowered the paper, squinted at Jacques’ beaming expression, and snorted, shuffling the newspaper and disappearing behind it again. “I don’t speak fancy, no troubadours.”

“Oh no, are you sure you’d want to turn away our custom? We have come a long way. Surely you can accept even a troubadour's gold?” Handy turned and cocked his head. Jacques’ demeanour hadn’t changed and he was still plying the charm, but he had felt a wild spike in the swordspony’s emotions. The little roiling sphere of emotion kept bubbling away under his skin.

“Yep, I’m sure. Scram!” Jacques’ smile strained slightly as he gently placed his hoof on the counter.

“We are only looking for some water canisters and other travel goods. Perh—”

“Get out before I call for the guards! Out with you!” he shouted. Jacques’ jaw set hard, and he opened his mouth to speak—

“Perhaps you’ll be more willing to deal with me?” Handy asked, stepping to Jacques’ side, planting his staff lightly into the ground next to the swordspony, who seemed like he was about to react very badly to the storekeeper’s rudeness. The storekeeper looked up at the cloaked minotaur, and his mouth twisted.

“I don’t sell to freaks, not two hooves or two hooved freaks. Get out.” Handy had to admit, this shopkeeper had balls as big as Scotland to say that to a minotaur. Either that or he was as ignorant as a Swede in a salt desert. Not being a minotaur, he didn’t take offence, but he did not care for this guy’s attitude. He clasped the top of his staff in two hands and leaned on it.

“We’ll only take a few minutes of your time.” Handy tapped his staff and mulled things over. Jacques looked at him sceptically, wondering what he was up to.

“Are you deaf, horn head? I said get out!”

“At least look me in the eyes when you insult me and my friend,” Handy replied calmly, but forcibly. The pony put down the newspaper, the high back stool he was sitting on creaking beneath him. He looked up sternly into the minotaur’s hidden face, his eyes barely more than a glint in the shadow.

“Fine, I’ll say it to your face! Get. The Tartarus. Ou—!”

“Five canteens of water, a barrel, two bags of flour, some rope, dried goods,” Handy interrupted. “Promptly please.”

“I beg your pardon!?”

“Three canteens first if you would.”

“Why on Earth would I serve you!?”

“Because we are paying. Can you get us a couple of canteens please?”

“Oh fine, if it’ll get you out of here!” The pony reached below the counter and produced two metal canteens on the counter. “There!”

“How much?”

“Fifteen bits. Each.”

“Que!?” Jacques exclaimed. “That’s ridiculous!”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Ten bits,” Handy said. The shopkeeper glared at him. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

“Thirteen bits,” the pony said after a moment’s hesitation. “No lower.”

“Eleven.”

“Twelve and no lower!” he exclaimed, slamming a hoof down.

“Alright, alright, no need to get angry. Oh, and could you give us just a couple more? Please?” he asked, never breaking eye contact, his voice curiously level. Jacques looked between them again.

“Oh, fine! There, that’s four canteens!”

“How much did you say they were again? Ten bits?” Handy asked, keeping the storekeeper’s gaze as much as possible, ensuring he looked back up at him each time he turned away to fetch things.

“Yes that’s right, ten and no lower!”

“Ridiculous. I’ll pay seven bits per canteen.”

“Nine!”

“Eight. We’ll pay eight per canteen.”

“Fine fine, just give me the money a-and get out!” the storekeeper shouted, shaking his head, brow furrowed. He looked down at his counter as if confused.

“A pleasure, glad we could come to an arrangement. Oh, hmm, we might need just one more. How much did you say they were? Five bits?”

--=--

Jacques was a cautious pony, and a cautious pony did not take potential threats lightly.

Handy was now a threat in his eyes. Well, more so than usual.

He had watched the exchange between the human and the shopkeeper intently, disbelieving of what he was seeing. Handy did… something to that stallion. He wouldn't stop staring at him, did everything he could to maintain eye contact with him, and then proceeded to fleece him blind, somehow convincing the guy to part with his goods at ridiculously low prices. Well, low in comparison to the absurd prices he was trying to charge.

They had witnesses too, regular patrons who had come into the store expecting to fight for every bit in trade. Thankfully, from what he could tell, none of them suspected anything more than the possibility that the shopkeeper had gone mad. The poor stallion had seemed so confused when they were done.

They walked together in silence after that, their bounty trundling along behind them on a bleached wooden cart whose wheels were fashioned from barrel lids. The dried, cracked ground was covered in a layer of billowing dust that kicked up by a sudden gust of wind, the sun beating down on them relentlessly.

"So," Jacques began, breaking the silence between the two, his voice conversational but level, "what exactly happened back there?"

"I haggled," Handy replied simply after a moment's pause.

"No, seriously, what happened?" Jacques pressed. His tone brooked no argument on the matter. Handy looked down at him. Jacques, for his part, had his hat lowered just enough to hide his eyes from Handy's own, focusing on the human's veiled lower face.

"…Ask Thorax next chance you get," Handy replied, looking back to face where he was going. "She can explain it to you better than I could."

"Are you saying she… taught you that?"

"...After a fashion."

They walked on in silence, heading to the local watering hole for some shade. Handy in particular did not seem to be handling the heat well. The saloon was a humble, run-down affair with a hole in at least one of the thin wooden walls, but it was shelter from the sun, and the water they served was clean and wonderfully cool.

"I'll never understand how you furballs can stand that heat…"

"Hmhm, the weather not to your sensibilities?" Jacques asked, horn lit and pouring himself another glass of water from the decanter, still not looking the human directly in the eyes and not forgetting the change of topic for what it was.

"Milesia is not known for its pleasant weather," Handy remarked quietly. Strange, he didn't seem to check to see if anypony was in earshot before saying that. Jacques did a quick look around. Sure enough, nopony was nearby, but it was unlike him to be so careless.

They sat in silence, enjoying the coolness and their water as the few patrons came and went, with only the saloon owner behind the counter to concern them. Jacques spent the time considering his options and wondering if it really was wise of him to gamble on the human's good graces to keep him out of the Viceroy's hooves. Changelings were one thing; he had experience fighting off changeling hypnosis. It was why he was never afraid of Thorax pulling that on him. Even if she did, he could fight it off. The human however… there was no warning, no sign, none of the tell-tale indicators anything was happening. Tartarus, even the victim seemed normal, as if he were doing everything under his own impulse, but there was clearly something very wrong. Jacques was in no mood to risk the same fate befalling him.

"Something bothering you?"

"Hm?"

"You're never this quiet, at least not while staring at the table."

"My apologies, mon frère, I am just thinking," Jacques replied. After a moment, Handy sighed.

"If it bothers you that much, I don't like doing it," he said, shifting his weight on the too-small chair and leaning his staff against the table. "It's hot, I'm tired, my legs are cramping because of these damned 'boots', and we needed supplies. I was in no mood to tolerate his shit."

"Still…"

"You make kissy face with a changeling, Jacques. You are in no position to lecture me on bad decisions." Again it was said in a whisper, but Jacques' ears pricked and swivelled, looking about just in case somepony overheard.

"Can you keep that down?" he hissed. "Somepony could overhear!"

"No one's close enough to hear, trust me. But this gives me a good opportunity to talk to you about… something important." Handy joined his hands and leaned against the table. Shrouded in patchwork robes, face veiled, and black horns poking from the sides of his hood, Jacques realised he looked very much like one of those crooked old mystery stallions one would hear about in creepy old traveling stories, making diabolical, supernatural deals that always backfired horribly on the foolish mortal who entered into them. He kept that to himself. No doubt Handy would be tickled pink by the idea, and Jacques did not care to put up with such a façade that he'd no doubt adopt.

"And what would that be?" Jacques asked, lifting his hat a tad to let his face be seen, still not looking Handy in the eyes.

"We're about to go somewhere very, very dangerous."

"Is it Monday already?"

"Funny, now shut up and listen. I need you to answer me truthfully and maybe, just maybe, we'll all get out of this alive." Handy waited until he was sure Jacques was not going to make any more wisecracks. At the small, confident smile that spread across his face, Handy continued. "I don't think you know the full circumstances of what and why myself and Thorax are on our way to her little hole in the ground."

"I've been told some bits, but I've been fishing for the rest."

"Well, now you'll have my side of the story then. I've been here before. I am on the home stretch now, and I need to make sure nothing else goes wrong. If everything goes as I hope, then maybe, just maybe, we'll all get out of this alive, and then we can start talking about that debt I supposedly owe you."

"Which you do owe me."

"Details. But I need to ask you a very important question."

"Go on."

"How fond are you of Thorax's continued existence?"

--=--

Speaking of a certain changeling, she was busy forcibly pinning a pony to a mud brick wall, cracking the dried plaster that covered it.

"What’s going on!?" she demanded in a harsh whisper, teeth clenched. The poor stallion she had at her hooftips was clearly undernourished and could barely withstand her. Either he'd been paying a heavy 'tax', or he was such a failure that he had been unable to siphon off even enough residual emotion from the town around him to feed himself. "From here to Manehatten I can get nothing about what’s going on. What’s happening back in Lepidopolis!? Why doesn't anyling know!?"

"I don't—hrk—know! I don't know, alright!? Let me go!" the brown stallion pleaded. The pair stood in a dusty side street behind an alcohol and tobacconist's shop. The short wooden building provided just enough shade to cover the disguised Thorax, while allowing just enough sunlight to blind her poor pinned captive.

"Beetle shit you don't! I looked the other way when you wanted to go solo. Now you’re going to return the favour!”

“W-What makes you think—” He yelped when Thorax used her magic to press him harder against the wall. “Okay, okay! I’ll talk!”

“Good ling,” Thorax said levelly. She let up the pressure, allowing him get a few breaths of air before slightly increasing the pressure and urging him to speak.

“Right, right, okay, you know how lots of changelings have been going to Lepidopolis now that it's been found?”

“I am vaguely aware of The Great Return, yes,” Thorax deadpanned. There were few events in recent memory that were directly relevant to every single living changeling, but this was one of them.

“Yeah…” He took moment to gather his breath. “Anyway, other… other changelings have been coming for the past month. Not Chrysalis’—I didn’t recognise their shell colours or their true voices. I don’t know how they found out about me, but they’ve been extracting Fen’s price.”

“Fen’s price?” Thorax parroted questioningly.

“I can barely feed myself,” the stallion said bitterly, looking off to the side. “Nearly everything I get has to be given up. At first it was weekly, now it’s day by day. At first I thought you were another one of them.”

Thorax got a bad feeling almost immediately and let the changeling go. He fell to the dusty ground with an ‘oof!’ She studied her surroundings intensely, reaching out and trying to sense anything. No, no hidden signals of inexperienced field agents. Most of what she could sense was more than a dozen metres away in any direction, so the changeling she did need to worry about couldn’t be nearby. They still had some time before whoever these changelings were showed up to shake down little Quartz over here. She rounded on the recovering changeling who was busy picking himself off the ground and rubbing his chest.

“This is bad,” she muttered.

“Oh no, I thought my day would start off much worse than getting beaten by an old sidhe member.” Quartz spat onto the ground, and Thorax rolled her eyes.

“Oh, you’ll get over it; this is important. Look do you still have your hex?”

“What hex?”

“The hex. For emergency situations?” The stallion looked up at her confusedly.

“Y-Yes, but I don’t even know why I keep it. Not as if I am exactly welcomed back there.”

“Well times change, I need you to get it for me.”

“What? Why don’t you just fly back there yourself!? You aren‘t rogue from the colony!”

“Because the same lings that have been bleeding you dry are likely the same ones guarding the way into Lepidopolis. We need your hex now.”

“I can’t just give it to you, you know! It’s tuned to me!”

“That’s fine, we’ll just steal you too.”

“Wh-What?” Quartz stuttered. Thorax glanced around some more.

“My my, I do sense some arrogant ponies who just arrived in town. You don’t suppose they’re your usual ‘friends’ would you?” she asked casually. Quartz froze, wide-eyed, his head snapping in the general direction of the town’s western entrance.

“We might have, what, a couple minutes at most before they close in on you and take what pitiful energy you managed to get today?” she asked, poking him in his exposed ribs. “Tick tock, Mister Skin and Bones. You can either come back with us or try to make it through the night with an empty heart.”

Quartz gritted his teeth, his brow furrowed in heavy thought. He looked up at Thorax with something resembling betrayal and fear, though he kept his emotions level. Pity, he had been such a great infiltrator back in the day, but even the most skilled changelings struggled to survive outside a sidhe or a colony. The thought elicited concern over an idea she had been jealousy hiding away at the back of her thoughts. She crushed it and focused on the task at hand.

