Tormenting Changelings For Fun And Profit
So here I am, flying into the Badlands, using my nifty new dictation tooth to write this remotely. Why am I up in the sky, flying, where ponies can theoretically see me, instead of just cleanly teleporting, you ask? A good question! The answer is, I have no idea where I'm going!
No, seriously. I'm looking for Chrysalis' hive. It's around here someplace, but the thing about Changelings, see, is that they're good at blending in. The Badlands are full of caves, and very, very treacherous to travel in if you don't have wings – the mountains you can see, the ones that stick up above the ground, are only the tips. See, what's actually there is a mountain range that was lowered a quarter of a trot below sea level.
A quarter of a trot may not sound like so much to you – since a trot, as in the distance measurement, was originally defined as the distance the average earth pony could cover in five minutes while trotting, you can probably go a quarter of a trot in less than 2 minutes, on land, even if you're a unicorn or a pegasus. But to put this in perspective... Canterlot is only a trot and a half above sea level. Distances for up and down, even for flying creatures, are very very different than distances on land. Pegasi can't usually fly higher than a gallop, which is approximately 3 trots (yes, I'm aware that Rainbow Dash and other stunt flyers can sometimes get up as high as 2 gallops for brief periods of time; even if I hadn't known, my dear roommate would never let me forget it); dragons can go up to an elevation of 15 gallops; an alicorn can get up to a whopping 300 gallops, which is approaching the edge of our world's thaumosphere (and atmosphere... you need to be an alicorn to get that high because you need to drag your own air bubble with you.) I, of course, can go anywhere I want to. I once hit a bunch of invaders from another reality with the sun. Celestia was so mad at me that day. It was hilarious.
But I'm digressing. A quarter trot below sea level is deep. I'm not going to talk about why the Badlands are so far sunken below sea level, except to say that it's something I don't like to talk about, which is why I'm not going to. The point is, the Badlands are a desert, filled with sand, and most of that sand is tightly compacted enough to take the weight of a pony... most of the time. It's called the Badlands for a reason, though. At any point, a pony might step on a region of more loosely compacted sand, and sink... and keep in mind, ground level for the Badlands range is a quarter trot down. That's a lot of sand. Admittedly, there are so many mountains in the area, almost none of the Badlands is actually as low as a quarter trot... but most of it is deep enough that if the sandstorms have loosened up the sand enough that a pony can sink... unless they're a unicorn with self-levitation spells, that pony is going to die.
So I highly recommend not traveling in the Badlands unless you're a pegasus, and maybe not even then, because seriously. Sand sand sand rocks rocks mountain sand. Could this area be more boring? There's a much more exciting region directly to the southeast of the Badlands, which is actually labeled on some maps as "the Battle of Discord", complete with attractively colorful checkerboards and floating rock islands, but the sad fact is, you probably couldn't visit. It's actually a region where raw chaos spills out of the underverse our universe floats in and the laws of physics break down completely, and Celestia and Luna have it walled off. I just checked. I could break that wall, if I really felt like it, but with the dimensional gates closed I'd really rather not. As fun as it would be for me to bask in the chaos energy and enjoy the sweet feeling of reality itself being warped into tapioca pudding, I'd be concerned that the magic penned up in there might be under a tad more pressure than usual, since it can't get back out of our dimension, and, well, you don't go venting a steam boiler willy-nilly if the steam has the power to melt reality, which it does.
The point is. There are no ponies out here. It's incredibly dangerous for anypony but a pegasus, and with desert conditions (so no weather to manage), nothing fun to explore, and alternate air routes to get anyplace a pegasus might actually want to go, there's no reason for them to be out this way either.
But, as you might have noticed before Anon basically squashed them all – all Changelings can fly.
The mountain range here is riddled with caves and tunnels. Many were dug by Diamond Dogs, because this mountain range is a rich source of iron, copper, and other minerals that Diamond Dogs can sell for gems. Or it was, once, before the Dogs mined it out and sold everything. Many were dug by draconequui, back before I was born – the land wasn't treacherous then, and we used to like to tunnel a lot, apparently. When I found these caves, not long after I began my glorious reign of chaos, I found them filled with the bones of my people, who huddled underground to escape the Second Fimbulwinter, and either froze, starved, or died of thirst. I laid them all to rest in convenient volcanoes in the San Palomino Desert, which has somehow managed to become a legend about Nightmare Moon's dragon skeleton army, which is totally unfair. Firstly, they weren't dragons, and I'm a little tired of my race being forgotten just because I'm the only one left. Secondly, this happened centuries before Luna's little hissy, and thirdly, they were my people and if they belonged to anyone they belonged to me, and fourthly, they weren't an army! It was just easier to animate the skeletons and make them walk and fly to their final resting places than it would have been to levitate the bones. Also, the reactions I got from ponies were vastly more entertaining this way.
Now, though, thar be Changelings in them thar hills. Hive Chrysalis isn't the only one in Equestria – she's had half a dozen daughter hives spawned, and most of them stayed in this country – but hers is, or was, the biggest. Changelings do need water, for which they generally have brainwashed, adoring pegasus slaves drag a few clouds into the desert, and that's what I'm looking for – not actual clouds, but evidence of water. All the actual bodies of water in the Badlands are so heavily salinated they're almost a more secure footing for a pony than the "land", or rather sand, is. The few living creatures who aren't Changelings who've adapted to live in this environment poop salt crystals. Really, I'm not making this up. There's an entire ecosystem of magical plant creatures that photosynthesize, run around finding overly salinated water, drinking it to fuel their photosynthesis, and then excreting the salt. (Sometimes pegasi do come down this way looking to gather salt crystals and smuggle them into Equestria, because this is the pure stuff, if you know what I mean.) Changelings, however, can't do that. They can survive on a lot less water than ponies can if their supply of love is good, but they do need some fresh water.
This is so boring. This is why I'm talking to myself, rambling on about salt poop and elevations like anypony but Twilight Sparkle could possibly care, attempting to win trivia contests with myself. I'm looking for water. In a desert. To be precise, in the mountains, hills and big protruding rocks, because when water actually falls on the sand here, it is soaked in completely. Most deserts experience occasional flash floods, where so much water falls at once that the packed sand saturates and the entire desert turns into a very shallow lake for a few hours, or a very deep puddle, depending on how you look at it. That never happens here because the water just goes straight down through the sand. Water can only collect on the solid ground, which means the parts of the mountain range that came up high enough that they stick out of the sand. So at least I don't have to look at endless quantities of sand, because I'd rather spork my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon a dragon has been chewing on, but oh dear chaos this is SO BORING.
Now you may be saying to yourself, "But Discord! You have such fantastic magic powers, why don't you scry for the Changelings or something?" Remember that iron I mentioned? Diamond Dogs got most of what could be easily mined, but there's still veins of it running throughout the rock. Iron disrupts harmonic magic almost completely, which is one of the reasons the Changelings hide out here. It doesn't block chaos magic nearly as badly... but if I push energy through iron with the goal "go get me information", when it comes back it is likely to be completely loopy and tell me "la la la flowers are so pretty", or more likely "wisenheimer sixty-seven purpled the from". Remember signal and noise? It's possible for me to get "information" back that's so full of noise even I can't detect signal within it. So I'll be able to use my magic in the hive, and I could even teleport out of it once I'm in... but I can't teleport into it even once I know where it is, and I can't scry from the outside to find it.
On the other hand, I just now realized that I can scry for water without salt in it.
You have no idea how hard I am facepawing right now.
That did the trick. Approximately five minutes after I stopped dictating, I found several bodies of water large enough and fresh enough to support a Changeling population... including one where it was actively raining. That seemed quite promising, so I teleported there, and sure enough, there was a pegasus with glazed eyes managing a nearly depleted cloud, raining it into a fairly large funnel-like hole that went down into the side of a mountain. The hole was not filling with water; all of it was draining away somewhere else. So of course, being as insatiably curious as I am, I sized myself down and jumped down the hole. The pegasus didn't even notice; Changeling victims are not well known for their powers of observation.
I hit water shortly after the light disappeared, and swam down the rest of the way. I don't recommend that ponies try this, by the way. The tunnel I went down was too small for a pony for most of its length, including a significant part of the portion that was under rock and water with no air to be found anywhere, so unless you're powerful enough to turn yourself into a fish, you're probably not going to survive the trip. Not an issue for me, of course; quite aside from the fact that I can turn myself into pure magic and don't even really need to breathe at all most of the time, I have gills, so I wouldn't have been discommoded even if I did need oxygen to survive. Also, I'm pretty sure that even at full size I could have squeezed through the entire passage, though I might have needed to remove my antler and horn first.
I came up in an underground lake. Now, unlike my underground lake, which is fed by an underground river, this particular lake was plainly fed only by captured pegasi. And maybe the occasional natural cloud that drifted in from the ocean and smacked into the mountain that the watering hole was built into, but that was likely to happen at best once a year. The water level was significantly lower than it ought to be. The lake basin was about 20 heads deep, but the lake itself went up to 16 or 17. The air quality in the lake was poor – if I had needed to breathe I might have gotten quite dizzy from the low oxygen content – and there was low-light algae growing all over the place, capable of surviving in as little light as came from the magic-powered lamps the Changelings had hung overhead, half of which had gone out.
This was not a well-cared-for hive any longer.
