Changing Ways

by Comma Typer

Storm

The rain cascaded hard on Sugarcube Corner and permeated its rooms with the clings and clangs of the downpour. Through a few holes in the rooftops, the water seeped into the bakery, farther down through more holes in the floors, and finally landing onto the bottom where two changelings were trying to plug the holes in the ceiling with wood, nails, tape, and cloth, hissing whenever the water splashed on to their eyes and blaming each other for the job not well done.

The dining area of the bakery had seen some improvements. The bright colors having dulled and died out, they were replaced with crudely drawn flags of black and green and cylindrical translucent pods of a sickly green—these thick pods hanging from the stony overgrowth multiplying from the rafters.

Ocellus was hovering up there, holding a pod closer to her eyes. “Two and a half days to go for you, little ones! It’ll be a good time for you chubby-wubbies to be alive!”

She heard a snicker, looked that way.

One of the two water-plugging changelings holding up a bundled ball of cloth against a leaking hole, the ball itself partially submerged in and trickling out water—one of them had a mischievous smile upon him. “I still can’t get over that, ‘Cell! You’re like some kind of stage mom or something!”

“Cut it out, Cornicle,” Ocellus said with a slightly cheery tone. “Chrysalis’s hooves are full for today—she’s got to be happy that I’m volunteering for grubsitting the seven hundred and fifty-first time!”

“Isn’t ‘grubsitting’ supposed to take place after they’re born?” said Cornicle’s companion, Atennae, as he put on a pair of broken glasses on the floor with his free leg.

“Doesn’t hurt to try,” Ocellus said before returning to her motherly duties.

A white flash.

Crack!

“Ugh!” and Cornicle was hiding behind the counter.

Antennae looked at him, struggling to carry the cloth ball. “Hey! This isn’t the lightest stuff in the—“

It fell on him, along with a few streams of water running down on his head, burying the unfortunate Antennae in clothes.

Ocellus chuckled. “I think you need a more permanent solution for that one!”

The door swung open, intensifying the rain’s peals.

Standing there, beside a soaked Pharynx, was Swift River who spread open his wings dripping with rainwater, his own mane drowned and disheveled by the weather.

Ocellus hovered down to the entrance, greeting: “Pharynx! Thorax!” and looked at Thorax from head to hoof, beholding his coat and his mane—his figure. “Swift River, huh?”

Thorax nodded. “Having a go at the name!”

Pharynx tugged him by the ear. “Yeah, but he forgot the most important part: the voice.”

Thorax, not giving his brother a look of acknowledgment, cleared his throat, massaged his neck, smacked his lips with his hooves, cleared his throat a second time, and garnered the attention of several other changelings working in the background who were disturbed and disrupted by the noise he was making. He opened his mouth, and, in a nasal voice:

“Uh, h-hi! H-How are you a-all d-doing?”

Pharynx groaned. “I asked Empis since he’s overheard the real article talk. Yes, that’s his actual voice...sadly.”

Ocellus smiled, putting a hoof on Thorax’s yellow shoulder. “Stay calm, and keep a level mind. Be safe out there.”

Thorax rolled his eyes again. “I know that! Why do you always have to treat me like a younger brother?”

“Because you are, Thorax,” Pharynx replied. “Stop treating me like some random stranger.”

Ocellus flew in between them, stretching a hoof out against each of them and their scowls. “Um, what about you two don’t get into sibling rivalry? We already have enough of that as it is.” She emphasized that by silently motioning towards Cornicle and Atennae now in the middle of a bitter argument about who ruined the bundle of clothes which lay wet and scattered on the wooden floor, the drips from above only continuing despite their passionate words.

Thorax shivered. “Well, we’re certainly not in big trouble like them.”

Pharynx slapped him on the head. “What about you try helping out if you think they’re in big trouble?”

Thorax laughed nervously, rubbing his harmless, unfanged white teeth. “Eh-heh?”

Ocellus sighed. “Since I’m sure you two didn’t come here to bicker and quarrel just for fun, let’s drop the subject.” She faced Thorax. “Ignoring the past few minutes: How do you feel?”

Thorax gulped, scratching his throat. “Fine. Nervous, but fine.”

“Wait ‘till he chickens out,” Pharynx muttered, followed by “Buh-kaw!”