“Alright,” Quartz relented, “but we need to use it now.”

“Not yet, I need to bring the others along with us.”

“What? What others?” Quartz demanded. Thorax smiled.

“Just a couple of friends.”

--=--

“What the buck happened here!?” Thorax demanded. It had taken her a few hours to extract herself and Quartz from the Town of Dustfalls, having then following the train tracks at the distance and flying close to the ground from shade to shade. They finally reached the trade depot close to evening. Handy personally found it very weird to see Charity Bell as a pegasus rather than a unicorn.

“Nothing,” Handy murmured as he sat on an upturned half of a barrel. He had a canteen of fresh water pressed against his veiled face to ease the pain of his black eye. Jacques was similarly scuffed up, but lacking a black eye himself, he was in considerably better shape. He sat sullenly at the other half of the barrel, flipping cards over and over again in some solo game with an annoyed expression on his face. Thorax cocked an eyebrow, looking between him and Handy. “Just a minor disagreement.”

“Oui,” Jacques added at last, “just a disagreement.”

The pair was seated in the shade of a building at the edge of town when Thorax found them. The four of them stayed there in silence as Thorax tried to puzzle out what had occurred while she was gone.

“So who’s this guy?” Handy asked, with only a modicum of his usual irritability. “Another changeling?”

His question was asked so casually that Quartz was caught off guard. He froze up for all of a second and was about to bolt then and there before Thorax’s hoof on his shoulder brought him back to reality.

“Yes, actually, and he’s our way in.”

“What— Thorax, what is this?” Quartz asked desperately. He was trying not to stare at the minotaur but was finding it distinctly hard to ignore the void in reality where a living being should be. Thorax put on her best obliviously happy pony smile as she turned to Quartz.

“Don’t worry about it!” The face immediately dropped as she turned back to the humanotuar. “But seriously, he’s our way in.”

“Chere, why do we need him? Don’t you know the way to the city?” Jacques asked.

“Yeah, we’ve already got the supplies ready for the trip,” Handy added dryly, shaking the canteen of water. “No trains into the Badlands interior I’m afraid. We’ve got a long ass trek ahead of us and more people just means more we have to ration supplies. I’d actually like to plan ahead for once so unless—”

“Oh forget all that, we’re not walking,” Thorax interrupted. Her wing lifted from her side, revealing a strange circular construction held within her feathers. It looked chitinous, not unlike the material Handy had encountered covering parts of Lepidopolis when he was last there. It had a green pulsating gem in its centre, with barely perceptible, scratchy runes along its edges that pulsed lightly in tandem with the gem. Handy had a vague sense of recognition, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“We’re not?” Jacques and Handy asked simultaneously.

“Nope, we got another way in, courtesy of Quartz over here.” Thorax gestured to her companion with her head. Quartz, for his part, looked slightly outraged at the use of his true name in front of these strangers. “Relax, Quartz. Like I said, these are friends.”

Quartz looked between the three of them. The swordspony eyed him levelly, and the Void, who could only ever be one person under that hood, stared at him blankly. He felt distinctly uneasy.

“I’m not so sure about this,” Quartz admitted.

“Do you want to starve?” He didn’t answer. “Anyway, Handy, you should be familiar with what this is.”

“Humour me,” Handy replied.

“It’s what I used to get you to Lepidopolis in the first place,” she clarified. No one said anything for a few moments, then Handy dropped his canteen. His empty hand held steady in the air for a moment before it started to shake and closed into a fist.

“You mean to tell me… this… entire time…”

“Uhm, am I missing something?” Jacques asked, looking to Thorax. She tossed the hex at him and he caught it clumsily in his hooves before holding it up to his face with magic.

“Portable evacuation ritual. Relatively powerful changeling magic. Chrysalis had her agents carry one at all times for the past few years for emergency transportation to a safe area. Until very recently, they were all tuned to take us to Lepidopolis. Toss them into any solid frame and it will create a… You know what? You’ll know when you step through it.”

“Why didn’t you have one on you this entire time?” Handy managed from where he held his head in his hands. Thorax put on her best clueless pony expression, complete with wide eyes and smile.

“Gee, I wonder. Maybe it’s because somepony told my queen that they were a really stupid idea, and she systematically began recalling and destroying all of them from her agents?” Her voice oozed sweetness and innocence. Handy looked up. Her pony face was unrelenting in its accusatory joyfulness, and he immediately realised the stupidity of it all. His head fell heavily back into his hands.

“You have got to be fu—”

“Anyway, Quartz here had managed to go solo before they were all recalled. This is his little hold out.” Immediately the three of them looked at Quartz pointedly.

“L-Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Too late,” Handy muttered. “Okay, fine, stupidity aside—”

“So wait, who told the queen these were a bad idea again?” Jacques asked before Handy snatched the hex out of his magical grip.

“Stupidity aside, I’m not going to complain about an easy way in, although I am going to have to demand to know what you plan on doing, Thorax.”

“What do you mean?” Handy glared at her, the memory of his first changeling encounter not bringing any happy nostalgia.

“Last time you dragged me through one of these things, I was surrounded by the friendliest of faces and got knocked clean out. So how are we going to counteract that?” In response, she gave Quartz a knowing look. The stallion fidgeted under her gaze.

“Wh-What?”

“Quartz, where exactly in Lepidopolis did you tune your Hex to?”

“W-Why do you ask?” He shifted nervously, wilting under the glare she gave him. “Okay okay, I uh… I have it set to this little storeroom me and a few others set up for a rainy day. Most of us went our separate ways after the crap that went down with that dragon…” His eyes lingered on Handy just a moment too long.

“Well?” Handy shifted, causing Quartz to flinch. “Get on with it. Is this location secure?”

“Yes, it is. Only me and three others know about it.”

“And who are these others?” Handy demanded.

“Ease up, mon ami.”

“Quiet, I’m not leaving it to chance. I want to know as much as possible about what’s going on before we get there.”

“Well in that case I got bad news for you,” Thorax grimaced. “From the sound of things, the queen doesn’t sound like she’s in charge anymore.”

“What?”

“Quartz here has been on the receiving end of some other changelings, and they don’t sound like our kind. The queen hasn’t been contacting us through the amulet for a while now, and I can’t seem to get any new information out of any of our contacts.”

“You mean all those times you were off doing changeling things?” Handy asked dryly.

“Precisely,” Thorax replied, gesturing with her upraised hoof. Handy tossed her the hex. “So it turns out things might be a little more… difficult than it was when you were last there.”

“Are you fucking kidding me!” Handy slammed his hand down. “All this time and trouble and she just— Is she even alive!?”

“We, uh, we’re not sure,” Thorax said, taken aback by Handy’s outburst.

“Oh well then, maybe I can take that as leave to just fuck off and… and… and... shit…” Handy petered off.

“What?” Jacques chimed in.

“Yeah, I think she’s still alive.” Handy sighed, looking off to the side and out into the vast expanse of the Badlands beyond.

“How can you tell?” Quartz asked.

“Geas, if you must know. She’s either alive or the geas still holds true if she’s dead, I don’t know. It means I still need to get to the city either way. God damn it.”

“I’m… confused,” Quartz admitted. Jacques gave him a reassuring pat on the back.

“Don’t worry, once the screaming starts, everypony will be confused!” He laughed. Quartz was not reassured.

“Okay, so what do we know about Lepidopolis? I want to actually plan ahead for once.”

“Well, assuming we get there relatively safely,” Thorax began, giving Quartz a sideways glance, “the city is swarming. There were still more and more independent sidhes and colonies arriving when I finally left on my mission. We likely won’t be able to move without tripping over changelings.”

“Oh goody, more of you.” Handy sighed. “What else?”

“If Chrysalis is no longer in control and can’t even contact us, then the situation might be volatile, but I have seen no signs of an exodus. Whatever has happened, happened without too much of a fight.”

“Meaning?”

“Tensions are likely high,” Thorax concluded. Handy grumbled.

“So, Chrysalis may or may not be dead, and the city we’re sneaking into is sounding more and more like wandering into a hornet’s nest currently being fought over by different groups of hornets. Great, just great. Any more good news!?”

“We have no means of defence beyond my magic, my sword, your hammer, and Thorax’s pretty face?” Jacques smirked as Handy glared at him.

“We’re looking at this wrong. We still have options.”

“How?” Handy asked. She tapped her hoof on the ground in thought.

“Your glamour. You can use it now, right?”

“Barely. I could just about manage it on demand for all of a minute back in Brightshowers. I’m still not sure how it works.”

“Glamour?” Jacques asked. Handy waved his question away.

“Anyway, you can’t be serious. Changelings can’t feed off of me. Even assuming I could get it to work, they’d pick me out of the crowd easily.”

“No, they really wouldn’t,” Thorax simply said, sitting down, hoof on chin in thought. “If you could hold it up for just five minutes at a time, long enough to get from one spot to another, noling would pick you out of a crowded street full of changelings.”

“Oh, this is rich,” Handy sneered. “Okay, Thorax, by what magical means would changelings not notice the one changeling out of hundreds on a street who doesn’t have delicious emotions to feed off of?”

“Look, it’d take too long to explain. Just trust me on this one.” Thorax held up a hoof as Handy raised an eyebrow.

“While this is all very nice, I believe you still have a problem to sort out before we go anywhere.” Jacques gestured to one of the bags. Handy looked over his shoulder at the pile of goods they had spent that morning gathering for a long trek across the Badlands that now seemed entirely superfluous.

“What problem? I imagine we could just sell it back or something—” Handy stopped at the look Jacques was giving him. “Or… just leave it here. You know, whatever.”

“Not what I mean. Mon ami, Quartz was it? This, how you say, hex of yours? It is magic, no?”

“Well, of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“And, hypothetically, should something go through said portal that was, say resistant to all kinds of magic… how would that affect the portal?”

“Well I uh,” Quartz quickly glanced to Thorax a few times before continuing, “I’m no mage, so I couldn’t really guess the specific mechanics of it, but uh, I’d think it might destabilise the portal.”

“And what would happen to us while going through it if that happened?”

“...Bad things,” Quartz confirmed. Jacques turned back to Handy with a grimace. Handy just sat there disbelievingly for a moment as he digested that bit of news. He looked back at the various gear they had, back at Quartz, down at the Hex, back at the bags.

“Are… Are you sure simply walking there is out of the question?” Handy asked softly, his brain slowly coming to terms with an idea that he simply did not want to entertain.

“Positive. Why?” Thorax asked, tilting her head questioningly.

“I just... I can’t… I mean I need…” He looked back at the bag containing his armour and the very real prospect he would have to leave it behind. “FFFFFFuuuuuck….”

“Ohhhh, right, hmm. Yes, that is problematic,” Thorax said, rubbing her chin in thought. “Would’ve been useful too. Can’t we just bury it or something?”

“And what are the chances somepony won’t come along and dig it up before Handy gets back to it?” Jacques questioned.

“What other options does he have? Pay somepony here to hold onto the very obvious armour of the very obvious human who is known for wearing said armour?” Thorax retorted. “The guards would be called within a day and he’d never get it back.”

In fairness to them, the pair was trying to think up a solution to this sudden conundrum, but Handy had tuned them out. The very idea of having to willingly part with his armour was… strangely frightening for him. Sure, it chafed and pinched and cut away here or there—it was never fitted properly to begin with—but that damn thing had saved his life on more than one occasion, vampirism be damned.

It was more than the physical comfort it gave him; it allowed him a sense of invulnerability against magic, a great and admittedly terrifying unknown. One unknown amongst many. It seemed childish in retrospect, but looking back, he had effectively been using it as a security blanket. The world was strange and confusing, but it was okay, for he was surrounded by a metal shell. He was strange and confusing, but that was okay, for he was contained within a metal shell. He had come to associate an unhealthy sense of comfort and security in that suit of armour that went above and beyond battlefield paranoia, and now that the very idea that he had to part with it…

“…Handy?”

“Huh?” He blinked and turned back to face Jacques.

“You alright? You weren’t answering me there for a bit,” he asked with a look of mild concern.

“Fine, fine, just… considering my options,” he said irritably, his knee bouncing in irritation. “You?”

“Me?” Thorax blinked.

“Are you one hundred percent certain about the fate of Chrysalis?” he asked curtly.

“Well no, of course not, I was just speculating—”

“Not good enough. I don’t want to be in that filthy hole in the ground for any longer than I have to.”

“Hey!”

“Shut up. I was done with this nonsense months ago. If I have to leave my armour behind, fine, so be it. Let’s get this over with.” He rose unsteadily to his feet. “And help me out of these blasted leg clamps! This disguise isn’t going to be doing me any good down there whatsoever anyway.”