I floated up and out of the water, resizing myself again to Breezy size (I'd say bug size, but given that I was in a Changeling hive, that might have given you the wrong impression.) In the poor lighting conditions, and with my overall dark colors, I was practically invisible as I flew through the cave, looking for Chrysalis. I found ponies sealed in goo – many of them dead. Ponies need real food, and more water than Changelings do. A well-kept hive rotates its captives; they spend part of their time in the goo, metabolic functions depressed so they don't need quite as much food and water, having wonderful dreams about all the ponies they love, and part of the time they're physically free and completely mesmerized by whichever Changeling they're attached to. Either way, they're given food and water until either their magic or their capacity for love completely depletes, at which point their bodies are fed to other captives in goo. It's a process that usually takes a decade or two, if they're cultivated properly. These ponies had simply been left in the goo until they wasted away, because there weren't enough Changelings left to care for them.
The defeat of the Changelings was around two months ago. Two months is more than enough time for a pony to starve to death, and far more than enough to die of dehydration.
I find Changeling methods somewhat wasteful to begin with – they're predators, sure, but they're predators that don't have to kill, so why use up ponies to death? If they'd put more harvesters in the field who claim to have legitimate specializations in illusion magic, who get jobs as body doubles for celebrities or whatnot, they could probably harvest more than they could handle. Of course, the more Changelings are out in the field impersonating ponies, the fewer Changelings the Queen of the hive has direct control over, so I know why they do things the way they do, but one queen's desire to have more 'lings to lord over doesn't seem to me to balance the disadvantages of being seen as murderous predators by ponies. But then, what do I know? I'm only the last member of a species that starved to death because they'd gotten a reputation for eating ponies, and ponies responded accordingly by driving them away from every food source they could find even after they gave the pony-eating up.
This, though... this wasn't just wasteful. This was horrifying. I wondered if Anon had the vaguest idea how many ponies he'd doomed to die by slaughtering so much of the hive. In the cartoon version of events, Changelings had been blasted into the sky by a wave of love, and surely some of them would likely have been killed off-screen, but Changelings can fly. Enough of them would have survived Princess Lovey's attack that their captives wouldn't have died of thirst.
I made a large portion of the cave into a giant cow-like creature, who I connected to the goo via tentacles and tentacle-like udders. The cow-thing would absorb magic from the surviving pony captives through the tentacles, feed on that, and use it to make milk that would feed the ponies. I didn't give it enough of a brain to feel anything but a general sense of vague satisfaction with standing there giving milk to ponies, and its own metabolism was decidedly low-maintenance. That would keep the ponies that were still alive fed and hydrated for a while, at least.
Ponies low on magic wouldn't be able to provide much love to Changelings, but I wasn't going to let them go – firstly, most of them were earth ponies and unicorns, because pegasi were of more use outside of goo prisons, and as I believe I made clear already, earth ponies and unicorns can't escape the Badlands, so where were they going to go? Secondly, releasing them would probably ensure the death by starvation of whatever else was in this hive. I make a point of not interfering with the chaotic processes of nature, such as conflicts between predators and prey, even between sapient beings, unless one side manages to really tick me off like the dragons did. Between Changelings and ponies, I'm not going to take sides. But I was going to do what I could to minimize the death toll on both sides, because death is seriously no fun at all.
Further into the hive I found a pit, where glaze-eyed Diamond Dog slaves, their coats mangy and unkempt but their tails wagging, were tossing limp Changeling bodies, mostly broken, badly injured harvesters and soldiers. There were Bitches down in the pit shucking the chitinous shells and lightly seasoning the meat underneath, then putting approximately equal portions onto plates and passing out to other Dogs, or young Pups. Plainly injured harvesters lay all around the pit, firing off their magic every so often to draw love from one of the Dogs or the Bitches, though they left the Pups alone. I watched for a while, rather amazed at the novelty of it. I so rarely see sapient-eating being openly conducted in front of the species being eaten, especially not when they're plainly the ones in charge.
Eventually I figured out what was going on, as I explored deeper and then ranged back to the pit. Diamond Dogs make tasty but low-calorie meals for Changelings – Changeling nutrition depends on both the strength of the emotion and the amount of the target's magic. (I once had a pet mini-hive of Changelings, a Princess and about 20 worker lings, that I could keep fed at a subsistence level without them ever needing to feed on anypony else, and without noticing any impact to myself, because they were able to convert my mild affection for them as amusing pets into satisfying, if somewhat tasteless, meals due to my godly levels of magic.) Diamond Dogs have little magic, especially when they don't have access to gems, but intensely powerful love. The Changelings had mesmerized an entire pack and were feeding on them, and disposing of the dead bodies of Changelings who'd finally succumbed to their injuries by letting their Dog slaves eat them. It was a lovely example of a symbiotic relationship in action. Might have brought a tear to my eye, although that could have also been the grit and dust in the air. Caves are not delightful places to be when you're the size of a Breezy.
There were injured Changelings everywhere. The only ones I saw that were unhurt were elderly workers, adolescent workers and harvesters, and larvalings (who are positively adorable – imagine a tiny foal, completely covered in green ooze that slimes out of every pore of its body! You just wanna hug them and squeeze them and rub their ooze all over everything! They don't grow the chitinous exoskeletons until first metamorphosis.) Most were heavily bandaged. Many were missing limbs, or eyes, or wings. I saw a de-horned Princess (or possibly a Prince, it's not always so easy to tell them apart), who, to add insult to her (or his) injury, was also missing a forehoof. Morbidly, I wondered if she'd tried to throw up her hoof in front of herself to protect her head from Anon's sword, and he'd cleaved right through it and her horn as well. At that she was probably lucky to be alive; when I broke out the day after the invasion, right before I headed for Zebrica, I could see there were dead bugs all over Canterlot Gardens. Probably took them a week to clean them all up.
And even given that there were injured lings all over the place... there were still far, far too few lings. Elderly workers aren't actually supposed to work – they're old and fragile and their chitin gives out if another ling accidentally elbows them. They sit around and tell stories to the larvalings, educating and caring for the youth, and they sleep a lot. And larvalings typically don't do any work at all because without their chitin in place, the ooze that carries Changeling magic gets all over everything, and their actual skin is very soft, sensitive and easy to damage. (Changelings are not actually insects. They're much more like ponies than you'd think. The chitinous armor is really armor, not an exoskeleton, and it exists primarily to hold in the ooze, which is more or less concentrated illusion magic. They've really got skin, muscles and bones in there, under the layer of ooze.) But here I saw fragile old Changelings and fragile young Changelings performing normal hive duties that usually would fall to the workers. The uninjured adolescents were mostly tending to the injured lings... and even counting those who were badly injured enough to be near death, there were maybe about a tenth of the Changelings that should have been in a hive this size.
You know, I'd known that Anon killed a lot of Changelings. I was there. I saw the bodies in Canterlot Gardens. But it wasn't until I was flying around the mostly empty hive that it really sank in how many he slaughtered. Personally. With a sword. As the master of the improbable, I can tell you how ludicrously improbable this is. Most Changeling hives have between 200 – 500 lings, but Chrysalis, as I mentioned earlier, was extraordinarily ambitious. Her hive could easily have housed 3,000 lings, and if she'd had enough field harvesters to support a hive of that size... okay, we are hitting the limits of my ability to do arithmetic here, but my point is, Chrysalis' hive had a lot of Changelings in it, before Anon. And now most of them are dead, and most of the ones that aren't dead are crippled or injured in some way. And Anon, personally, killed or injured most of them. I'm sure the Royal Guard got some, but ponies are rarely this brutal.
Eventually I found Chrysalis.
She wasn't in her throne room; that was empty. She was in the birthing room, which is essentially a secondary throne room for a Queen, but with a bed and supplies for medical emergencies. There were no eggs being laid or babies being born today... none for quite some time, because in order to get there I had to pass the nursery and the clutching chambers, and there were no eggs, and no larvalings younger than a year. Instead, Chrysalis was lying on something like a narrow, padded table exactly the height of the bottom of her barrel, so her hooves could touch the floor, but only barely. It was a lot longer than she was, though, so she could comfortably rest her head on a large pile of pillows in front of her.
Most of her chitin was gone, exposing green ooze and pale white skin underneath it. Her horn was broken off at the tip, and broken again in the middle but not all the way through, so the top half hung at an angle. Her wings were a tattered ruin. Her mane and tail were braided with ribbons and tiny jewels, so obviously someling was trying to take good care of her, but being clean and well-kept didn't change the fact that she looked half-dead. There were a lot more holes in her legs than there ought to be, and one of her forehooves was torn, as if something had caught in one of the holes and ripped its way through. One ear was missing, and one of the tines on her queen antenna, the little bud of vaguely crown-like antennae on her head that allowed her to communicate mentally with her Changelings, had been sliced off.
At the top of her power Chrysalis had beaten down Celestia. Admittedly, part of that was because if Celestia had pulled on the raw power of the sun in the middle of Canterlot Palace, she'd probably have melted it and a significant proportion of the wedding guests to glassy slag, but still, being able to defeat Celestia was a stunt even Starswirl would have found it hard to pull off – he'd have succeeded eventually, but probably by resorting to dirty tricks – and that neither Luna nor Cadance was actually capable of. (Nightmare Moon could, but I believe I've talked about how dark magic functions as an amplifier.) And here she was, two months after her defeat by Anon, looking as if she'd been barely healing in that time. I had to assume that when whatever lings had survived the assault had managed to drag their queen back home, she had looked basically dead.