Ocellus rolled her eyes, still looking at Thorax. “Don’t listen to him. I’m certain you’ll do well in your mission. You won’t be alone...but the others won’t be coming together for a while—pretty busy scouring the whole area for family pictures and other mementos for the feast later tonight.”

Pharynx licked his lips and rubbed his hooves, narrowing his eyes into sinister shapes, finally letting loose his two-tailed tongue in an abrupt hiss.

Thorax, on the other hoof, stepped away from him and towards Ocellus. “OK, uh, are we going after or before dinner? Because, I want to have my portion of dinner early so I won’t bother everyone else.”

“Or,” Pharynx said, raising a hoof and trotting to him, “you want to get the lion’s share of the harvest when you weren’t even present in the attack? That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s not ridiculous if he behaves,” Ocellus said, placing a hoof on Pharynx’s shoulder, trying to calm him down. “If you want, I’ll accompany him before he regroups with everyone else. Deal?”

Pharynx shook his head. “I’ll be the one accompanying my flesh and blood!”

“But, we’re all the same flesh and blood—“

“I didn’t ask for the technical definition of ‘flesh and blood’, did I?!” Pharynx lashed out, stepping on her hoof.

“Ow!” and raised her hoof to her head.

Everyone else looked at her.

Thorax gently tapped Ocellus on the head, doing her best to comfort and relieve her.

Raising both of his forehooves in the air as if in defeat, Pharynx whined, “It’s like the changelings around me get more incompetent with every passing day!” He spread his wings and headed out the bakery, but not before pointing at him and shouting, “I’ll be seeing you, brother, before you take off, so don’t think you’re out of this yet!”

And he was outside, drenching himself in the storm which dimmed the day into part-night with its ominous army of gray clouds and its volley of ruthless raindrops.

Thorax, stroking his mane, sighed, held on to Ocellus’s pained hoof and kneaded it smooth. “There, there. It’s gonna be alright. It’s just a bad hoof, that’s all.”

Ocellus nodded, steeling her lips together not into a smile but into a neutral kind of expression, void of any emotion.

As Cornicle and Antennae argued farther behind in Sugarcube Corner, never noticing the drops of water landing on their heads.

---

In town hall, the rain flooded the floor and banners wet, carrying away unused clothes and heavy papers into the grim gale outside. The cages sat there in their places, most of them on their shelves with the remaining few on the floor in that grand hall. Those who were not asleep and snoring—they were subjected to perennial shivers and shakes, watching this and that dark space, whispering to one another if this or that shadow housed a changeling in waiting—waiting to scare them.

Two cages lay beside each other, detaining Pinkie and Fluttershy in an iron clamp. The former’s hair had now shriveled into a long, flowing disarray of strands framing a sorrowful frown and a sober pair of blue eyes ever looking upwards at the dreary sky of gray becoming black. The latter was reduced to a bawling wreck, resting her head on the cold cage bars and muttering to herself syllables, eyes surveying the cracked floor filled with the remnants of windows and ceremonial cloth and fine fabric as her tears joined the rain and masked themselves inside the waves.

Then, a step, a puddle splash.

Several slowly rose up within their cages, a few whispering to others in their adjacent cells.

Some closed their eyes and hid their faces from the open doors. Others held their ears up, seeking to understand the conversation above the storm’s endless crashes.

“...stay quiet, and you’ll cause no trouble at all,” a female voice said from the hallway, growing nearer.

“Y-Yeah, I kn-know, Ocellus,” another voice, a male one, responded. “But, what if—“

“Shh! Don’t you worry. You got me, and you should trust me.”

Whispers abounded in the cages. “What does it mean?” “Are they already fighting against each other?” “I wish they are. I really wish they are.”

Then, into the hall, Thorax and Ocellus in their changeling forms.

Many in their cages trembled, backing away from them.

“You’ve done more than enough!” an Earth pony shouted, scared, from her cage. “Please, spare us! I-I d-don’t want anymore!”

Ocellus nudged him on his skinny ear. “Don’t hold back, Thorax. You need to have the energy to make the trip.”

Thorax looked at him, not saying a word but, rather, half-closing his eyes as if to peep out a tear.

Ocellus held him firm on the shoulder. “Thorax, you have to.”

He looked at her.

Slumped his shoulders, sighed, raised his head.

Thorax looked at the Earth pony who had shouted.

All eyes were on her.

The mare shook her head, closed and opened her eyes. “No!”