Jacques rolled his eyes as his horn lit up to help Handy out of his current predicament. As he did so, Handy kept telling himself if worse came to worse, so long as he made it out, he could always find his armour again with the witch torch. Or hell, just commission new armour. Heat Source lived close to the north of the Badlands, right? He’d be heading that way on the way back to Griffonia anyway. You know, assuming Chrissy dearest let him get out of there alive. Maybe he could get her to make something that didn’t rip and tear so easily to boot. He could get anyone to take their time to make him some new armour true, but hey, why settle for anything else when you have the slim possibility the first blacksmith you ran into is able to successfully replicate the whole magical resistance angle?

Still, even if he did have other options, the temptation to just stick the armour on and lug it overland in the vague direction of Lepidopolis was still strong. Sure, getting across that blasted hellscape was hard, but how hard could it be really if he had proper guidance and he prepared beforehand?

--=--

Very. Hard.

Crimson found herself panting heavily by the time they reached a crest in the dry cracked earth. The dust of the desert billowed in the wind, forming tiny dust devils along the plains as the sun beat down upon them. Her cloak was scant comfort amidst the dry desert heat. Winter though it was, and much cooler than last she was here, the mercilessness of the Badlands made itself well known. She levitated a canteen to her muzzle and drank greedily of its remnants. Her thoughts were jumbled and frazzled from the heat of the day and weariness from the trek.

Her two companions were not doing too much better. Still retaining their pony disguises, Glimmer and Façade had come to rely very heavily on Crimson for their protection from the elements during the nights and days when the occasional dust storm or flash flood caught them unawares. At one moment, they had had to dig the ground out from underneath a rock outcropping to use both as a wind shield and to ward away the ferocious denizens of the desert. More than once she had forgotten to take precautions and set her wards up before sleeping, but her companions still hadn’t acted against her. How fortunate for them.

A few times, when she had expended a spell to detect a pocket of fresh water beneath them, she had called upon the raw force of her old magic to draw it up. They had prepared well, but nopony complained about more fresh water. It was only when the illusions began that they started to have trouble. Illusions of a road or town in the distance, the sound of trickling water from just over the next rise, shouts for help inexplicably heard coming from behind dangerous looking rocks. That was when her 'friends' proved to be useful. More than once she had been warned off from paying attention to the false visions, guided this way or that when they encountered a specific illusion. Sometimes she had been stopped in her tracks, forcibly by the pair of changelings, and when she snapped at them, they had revealed how she had almost walked head first into a dark chasm to fall her death.

She had not even noticed the illusion before it was dispelled. That was some serious magic, and she could not even detect the slightest aetheric whiff of the spell that created it. Once she had even seen a tall, monolithic structure in the distance, appearing massive and made out of some strange kind of rock she had not seen thus far in the Badlands. She asked her companions if it was another illusion, to which she was informed it was not. It was in fact a ruin, one she was told she shouldn’t speak of as close as they were, and that they should continue on before the ruin noticed them in the distance. She still wasn't sure what they meant by that but had followed their advice as they hurried along, keen to put the vision out of sight.

But for all their aid, the trek was still arduous. They had crossed the border from Equestria three weeks ago, and all of that time had been spent just simply getting to here. Wherever here was. She looked up, and sure enough, there was nothing before her but more empty expanse of blasted landscape and dry, cracked ground with the occasional scrub brush here or there. Her ear flicked under her hood, picking up just over the sound of her panting breath. She glanced down to see a small scorpion meander its way across the ground towards her hoof. She lifted her forehoof and crushed it without a second thought.

"Where are we now?" she asked testily. She had not exactly warmed to her former captors, but she had somewhat begun to tolerate them more. They had been become considerably less annoying since they started their journey into the interior of the Badlands. Probably because, much like herself, an arduous trek through dry blasted wilderness did little for one's tolerance for frivolity.

"I don't understand…" Façade began, looking to and fro, fluffing his pegasus wings in agitation. "We should be here."

"Did we double back again? I swear, if we ran into another new illusion…" Glimmer cursed.

"Who even set up these new traps? We already lost several days’ travel because of that last turn you suggested."

"Hey! I'm not the one who nearly ran us headlong into a nest of rock crabs!"

"Oh, but you were the one who nearly dropped our canteens down an illusionary well!"

"The well fooled all of us and you know it!"

"Enough!" Crimson shouted. "Will the two of you stop it. You can kill each other when we're done for all I care." She turned back around so she could continue glaring at nothing. Glimmer and Façade looked at each other for a moment, their mutual annoyance getting to them both. Add to that fact that both changelings were very hungry, and they were more than a little testy in their own right. They had prepared for the trip beforehoof. Sure, Crimson had little problem with letting them go off to gorge for the long trip. Ordinarily they'd fly most of the way, but given that they had to guide a pony who couldn't fly, they remained grounded.

Three weeks was a long time to go without feeding on emotion, even if you started with a full tank, and physical food by its lonesome was not enough to keep a healthy changeling alive.

But that wasn't Crimson's problem now, was it?

No, her problem was finding her master, and the nag who had dared to falsely imprison her just to get at him. That left her with the empty expanse she was looking at.

No.

It wasn't empty, was it? Her horn glowed, at first the healthy red of her own, personal magic. The power rippled along her skin, coursing through her nerves until it reached the cluster at the base of her horn, gathering and concentrating there in a millisecond before encompassing the bony protrusion itself. She pierced the open expanse before her, probing it with her magic, trying to uncover—

Something large and black appeared in the air before her, a mere second before it collided with her jaw, jerking her head violently and sending her flying backwards with the force of impact. She landed on the ground painfully, skidding to a halt between Glimmer and Façade. The two changelings reacted with alarm, Façade taking to the air and Glimmer's horn lighting up. More black forms emerged from the very air itself around them, some sneering, others grinning. Most bore expressionless masks.

"So, some of Chrysalis' lost little ones come back home to roost, and what’s this? A little gift for your fallen queen?" one of the bigger changelings piped up. He bore armour on his forelegs, with little else to distinguish him other than an orange shell worn on his back, under his wings. His eye covers were of a similar colour, denoting him as originating from one of the western colonies by ethnicity. "You can drop the disguises. We know what you are."

The pair slowly dropped their disguises, the gentle wing flaps of Façade turning into the noisy buzz of his changeling wings.

Glimmer's horn remained aglow with a spell. "What is the meaning of this?" she demanded. "Let us through! We have as much right to the city as anyling!"

"Oh I don't think you do, sweet stuff," the changeling said as he strode confidently up to the still prone form of Crimson on the ground. "I don't know how long you've been away, but times have changed since your pitiful wretch of a leader claimed the crown for herself… again."

"Watch your tongue, vermin," Façade hissed through clenched teeth, fangs bared. The changeling sneered.

"I'd take your own advice if I were you, small thing. In case you didn't notice, you're outnumbered, and your kind is hardly welcome in Lepidopolis anymore. As for this," he kicked the unresponsive Crimson once, "we'll be taking this. My sidhe could use a restock." He received a hiss from another few of the orange-shelled changelings, and he snarled at them, his ears flicking to and fro. "Fine, I'll share."

"No!" Glimmer said, taking a few steps forward before she was dragged back and pulled to the ground with magic by a few of the other changelings. "You can't!"

"I can do whatever I want, low breed scum!"

"You don't understand! She's not food!" Façade tried to explain before being grappled by two other changelings.

"Oh, and what else could she be? This pony's not good for much else…" he said, a wicked smile creeping along his face as he leaned down to roughly where Crimson's ear would be beneath the hood. "Or are you? I know you're awake down there; I didn't hit you that hard. I can hear your praying under your breath."

"She's not praying…" Glimmer murmured fearfully. Façade looked alarmed and tried backing away, stopped only by the changelings weighing him down.

"What?" the lead changeling asked, before leaning down, listening intently. He could just barely make out the sounds coming from the mare's mouth.

"…vasicum os fekir, helum iud ilukuime!"

Crimson's eyes shot open, their surfaces blank apart from the sickly white-green glow as mist flowed from her sockets. Her mouth opened wide in a soundless chant as her body levitated inches off the ground. The cracks in the dried ground beneath her lit up, expanding from where she lay as eldritch tendrils of energy struck out beneath the earth until they came to rest underneath each of the changelings. The ground exploded outwards, claws of hardened earth erupted around each of the screaming changelings before closing in around them, trapping them in their deathly grip, closing, crushing in on them, and pulling them back into the crater of earth from which they emerged.

The changelings that had gripped Glimmer and Façade were torn away from their victims by the remorseless claws of earth; the ones who were quick and took to the air were snatched from the sky as ropes made from earth leapt up with preternatural speed and wrested them from the safety of the skies. Each and every one of them was pulled slowly, deliberately into the ground until they were submerged, their last sights and sounds being that of their comrades being pulled to their deaths in the same manner as themselves. The changeling at the forefront was the last to be consumed, pulled until only his face remained above the ground. He could barely get the air out of his lungs to scream. He looked up to see the floating form of Crimson Shade before him. Her form was enshrouded in a black cloak that rippled from the energies flowing around her body, her head haloed by the sun which should have casted her face in shade, but oh, oh no, for there was a much more hideous a sight to see instead of a black, anonymous silhouette.

Her face was aglow, her eyes alight with eldritch flame as if burning from within, her open mouth moving in accordance with unspoken obscenities, and from each orifice on her face, more of the ghastly, smoky substance dripped forth, heavier than air, falling to the ground before dissipating and disappearing from sight. She leaned down to him, and with a soft voice that did not come from her still moving mouth, but rather from everywhere at once, she spoke.

"No, I'm not good for much. My old mistress would agree with you." She paused for a moment, delaying the changeling's death by mere seconds so he could hear her. "Except this."

She allowed him to be swallowed by the earth, just like the dozen or so other dark splotches of disturbed earth surrounding them, where trapped and terrified changelings lay buried alive. She allowed herself to drift slowly to the earth until her hooves touched the ground, and then she raised her right forehoof slightly before stomping it to the ground and twisting her hoof into the earth in one short, powerful movement.

There was a resounding sound of over a dozen sickening, muffled crunches and sudden movements in each of the disturbed earth patches. All went silent in the Badlands. Only the soft wind rolling over the desert refused to hold the silence. Glitter and Façade were left lying where they were, stunned and terrified, eyes forward, staring at the back of the black-clad unicorn as the breeze tugged at her cloak. They both jumped when she suddenly looked back at them with a neutral expression.

"Well, it looks like Façade was right after all. We're here," she said evenly, turning back and walking towards the vast expanse as if nothing had happened. "Come on, I still need your help if I'm to find your queen. Sounds like she's not in the best of positions. How unfortunate."

She didn't stop to see if they followed her or not—the charms would let her know their distance. Crimson was more concerned about simply descending into the darkness below her. As she advanced, the illusory landscape before her rippled and warped, like a still body of water vibrating rapidly as the ground beneath it shook before finally letting her pass, the magic washing over her form like a sheet of rain as she passed through and saw the rock formation revealed before her. It was an arch of red rock three times the height of a pony, its opening like the maw of some great desert beast half buried in the ground. She paused there to take in the sight before inhaling deeply. Her knees nearly buckled from under her, and she grunted as she stopped herself from keeling over then and there. Her horn lit up as she lifted out her spell book from her saddle pack, flipped it to the page she knew the spell was on, and recited it to memory once more.

That had been a hard one on her, especially in her current condition, but it was safe. She was prepared, and nothing would be lost. Briefly in thought, after she was reassured she had relearned the magic used, she flipped the book to another page and lifted out the loose sheet of notes she had made from studying the slim book her master had retrieved from the dead prince's room so long ago now. That spell could come in useful down there. She only hoped she was right in her musings. The Mistress had forbidden any independent study and research in the magic that was not overseen and directed by her for her own benefit.

Well, the Mistress wasn't here now, was she?

She studied the sheet some more before putting it away and marching forward into the darkness. A short while later, two other living things followed after her.

And Crimson smiled.

--=--

Lepidopolis was teeming with life. The sheer noise alone was palpable, but above all, the first thing Handy noticed as he exited the portal was the most shocking.

He could feel them.

Hundreds of them, thousands of them overwhelming his auspex all at once and causing him to stumble and fall to his knees, hands clutching his head as he tried to deal with the pain of the sudden rush and demand on his mind. He forced himself to discount more and more, to withdraw the range of his senses until he could only feel the people in his immediate vicinity.

That had been unexpected, both because Handy had not accounted for the sudden sensation of feeling an entire city full of living beings instead of the few dozen that had occupied the trading post where they had just been and, as he later realised, he did not expect that thousands of changelings, left to their own devices amidst other changelings, would wear their emotions on their sleeves.