There were relatively uninjured worker lings bustling about, caring for her and two injured Princesses, probably her direct heirs. One Prince in mint condition stood guard. The main difference between regular Changelings and the lesser royals is that Princes and Princesses have manes (short, sparse ones, but manes nonetheless), and horns – closer to standard unicorn size than the monstrosity Chrysalis sports – and their eyes have pupils. (That thing you see on the normal Changeling's head looks like a horn, but it's really an antenna. It can do some very, very limited magic, but it's mostly for communicating with the hive and receiving the orders of the Queen.) They don't have whites in them, and good for them, because whites in the eyes are highly overrated, and they're the size of normal Changelings, so they don't look like crunchy cheese-legged alicorns with insect wings, but rather like crunchy cheese-legged unicorns with insect wings.
Noling else in the room seemed to have a functioning horn – Changelings who morph into unicorn forms can do basic unicorn spells, but they don't have a lot of power and they can't do anything complex, so I wasn't worried about them. Princes, on the other hand, often train to be full-blown mages, because they can't metamorphose into Queens – their entire purpose is to cement alliances between hives by marrying foreign Queens, though sometimes they work as harvesters and sometimes they provide a second line of defense for the hive. He might actually know some spells complex and powerful enough to give me a moment or two of discomfort.
So I took his horn. Yes, a trifle repetitive, I admit it, but I'd never done that one with Changelings before, and I wasn't here for fun and entertainment, sadly enough.
As the Prince, predictably, gasped, "My horn!", I sized myself up, twirling the horn on one talon.
"Oh, relax, Your Royal Unhorniness, I'm just borrowing it for a bit so you don't make trouble," I said. "I need to have a conversation with your mom. Or is she your wife? Maybe your wife and your mom?"
"Discord," Chrysalis hissed. "I'd heard you escaped. Come to finish the job that wretched creature started?"
All of the Changelings in the room clustered around their queen, most of them between her and me, the rest in a ragged V formation flanking her sides while still facing me. I was almost tempted to provoke them into a fight, because I really wanted to see what a handful of Changelings thought they could do to stop me, but I was here for a reason and I wanted my Element of Deception a lot more than I wanted to play with Changelings. So I snapped my talon, and all of them dropped onto conveniently placed pillows and started ostentatiously snoring. I didn't want Chryssie to think I'd killed her little lings, after all.
"Chryssie! Long time no see!" I said.
"We've never met, you oaf," she snapped... after glancing at her fallen Changelings, presumably checking to make sure I hadn't just turned them into animatronics or something.
"And yet you still recognize me. The curse of being so beautiful, I suppose; I can never escape my fans." I snapped up a snazzy ensemble in purple, red and green, with sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat, and created paparazzi to range around me snapping photos. "I'd say you're looking good as well, but we both know that's a lie."
"Why are you here, chaos creature?" she snarled. "Wasn't the chaos of our deaths enough for you? We died to free you; you could at least show us the courtesy of leaving us be in our misery."
"Oh, come now. You didn't die to free me; that was simply a bonus, and one you most likely never intended." I sat down in front of her on an intangible floating chair. It wasn't really a chair, of course, it was just gravity shaped like a chair. "You died because a murderous monster from another universe showed up with an improbable shiny crystal sword and proceeded to murderize you. Am I right?"
"And so you've come to torment me with memories of that day?" she said bitterly, turning her head away from me as much as she could, considering that it was supported by a pile of pillows and I was getting the impression that she probably had a neck injury of some sort.
"Not at all!" I leaned down into her face. "But I thought you might be in the market for a little revenge."
Her eyes widened. "I'm listening."
I manifested a trench coat and opened it up to show her a collection of my best fantasies about Anon – Anon being strangled to death by me, Anon being strangled to death by my vines that never bothered to wake up and grow, Anon being strangled to death by all of the bearers of the Elements... hey, I don't like blood. If someone absolutely has to die, I kind of like the whole strangling thing. But I'm not a one-trick draconequus; there were also images of Anon being sliced to pieces by his own sword, Anon being zapped to death by Celestia and Luna, Anon drowning in a giant mug of hot cocoa, Anon falling to his death from a bookcase the size of a tower in Canterlot Palace...
I admit it, I spend a lot of time fantasizing about killing Anon. I mean, I'm only going to actually do it if it turns out that I can and it's the only thing that will work – I'd honestly prefer to stop him without bloodshed if possible. (This is a filthy lie and I should wash my mouth out with apple cider, which I'm doing right now. But there's a difference between what I want, in my gloriously chaotic and impulsive heart, and what I feel is the best thing for me to do. Admittedly, most of the time the difference is pretty much invisible, but in this case... death is still not chaotic, and I'd much prefer to have Anon alive, humiliated, hated by everypony he manipulated, broken, despairing, and forced to go back to Earth to work as a grocery bagger for a psychotic manager who makes him work unpaid overtime. And then I could go visit him for the rest of his life and taunt him about how he used to be a god and now he bags groceries and all of his marefriends hate him and ritually burn pictures of him on the anniversary of his ignominious defeat. Hey, a draconequus can dream. Either that or throw him into a dimension of madness where his mind will be fed on by a horde of eldritch things from beyond the veil for the next thousand years as he gibbers and screams for mercy in forgotten languages even he no longer understands. One or the other.)
"Take a look at the possibilities," I invited. "Any of them speak to you?"
"All of them. Though I'd prefer ones where I'm healthy, and restored to my former strength, avenging my children on him in blood while wearing the form of whoever he most loves. But I doubt even you're capable of granting that to me." She rested her head on the pillows, gazing up at me only with her eyes. "What do you want?"
"Well, I thought that was obvious. Revenge. Just like you."
"Why do you want revenge on him? He didn't murder your children. Do you even have any?"
"I'm really more of a free and independent spirit, if you must know," I said. "Changing diapers and giving up the nightlife for nursery rhymes and bedtime stories? Not really my thing."
"And plainly, he didn't murder you, and from the stories we have carried down through the generations, I know of no evidence that you're even capable of loving anything aside from yourself."
"It wasn't for lack of trying." I stretched out, floating more longways than seated now. "I'm guessing, from the numerous spots where your physicians' best attempts to graft dead Changeling armor onto the big holes in yours have obviously failed miserably, that you had a taste of the Element of, bleah, Protection yourself?"
"Yes." She closed her eyes and spoke bitterly. "Everything we knew about the Elements of Harmony said that they shouldn't be able to harm us. We treasure harmony within our ranks even more than ponies do. There is no more perfect harmony than a well-run hive. It should have been no more possible to use them against me and my Changelings as to use them against Celestia."
If she hadn't been using the Element of Deception, then her hypothesis would probably have been correct, for the original six elements anyway. The Elements of Harmony would have worked on her because she was using an Element of Disharmony, but wouldn't have done anything to her Changelings. But the existence of the Seventh Element changed matters. "They shouldn't have," I agreed. "But the Element of Protection isn't really a Seventh Element of Harmony."
"Then what is it?"
I shrugged. "I don't know, yet. But I intend to find out. And then I intend to destroy it, or its wielder, or both. You're not the only one he used that oversized Ginsu on."
"That what?"
"Never mind. His oversized bread slicer. He's chopped me with it, more than once."
"It can harm you?"
"It's not an Element of Harmony, but it's close enough to one that it does very bad things to chaos, yes. Obviously, seeing that I am in possession of all my parts and you are not, I'm still a gazillion times more impervious than you are, but that doesn't mean I like losing my tail, even if it grows back a few days later as good as new."
"So he can harm you." She smiled thinly. "That would be useful news, if my hive and I weren't already dead."
I tilted my head sideways. "You're looking like something the cat dragged in, certainly, but most days I'm fairly certain the dead don't hold conversations. Or at least they don't do so while lounging on silk pillows. I mean, after a thousand years maybe I'm a bit behind the times, but I'm fairly sure I'd have noted a change like that."
Chrysalis laughed harshly. "Oh, I live still, now. But I can predict the future as well as any soothsayer could. I made the mistake of bringing my strongest daughters with me to what should have been my triumph, and instead, those that the monster didn't outright murder lie as broken and weak as I do. All the Changelings I didn't bring with me into the battle that day, all the ones still whole and hearty, I sent with the daughters too young for metamorphosis. I begged another hive to take them in, traded them treasures beyond reckoning, so that some other queen will raise my daughters until they're old enough to start their own hives."
"Didn't think it was a good idea to keep them around the old family manse, hmmm?" I knew exactly why she'd done it. Changeling Princesses get along as well as any other sisters as long as their mother is alive. When the Queen dies, all of the ones still living in the same hive as their mother fall into a bloodlust frenzy, murdering each other for the right to be Queen. And then the survivor metamorphoses, whether she's old enough and strong enough to bear the transformation or not. Queens are very tough and hard to kill – almost as bad as alicorns, if they're properly fed, though they age like any other pony – and usually a Queen stops producing new ones a few decades before she dies of old age. So she has plenty of time to choose a successor and make sure that the other ones have all gone out into the world to found their own hives. If Chrysalis was dying of the injuries Anon inflicted, she wouldn't have that kind of time.
Whichever of her badly injured daughters was unhurt enough to bear metamorphosis would probably become the new Queen of the hive, and if her sisters were in bad enough shape that one might even be able to control her murderous impulses, since none of them would be viable rivals. But if there'd been healthy ones around, there'd have been a bloodbath as soon as Chrysalis kicked it.
"I don't know what you know of healthy hives, chaos creature," Chrysalis said, "but mine will not survive. More die of their injuries every day; there isn't enough love to sustain us, let alone heal us. By the time enough have died that the love supply we have now could heal the rest... most of our provisions will have gone bad as well." In case you're wondering, she meant that the ponies in the cocoons would be dead. Just so you know. "Few of my larvalings will be ready for first metamorphosis by the time the adults of the hive are dead... and only the love we adults feel for them is sustaining them. I'd have sent them away as well, but at the time I thought the hive had some hope for survival, even if I didn't."