Thorax walked up to her, taking it slow with each stride, with each splash of a puddle, with each trample of banners and papers.

The mare turned away from him and bumped the cage walls, tried to dent the prison bars with whacks!

They did not bend a single inch.

She whirled around.

Saw Thorax standing in front of her.

That ghastly, dark creature before her—those bizarre eyes, those fatal fangs, those holey legs—

“Agh!” Held up her hooves on to her face. “No, you can’t take me the same way she did to Lyra and my friends! I know...I know what you’re all trying to do, and it’s horrible to even think of them! Please consider, please think, please think—I don’t want to stay here! Let me farm your fields, let me work at building your boats—anything but being turned into some unfeeling—“

A hiss.

His mouth open, his eyes wide open. A pink stream coming out of the mare.

Out of the whimpering mare.

Thorax absorbing the stream into his mouth, down his throat—a river of love into his stomach.

“No!” she cried out, reaching out to him with her failing hooves—her own voice fading. “You...you’re going to let us live like this, you might as well just kill us...to forget—“

She wavered.

Thorax’s mouth still open.

The river pouring into him.

Silence filling the air, the whole town hall, against the storm.

Ocellus looked at Thorax. “Uh, I think that’s enough love for—“

He pushed her aside.

She shook her head, cracking a little smile of her own. “Well….”

“He’s not stopping!” a pony cried out.

Murmurs turning into loud words.

The victim falling limp on the floor, able to move only her eyes, her mouth, and one hoof—that one hoof raised in defiance against Thorax. “Y-You...please….”

She shut her eyes.

Collapsed.

The river disappeared.

Thorax snapped his mouth shut, staring blankly at the space before him.

He looked at the pony before him, lying unconscious on the cage floor.

Storm coming back to him—the gray strands flying in and out of sight past the breaks in the wall and the broken windows, the booming commotion racing to full volume, the distinct scent of the rain itself—

Thorax slowly raised a hoof above the ground.

Ocellus caught it, planted it back down. “Don’t, Thorax. Don’t. It’s better this way.”

Thorax was silent. He saw that mare and could describe her: a blonde mare in coat, her lustrous two-tone mane of blue and fuchsia frazzled and disorderly; her cutie mark was three striped candies in wrappers—here she was, limp and cold, almost as good as dead from a quick glance.

“You’re evil!” Pinkie shouted from her cage.

Ocellus turned to her, her smile coming back. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘You’re evil!’” Pinkie repeated.

Fluttershy turned her head to Pinkie. “Pinkie, this isn’t the best time for—“

Ocellus flew to her, struck her cage and sent Pinkie rattling.

Pinkie rubbed her head, standing up. “You think that’s all you—“

A hiss.

Pinkie's own stream of love coming out of her body.

She opened her mouth, her jaw dropped low—shocked.

Ocellus feeding on Pinkie’s love, her fangs in display as the hiss rose in volume.

Not a sound came from her mouth. Only a silent struggle, trying to wrest away from the feeding.

As ponies above screamed, cried at the sight.

---

Pharynx stood at the counter of the bakery, checking a list of ingredients on the surface.

The door opened, letting in the sound of a rolling thunderstorm and the view of a night shrouded in the darkness with barely a light upon it save for a green lamppost made out of stone.

Ocellus dripping wet, beaming. “You wouldn’t believe what Thorax did before he left!”

Pharynx raised a brow. “You didn’t tell me he was leaving! How dare—“

“He treated his snack for all that their worth,” Ocellus said, helping herself to a sinister chuckle of her own.

Pharynx smiled. “Did you mean he picked them dry?”

“And not just two or three of them,” Ocellus reported. “Almost everyone on the ground.”

Pharynx hovered over the floor and rested his head on his two raised forehooves. “He’s finally learning his place. He’s in the winning side, and he has to act like it!”

Ocellus nodded, smiling. She snatched two muffins from a cardboard box, hoofed one to Pharynx.

They ended up eating those sweets together, taking in their delicious blueberry flavor and their crumbly texture.

While Pharynx turned his head round, Ocellus, for a quick moment, dropped her smile and glanced outside through the window pelted and smudged with rain.

The storm ploughed its way through Ponyville, pummeling the poor village in its anger—over there, a few wooden beams plucked out of their hay-covered roofs and sent flying into the fog, never to be seen again.