He knew that much about his auspex. It meant that he felt others, not saw them, but lacking the proper vocabulary, he was hardly in a position to speculate about the implications of a literal sixth sense, and God knew what else his vampirism meant he was capable of down the road, never mind explaining to Jacques his sudden stumble.

"Nothing… it’s nothing, just… I really, really hate teleportation. Of any kind," Handy explained as he tried to shake off the nauseous feeling the changeling portal had left him with. He had experienced at least five different kinds of instant teleportation now, if you include that space warping nonsense that went on in the Greenwoods and Lady Ashiah's ruins. Changeling emergency hex teleports which involved jumping through a portal of what appeared to be green fire, which did wonders for Handy's newfound pyrophobia as you might imagine, were his least favourites. Both because of bad memories, the fact that it looked like a vortex of green fucking fire, and because it left you with a dizzying, whirling sensation accompanied by a lovely feeling of burning.

He'd skip the memories of the forest fucking with his perception and, you know, fucking teleporting him, armour and all, across a damn chasm.

Last but not least, was following Whirlwind into those creepy ass ruins in search of the Greater Spirit of what-the-fuck. You know, it was not that the instant translocation from one place to another as soon as he crossed a threshold that got to him—it was the implication that at any point he'd cross over and had not realised he'd been transported. Imagine if you walked out your room one day and suddenly you were in Siberia. You'd be a little perturbed too. Oh, and while we're at it, let’s all imagine the many strange and exciting ways such translocations could have gone wrong. God only knew what other wonderful ways one could instantly go from one place to another.

"I swear to God I am done with teleportation, ugh." He pushed himself back to his feet as the last of them, Thorax, stumbled through the portal and got to her feet.

"Hmhmhm, mon ami, then how else would you prefer to get from place to place then?" Jacques teased as he poked about the various pots and boxes in the rather cramped and dark room they were in. Quartz hurried from place to place, horn aglow and disguise dropped as he checked various things, making sure everything was where he left it.

"I have an airship, I’ll have you know. I'll be using that from now on instead of being a slave to trains and magical knickknacks that knock me around the world like a cosmic ping pong," Handy muttered to himself as he found a place to slide down and Jacques found himself busy with Thorax. "No more of this carry on, furthering about on the ground, no more bullshit, just a straight shot, pew, from A to B and Hell take the hindmost, rasenfrasen…" Jacques raised a questioning eyebrow at Handy before turning back to Thorax.

"How are you holding up?"

"Just give me a second…" Thorax said, shaking her head as she took in a few breaths. "It’s been… a while since I used one of these." She steadied her breathing and allowed her eye covers to recede. "Well, if one good thing has come of all this," she said, blowing hair out of her face, "it’s unlikely most lings will even recognise me as military, what with all this mane hair."

"A comfort, I am sure," Jacques said, eyeing the other changeling in the room, his voice lowered, "and him?"

"Hmm," Thorax acknowledged thoughtfully, eyeing Quartz. The stallion was emaciated, even by changeling standards. She waved Jacques closer so they could talk a little out of the stallion's earshot. "Perhaps it’s best if you stay here with him."

"Me?"

"I can slip out there. Handy has… ways of getting by unnoticed. All you have is your ability to hide your emotions. It’s surprisingly like a changeling's," she said simply. Jacques didn't rise to the bait. "Quartz needs reassurance we're not going to abandon him here, and we need to ensure he doesn't rat us out for his own gain. You need to keep a watch on him so we can maintain a safe home base. Can you do that for me?"

Jacques' face was impassive for a moment before smiling gently.

"Stay here in the heart of a city full of delightful ponies all too ready to capture me and bleed my heart dry while keeping an eye on an untrustworthy rogue changeling we only just met, who's stuck down here with us and nothing but my wits and charm to keep me safe?" he asked in mock thoughtfulness. "Why, anything for you, mon chére."

"Flattering," Thorax said dryly, though she didn't stop him theatrically lifting her hoof to kiss it, "but I mean it. I can't hide you that easily, and it’s either this or hide another body."

"Well…"

"Jacques."

"Fine, alright, I'll keep him out of trouble," Jacques said as he gestured for her to follow just a bit further back into the storeroom. Handy glanced over to them for a moment before being distracted when Quartz let out a yelp and had a crate fall over him. "And if you cannot hide me, chére, how do you expect me to get out?"

"Well, I… I'll work on that," she said uneasily, looking away for a moment. Jacques’ smile dropped slightly. "Truth is, I was planning on having you stay behind, for practicality's sake. But things changed. If… If Chrysalis is out of power, I need someone down here I can… I can trust," she admitted, her eyes narrowing pointedly in the direction of Handy and Quartz. Jacques didn't follow her gaze, instead focusing very intently on not letting certain conflicting feelings any air to breathe. It wouldn't do.

"You can trust me to do the best I can," he said, nudging her. "Alright, I'll stay here and keep our new friend out of trouble, for his own sake of course. Are you sure you can keep Handy out of trouble?" he asked just loud enough to garner Handy's attention as they navigated their way through the storeroom back to them. The human had been busy trying to pull a crate off of the weakened Quartz who, as one might imagine, was simply delighted by the proximity of the Pale One, helping him or not.

"What's this now?" he asked, finally levering the heavy crate off of the hapless ling. "And what the hell have you stored away in these things?" Quartz didn't reply, just trying to scurry away to put some physical distance between him and Handy. He ran face-first into Jacques' chest, and the unicorn lifted the smaller stallion up by the scruff with his magic.

"Now now, mon ami, it’s rude to enquire as to another pony's possessions," Jacques said, sitting Quartz up and dusting down his wither, making the poor, harried changeling even more confused. "It has been decided that I will be staying here, holding down the fort if you will," Jacques gave Quartz a hard look, "and taking care that our friend here is not discovered by anyone unsavoury, of course."

"Wh-What?" Quartz mumbled.

"Well… I can't argue with the logic there," Handy admitted, quickly coming to the obvious conclusions that brought Jacques and Thorax to this decision themselves. He shifted in his makeshift robes that had been mightily uncomfortable in the heat of the Badlands above, but surprisingly comfortable in the caverns beneath it.

"Right," Thorax said definitively, looking around the room. It was the same dusty, smoothed rock walls from before the changelings had reclaimed Lepidopolis; unchanged, no sign of the chitinous covering she was used to from changeling settlements. Good. "Quartz, you said you and a few others used this storeroom as a private stash. I assume all this," she waved a hoof at the collection of crates and boxes filling up most of the space, "is yours? How likely are we to have one of them drop in on us right now?"

"I, uh, not very likely I should think. Most of them settled away from the Badlands. They shouldn't run into any trouble bad enough to force them to… take the emergency route home."

"And what quarter of the city is this in?"

"Western, near the slopes to the pit."

"Good. Handy?"

"Yes?" He turned towards her.

"Get ready, we're going out there."

"What? Now?" he jerked in faint surprise.

"Yes."

"Shouldn't we wait? You're the least likely to rouse any suspicion. Shouldn't you go out and get a feel for the city before we do anything like, say, drag me out there? What if you're wrong?" he argued

"Your glamour either works on multiple targets or it doesn't, and the longer I spend out in public, the greater the risk of recognition, so scouting is out of the question. It’s better to limit exposure altogether, and either you can hide yourself from everyone at once or none at all. So get to it."

"What?"

"Try it out."

"Here? Now?" the scepticism in his voice was palpable.

"If you can fool all of us at once, you can fool a street. The number of onlookers shouldn't matter by that point."

Handy looked around him: a curious Jacques who, thus far, still had no idea what they were talking about, and a random changeling. As much as she may have had a point that this was as good a control group as possible—one person who knew full well what he could do, a non-changeling who knew he could do weird shit but not the specifics, and a clueless bystander who was an expert in deceiving others visually—it all did nothing to ease his sudden sense of stage fright.

"I'm… not sure about this. I could barely get it to work on command before."

"I'm sorry, do you want to remain under a geas or not?"

"…Fine," Handy said, standing up with a sigh and looking down at his audience, his hammer clinking against his belt and side pack. Three points of light lit the room, two green and one golden, from the points of their horns. He grimaced as he focused on each pair of eyes, in turn closing his own to steady his nerves. This, if experience had taught him anything, was going to hurt like a bitch. He had an image in his mind, a rough one but it would have to do. He had a desire; he had to make himself want it. He could figure out the hows and whys of how his vampiric magic worked later. It wasn't just the intent, wasn't just the desire to be seen as what he wanted, but specifically that he didn't want to be seen. Something else had to take his place when others looked at him. Perhaps not wearing his armour would be a boon in hindsight, but there was only one way to tell. He opened his eyes.

"Okay, I want you all to close your eyes. That means you too, Quartz. Open your eyelids so I can see you closing your eyes." Quartz seemed to swallow a moment before retracting his eye covers, revealing bright blue eyes. He then closed them. "Right, when I say open them, don't laugh. I swear to God if you do…"

--=--

Two forms entered the darkness of the western quarter of Lepidopolis. It was a rundown area, even in the city’s heyday, when it was alive and bustling with life and its stonework was fresh and new. Low, squat structures in ordered rows and streets situated on a depression led down from the city into a hollow in the earth, the black expanse beneath them that was still as yet unexplored by any of the city’s new denizens. The streets were even more broken up than the rest of the city, broken flagstones giving way to gravel and churned rock.

Yet even here in the depths of the earth, in the heart of the blasted, sun-cursed landscape above their heads, life bloomed. Changelings took to the streets, sounds of industry and commerce ringing through the air. Smoke and smells wafted into the air, carried up by hidden currents and eddies of air that took the smog and pollution into ancient, hidden canals buried through the rock, away from the civilization below.

Changelings filled the streets going about their business like any other city would. Indeed, if one did not know any better, one would not think there was anything amiss.

Oh, but there was.

Thorax was the first to exit the back streets from their hidden location, emerging into the crowded street before her and looking up and down impassively. Changelings of every shell colour imaginable could be seen, obscured and confused by the various mane and tail colours of the civilians. Guards denoted by helmets of moulded onyx and iron stood out from their lessers by their brutish distinction, their wicked spears held ready as they eyed the bustling mob suspiciously.

This was not good. The colonies should not have mixed this readily. This many mixed sidhes should not be this comfortable together unless… Thorax shook her head and pushed on, spotting a good position ten metres down the way. This was the Commune's portion of the city, which meant they had some leeway in terms of being noticed. This many different changelings in this tightly packed an area was good initial cover, but it wouldn't do to risk standing out. She felt eyes upon her immediately when she left her side street. That was familiar, almost reassuring in changeling society. She just hoped her little tagalong coped.

Not long after she left her spot, another changeling emerged. It was lanky and wore a grey cloak apparently hewn from rags. Blue eye covers hid its pupils. It wore bandages over one foreleg but otherwise seemed nondescript. The ling took in a breath before walking out into the crowded street once it saw an opportunity to enter the flow.

Handy did not like his current position. Not one bit. Every nerve was on edge, every muscle tensed and ready to lash out. Still, he held firm; he held his nerve. He didn't dare reach out with his auspex to see how many eyes were upon him, to know exactly how many fucking changelings were surrounding him right this second. He could not afford the additional mental strain, no how much paranoia urged him to do it.

One changeling almost brushed into him, and he had to swerve his feet to avoid him. It was working. It was then he realised how stiff his movements were. Not good—someone might find that suspicious, as if he were a changeling in the wrong neck of the woods.

'Why isn't anyone stopping me?' he thought to himself as he passed by more and more changelings. More than a few eyed him as he passed: some dispassionate observers, others with the look of habitual suspicion in their uncovered eyes. Still, others covered their eyes and hissed at him as he passed, usually the changelings attending stalls that were selling… something. He didn't linger; they made it clear they didn't want any business from him. 'Can they not feel the lack of anything when they see me pass? What’s going on?'

His musings resulted in one changeling bumping into him. For one, terrifying moment, Handy's heart stopped.

"Watch where you're going, beggar!" the changeling hissed at him in its two-toned voice, swatting at the cloak he wore. Handy briefly thanked God for the foresight to include the cloak in his disguise. The changeling felt nothing untoward when it bumped into him. His disguise had held. "What!?"

Handy blinked and hurried on, realising he had been staring at the changeling in partial shock and not wanting to linger any further. Later he would realise the odd benefits of being disguised. You know how when you walked down the street, you automatically judged the appropriate amount of space you had to leave people in front of you so that you did not crowd them or bump into them? Well, when everyone saw you as a changeling, they did the same, leaving Handy with an inordinate amount of space in front and behind him, but very little for his sides. He'd think about that later because right now he was suffering under the mother of all migraines.