"I was getting that impression, yes," I said. "Healthy hives don't generally feed their dead to Diamond Dogs."
She laughed weakly. "True, but that simple strategy has probably kept us going longer than we would otherwise have. Dead Changelings bring disease to the hive, and there are so many and we are so few, I'm not sure we could carry them all to the outside and give them to the sand. The Dogs give us love, at least."
"It's too bad you can't make use of love from entirely non-magical creatures."
"Nothing in Equestria is entirely without magic," she said softly. "We could make use of creatures without magic, if there were enough. But you perhaps may have noticed how very, very few creatures live out here. We chose the spot for its isolation, and now it will be our grave."
"Well, that's morbid."
Chrysalis closed her eyes. "If you have not noticed, I am very busy dying. Get to the point of your visit soon, or it may be rendered moot."
She was exaggerating – she wasn't going to die in the next hour. I gave her at least a week. Maybe a month or two – as I said, Changeling Queens are tough. She'd be in agony the whole time, though, because her wounds weren't healing. The Element of Protection hadn't disintegrated her the way it had tried to do to me, but it had disrupted her magic, so she was healing at the pace of an unmagical creature – a donkey, a cow, a sheep – and given that half her chitin was missing, and was probably never going to grow back without magical assistance that she wasn't going to get, her exposed skin would be in pain just from exposure to the air. Bandages could only do so much. The ichor that supported her magic would slowly ooze out of her, leaving her body through the large wounds in her armor too fast for her disrupted magic to replenish it, and finally her magic would fail completely, leaving her to starve to death because without magic Changelings have no way to feed. But she might die of her injuries before that happened.
"Oh, very well, if you insist," I said. "I can be blunt and straightforward if I have to." I teleported behind her and murmured directly in her ear as I floated above her. "You have my Element of Deception. I want it back."
Chrysalis laughed. It sounded like it wanted to turn into hysteria, but her ribs probably hurt her too much to laugh that much. "I don't," she said.
"Oh really?" I coiled up in front of her and glared into her eyes. "Don't lie to me, Chryssy, I can make your death a lot more painful and prolonged than it was going to be otherwise."
"I'm not," she said, laughing again, bitterly. "If it's what I think it is... the amulet I was using to amplify my powers so that neither Celestia nor any other who knew Cadance well could notice if I slipped from character?"
"Nice to see you at least acknowledge that you know what I'm talking about," I said coldly. "Where is it, then, if you don't have it? Since you admit you did have it."
"I'll tell you if you promise me something."
"It's funny, I could have sworn that you're helpless on your deathbed in front of me, that your only protectors are asleep and hornless anyway, and that I'm the god of chaos. You know, when I went to business school, they told me to negotiate from a position of strength. I guess you never went to university?"
"As if you'd have lasted a day in a university, any university," Chrysalis said. "Too much order and control." She closed her eyes again. "You want something from me. I may be helpless... but I have nothing to lose. Torture us? Drive us to madness? We're dying. You can help us, and perhaps we'd have a chance... or you can torment us as much as you like, but it will do you no good. I'll tell you nothing unless you help us."
I glared at her. "Do you really think you're tough enough to take what I can dish out?" I hissed.
"On the contrary, I think I'll die five minutes into whatever you're planning to do," Chrysalis said, chuckling sardonically. "Perhaps ten, if I'm unlucky. I am much too weak for you to torture me for information, Discord. And the longer you delay, the greater the odds that I'll simply expire before I have a chance to give you what you want."
"Oh, fine." I stopped trying to be intimidating and stood on the ground, arms folded. "What sort of help do you want?"
"Let my hive live," she whispered. "I don't expect you to save me, and after I brought us to such an end I am not even sure I'd want you to. But give one of my daughters back her health and strength, so she can lead the rest to safety. Give us food to help us regain our health, if that's within your power. I realize you don't love anything but yourself and we can't feed on reflection, but give us ponies, or some other creature that loves. Let there be a new Queen who is healthy and strong, and a good supply of food, and they can live on without me."
"How do you guys feel about winter sports?"
She blinked at me. "What?"
With a thought, I removed the entire cave structure and displaced it into the mountains around the Crystal Empire. If Anon and pals did anything even remotely like what had happened in the cartoon, there was going to be a food bomb going off within the next couple of days. Actual insects hate the cold, but Changelings aren't actually insects, and are in fact warm-blooded creatures who can tolerate the cold well, their magical ichor forming an excellent layer of insulation. Plus, now that the Empire was back, the magical warmth generated by its crystals would heat the entire region.
"What did you do?" Chrysalis asked, gasping, her magical sensitivities strong enough to detect exactly how many ley lines I'd just dragged her entire hive across, cave structure and all.
"I don't really want to put a new puppet queen on the throne," I said. "Quite aside from the fact that it would be much more fun to watch your daughters fight it out, I can count on you to hate Anon as much as I do and not lock up with PTSD or something. So rather than wait for one of your daughters to get queened and lead you all to the Promised Land, I decided to dump you there myself."
"Where are we?"
"That would be telling." I grinned. "You'll find out soon enough. As for food—"
Ordinary dogs, small d, aren't magical creatures, but according to Chrysalis, Changelings can feed on them anyway. When I was a child, ponies weren't great at taking good care of their animals – cats and dogs bred and ran wild, and the "pounds" that they were collected in often had miserable conditions, and sometimes were forced to kill animals due to overcrowding. Now ponies have swung much, much too far in the opposite direction; they take such good care of their animals that animals are often virtually helpless without pony assistance. Animal shelters in the big cities of Equestria are stuffed to the gills with animals that can't survive without pony care, where the ponies they would have relied on have died, moved, given up on animal care, or have just become overwhelmed. Ponies like Fluttershy step in to adopt as many as they can, but because ponies have crippled animals' natural abilities to take care of themselves, the level of pony care needed by Equestria's animals is more than ponies can possibly give.
Dogs, in particular, are well-known for being loving, loyal pets – which is part of how carnivorous animals got to be such popular pets for herbivorous ponies. So I just pulled dogs out of shelters all over Equestria and dumped them all over the caves, along with big piles of yummy raw meat made from chaos. I gave them some meat trees growing outside, with branches high enough that the dogs wouldn't be able to get to them, but Changelings can all fly. Let the Changelings collect meat from meat trees to feed their pups, and the supply of love would be endless. The fact that ordinary dogs have very little magic meant that there wouldn't be a lot of nutrition coming from any one dog, but I provided them with a lot of dogs.
"What is that noise? What did you do?"
"Fixed your food problem. You now have a very large quantity of loving canines who are even stupider than your Diamond Dogs. Take care of them, feed them from the meat trees I gave you outside the caves—"
"Meat trees?"
"Don't interrupt. You should be doing reasonably well for food for a while. And for my final trick—" I snapped my talon and sheared away the edges of Chrysalis' chitin, where the Element of Protection had slashed through. She screamed.
"What are you doing? Stop!"
"Sorry." I wasn't actually that sorry. "I know from personal experience that if Anon slices you up with his cheese dicer, the parts of you that his sword touched while he was cutting off other parts of you are contaminated, their magic disrupted. I'm removing the parts he disrupted, which should allow the rest of it to start healing. You might still die – I'm not in the business of handing out miracle cures – but I've given you a fighting chance." I grinned down at her. "I find that chance is so much more fun and exciting than inevitability, don't you?"
She moved, slightly, as if trying to pull herself off of her supporting bed, and collapsed back onto it. "I'm in agony. Are you sure this isn't the part where you try to torture me for information?"
"No, you're going to freely give me that information, now that I've helped you. Your hive has a good chance of survival, now, and I expect you to make good on your promise."
"And if I don't, you'll torture me."
"If you don't, I take back the gifts I've given you, and you can die in torment knowing that you won a second chance for your hive, and then lost it by double-crossing me."
Chrysalis took a deep breath. "I traded it to the hive of Forgotten Sky, where I sent my daughters, as payment for taking them in."
"Which is where, exactly?"
"In Hayre. In the old lands. Near Underhill."
Very interesting. I whistled. "Moving up in the world, your girls, aren't they."
"Equestria was supposed to be the New World. They know us, in Hayre. They know how to ward us away. The lands are old and full of heritage and tradition, and you know as well as I do that those are other names for stagnation. This was the land of progress, the land where Changelings would finally make their mark." She was plainly exhausted, eyes closed, voice starting to slur. "I didn't want to send them there, but no other hive would take them."
Changelings originate from a subdimension called Underhill, or sometimes called the Fey Lands, which is very similar to Tartarus except for the fact that it is nice, and you would want to live there, if it weren't for the fact that if you're a magical pony the inhabitants will probably suck you dry. The only natural gate to Underhill in Equestria is Breezy Land, and that's actually sealed off from the rest of Underhill so you can only get there via the Equestria side and only during the time window that the gates are open. Most of the Underhill gates are in Neighropa or the islands around it. What Chrysalis was talking about was a hive near, or possibly within, the Sidhe Gates, the ones that can be accessed via caves in Hayre. There's also the Low Gates in Agland, the Avalon Gate in Albion, the Fae Gate in Prance... no shortage of ways to get there, if you cross an ocean first.
