The Last Changeling War

by Coyote de La Mancha

Chapter Eight: My Heart Is Twisted.

She took solace in her temporary lair, seething, as her hated disguise burned away in green fire.

She needed just a few minutes, perhaps an hour. She'd say she'd been sleeping. The fools would believe that easily enough. Just enough time to acknowledge her hatred again, bathe in it, and then accept again with new clarity the mask she had chosen.

The war was about to begin.

She imagined the Empress in her fortress, surrounded by her fawning sycophants. Pathetic, idiotic, infantile wastes of flesh. She, most of all.

She imagined, for the thousandth thousandth time, all she would do... to Her.

Capture would be essential, of course. And plenty of magical healing at the ready, to ensure her enemy's long life in tormented captivity. The Empress would spend years longing for death, even after the crystal of her mind had shattered at last, its fragments scattered in the void of a scorched and emptied psyche.

A creature of nothing but pain. A broken and lost soul condemned to eternal life.

It was the very least that the traitor deserved.

But, that was the future. With the first assassin squad dead through unknown means, The Empress would be more careful, more protected than ever. The bitch was apparently terrified. And in that much, at least, she took comfort.

But it wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

Nothing could ever, ever, ever be enough.

She shook herself. Focus, she chided herself, again and again. Patience.

The Crystal Heart was a powerful talisman. And with Her cowering behind it, things had become more complicated. The Empress' sense of security and faith in herself, the confidence of the Crystal ponies in their rulers... all of these would have to be carefully undermined and then destroyed.

And the plan would still work for that.

Ultimately, despair would be her greatest weapon. What she had anticipated as the final move in her endgame had merely been turned into a transitional phase, that was all. A point of change as she shifted her focus from destroying Equestria to destroying the Crystal Empire.

And the Crystal ponies.

And then, at long last... Her.

Carefully, silently, Queen Chrysalis took on again the shape of her enemy. Then, she began once again to don her mask of mimicked emotions and uncertainties, the better to lead her foes all to their ultimate destruction.