It had started off small, like a sudden piercing pain in the head, just above his left eye. But it had grown, each progression lancing into another part of his brain as he spent longer and longer projecting his glamour. His greatest trial was when he passed by a pair of changeling guards, one of whom was eating something that looked uncomfortably like a cooked rat in some kind of flat bread. The pair had been eyeing him since he had run into that other changeling, and continued to do so as he passed.

The pain in his head grew, and he could barely focus on the street in front of him. He saw where Thorax had exited the street from. He was almost there; he could not afford to pause now. He could not afford to risk what others might see if, say, he lifted his hand to rub his forehead. Would others see him merely lift a forehoof to do the same motion, or would the illusion do something altogether unexpected? Or would it break entirely? He did not know; he could not know. He had to go before anything happened. He saw one of the guards turn to murmur something to his companion, and Handy hurried his pace. His eyes were almost forced shut with the pain by the time he turned the corner and into the dark little corner of the world Thorax had led him.

Then he had the pleasure of being grabbed from somewhere and dragged into darkness.

"Did anything happen!?" he heard Thorax's familiar voice hiss. Handy whirled around to see the changeling stare up at his true face in the darkness, barely perceptible from the street lights and from the cave ceiling above. His disguise dropped from the shock of being grabbed. "Were you noticed!?"

"I… I ran into someone."

"You what!?" she quietly screeched.

"It’s… It’s okay, he didn't see me. He still saw what I wanted him to see… Thorax, how is it that none of them noticed that I'm, well, me?"

"…What?"

"Heartless… How come they couldn't tell I was Heartless? I should have been a blank spot in a wall of colour to them."

"Oh… did you not sense them?"

"No, I was a bit busy focusing on other things," Handy groused, gently rubbing his head. Since he had released the glamour his pain was receding, slowly.

"Well, take a moment and see for yourself," she said, gesturing to the street. Handy waited a moment, giving her a sceptical look before reaching out with his auspex and… okay, whoa.

"Why…” He paused as he grunted, the pain in his head spiking. “Why are they all hidden? Why is every single one of them holding back? Are changelings afraid of each other stealing their emotions?"

"I wish…" Thorax murmured as she rolled her eyes. "This is just common practice when two hostile sidhes have to live in close proximity with one another. It’s even worse when it’s rival colonies."

"Explain things as if I wasn't actually a changeling, if you please," Handy deadpanned.

"Okay, look, a sidhe is… Think of it as an extended family you can join or be made to join. Smallest they get is twenty changelings. Mothers, daughters, siblings, fathers, you get the idea."

"Be made to join?"

"Abup bup, short version, remember? A colony is a catch-all term for any collection of sidhes that governs itself and can take on a variety of forms. Chrysalis is my Queen for example."

"Okay…"

"Some colonies are more… radical than others. The Commune is one such, and we're both lucky and unlucky to have ended up in the section of the city claimed by them."

"How so?" Handy asked, withdrawing his auspex before it extended too far. There were easily a thousand or so changelings just in their vicinity. He felt like talking even quieter after that. He had also sensed, apart from nearly a thousand dimmed signatures from changelings hiding their emotions, thousands of absolutely tiny signatures that winked in and out of existence all over the place, and he would really rather not dwell on the implications of that.

"The Commune break sidhes up, treats itself as one large sidhe. No hierarchy, everyling is responsible for everyling else."

"And that explains the distrust how?"

"Because that means everyling is responsible for reporting on every other ling's discontent," Thorax said simply. "Makes you a little jumpy when there are no lings within your colony you can genuinely, for better or for worse, call your own. So everyling hides." She walked around him to peer around the corner, looking down the side street.

"That was the new normal for a while now. With all the colonies moving to settle in the reclaimed city, changelings from sidhes of one colony distrust another. I was banking on it being the case that most if not all lings would be hiding, at least until they got home behind their own walls. Here in the Commune, it’s the norm all the time, whether there are rival colonies nearby or not.”

“So when they saw me and didn’t sense anything?”

“You were a blank spot on a wall painted slate grey. Much less noticeable than you’d think. Now, if you were in the middle of the street on your own, it’d be a different story entirely.”

"Goody," Handy murmured, leaning up against the wall and resting his head against it. It was pretty dark where they were, a small back street, but it wouldn't hide them for long, especially not if Handy didn't adopt his glamour soon. He needed just a moment's rest. "Where are we going?"

"I'll let you know, I just need to… orientate myself," Thorax said, looking up, her mouth moving as if counting. "Okay, come on, I know a place we can find some answers."

"Give me a second."

"We need to move now!"

"Just a second!" Handy hissed as he waited for the splitting pain in his head to ease, just enough for him to concentrate again. The auspex did not help, so he focused his will to suppress that even harder. She looked back at him in agitation, her wings flicking once or twice as he took in a few more shallow breaths before pushing off from the wall. He looked down at her. "Anyone looking?"

She turned to look back down the alley to the main street, up into the sliver of open cavern above the street, and then back down the backstreet she planned on heading down. Noling was nearby.

"Everything's cl—" She blinked. It was still strange seeing a changeling where there had once been a human. It looked back at her impassively, its pale blue eye covers disguising whatever he had chosen for his disguises' eyes to look like. To see that obscured visage in the darkness of a backstreet would be unnerving in any situation, but to know the being behind that face was something much worse than a changeling, something that tasted of the void, was disturbing.

“What?” he asked, snapping her back to attention. She shook her head and looked down the backstreet.

"Come on, we have a bit of a way to go."

--=--

Jacques sat back with a sigh and affixed his hat. Quartz looked between him and the door the others had left through, and shifted uneasily.

"Oh, would you relax? We're going to be here for a while. There's no need to fret," Jacques gestured with a hoof. Quartz’s lip curled and he turned away, looking amidst his collection of boxes and supplies for something in particular. Jacques wasn't unduly concerned. A changeling in Quartz’s condition couldn't do much that Jacques couldn't handle and overcome even if he found a weapon.

The unicorn had been in far too many situations like that to not be confident of his abilities. Still, he kept the rapier on his belt angled and loose for an easy withdrawal. You never know.

"Would you like to play some cards to help pass the time?" he asked, idly scratching his grey beard, contemplating trimming it. Quartz ignored him, horn aglow until he let out a short gasp of victory, pulling a black urn from somewhere. The changeling hurriedly uncorked it and… seemed to breathe in the air trapped inside?

Jacques raised an eyebrow at this. The urn itself was nothing spectacular, although now that he scrutinized it, it seemed to have tiny cracks in a latticework all across its surface. A barely perceptible green glow, of the hue indicative of so much of changeling magic, pulsed through the cracks as Quartz breathed the air within. Each breath seemed to make him more relaxed, less… well, he should rather say more strong, more sure of himself. How very strange.

Quartz at last plugged the urn and put it back on the ground and slowly, with much more confidence and surety than before turned and walked over to where Jacques sat. Quartz’ unshorn blue mane cascaded wildly across his face.

The changeling looked at Jacques with its implacable, shielded eyes.

The unicorn calmly shuffled a deck of cards on top of an upturned box he placed between them, a friendly smile on his face, the hilt of his sword just resting inwardly across his left knee.

"I'm leaving," it said simply. "Thorax isn't here to protect you."

"That she isn't," Jacques said, his horn aglow as he rested his hooves on the box, the cards being dealt to both sides. The changeling did not notice the small sliver of magical aura gracing the underside of the round hoof-hilt of the pony's rapier, just out of sight from his angle.

"Then you know you couldn't stop me, even if you wanted to."

"Oh I wouldn't say that, mon ami," Jacques said, finishing dealing the two hooves of cards. He picked up the remaining deck in both hooves, knocked them against the box to set them straight, and placed them to the side. "Sit, play a game. Let us talk while we wait."

"Do not make this difficult on yourself," Quartz nearly snarled. "I am not staying in this city any longer than I have to. I only came along because the alternative was being made to starve."

"And you're not starving now?" Jacques asked. His face was one of mild curiosity, his hoof of cards held before him in his magic. Quartz smiled.

"I had a little pick-me-up. I'm more than capable of forcing my way out, pony. Let me go and maybe I won't let other changelings know you're hiding here." Jacques only smiled and looked down at his cards. It was a good hoof, all things considered.

"Well, we can't have that now, can we?" he said, his voice a low rumble. Quartz opened his mouth to say something before catching his words in his throat.

There was a flash of silver and the cold press of sharpened steel along the side of his neck, pressing down on his dermis, hard. A sudden movement, and it would tear his neck open. He froze and looked down in surprise. In the second it took for Quartz to decide to respond, Jacques’ hoof had reached to his sword, clipped into the hilt and withdrew the blade in a flash. His magic had opened thin clasps in the blade's sheath, which loosened the cover until its natural, seamless split was open, allowing the blade to be swung literally from the hip in an arc directly resting at Quartz' neck, without having to deal with the hassle of withdrawing the blade by hoof and then thrusting it forth. No need to give Quartz an extra second of reaction time, after all.

"Now, forgive me for being sloppy. I am a much better swordspony with my blade gripped in my magic," Jacques said, looking up at Quartz' shocked face, "but I felt like showing off. One must be proud of their abilities, no? I always did enjoy fighting with my hooves. Much more invigorating, wouldn't you agree?"

"I—" Quartz began but was silenced when Jacques pressed the sword harder, forcing him to move his hooves a bit.

"You are not going anywhere. You will be telling nopony we are here. You are going to sit down here with me, or else I'll be playing cards by myself with a decaying corpse in the room," Jacques said evenly, his smile dropping. "And that would be terrible."

And so it was that the changeling known as Quartz reluctantly sat down on his haunches across from Jacques and looked down at his cards.

"S-So, what… What are we playing?" he asked, and only then did Jacques smile and lift his sword away, resting the blade across his lap, his horn still lit, helping illuminate the dark room. It was all the better to suddenly grab the sword and put it to work if Quartz ever regained his bravery to attempt something. He briefly explained the rules before they set to playing a game, and another, and another after that, rarely talking. An altercation like that can sour the mood somewhat, you understand.

It was some time in the fourth hour that they heard a knock on the door.

--=--

Handy discovered why the changelings had no use for their own currency.

Months ago, he had found it odd that Chrysalis had let him get away with so much gold with nary a hiccup of complaint. One might brush it off as generosity or gratitude. However, even the most generous and thankful of monarchs wouldn't just allow someone who, not an hour beforehand, had threatened their life before saving it to make off like a bandit. Chrysalis was most certainly not characterised by either trait.

When he had been moving from street to street while disguised, slowly, so very agonizingly slowly, he had not noticed it. What he did notice was a very candid look at changeling society from the inside. They bought and traded, mostly tools, physical food, and furnishings, strange changeling creations he couldn't name that were made from that same strange material that now coated everything. Gone was the sepulchral beauty of the stark grey buildings built into the sides of mighty and impossibly ancient stalagmites, their squat, hard, and cunningly carved forms replaced by hard black formations. They were the same ones he remembered from his time in Chrysalis' palace when he had escaped his pod, and how starkly they had contrasted with the fine, ancient carved passageway that the secret switch had opened. It was like he was in some strange doppelganger of the city he had once seen emptied and stalked by an undead terror.

It had been a maze before, back when it was easy to tell the difference between rock and built stone at a distance. Now it was even worse. There were constant low light conditions, made worse by the darkened environs. The false starlight provided by the ephemeral beauty of the luminescent moss and plant life that covered the cavern ceilings was not enough anymore. What little light provided by the strange chitinous substance itself at times didn't help matters. The dominant colours of light was green, but some buildings emitted orange or blue and other soft colours from parts of the strange substance that covered everything. That only helped to cast everything that was partially illuminated by them into soft shadows. The only 'normal' lights could be seen from within buildings through windows that had been left open by whatever changelings were foolish enough to risk it.

The only things that were untouched, it seemed, were the literal hanging sepulchres hanging above them. The tremendous stark white artificial stalactites where, he now assumed, ancient changelings had entombed their dead still hung proudly above, and water still ran down their sides, made to cling to the buildings' sides before reaching a central point and flowing like a waterfall to pools down below.

Handy saw one stalactite sepulchre that missed the point at its base. Ah, memories.

It was while trying to take everything in while again following Thorax from point to point that he risked the strain on his already pained mind by reaching his auspex that he saw it. The prime reason was that he was curious about two changelings who were speaking in a language that definitely wasn't Equestrian. He picked out the two changelings, as both of them had shorn their emotional suppression, ensuring he could sense them clearly.