The thing is, of course, that because Changelings came up first in those regions, the creatures that reside there – ponies in Albion and Prance, sheep and goats in Agland, cows, ponies and sheep in Hayre – are very, very well aware of how to properly detect, fight and protect themselves from Changelings. Equestria knows very little about Changelings, so the ponies over here were easy pickings. Normally, hives do not take in Princesses from other hives – the risk to their own Princesses is far too great. But a hive in Hayre, where the inhabitants know what herbs repel Changelings and what potions force them to transform to their true selves, would have a lot of use for the Element of Deception, simply in order to thrive and grow.
Which meant I might have a serious fight on my hands, if I couldn't negotiate with them to give them something they wanted even more. Well, I doubted they could possibly be as tough as Winnie was.
"Thank you, my dear, you've been an enormous help," I said, and gave Chrysalis a big fat smooch on her cheek, which woke her up enough to try to bat me away. She had a disgusted expression but you know, I bet she secretly enjoyed it. "Ta-ta!"
If Chrysalis survives – and with the help I gave her, she might, now – she's on my short list for allies to potentially give Elements to. I'm not giving her Deception, obviously – she handled that so badly, I doubt she's capable of properly bonding to it now. But one of the others, maybe.
And now, I'm off to lovely green Hayre, land of the Eohippos, Breezies, Changelings, and various other creatures from Underhill, to negotiate with the Changeling hive that got my Element of Deception. {Editor's Note: Hayre is pronounced hay-ruh, not like hair. This confused me the first time I read it because for once Discord spelled it correctly, which I didn't expect. –ed}
Oh, except Gilda says I have to spar with her first. Like I have time for this.
So here I am in beautiful Hayre, looking for the Board of Tourism, but for some reason everypony I've asked about it has screamed and run away. Really, it's enough to give a draconequus a complex. Do I have spinach stuck in my teeth? That would be very unusual, considering that I never eat spinach.
Changeling hives are even better warded over here than they were in the Badlands, but they're doing it with pure magic. There's a superstition that cold iron, a substance that disrupts magic in general, is dangerous to Changelings, and it's a persistent enough superstition that Changelings themselves believe it. So noling lives in a cave with iron running through it (also, there is very little iron in Hayre to begin with.) And the thing about trying to hide your cave, or bog, or tree forts, with magic is that I can directly detect magic, so that trick doesn't work on me. It's sort of like dyeing your coat black to sneak through the night and forgetting that ponies are warm-blooded creatures and that therefore anything that can see heat—which, among other creatures, dragons, thestrals, timberwolves and hydras can—can see you just fine.
No, I'm faced with the opposite problem right now. I'm in the capital of Hayre, Dapplin, sitting on top of one of the tallest towers, and I can detect no less than fourteen hives within a quick trot of the city. No, wait, is that fifteen? Fourteen, fifteen, eurgh. Math is hard. I keep losing track of whether I counted one of them twice or whether I missed one. They're all using Changeling magic, aka processed love-derived magic, to disguise their hives. If they were trying to hide from me it would have made more sense to mind-whammy a unicorn, or maybe a zebra, into making them a cloak, because then I might not notice – I'd see a concentration of unicorn magic but figuring out that it's actually important would be less like a needle in a haystack and more like trying to find your favorite needle in a haystack-sized stack of needles. Zebra magic might work because they make their magic blend into the background of the natural magic; I'm less likely to notice a spot that's very, very green on a background of mostly green than a spot of blue on the same background. But of course, they haven't done either one because they have no idea they should be worried about me. News doesn't travel particularly quickly between nations, and it's not as if the Hayre government would go out of its way to inform the Changelings of anything except how pleased they would be if the Changelings obligingly dropped dead.
But, you know... now I have to go visit fourteen hives, or maybe fifteen, to see which one of them is Forgotten Sky, and it might not be any of them because the hive might not be near Dapplin. Changelings have a bit of a dilemma when they choose the location for their hive. They blend in best in big cities, so close to a city is an ideal location to get a large number of harvesters out into the population, find a significant number of ponies that nopony will miss, and drain them, while also finding ponies that somepony will miss and impersonating them. On the other hoof, land is generally at a premium near a big city, and it's much harder to hide your hive when developers want to build a suburb on it. Forgotten Sky could be anywhere in Hayre, and this being where Changelings come from in the first place, there are many, many hives here.
Hmm. Let's try this.
Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! Or ma'am, or whatever you are, I can never gender you Changelings properly. Can you tell me –
--No, that is what we call rude. You do not try to mob the draconequus for asking—
--It's jello. You're swimming in it. If you don't want it to cover your breathing holes you might want to—
--Hello! Lord of Chaos, trying to talk here!
--No, it makes perfect sense. I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever magic you fire bounces off of me and sticks to you. Literally. Also, got your horn!
--I would already—
--Stop jumping on me! I am three seconds away from conjuring a giant fly swatter—
--All right, that's it. This is my ool! Notice there are no liferafts in it! I'm sure there will be some pee once you figure out that I really don't care if you all drown, but there are definitely no liferafts.
--The meaning of this, Your Majesty, is that I came here to ask a simple question and all of these changelings attacked me.
--I can't be trespassing. I'm the spirit of chaos. See my badge, here? This gives me the right to go anywhere on the world I want to.
--You really don't want to be doing that, Your Majesticness.
--I warn them and warn them but they never listen...
--What? It's just butter! I didn't kill your queen, she'll have herself dug out of there in no time.
--If you would just—
--Fine! You can all drown! Or you could answer my very simple question, and then I could give Mr. Princely here back his horn, and move my ool back home, and maybe even stop buttering your queen! Though really, she should be paying me for this. Butter will do wonders for her complexion.
--Just one little question. Where is the hive of Forgotten Sky?
--That's fine, that's fine. Changeling solidarity and all that. I guess I'll just put your hive in my bag to go—
--Yes. Yes, you're in a bag. Yes, I'm going to tie the bag closed and then you're all going to have to do a lot of drinking if you don't want to drown. Wow, that's going to result in a whole lot of pee, won't it. I mean, it'll go from being an ool to a pool to a p, because there won't be any water left in the ool after you guys are done drinking it all—
--Oh, did I forget to mention that? Silly me! I'm Discord, the spirit of chaos. Pretty sure I did mention the spirit of chaos part.
--Hi, Queeny! How did you like the butter? Me, I prefer cream cheese.
--Speak up! Don't be shy!
--Oh, come now, trying to drown the only fellow who's trying to save all your lives? Just because he's willing to sell out a fellow Changeling hive to save this one? What did Forgotten Sky do for you guys that you're willing to die for them?
--You're right, that's not what my rep suggests at all. I've been going about this all wrong! Instead of filling the bag with water and threatening to drown you, I should turn you all into collectible Hearth's Warming ornaments!
--Oh, you've heard that? You've been to Equestria, or am I just that fascinating?
--You spied on Celestia? Magnificent! Right under Chrysalis' nose, too. I'm very impressed. But see, the thing I said was "I don't turn ponies to stone", not "I don't turn Changelings into hoof-sized crystal ornaments for a Hearth's Warming tree." Oh, wait, Yule tree. I forgot you guys don't even celebrate Hearth's Warming over here!
--How about cheese? Would you prefer being cheese?
--Your Majesty, I don't think this ling likes being cheese. Now that you're covered in cream cheese, I think you have the experience to answer this. Should I make him an orn—
--That was rude, my dear.
--Yes, I know this is your hive. I still outrank you. Spirit of Chaos, fundamental underpinning force of magic, plus, not only do I have your horn, I also have your nose.
--Gingerbread Changelings! There we go! That's not a single bit like stone.
--Alas, poor Changeling Queen! I knew her, Horatio. A mare of infinite stubbornness.
--No, I haven't killed her. How could she still be screaming curses at me if I had killed her? I just removed her head, sheesh.
--Well, she should have thought of that before she charged at me... after I'd already taken her horn. And her nose. But I think I'm going to put back her nose; there you go, much more attractive. I don't really have enough heads that are always screaming in my trophy room at home; old pal of mine used to send me one every Samhain, but we fell out of touch this last millennium.
--Now you're willing to deal? I turn half the lings in this room into Gingerlings and one of them into cheese, I remove your queen's head from her body and dance with it, and it's not until I say I'm going to take her for a trophy—
--You actually don't, dear heart. See?
--Oh, the screaming. Tone it down, willya? That's better. Ah, the old zipper trick, never fails to calm them down.
--Why, yes. Yes, these fully poseable and finely crafted figurines are all of the Princesses currently present in this hive. Except I think this guy might be a Prince. I could look at his undercarriage to check but frankly you guys aren't really impressively built to begin with and now that I've made him fun-sized I think I'd need a magnifying—
--Did you have something to say, Your Majesty? Because if this is more snarling and cursing I'll just take your entire mouth the next time and not even bother with a zipper.
--So that thing you were saying before about how it doesn't matter what I do to you because your daughters will take your place... is it sinking in now that that is not an option on the table?
--I already told you what I want! Give me the location of the Forgotten Sky hive and I'll turn everyling back into a Changeling, return the horns I took, clean up the water and the cream cheese, and put your head back on your body.
--There we go. Was that really so hard? Here, just to show you how grateful I am that you finally answered my question, let me give you all a makeover.
--I think it's an improvement! You're love vampires, right? Well, all the fillies love vampires that sparkle! You'll be a huge hit!
--Mmm... no. You can stay this way. Let it be a lesson to you. When the Spirit of Chaos says "jump", you say, "how applesauce?"
--And here I thought we already had the discussion about horns.
--Oh, it's in this hive someplace. Dig hard enough, you'll find it. Do be sure to wash it before you put it back on your head.
--What do you mean what good will that do? As soon as it's back on your head, it'll stick again and you'll be able to do magic just like before. But you won't be able to get rid of the yellow stripes. Those are a permanent gift from me to you.
--One more complaint and when you stick the horn back on it will fasten to your nose and you'll bloat to the size of a giant honeybee. Maybe I should do that anyway.
--You let your children beg on your behalf, but you're too proud to beg for yourself? Is that it? Well, after the hard time you've given me, maybe I'd like to hear some begging. Maybe some "Discord, please, don't make me look like a giant bee and be the laughingstock of every hive in Hayre for the rest of my life" would go down nicely right now.
--Okay, bee that way! Haha! You get it? Bee that way?
--Oh, you Changelings are a terrible audience. Grow a sense of humor if you don't want to be pink sparkly Changelings with a honeybee Queen for the rest of your lives.
Whew! Now that was some excellent chaos there. I won't lie; as frustrating as I might find it in the moment when it's happening, I really do like it better when they resist, and give me an excuse to let loose on them. That particular Changeling hive was unusually dense – not in terms of how many Changelings resided within, but in terms of how long it took them to figure out that they can't fight me.
It surprises me a little that whatever nameless hive I first invaded (which I shall heretofore dub Honeycomb Hive in honor of the makeover I gave the queen) fought so hard not to give up the location of another hive. I'd always thought Changeling hives were competitors. And maybe they are, but maybe when faced with a threat that could impact multiple hives, they band together. Hmm! I must give this some thought. If Changeling hives are competitors but intercooperate when dealing with threats that imperil all Changelings, then what would happen if I persuaded a few queens that letting their neighboring hive be discovered by ponies would be a delightful way to get rid of the competition? That could be lots of fun.
Maybe I'm overthinking things and the real reason they tried so hard not to betray Forgotten Sky is that Forgotten Sky is some kind of uber-hive, rather like Chrysalis' hive is in Equestria. Most hives in Equestria descend from Chrysalis; there were Changelings in my day – as I think I mentioned, I had a pet miniature hive of my own for a while, and they weren't the only lings in Equestria – but Changelings dream, and they were too slow to adapt to the new world order. They were used to my freewheeling world of anarchy where there was no central government to try to hunt them down. Once Celestia and Luna took control, Luna hunted all the Queens and Princesses down by their dreams, invaded hives, corralled the lings, and banished them to islands off the west coast of Equestria. I wonder to this day if Luna ever realizes she doomed them to a slow death by starvation that way, that her attempt to grant them mercy by banishing instead of killing them was no real mercy at all. By the time of Luna's fall, there were no Changelings in Equestria, and they didn't return until Chrysalis' arrival, less than a century ago. So now, almost all the Changelings in Equestria are in Chrysalis' daughter hives.
I won't know if any of the Changelings' side of the conversation came out until I go back home and see what my tooth just recorded to my journal, but just in case nothing came through: after a tense negotiation with one of the local hives, in which I of course thoroughly humiliated them and their queen for trying to refuse me the information I wanted, I finally got the location of Forgotten Sky. So I'm going to stop narrating in real time now. Judging from how hard Honeycomb Hive resisted me on the simple question of Forgotten Sky's location, I may be in for a fight... but unlike dragons, Changelings aren't much of a threat to me, and while most of them are pretty boring the queens are always fun to mess with, so I expect to have some fun.
You know, either way I win. They capitulate, I get what I want and move on with my life, maybe go find Lulalula Trixamoon and give her the shiny thing I just acquired, maybe go have a chat with Spike the Tiny Dragon, or maybe just go make myself a platter of spaghetti with cream cheese, jalapenos, and toadstools and drink it all up. They refuse me, I get to amuse myself at their expense. See, win-win! Sometimes I love being me.
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This is part of my headcanon why Chrysalis attacked Canterlot: After Luna returned and resumed her duties, Chryssie found out that she can track changelings using their dreams, got scared and launched her desperate attempt at invasion because she figured that remaining hidden was no longer possible for her hive and her infiltrators.
You know, I am so glad that you don't follow the canon for Changelings. That stuff is so bloody borring, and it's such as shame to, as there is so much potential lore for a species like changelings in Equestria. On that vein, let me say that the little bit of world building you had here with the changelings was excellently done, and I'm actually adjusting some of my own headcanon here because, well, frankly I like yours more.
Although, now I am curious to know what reaction, if any, Luna would have to finding out all those changelings she banished starved to death. Would be interesting if nothing else.
As for everything else, Discord is hilarious and awesome as usual, and the fate of the changelings and Queen Chrysalis here was horrific and made me hate Anon even more. It really is amazing how much hate Anon can generate-I was already at the belief I couldn't think him of him as anymore of a pathetic waste of space than I already was. You proved me wrong.
...pink sparkly changelings? I wonder if the colour change remains no matter what shape they take?
Another chapter? You spoil us, but don't stop. I may be dependent on your horse words.
I have a soft spot in my heart for changlings. Apparently so does discord as he basically gave Crissy her best chance at living.
Somehow I have in my head that Discord is going to use Sunset Shimmer in the future.
Fascinating stuff all around, from the site of the Battle of Discord to how changelings use enslaved pegasi to the fae realms. Quite a lot to take in here for a world building junkie like me.
Still, I get the feeling that Forgotten Sky won't quite be the walk in the park that Discord expects. It'll probably still be easier than dealing with Winnie, but something tells me that Discord just tempted fate...
Eagerly looking forward to more, especially the upcoming scene with Spike.
-ed? So the editor's name ends with ed or is that something of the english language i don't know?
I hated Anon before, but now I really, really, loath him. Personally murdering hundreds, if not thousands, of changelings without any hesitation or regret? That's absolutely heartless. Even trained soldiers have trouble pulling a trigger, yet he could personally cut up all those changelings? The monster has no empathy, and I hope he is put down.
I love the part about 'honeycomb' hive. Discord can be pretty nasty when he wants to be as well. His empathetic senses are pretty low as well, but even then he is relatively harmless... Well, besides the emotional and physical trauma he leaves behind. At least he doesn't directly murder, though.
Super excited for part two!
For a while there, I thought that Forgotten Sky was Chrysalis's hive, and that you'd just cut out that one-sided conversation scene for brevity, along with a whole extended subplot about Discord's search. Wasn't expecting that scene to show up where it did.
6943488
You know, I like this theory and I do agree with it. Harmony seems to be more subtle in a lot of ways than outright order. Just look at the pilot episodes of canon and you can see that. Twilight didn't even realize until the very end that her slowly growing friendship with the others was what gave her the power to best Nightmare Moon.
I have to wonder if your idea and my new theory about how Anon might be taken down might have room to mesh together? We know that the story has to be subverted in someway. It recently occurred to me that there's one major trait that many self-insert-brony-in-Equestria-seventh-element fics have in common. One that isn't absent in this story, but not being fulfilled the way it would be normally...
Think I'll wait for the next chapter before I put up what it is, though. See if that theory about who the editor is pans out.
6943864
"-ed" is a commonly used note by editors in books, comics, etc. It indicates that the text attached to it is a note made by the editor of the work and not something the author originally put in. They're often used when the editor feels he needs to clarify something about the part he's editing.
Interesting changeling headcanons.
Weeeell who can blame you?
JESUS CHRIST! Just a casual reminder that this is DISCORD THE GOD OF CHAOS!
PPFFT! Wonder why!
Isn’t Chrysalis’s hive in the Badlands – well, was – with iron? Or do they not buy into it?
You mean pool?
Does he actually mean ool? Like ooze-pool?
Is that what I think it is?
ESPECIALLY since they aren’t up to their gills in super-magical artifacts like Winny was.
Can’t wait to see his confrontation with the Forgotten Sky hive!
6944064
Yes, the point was that in Hayre they follow the old superstitions. Chrysalis' Hive doesn't buy into the belief that iron weakens Changeling magic, so they have a much better hiding place than the hives in Hayre.
The joke the whole "ool" thing is referencing is a sign that you see sometimes on people's swimming pools: "This is our OOL. Notice there is no P in it. Please keep it that way!" Discord is riffing on that.
And if what you think "heads that are always screaming" is, is a Gravity Falls reference, then you are correct.
6944365
Oh, I've never seen that.
6943888
I might have only started reading this recently, but one of my favourite parts of the story [among many others] is how the author slowly reveals the horrifying consequences of making Equestria conform to Anon's headcanon as he twists it to suit his own purposes across several chapters.
As well as demonising the villains, major or otherwise, and turning the Element bearers and Princesses into Anon's love interests(with terrifying implications of mind-controlled rape), he wrecks havoc on the villains, and mete out death sentences without any hint of mercy and/or remorse on his part. [In Diamond Tiara's case, humiliation.]
But I digress.
The reason I made a reply to your comment is because what you've described about Anon
means that he shows signs of Black and White Insanity, where the characters he likes are "spared" and, the world of Equestria that serves as an escapist fantasy for him is turned into a Crapsaccharine World where mares are not above committing sexual assault on what few stallions there are left and like I've said earlier, villains are harshly punished.
You know what i like about this story? How you take someone so powerful, such as Discord, and then you just have him working so hard for a win, Any win, with a self inflicted handicap against someone stronger then him.(not smarter, more skilled, craftier, or more adaptable. Just whatever the thing that live's in anon's head is a stronger reality warper.)
6944430
6944858
Uh, scary thought to consider.
Is Anon actually a real person? I mean in the world of the story, of course, is he actually a human from the world Discord visited? Because reading your comments gave me the frightening idea that maybe he's not.