He also sensed the tiny, almost imperceptible ball of emotional energy floating between them. It grew bigger or smaller as the pair argued until finally it reached a certain size and went to the changeling managing the stall. In return, the buyer took what appeared to be a set of parchments and hard leather bindings in its magic and flew off.

The changelings didn't just siphon off emotion from people for food—their entire economic system was built around it. It was an invisible, intangible currency that could only really be manipulated, stored, and divided by changeling magic. A currency that was consumable, in constant demand, and constant need to be replaced, as necessary for getting up in the morning as it was to paying your taxes. He was only even aware of it because of his auspex. No wonder they didn't care about their own gold coinage.

Handy had been standing there running the ramifications of this revelation through his head before a commotion brought him back to reality. A squad of armed changelings were making their way down the street, and people were getting out of their way. Thorax was all but gesticulating wildly on the far side of the street, so Handy wisely decided to move along before anything untoward occurred.

Rests were short and fitful, and he was glad for every stop they made where he could hide behind something suitably tall in a dark place and give his glamour a rest. If he ever got out of here alive and without a geas, he was going to go straight back to the minotaur disguise, because Jesus was this a pain in the ass. Maybe one day, like his auspex, he'd grow used to it and have exercised the ability enough that the pain would be negligible. Today was not that day.

Thorax had brought them to a series of wide-open, deserted streets. Handy had found it odd, given the general sense of overcrowding he got nearly everywhere else. Getting across a street without worrying about a press of bodies was actually a pretty hair-raising experience at some points. He looked up. The streets seemed to have a ceiling in some parts, but it had been knocked down in others. The streets were lined with empty blocks on either side, open to the streets themselves. There was nothing in them: no squatting changelings, no possessions, nothing. He was about to question Thorax about it until she led him past one intersection that was partially flooded with water. He looked to his right and saw one possible reason changelings might not want to settle here.

For all the pressure and eroding power of the water crashing down on top of it from the broken sepulchre far above them, the bones had remained as strong and as imposing as ever. The leering, draconic skull twice the height of a man and more than that in its length faced him, its mouth snapped closed, its empty eye sockets staring into eternity as rivulets of water washed over and around the skull. The chunk of rock that had doomed the fell unlife of the dragon still jutted from the back of its ribcage, pinning it to the ground from whence it had broken the spells of protection guarding the infernal furnace that housed its soul, allowing the life-giving waters to douse the foul phylactery and end the dragon. There were still ancient blades and weapons sticking out of the sides of its back and ribcage, the remains of others who had tried to slay the beast that could not be felled by swords or spears. Those had not been removed, but the statue upon which he had ridden down to end its life was taken away to parts unknown.

He stood there for a time, gazing in wonder and terror, the memory flooding back to him, trying to think of what mad gambling thoughts had ran through his head to take his hammer to the support pillars and allow the plinth to drop with him on it. What madness had possessed him, compelled him, to take such a stupid risk, one that should have ended his life if there was any justice in the world. Everyone should have died that day. The way out had been set aflame, Chrysalis was about to have her life snuffed out, Handy apparently forgot about that little thing called self-preservation for some God forsaken reason, and the dragon had hundreds of little trespassers in its territory. They didn't die, the dragon did.

He was still standing there, contemplating the immensity of the act that had saved his life and won him his hammer and, in a way, ensured he would be here right now. Had he let Chrysalis die then and found another way out, this wouldn't even be something he had to deal with. He could not comprehend his past self's actions.

"So, you plan on being seen or what?" someone sighed beside him. For the third time in two hours, Handy had to be snapped back to reality. Man, he’d been scatter-brained lately.

"Sorry, I was just… distracted," he admitted.

"And you're naked."

"What!?" Handy looked down at his still very much clothed self, patchwork robes and all. "I'm… not? Oh, oh right!" Handy said, quickly reverting to his glamour. He was still human when Thorax looked, but was a changeling when she blinked. She still didn't understand how that worked, and she was the legitimate shape-changer of the two. She looked down to be eye level with the 'changeling' before her, then glanced over to what Handy had been staring at and saw the remains of the dragon.

"Did they not try to get rid of it?" Handy asked. She shook her head.

"Noling wants to touch it."

"Why?"

"Necromancy is bad luck," she just said. Handy gave her a confused look. "What?"

"Nothing… It's just last time I heard anything about necromancy, it turned out… You know what, never mind. So, is that why this part of the city is so deserted?"

"Yes." She looked around her, her wings buzzing in agitation, "It's why it's useful for a shortcut. Come on, I know a shopkeeper nearby who can help us."

Handy hesitated for a moment as she walked off, turning to look back at the leering, gigantic skull one final time and pondering the dark depths of its eye sockets. It bothered him, though he did not know why. He could not understand why he had done what he did.

He followed after Thorax, his splashing feet in the water at odds with the vision of the changeling walking through it. That an observant onlooker would be perturbed by this would not be an unfair assumption.

--=--

The heavy stone door, still held up by the ancient hinges, nonetheless scraped across the floor with the added weight the chitinous plates the changelings insisted on covering their architecture with. Thankfully, the dark interior had none of that nonsense.

"Go away, we're closed," a scratchy, two-toned voice coughed from the backroom. The pair of changelings entered the building regardless. Handy looked around. It seemed to be a store dedicated to selling pottery. Stacks and stacks of strange pots of varying sizes and shapes stood stacked in neat little pyramids or held in racks along the walls, all uniformly black and all also possessing the tiniest, infinitesimal latticework of random cracks only visible thanks to whatever magic was within them. Dull, pulsating reds and blues and greens and yellows hummed from within. Not enough to illuminate the darkness, but enough to reduce it merely to a ghostly, multi-hued gloom.

"We know you are." Thorax closed the door with her magic and whispered to Handy, "Touch. Nothing."

'I had no intention of breaking open the clearly magical jars, thanks,' Handy thought sarcastically, eyeing his surroundings warily. Thorax walked up to the counter and knocked on the stone surface. Handy noticed that the interior had none of the changeling augmentations the exterior of the building had. It was clean, tidy even, and well cared for. Hell, the stool behind the counter was made of wood and had a leather cover for sitting on. 'Strange, why do they change the outsides like that but keep the interior cosy?'

"I said get lost!" an elderly-seeming changeling hissed as it emerged from the back room with unsteady movements, grey beard with flecks of white, white swept back mane that seemed to be receding, and a cropped tail. His eyes were covered though. Handy had now long associated that with guardedness with lings. It was strange to see an old changeling. Hell, it was still strange to imagine they had eyes under those plate covers and that they could grow hair. Guess that was what happened when your earliest encounters were with military changelings.

"We won't take up much of your time I promise." Thorax remained calm despite his hostility.

"I am not open; get out before I call the guards." His voice was low, his wings buzzing dangerously. Thorax stared him down for a minute before responding.

"I am Thorax, trueborn of the sidhe of Swornfather Ithilid. I am on a mission from her Highness herself and have just returned from the wilds. I need your help." The old ling was quiet for a moment, his wings buzzing once or twice, before sighing. His covers slid back to reveal a pair of tired, lime green eyes.

"Hard times it is if I find common cause with an Ithilid of all changelings," he muttered. "Still, reality is what it is, and I'll put family rivalries aside for now. Follow me, not him."

"What?" Thorax looked as the old man pointed at Handy.

"Don't know who he is, and he smells weird. What sidhe are you?"

When Handy didn't answer, the old changeling looked to Thorax who was also silent for a time.

"He's an ally."

"Hmph, well then he's an ally who can stand out here then." He stomped his hoof firmly, his leg seeming to possess many more holes than younger changelings. His horn lit up and the door to the building was grasped in its aura. Handy heard heavy stone latches slide into place. "You stay put, stranger, and don't try anything."

Thorax just looked at Handy, and he in turn simply nodded back. The pair then disappeared into a back room. The door closed, lit up with magic, and was locked, and only then did Handy let go of the breath he was holding. His glamour dropped immediately, and he gripped the stone counter, leaning against it in a pained crouch as he cradled his head. The pain beat away at every side of his mind like jackhammers, and his vision was beginning to swim. But he kept his mouth shut, not vocalising the pain and grateful for the soothing darkness of the room. A bright light would only make a bad situation worse he intuited.

The pair took their time in the back room, talking about God only knew what as Handy assessed his situation.

'Okay, fuck the glamour. Jesus, is that rough. I need a lot more practice before I use that willy-nilly,' he told himself before realising he was beneath ground. In a locked room. Surrounded by danger. And no idea how to immediately rectify that situation. Again. 'If I keep this up, even dwarves would call bullshit.'

He took out his hammer and took hold of it, just in case. Without his armour, this was his most prized possession and his biggest comfort. Sadly, it had lost whatever magical charge it had gained in Manehatten—he had tested it on a tree a few days back. No satisfying Thorian hammer blow unfortunately. Whatever the witch did to it, he guessed it only retained magic it absorbed, and it absorbed magic that directly struck it. That was at least what he was guessing; he'd have to test it.

Preferably in a controlled environment and not in a fight. That could end badly. Either way, he could break plenty of peoples' faces with—

He dropped the hammer when his left arm spasmed, ignoring the pain in his foot where the hammer struck it as he grabbed his left arm and rode out the pain, trying desperately not to shout out in pain. That was a bad one this time. He held up his left arm gingerly, flexing his fingers experimentally. One more little thing he could do without right now. Looking around, he saw the changelings hadn't come out to investigate the noise. He reached out tentatively with his auspex. Yep, that was the pair of them in the back. No one else seemed to be in the building, and the nearest ling was some guy hiding his emotions in the next house over with another ling whose aura was pulsating wildly. Anger? Probably. Eh, whatever it was, that changeling probably had it coming.

Wait, hold up; there were two coming up the side of the building, one larger and the other smaller, neither hidden. He could hear them now. Was one of them… crying? Curiosity piqued, Handy readopted his glamour and navigated his way to the other side of the room, to a window covered by a thin slab of chiselled rock. It was hinged upwards, so he lifted it up to look out through the partially warped glass.

It was a changeling hovering just off the ground, its wings abuzz with the effort. It had red hair and similarly shaded eyes and was carrying a baby in its forelegs. She seemed to be speaking to it in hushed tones, trying to mollify it. It was surreal to watch. Out of curiosity, he risked the extra pain to sense what they were feeling. Sure enough, the mother changeling was trying to feed the little child, wrapped up in some kind of black weave substance, by giving it little chunks of emotional essence. The little changeling flailed and pushed them away each time and was still bawling, as if starving, yet it was refusing to be fed, and the mother was getting more and more distressed. Handy couldn't make any sense of it.

The mother looked up suddenly and saw him standing at the window looking down at her. She hissed at him and he stood back, dropping the stone cover over the window. He took a few steps back, dropping his glamour, thinking about what he saw.

It was another while before he saw the magical aura on the door to the back room. He quickly readopted his disguise as the pair walked out. The old changeling gave Handy a suspicious look before retreating again into the dark of his storeroom. Thorax entered out from behind the counter looking very concerned.

"Okay, well, I now know what's going on. The queen is captured."

"By who?"

"I'm not sure which of them ordered it, but the other colonial rulers have her imprisoned within."

"Fantastic. What now? Where are her soldiers?" Handy asked. "You can't expect me to believe they'd just let this happen to her."

"They didn't," Thorax said tersely, teeth gritted she looked to the side, inspecting one of the pots. "The ones who weren't captured or suppressed are under constant watch, like Itiold's sidhe. That’s why, when we're leaving here, we have to be in possession of one of these."

She lifted up one of the smaller pots in her magic.

"To make it seem as if we came in here to buy something?"

"Less suspicious that way."

"So what now?" Thorax stared hard at the pot.

"Someling has to stand by while the other goes in to talk to the queen. She has to have some contingency plan for this. She has to." She turned to Handy. "And that means you."

"What!? Why me?"

"Because the alternative is leaving you unattended and right in the open. And frankly, I'm the only one out of the two of us who is actually a changeling, so worst comes to worst, I can handle myself out here. You can't."

"Great, fine, all the better," Handy conceded, his voice anything but amicable. "Then do you know where she is being held?"

"Yes."

"And how am I going to get to her?"

"Don't worry about that," she said, taking the trinket and heading to the door. "I can get you in."

--=--

It must've been the fifth one that day who had come to croon over her. It was getting old.

The heavy chains clinked as she shifted, taking a more dignified stance. If she must be forced into a cell too small for her, she would at least sit up straight to face her hecklers. Granted, not the easiest thing to achieve with her horn scraping along the ceiling. The cell was dry at least, but that was small comfort to the captive queen as the yoke around her neck crackled with energy along its runes. It chaffed worse than before, now that she had slept in it, but she would not let her discomfort show.

The door at the top of the steps squealed open and light shone down. Chrysalis squinted her eyes at the brightness, but refused to cover her eyes.

A queen would not show fear before her lesser, and that was what each and every one of them were: lesser. Scum. Treacherous wretches who had abandoned her six years ago and betrayed her. Treacherous wretches that would again usurp her rightful claim who even now bickered amongst themselves under a veneer of civility above her head. Which of them would come to her now, she wondered? Which of them thought themselves so haughty they could bring her to tears, to get her to beg, to have her swear herself and her changelings to them and their goals in exchange for the potential for freedom?

She bowed to noling.

The approaching changeling was quiet as she descended the wide steps to the base where the lone cell was kept. The ancient verisite steel bars, still as sturdy and strong as they were when they had been forged in ages past, separated the pair. The younger queen stood outside and looked in at the disgraced changeling with a triumphant smirk that Chrysalis was getting bored with seeing.

"I—"

"No." Chrysalis shot her down without a moment’s notice. The queen stammered in response, red hair shaking loose and piercing steely white irises staring at her.

"What do you mean no!?"

"You came down here like half of the other rulers did before you, and you seek the same thing. My answer is no," Chrysalis responded in a monotone, deliberately obfuscating her true voice as an insult. That got the younger queen's hackles up. She could see it in her eyes, though her face did not betray it. Impotent fury was always her favourite emotion to feed on, and she'd be damned if she didn't spend her last days feeding on what little she could elicit out of her would be tormentors. Pity she had no luck so far. No changeling worth their salt let their emotions reach in a position where another could feed off of them.

"You insolent, lowly creature, I was going to offer you—"

"Freedom in return for service." Chrysalis sighed before scowling, her expression hardening. "You and the twenty or so others before you. It is not happening. You will not have my changelings."

"Then what’s left of your changelings will die with you!" the younger queen hissed. Her expression softened and relaxed back into a smile. "Not many died, you know. You ordered the surrender just in time. It'd be a… shame to put such magnanimous foresight to waste, do you not think?"

Chrysalis did not respond, daring not to answer that question directly lest she give anything away. The young queen snorted, evidently unpleased.

"What’s your name?" Chrysalis asked suddenly. "I am familiar with the great colonies, but you're a new face, and you're too big to be a lowly new-blood. Which means you're old-blooded."

"Good eye…" the other queen preened. Chrysalis shrugged, her chains clinking with the movements as she lifted a hoof to her face, inspecting it.

"Or you're a glutton. What’s that nice term the ponies use these days? Big boned?" Her interlocutor spluttered with indignation, and Chrysalis smiled. The other changeling scowled, and her horn lit up, a dark white colour. Chrysalis' yoke was yanked, and she hit the ground chin first.

"I would be more careful with my words if I were you, Queen Chrysalis," she spat, looking down at her. "The wards do not prevent magic being used on you." She released the yoke, and Chrysalis pushed herself back up with the slightest of pained groans. "To answer your question, I am Amethyst."

"A pony's name, I see."

"My name, you insufferable pig!" Amethyst shouted at her, Chrysalis plied her ears to her head and winced at the shrill noise.

“Not so loud, I’m right in front of you,” she calmly admonished, her apparent serenity angering this Amethyst even more. The younger queen fumed for a moment, horn lighting up. Chrysalis prepared herself to be assaulted yet again. It never came. Amethyst looked thoughtful for a moment before snorting and letting her magic dissipate.

"You know what? Have it your way, Chrysalis. I was going to save you, you know."

"I am sure."

"I mean it." Her face lit up with a parody of compassion. "The Archon has the sway of the congress, you know. He made a concession to the Commune. Their support and loyalty if he gives you and your changelings to its leader."

That got Chrysalis' attention. Amethyst's face fell into a more serious façade.

"There are not many old bloods these days, you know, and your sisters haven't been seen in decades, and the other old bloods are too threatened to not side with the Archon. It's in our best interests to work together before our entire race falls apart." Amethyst turned and ascended the stairs. "That is what it's all about after all, isn't it? Lepidopolis? The 'Old Keep'? Or does it irk you so much having to serve somling as young as myself that you'd see all that go to waste? Ruminate upon your selfishness, Chrysalis, and consider if it’s worth it."

Chrysalis said nothing as she waited for Amethyst to close the door behind her, leaving her in darkness once more.

"Naïve, idealistic young fool…" Chrysalis muttered as she laid down and gingerly rubbed her chin where it had collided with the floor, hissing as it stung. It felt like her dermis had been torn with the friction, but thankfully she didn't seem to be bleeding.

"You know, I am just loving this," a masculine voice spoke. Chrysalis perked up, eyes wide, looking about for the source of the voice. "Really, that was... kind of cathartic to witness."

"…It can't be," she muttered to herself, the voice sounding eerily familiar. Her ears swivelled, trying to pin the sound. Then she noticed a blue light edging in from beneath her. She sidled over to the far wall of her cell, as much as her bindings would allow as she stared suspiciously at where the light was coming from. The floor of the cell had no corners where the walls met the floor. Instead, there was a flat, diagonally-aligned surface running along the corners of the room, and in several of these there were grates, too small and thin for anyling to be able to fit through. Noling imprisoned in this particular cell was going to be able to shapeshift in any way to make use of the opening even if they could remove the grating.

"Handy?"

"The one and the same," the voice replied, the blue light almost blinding in the darkness of the cell. "Now, are you going to come over here, or am I going to have to just leave and forget I even saw you?"

"No wait!" Chrysalis nearly shouted, scrambling across the cell, her chains kicking up a racket as she threw herself at the grate, staring wide-eyed and disbelieving at what she saw before her.

Because what she saw before her was a changeling.

"Uhhh…"

"Oh, right. Huh, that’s an interesting effect. Thought I stopped it. Do me a favour and turn around,” the changeling said in Handy's voice. "Just look away for one second. Trust me, I can do nothing worse to you than what you're going through right now." Chrysalis was quite sure she might or might not be hallucinating a torch-wielding changeling that spoke in Handy's voice from the area beneath the grate. She wasn't that far gone that she'd hallucinate her changelings coming to rescue her, was she? She reluctantly closed her eyes and shook her head.

"Ack!" And then she proceeded to leap back in shock at what she saw when she did, promptly hitting her head on the ceiling. That particular reaction made Handy smile. "H-How is that you—? How did you get here!?"

"Ways and means, Chrysalis." Handy’s smile dropped as he peered at the queen through the small grate. Chrysalis had a million and one thoughts cross her mind all at once, but before she could act on any of them, something small was held up to the grate.

"What is that?" Handy held the torch closer, and the blue flame illuminated it. Chrysalis had a sharp intake of breath. "Give it to me!" She pawed away at the grate with her hooves. Handy withdrew the strange, perpetually moist parchment with the strange drawing on it.

"Not until I've gotten some assurances, Chrysalis," Handy said coldly. Chrysalis stared at him spitefully. "I have come too far and endured too much to give much of a damn about anything right now other than getting rid of your damn geas over me."

"Give it to me, Handy. Now." Chrysalis' teeth were clenched. Handy remained unimpressed. He held the parchment in between the index and thumbs of both hands. He began to ever so slowly pull in opposing directions, threatening to tear it. "No!"

"Do I, Handy the Milesian, have the word of Queen Chrysalis that our geas is fulfilled?" he began slowly and deliberately, staring right at her eyes. She met his gaze hatefully. “Just as I had her word, as far as she was able to communicate it in the simplest terms, that the object in my possession was the very same and only one which she wished me to retrieve? Or does she renege on her confirmation to me now, given that it was the only qualification of her demand of the geas, and thus breaks her compact?"

"…These words were not in the beginning of the geas, Handy," Chrysalis said icily.

"But they are at the end of it," Handy replied, not wavering once. "What say you?"

"I… Queen Chrysalis, give my word that our geas is fulfilled, having been satisfied I have been brought what I have sought." She was clearly bitter, evidently having planned for some work-around had this circumstance come about during happier times for the scheming monarch. "Now give me the key!"

Handy folded the piece of parchment up and slipped it through the bars of the grate and stood there while Chrysalis excitedly withdrew the piece of parchment from the grate with her muzzle, laying it out flat on a relatively clean part of the cell floor. She turned around and held it up, so she could see it in what little of the torchlight reached it from the grate now behind her. If Handy didn't know any better, he could've sworn he saw a childlike glee on her face as she looked over the clearly incomplete creation.

As he thought, he wondered. He had brought what he had been told to bring, so he had been released from the geas. It had been a long while now, so he thought about actively abandoning the changeling city and returning, at long last, to home. He was delighted beyond expression when he felt no restriction on his thoughts. The geas was lifted. Even if the caveat of never being able to harm Chrysalis remained, it hardly mattered anymore. He turned and left.

Chrysalis noticed the light receding and turned desperately, her chains skittering along the floor and her heavy yoke clanging against the metal of the grate. "Heartless, wait!"

"What do you want, Chrysalis?" Handy grouched, his robe trailing in the ankle deep water and slime of the tunnel. He didn't turn around nor stop, however.

"Please, come back here!" Chrysalis shouted, briefly looking up to make sure noling had heard her. "Come back, you must help me!"

"Help you?" Handy chuckled, stopping and looking back, eyeing the dark slit in the wall down the tunnel from him, barely illuminated by his torch. "Why on earth would I want to help you, of all people?" Chrysalis was silent for a time. It caused her to choke when it came out, the words unfamiliar in their vile context being uttered by her vocal cords, but Handy presented an opportunity she could not pass up. Not if she played it right. But to even have such a chance as that, she had to say the words, to hold his attention if nothing else.

"I… need your help," she managed, the pleading sickening her. There was no response for a long, agonizing time. At last the blue light approached, and Handy, trudging up through Tartarus only knew what lay in that ancient sluice tunnel he used to access her, stopped outside her grate. He was in a patchwork robe and hood, a cloak about his shoulders that at one point might have been fine, but was now torn, tattered, and covered in dirt and filth. His perennially attached armour she was so used to seeing on him was nowhere in sight. He looked at her from under the hood for a long time before speaking.

"What's in it for me?" he asked. Chrysalis blinked.

“What?”

"I said, what's in it for me?" Handy repeated. "Come on, I indulged you this far. The least you could do is show me what you're offering."

"If you helped me," Chrysalis began incredulously, "I could give you whatever you wanted!"

"Yeah, you probably could, if you were free," Handy said. "You're not free. I am. I intend to remain free. It’s pretty great. You should try it some time."

"Do not do this to me! You must help me!"

"And why must I do such a thing, Chrysalis? You have nothing over me and, frankly, the more you try to push that I somehow owe you my help, the more likely I am to walk right on out of here and leave you to rot. So hit me, Chrysalis, what do you have to offer?"

"Help me out of here and you can have all the gold you could care for," she said quickly. "All of it, I don't care! Have as much as you want! Gems! Information! Anything!"

"Those are all pretty nice things that I would like to get a hold of," Handy admitted. "That’s it?"

"Get me out of these chains," Chrysalis said, trying not to let her desperation and anger get the better of her, "and I swear you can have all of that, and more."

"Hmm," Handy mused. "And all I'd have to do is get you out of there?"

"Yes!"

"And how, pray tell, am I to do that if your own army could not save you? I have your little scout outside right now, who I think is the only member of your military your captors haven't accounted for."

"These chains, do you have anything that can break these chains!?" Chrysalis asked desperately, grabbing a bundle and shaking them to make a point. Handy considered them for a moment. At the right angle and some room to work with, he could use his hammer to break them, but he'd need some leverage between the links. The grate was barely the width and length of his arm, so he couldn’t get through it to do it. He could give her his hammer but without her magic and with her restricted body movement, she could never use it effectively. Besides, that was assuming he'd be able to remove the grate in the first place. Judging by the tiny, scratchy, glowing changeling writing along its edges, he surmised trying to tamper with it would be a bad idea.

"No," he said truthfully, "and you have no alternate plans in case something like this had happened?"

"I had. If any of them were still viable, do you think I'd be in here?"

"No, I suppose not." Handy looked around the grate in front of him once more, thinking. "Well, good luck."

"What? Where are you going!? Handy!" she called after him. He didn't answer. "Come back! Help me, damn you!"

"It’s such a shame," Handy said as he disappeared further into the tunnel, "that you wouldn't do the same for me if our positions were reversed. What makes you think I'd do it for you?" His challenge was not met with an answer as he continued walking down the sluice tunnel, his mission having been completed, his geas fulfilled, his freedom assured, and the queen's denied. All in all, not a bad way to end a day's work.