The author's comments in earlier chapters made me think that Character! Anon is the real person and Author! Anon is his subconscious applying itself to reality, but what if the reverse is true? That A!Anon is the actual living being and Ch!Anon is just the story he's writing forcing itself on Equestria?
It certainly wouldn't make his actions any more moral or justified, but it would offer an explanation for how he could do this stuff. Because from his perspective he's not actually doing any of it. He's just writing a story and doesn't consider that any of it is really happening.
And now I gave myself the chills. Yikes.
6943488 I love your theory, Discord taking a rag-tag group of misfits and turning them into a harmonious team to
save the teen rec centerdefeat Anon and accidentally become good people in the process would be awesome.In other fics from the author, Zecora acts as the oracle of the Tree of Harmony, and she was the one who negotiated a truce between Discord and the Tree. I don't think we've seen Zecora yet, but I would be curious to see how Anon has affected her. She seems important enough in the show that he would have warped her at least a little bit, to the extent he affected say Shining Armor. But making a highly intelligent priest, who has probably trained herself to resist mind magic, at least the chaotic sort believe the core doctrines of her dogma are fundamentally different from reality seems very unstable.
(There...are...six...elements!)
6944858
Perhaps. I mean, if I placed myself on a pedestal and touted my own values as the be-all and end-all, I would be disinclined to listen to how I might be wrong. His illusion certainly gives him the misconception that just because he thinks he has the moral high ground/ sided with the heroes, he can get away with just about anything, up to and including genocide.
EDIT:The fact that he has written a false backstory making out Discord to be a cold-blooded villain that had murdered Princess Celestia and Luna's father certainly helps too.
Or try to disable the !Author Anon long enough to take control of the story and write out the ending he wants, including subjecting !Character Anon to torture.
That doesn't seem likely, though.
6944920
Unfortunately, I've read through your comment twice and it's safe to say that I could not fully understand what you've said. Meta stuff and the finer points of Literature isn't really my strong point, after all.
Or anything else, for that matter.
6944858
This one.
See, Changelings are a faceless horde. They're not ponies, which are people. They're bug monsters, and like robots and demons, it's okay to kill them. They bleed green! Standards and Practices will totally allow them to bleed on screen!
Anon is very, very, very heavily influenced by television/movie logic. He thought it was okay to slaughter the Changelings because it's just like Buffy slaughtering vampires, or a comic book hero destroying robots. They're not people. They don't count.
6944430
Yes, exactly. Good is good and evil is evil and never the twain shall mix, unless evil is female and attractive to Anon and therefore can be redeemed and isn't so bad. (Anon tried to kill Chrysalis, and eventually she would have died of her injuries without Discord's intervention, and she still might... but Luna is now time-sharing her body with a saner version of Nightmare Moon who also loves Anon and hates everyone Anon hates, and rather than being a madmare who's willing to plunge the world into eternal darkness, she's simply an extremist who takes everything very, very seriously. Every time Discord has interacted with Luna in dreams, Nightmare Moon shows up to help Luna fight him.) Most likely, if Anon were to encounter Sunset Shimmer, he would personally redeem her and show her the path of friendship, and love, and she might well join his harem. However, Flash Sentry would suffer humiliation after humiliation, turn out to be a horrible bigot and a secretly evil person, and end up either dead or socially outcast, because no one steals Anon's waifus.
Anon's not a sociopath, but he's a guy who believes the world works according to the rules of fiction, living in a universe that to him is fictional, and his subconscious mind has the power to treat the world as if it were fictional. So Changelings can be slaughtered for the same reason orcs and demons can be, and he spares no thought to their suffering because they're evil. If he was up against ponies he wouldn't be nearly so vicious.
6945024
6945080
Broken Moral Compass argument:
He certainly thinks that the major villains are 100% evil [Save for Nightmare Moon, since she's technically Princess Luna's Super-Powered Evil Side] and that Diamond Tiara deserved to be humiliated for what she did to the Cutie Mark Crusaders, judging by the way he had treated Discord and Chrysalis.
He straight out ignores the fact that some villains can be reformed and heads straight towards beating the crap out of them, consequences be damned. As a step towards achieving this goal, he convinces the two Princesses that Discord was their father's killer, and himself that "Since Discord's a cold-blooded killer, we can act against him however we like without any moral qualms."
For Chrysalis, she had impersonated Princess Cadence and tried to invade Canterlot for Equestria's love to feed her people (Understandable, but unforgivable.), which resulted in Twilight's friends and family abandoning her and leaving her to cry, making Anon think "Ermahgerd, mah Waifu's hurt! Better use my dick to make her feel better!"
Anon's punishment? Committing genocide which would have resulted in the Changeling's extinction in the Badlands had Discord not intervened just because of the acts of one Queen. Very stupid and unforgivable.
It reeks of Protagonist-Centered Morality to me. If I haven't said it before(and if I did, please bear with me), personalities Anon likes are excused, while those he dislikes are punished severely. If that form of morality isn't flawed and broken, I don't know what is.
Self-delusion argument:
It's one thing to murder people in a game [take Grand Theft Auto] and another in real life. From what we've seen, Anon's a blatant self-insert that warps and twists Equestria to suit his fantasy. People rarely think out the consequences of their own fantasies.
Since no origin story on Discord and the Princesses' parents are shown in the show, it falls to Anon to fill in the missing gaps, since he does not know the true origin story, and look where that's ended up.
He deceives himself into believing that all of Equestria is mainly dedicated to stroking his ego and providing him with mates to fulfill his perverted fantasies, and that those who aren't useful to him can be destroyed with absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever to the wider world.
...I've just realised I wasn't exactly answering your question. God Dammit.
Bear with me here even more.
It's hard, if not outright impossible, for the audience to sympathise with characters they have only seen for a short while. [Like the Father.] No.
Anon's true reason for anger stems from Discord mind-raping the Mane six and trying to take over Equestria in "Return of Harmony". Anon's mind process for creating backstories for villains probably runs something like this:
1. "He's evil because he did this!"
2. "He did this because he's evil!"
3. Repeat 1 and 2 and you'll get a flat villain who Anon will not feel sorry for killing.
The backstory where the Princesses' father is murdered is only a reason for the Princesses to hate Discord. The Princesses' father is only a narrative device. It doesn't matter what he looks like, it doesn't matter what he did, save for the fact he raised the Princesses and was murdered by Discord. He just needed reasons for everypony he likes to hate Discord so that they'll all celebrate in a gigantic orgy dedicated to Anon when Anon kills Discord.
EDIT: Thanks to 6949059' comment, I now have new material to work with. Thanks!
Well, it turns out that one of the most important episodes in the show received a lot of hate just because butthurt fans wanted to see more villainous Discord instead of how a reformed Discord could interact with the rest of the cast as friends and an emotional journey towards making friendship. Who knew?
So, assuming that Anon is one of those fans, making Discord out to be the villain would make sense, because as well as making Discord conform to his headcanon, a [sarcasm]legitimately powerful and frightening[/sarcasm] villain is served up as a punching bag just to show how powerful Anon is.
Oh, the dance between Anon and those he makes out to be villains may be action-packed and filled with Damsels in Distress, but in the end, the fact that Anon will inevitably triumph over the antagonists, save the day and get all the girls in accordance with his own wish-fulfilment fantasies destroys any suspense and sense of immersion a reader with any common sense might have.
To summarise: IMHO, it could be a combination of both, though it could be leaning more towards the latter.
Also:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/5/19/631450__safe_solo_smile_open+mouth_happy_cheese+sandwich_school+uniform_wingding+eyes_sparkles_artist-colon-omnifob.png
EDIT: Also, I've started typing out my reply to Orion before your reply came along, so I didn't take the time to take your answer into account.
Oh, and one more thing before I go:
cathyreisenwitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/no.jpg
With all that chaos bottling up, Discord just discovered a time limit for himself? And what will happen to other worlds, whe it gets vented en-masse?
6943488
No, Anon's powers are working fine here. He gets to do more of the heroing if he has less backup; of course, he can't have no backup, or else there's no-one to tell the others how incredible he his while he stands quietly and pretends to be humble. But having all six around all the time might make it look like he can't manage without them...
6945212
I'm behind both of these, especially the mixing of the two, but I think we need to look from a slightly different angle. Not that I'm trying to be sympathetic towards Anon, but he's not consciously trying to convince anyone of anything. He's a brony with his own head-canon like so many other fans of every other show out there have. Worse, he's a guy that hasn't seen past early season 3 so he doesn't have anywhere near the whole story.
Show of hands/hooves: Who else out there had a head-canon similar to Anon's after Discord's first appearance in the show? Maybe not with the whole father-killing angle, but as an unrepentant monster whose only goal was to spread misery and suffering across Equestria? I mean, Celestia didn't really paint him in the best light in the Season 2 premiere, and his personal stained glass window that shows him puppeteer helpless ponies didn't help matters. His own actions only further damned him.
There's nothing inherently wrong with having a head-canon to explain things your favorite show/movie/book/whatever leaves vague. Part of the fun of any work of fiction is talking to other fans, comparing theories, and developing those sorts of stories together! The Season 2 premiere gave us Discord, an enemy that even Celestia was afraid of! One that could beat her magic, steal the Elements of Harmony, and warp the living embodiments of those virtues to the polar opposite of their natural selves! And he did all that in the span of a few days! I certainly believed that Discord was a lot worse when he was running Equestria completely. Though less a "Vicious chaos tyrant" and more an "overgrown child refusing to clean up after himself" sort of worse (which he's practically admitted to in this story).