Chrysalis sat in the darkness as the Heartless departed. The precious artefact she had in her hooves seemed so worthless now, but it was all she had. She shook. Why? She did not know. Her thoughts turned to the precious thing she had hid in some far away pony town on the edge of the Badlands, the future of her colony and kingdom under the very noses of her enemies that not even her changelings knew was there. Perhaps she should have told him so that he could inform them, give them some hope if nothing else, some reason to escape should she fail them again. Chrysalis, however, could not be sure he would not bring harm to her precious secrets himself, so she held her tongue.

And so she sat in the dark cell awaiting her fate, and cursing herself for once again trusting the words of those conniving fellow rulers in the senate above. Such was the folly of trusting oath breakers.

And the fate that should be portioned out to such creatures now awaited her instead.

Author's Note:

*Last Wednesday - Chapter around 4-6k words after so much time in a funk*

Me: "Okay, I should get this finally done for Monday"

*Friday - 12k and counting*

Me: "Neeeaaarrrrllllyyy done"

*This Morning - 17k*

Me: "If this hits 18k I'm going to be pissed.

*As it is now*

Me: "Fucking... Damn it."

===============================

My editors really deserve medals.

Comments

[JBL]

Hey this chapter didn't pop up as an updated favourite. Might have to throw up a blog post to tell people.

[Shocks]

It was bad enough he had had to slake his thirst on some poor bastard’s unfortunate pet cat before they left Brightshowers. The scratches on his face healed, true, but it was still amongst the foulest blood he had ever tasted, and there wasn’t near enough for his weekly needs, but at least it had taken the edge off.

So Handy's not a fan of pussy? I knew it!

[Handyman]

6401891 ellesplanet.wordans.com/wvc-1324694788/wordansfiles/images/2011/12/23/114176/114176_popup.jpg

[Asheram]

"Is it Monday already?"

Every day is a Monday.
Great chapter, boss!

[Shocks]

6401894 gifsec.com/wp-content/uploads/GIF/2014/03/Evil-Laugh-spongebob-gif.gif?gs=a

I regret nothing.

[Aerial]

That chapter size though. I'm going to absorb it all in one sitting.

[The Serpent Mage]

21,000 words.

Handy, I have things to do today! Things that aren't slogging snoring reading through this absolutely terriblewonderful story here!

...there goes my Monday.

6401891 Fucking genius

[Slayerseba]

Shit! Is it just me or someone else want to see as he saves our vavorite ling queen from her misery too.

[CMDR Kovacs]

6401825 Meanwhile, I was not allotted access to this!

[Handyman]

6402307 ...oh fuck my bad.

Dude, give me your skype.

[JBL]

6402307 Man, count yourself lucky! Having to do 20K in a few days isn't really what one would count as a privilege. =I

[MrMwagf]

Now that is a tasty Plothock you have there ... No! i must not give in to temptation ... ... ... shit.

[Semi-AutomagicCupcake]

[Dj7291993]

Dang, what a chapter. Chrysie might nit want to hope to hard. A certain red unicorn that wants seeks her may be worse than the cell. Though, I'm sure she's more than capable of breaking in.

[CMDR Kovacs]

6402309 [e-mail]

6402399 So? I was bored all weekend, and it's fucking Lameburr Day, eh. Not even rolling around in a Mad Cat was enough to debore me, bruh.

[hs0003]

Great chapter! A bit long but great still.
I wonder how long it'll take before conflict with the ponies continue.

[The Tyrannical]

"Is it Monday already?"

lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G1zJdLlxpYM/VRZ1Y8ld76I/AAAAAAAABDE/naqqlMe1k-U/w800-h800/donald_duck___rape_face_by_dantesgrill-d4vaunk.png

Also...

Once she had even seen a tall, monolithic structure in the distance, appearing massive and made out of some strange kind of rock she had not seen thus far in the Badlands. She asked her companions if it was another illusion, to which she was informed it was not. It was in fact a ruin, one she was told she shouldn’t speak of as close as they were, and that they should continue on before the ruin noticed them in the distance. She still wasn't sure what they meant by that but had followed their advice as they hurried along, keen to put the vision out of sight.

...I want elaboration on this monolith.

[MonolithiuM]

Getting home from work and I get a chapter of Bad Mondays? Thanks, Handy.

[More Dakka]

A wild chapter has appeared!

[Sinestere]

I know I really want Handy to save her. I know I want Handy to be the better person. His cry out in the forest tells me that the decency inside him is still alive, that he still remembers who he really is.

He has a useful working relationship with a changeling queen. You don't throw that kind of investment away. Also, giving her a chance to be the better Ling that she holds herself to be is something as well.

Yes, Handy wants to be terrible right now. But not being an expression of his terrible self is how he survives on the inside, in his heart. Leaving her in chains in the cold dark cell would be very expensive to Handy's humanity and he knows this. It would be different if she was a stranger. But she is no stranger.

[Adam Jensen]

6401891
6401894

[More Dakka]

Wow Chrysilis seems desperate... If not outright stupid to think Handy would help her just because she asked it of him. Hell, after all the shit she's put him though, she's lucky he's not wallowing in sheer schadenfreude.

I've got a feeling that he's going to help her... And that it will change nothing the next time she's 'on top'.

[Aerial]

I gotta say I'm really looking forward to seeing the abilities he picks up in the future. He got the glamour and auspex from the changelings, right? I wonder what he'd get from, say, pegasi. Or griffons.

Also waiting for Crimson to arrive and wreak havoc.

[Handyman]

6401899 Get used to the lying, its kind of Handy's 'thing', that and he's a cynic of the 'fallen idealist' sort. He used to like the notion of St. Valentine's day when he was younger and is a little bitter with how sad its become.

6401891
6402130
6403615 Well I can assure you Handy is quite clear on the fact he likes women. Cats can all die in a fire however. Not gonna lie, that is one hate from my real world life I just decided to give Handy outright. Fuck cats forever.

6402016 Hm. Boss, yes I shall accept this title.

6402058 You might want to get a cup of coffee, mate.

6402057 Heretic.

6402130 Well I do apologize for this filth.

6402263 Feeling sympathy for Chryssi now are we?

6402542 *reels in the line*

6402555

6402575 Crimson will be fun.

6402847 Chronologically? Not long.

6402924 We all want a lot of things.

6402972 No problem.

6403156 Quick, throw a pokeball!

6403258 All very reasonable, we'll see if Handy agrees with you.

6403643 Oh Handy's not going to be doing anything that's not going to benefit him.

6403794 Glamour Auspex and Suggestion, he is the vampiriest of vampires. We know Thestral blood is pretty fucking OP and rare.

Griffon blood increasing strength and endurance and adrenaline production by a fair bit, but at the disadvantage of really making him unreasonably aggressive and agitated and Handy is an easily angered man to begin with, considering he's been actively holding back his 'seeing red' phases now that he's a vampire (he's terrified of what would happen if he actually cut loose), he's not keen on making those things a permanent feature, so he's not planning on drinking too many griffons for fear of that becoming permanent.

Unicorn powers allow him to actually straight up see a perception of reality that nearly nobody does in terms of 'seeing' magic in the atmosphere around him, as well as being able to perceive things in shocking clarity and detail from farther away, along with increased, hearing, smell and absolutely silent movement, to the point where he has to consciously want to be heard in order to be heard.

Earth pony blood gives him a few benefits such as, instead of 'sensing' peoples' emotional states that changeling blood gives him, it allows him to perceive 'living things' from animals as small as mice and bigger. So he could look at a building and see how many people are living inside based on these weird coloured clouds he sees in his vision, think of it like detect life from the Elder Scrolls games. It also allows him extra strength (hurr durr) but also a keen perception on the weak points in physical objects, where he'd need to hit something and how hard in order to break it. Useful stuff.

I think thats everything he's drank so far.

[CommandoDude]

6403258

That's honestly what makes this story so great. You can see that moral dilemma, Handy genuinely wanted Chrysalis to convince him to help her. He was going to leave, and then she asked for help; he could have just kept going and left, but he didn't, because as much of a bastard Handy likes to think he is (and kind of is) he does have a soft spot.

Except Chrysalis appealed to his greed. And in the end, people are going to care more about their own neck than their pocketbook. All the gold and gems in the world weren't going to get Handy to risk his life for her again. Especially after she strong armed him into going on that little adventure for her.

But I feel like something else might. And I think Thorax might appeal to it, because unlike Chrysalis she knows Handy a lot better.

[Usurper]

6402924 The Monolith wants an elaboration on you.

s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/3e/62/ef/3e62efbcacf8a6120ea8376354c93803.jpg

[Shocks]

6403882 I suddenly want every person Handy meets to throw a cat at him.

Make it so Handyman!

He'll be drowning in pussy! Oh god I cant stop.

[Handyman]

6403904 You are incorrigible =]

[wlam]

humanotuar

"Huminotaur" would've worked better, I think, but still, kudos for that pun.

“Gee, I wonder. Maybe it’s because somepony told my queen that they were a really stupid idea, and she systematically began recalling and destroying all of them from her agents?” Her voice oozed sweetness and innocence.

Handy keeps being so sharp he cuts himself, doesn't he just?

Also dayum, Crimson was actually kinda badass there. What a thing to say about a pretty pastel pony.

[White Glint]

Wow that was great. I actually feel bad for Chrysalis. She's dealing with betrayal from other changelings as well as Handy just walking away. Also props of the Crimson part. I'm actually super interested in hearing her continued story right now.

[More Dakka]

6403882

Will we be seeing that talk between Celestia and our favorite pony vampire which was teased in the previous chapter? Or at-least the aftermath?

[The Orthodox Priesthood]

Imagine if you walked out your room one day and suddenly you were in Siberia. You'd be a little perturbed too.

I don't get it.

6403882

Fuck cats forever.

Not helping your case, brah.

[wlam]

6404571
I am told cats are fine, too, but personally, I just don't see it. I guess pussy just isn't for me. I'm all about the cock.

i.imgur.com/dWVahpn.jpg

[Shocks]

6403921 It is a gift, praise be on to me.

[Aerial]

6403882 He has to snack on more unicorns pronto.

[mastermenthe]

6402924
Just as Tsathoggua rests underneath the four peaks of Voormithadruth...
Underneath the Monolith, an Old One sleeps, dreaming...

[mastermenthe]

6404571

I don't get it.

Imagine this scene: you open your bathroom door, see the bathroom through the door, you step through, and as soon as one foot lands on the tiles of the bathroom, you are in siberia, one hand still holding onto thin air as if grasping the doorknob.

[The Orthodox Priesthood]

6405655
So, every day?

Got it.

-Literally every Russian

[Lupus]

How dare this not show up in my updates! I feel so behind...

6403882

Fuck cats forever.

vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/degrassi/images/1/12/Kerry_Washington_Preach.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140504181947

I bet Celestia's spies are a little miffed that they lost Handy.

It was in fact a ruin, one she was told she shouldn’t speak of as close as they were, and that they should continue on before the ruin noticed them in the distance.

Wonder if that's gonna be important later...

Fingers crossed that we haven't seen the last of the undead dragon. It'd be fun to have Chrysalis, or better yet Handy, find some way to control it and lord it over the other rulers.

[GuyverAlpha]

Well, it finally happened. One of my Favourited stories updated and I was not notified. I am glad I had alternate reasons to check and find this wonderful chapter.

[JBL]

You know, the way Handy just walked away from Chrysalis reminds me a lot of Navarone with how he would deal with Chrysalis.

[ClosetKnight]

6408041 why the hell does that name seem so familiar?

[JBL]

6408652 From Diaries of a Madman.

[Usurper]

6408802 I thought that character has a soft spot streak for changelings, especially if it means he can sleep with them.

[JBL]

6409298 Nah, I was just trying to rustle Handyman's jimmies.

i.imgur.com/FDqCMNQ.gif

[Usurper]

6409420 That isn't a task you should attempt alone, my friend.

Here, you'll need this:

derpicdn.net/img/2015/5/8/891885/large.png

[ClosetKnight]

6408802 ah. thanks.

[Scarheart]

I find myself feeling bad for Chrysalis.

[D48]

Am I really the only one that feels bad for Quartz? Sure he was a bit of a jerk at the end, but it sounds like he has been getting shitted on big time so it is perfectly understandable that he would want to try to get out of his bind one way or another. Granted he would probably have been better off throwing his lot in with Handy and friends, but it is understandable that he is wary of them after the way Thorax treated him.

Also, I had forgotten about how fucking terrifying Crimson can be.

[ArcaneVisions]

Well if chrysalis maybe would have acted nicer to handy, he might have been more inclined to help her.