The major problem with Anon's head-canon is that it's being forced onto the world around him by whatever is fueling his powers. All he did was have the idea that "Discord was a monster that murdered Celestia's father and that's why she hates him", and his reality warping powers did the rest. He doesn't have to convince anypony that he's right or that Discord is a monster, because they already believe it. And that fact probably only adds to his power rush because he's seeing proof that all his theories about Equestria were "right".
There's no changing the fact that he's still a monster, though. The removal from his home world and power trip only goes so far, and he'd need to be a little messed up to think for even a second that anything he's done to the Changelings, Diamond Tiara, Discord, or any of the other villains is in anyway heroic. Mass genocide, yelling at little girls until they cry, and laughing as your enemy bleeds and dissolves in front of you are not the actions of a morally upstanding person. But his twisted world view makes him think he's the hero because he's only ever mean to "the bad guys", and his powers mean everyone else sees it that way even if they'd normally be appalled by such actions.
I get the feeling that if he'd ever interacted with other bronies, he was probably the sort that would put up stories like what the author is deconstructing here. And then when people tried to comment on why something doesn't make sense or point out the weak points he'd just delete their comments and accuse them of trolling him.
6947354
This is pretty much it.
Anon doesn't know he is warping a pre-existing world to fit his preconceptions; he believes things are just naturally turning out as he expects them to. I can't hold it against him that he had headcanons; I'm sure if I had his powers and ended up in Equestria and was subconsciously warping everyone to be what I expected them to be, everyone would believe Discord had a tragic backstory, which would turn out to be really inconvenient if the truth was that Discord was completely evil, or an incomprehensible cosmic force.
He's not entirely as innocent as you make him sound, because he has seen all of season 3. He knows Discord was supposed to reform, he knows that Twilight was supposed to ascend into an alicorn. He hates these plot developments and refuses to believe in them. He wouldn't be alone; many, many fans of the show got totally butthurt over Discord's redemption (it doesn't help that Keep Calm and Flutter On was so incredibly rushed and pretty much unbelievable). I can't hold that against him either, though, really; at this point, if they air an episode in which they reveal Discord's background and it's so different from the one I gave him that I can't reconcile it, I will probably declare it noncanon for purposes of my fanfic and continue blithely on with my version of the character. :-)
But Anon is culpable in that, when presented with a real world that is exactly like he believed this fictional world to be, he doesn't question why. In his place, I would wonder why everything matched my headcanons. Why would I, specifically, turn out to be right about everything, and so many other fan writers wrong? I wouldn't suspect I was subconsciously warping reality -- I'd assume that either I was insane and hallucinating all of it, or that some other entity was screwing with me by presenting a reality just like the one I believed -- but I'd know something was wrong. Anon doesn't question it.
And Anon knows that Twilight et al could have saved themselves from the Changelings, and could have saved themselves from Sombra, but he's had to insert himself, both times, and steal their glory. This is a trend I find infuriating in fanfic -- it's one thing to self-insert and have your self-insert defeat an evil plot that never happened in canon, quite another to self-insert into an evil plot that you know the canon characters handled just fine and take over the role of the good guy from the actual good guys. I don't understand why people do this. I understand fix-it fics where your self-insert saves your favorite characters from canonical doom -- I've written those. But why fix a thing that wasn't broken? If the heroes defeated the bad guy, soundly and unambiguously, and none of the heroes got permanently hurt or scarred, and there was no collateral damage... why self-insert to "fix" it by having your character save the day?
Anon is worse than a self-insert writer in this regard, because the self-insert writer is taking character development and credit away from fictional characters that can't be hurt because they're not real. Anon is dealing with real ponies, who he thinks he loves, but he's taking away their ability to grow and develop and their credit as heroes, and he doesn't question the morality of doing this. He wants to "protect" them from things that he knows they defeated in canon, to justify his own existence and let him be a hero.
Discord, of course, holds everything against him, but Discord has never claimed to be entirely rational. Discord blames him for things like the false memories implanted in Celestia and Luna even though he knows Anon doesn't seem to be aware of what he's doing. I personally can't blame Anon for doing those things, but I blame him for being dense, failing to notice that a world that revolves around him doesn't make sense, having a black and white morality so rigid it leads to committing mass murder, and deliberately interfering in the heroism of the main cast.
And in the next chapter, if you thought you hated Anon before, you'll see evidence of something he's done quite intentionally that is probably the most selfish and awful thing he has done deliberately in the story. His treatment of villains is black and white morality territory and he genuinely is not equipped to recognize how terrible he's being; he doesn't know he's warping all of Equestria to match his beliefs; but the thing we've seen that he has done is something that he could have and should have known was cruel to do, and he did it anyway and hurt someone who is not a villain in the slightest.
6948705
As Discord would see it, he knew he was doing something awful when he did it, and it damaged his sanity to do it, but he felt like he had to, to protect the ponies. The dragons were the aggressors in the war and would not negotiate. In fact, the worst stuff that Discord did, he did after the dragons had killed him, and to the best of his knowledge Celestia and Luna, when they'd met with the dragon leaders to supposedly accept a surrender.
So he's not going to recognize the similarities unless someone beats him over the head with them (metaphorically). Which someone might.
6949065 There is also a grave difference regarding moral standards between Discord killing all the Dragons, and Anon killing all these changeling.
Discord had established that Dragons were completely unwilling to negotiate and would not except any other end then their ultimate feast with all the much more peaceful ponies as their dinner.
Seeing that dragons really have their ferocious condition of being cold murdering beasts, enjoying their kills, at least I imagine that was how Discord described them, and Celestia really depended on Discord to stop them, the dragons, from committing genocide upon her own people.
So preemptively, he was send into the war, and dealt with them personally to prevent many more casualties on the ponies side, as well as keep Celestia alive, while as it seems back then this still a pretty different mission for him, considering how many, and strong, Dragons he had to neutralize.
What I mean is, he committed genocide on a species that is one of the most dangerous, aggressive and ferociously merciless, once provoked, in equestria, and as it stood they outpowered their entire nation massively, since we are talking about huge magic resistant Dragons here of all elemental kinds.
Dragons were coming for equestria, and they would have devoured the ponies as a whole, just like that. Plus they never negotiated, in exceedingly stubbornness.
Hence, why Discord offed them, it was a valid choice, even if that sounds hart.
In comparison, the Changelings are hardly as mercilessness as the Dragons, nor as ferocious and greedy. Discord told us as much. Sure this was an invasion, of one castle mind you, but the thing is since Anon is well informed about the series (he does not deserve to be called a brony in my eyes), it could definitely have been easily prevented to slaughter them like that, or repel them with their 'love magic' either, beforehand in well foresight. In this case, It had been Anon's responsibility to share information about them, prepare a trap or something, and then start nagotiations once they were caught, since in such a position the Queen would have been more sane and willing to agree.
I understand that Anon arrived before the Canterlot invasion, right?
But instead he used his sword and ended the whole fiasco in a bloody massacre for the changelings.
Discord's choice to commit genocide on the Dragons is understandable at least, his reasons are clear.
Anon though was being unreasonably violent and slaughtered a species that was in this invasion clearly at a great Disadvantage, with him having practically godlike killing powers. He just posed as the hero, tossed the changelings off as monsters, and left them with much more problems and injuries than what Cadance would have done.
Which eventually would have let to the hives slow and cruel demise.
So Discord's reaction actually being intelligent to the Dragons, and understandable, Anon's merciless slaughter of the much less dangerous, and certainly better to nagotiate with, changelings is unbelievably cruel, since he had the chance to find alternative ways, instead of labeling them of as the enemy and then be done with it.
Therefore, I find Discord's actions more justified then Anon's, who should have been in the right mind to work something out had he not been so stupid to begin with.
Anon's general behavior is mercilessness against any creature that he deems a monster, and he does that judgment with vigor and very prematurely.
6949059
Can't wait on the chapter then, and it's oddly relieving to hear an author hates a villain she wrote as much as I do.
I guess it's true what they say, a writer needs to care about all their characters, but you care about the heroes and the villains in different ways. I'm dreading just what this terrible sin Anon consciously committed might have been though, even if I can already guess who the victim was...
Aren't dogs omnivorous?
6949059
I've actually seen three variations on this. The first is where the heroes are made less competent so that the villain beats them, allowing the OC to save the day. The second is where the power balance doesn't change at all, the and OC steals the spotlight. These are obviously bad writing, and Anon does both.
The third, however, is where the enemy is made smarter and/or stronger, resulting in the heroes needing backup to face a bigger threat. Example: having Nightmare Moon shoot Twilight in the middle of her big speech in the first episode, thus preventing the elements of harmony from being activated. All she needed was a touch of genre savvy and she would have won.
In particular, I'd like to know your thoughts on the last one, where the villain becomes more powerful and forces the usual cast to call in a new member.
Hadn't seen this spin on the puppy-love engine before. But then Discord just spins it the usual way. That's one.
welp, that settles it; discord truly is an irredeemable monster.
I just want you to know that seeing someone actually make effective use of the fact that the concept of a changeling originates here in Ireland really made me happy. I love my home's folklore, and though it's a veritable goldmine for changeling myths, I've never actually seen it used with any degree of skill. You even bothered to do your research and call it Éire.
The rest of this story is equally fun and enjoyable, from what I've read so far. The dissertations on the nature of magic and all the in-depth worldbuilding, as well as all the wonderful fun-poking at awful HiE tropes is a real pleasure to read. My only disappointment is that I didn't read it sooner.
7593387
Well, at least he refrains from retroactively gender-swapping ponies and rewriting memories, unlike a certain Hitler.
9449461
yeah, and that's all well and good.
but... CREAM CHEESE.