Evoli Victorious

by Starscribe

Chapter 3

There were seven queens of any consequence in the former United States. Not that most who lived there now had ever heard that name, and certainly none of them would be willing to admit it. Those queens knew each other by many names over the years, Evoli included. Over time, their suicide pact had ensured stability in many of their domains, such that the primacy of names no longer mattered.

They had come to use titles instead, and to recognize each other’s territories by those names. To Evoli, or Ajna, as was her title among her equals of the great queens, the remaining eight territories were themselves the borders of the world. Up north the land grew too harsh for changelings, and so was not worth taking. To the south, the population was often too sparse, at least as far as her kind had seen to explore as they marked civilization.

Of the six remaining great queens, she had only five targets. Queen Anahata had not attended the last great concourse, and it was an open secret among her kind that her drones had succumbed to some new disease. Her costal territory was out of reach for now, as it stretched along the southern seaboard, but that would change in time.

Two queens of consequence stood between her and that unclaimed land. The closest of those would not be the simplest target to conquer, and she would have to act quickly. Manipura had long contained her probing advance along the eastern border, with a network of spies so tightly-woven into the populations of pony cities that it was impossible to make a journey of any length without being discovered.

Manipura was too young to know the great dying of the plague—she had been weaned in this world of terrible scarcity, by a queen who had given herself to the ice almost as soon as she had taken over. Her weakness is certainly congenial, Evoli thought. It is a disservice to the hunting ground to leave it so poorly used.

Youth might bring vibrancy, but it also brought inexperience. As Evoli committed new probes to her eastern border, taking more precise control of her drones than she ever could’ve dreamed of a century ago, she discovered what she had expected. Manipura had prepared herself well for infiltration from changeling enemies.

An invading changeling army would keep to the population-centers of ponies the same way an army in the desert had to keep to aquifers and rivers. It took tremendous energy to power an army on the march, even moreso when there were numerous controllers serving as officers, or ancient queens gaining experience leading an army in war.

But Evoli’s troops were not controllers—she had only a handful of males now, and she would not risk them in such dangerous missions. If a changeling army was prepared to sacrifice—as much as a third of its number if the distance was very great—it did not have to worry about keeping to population centers to feed.

Evoli knew she would not have long to work. The refined love she had harvested from her first conquered queen would not keep her from starving forever. She needed better food, from prey who owned actual territory. It was a shame Manipura would have to die.

Word could not escape of what she had done, or what she planned, or else the remaining four great queens would turn and crush her together. Their minds were still enslaved to Riley’s old pact. Perhaps when there were fewer of them, Evoli could try to free them too.

Or maybe not. Maybe they would all need to die.

Riley prepared her army with weapons Manipura would not remember. She lit the old forges again, making armor out of the enduring metal, Duralumin. It was softer than the fine steel plates her officers had once worn, many years ago. But steel simply had not had the endurance to survive so long. Evoli had no time to build an infrastructure to mine more.

Besides, building wasn’t really the changeling way. Building was for prey. The masters of the world could take what they wanted, regardless of who had built it first.

While her army prepared physically, she made good use of her captive queen. Evoli could produce a great many eggs—but as it turned out, she could also bond drones that were not physically her own. So long as she was the one to give them their first few drops of love, they would serve her, and not the one who had birthed them.

It took her only a year to swell the ranks of her army to nearly ten-thousand. They were impossible numbers—numbers she couldn’t dream of being able to feed. But that didn’t matter. Most of them would not survive the war.

Her estimate had been in error, as it turned out. Just over half of them starved as they crossed the most desolate wasteland between the seat of her power and Manipura’s hive in the ruins of the city once called Austin.

Evoli watched them die, a great trail of corpses that littered the ground behind them as they flew. She felt confusion, if only for a moment. There was something else her older self should’ve been feeling. Or maybe that was her mother’s voice. “Bono malum separate.” She could almost feel the dead queen towering over her. Impossible of course, since her mother had never been so magnificent as she was now.

“Cura te ipsum.” Evoli responded to the specter. It vanished without another word, leaving her with the terrible sight of her dead. She had not brought any of her males on this trip, or any of her last few controllers left in the hive. They would be needed supervising the captive. This was good—it was probably not advisable for creatures as emotional and weak-willed as males to see the price the swarm had to pay for victory.

They reached the great hive by night. This meant nothing for a changeling hive—as any hive of consequence would be both active and guarded no matter the hour. Only in the domain of a poor queen with poor hunting grounds would the hive ever shut down for even a brief interval—letting the drones rest to conserve their strength.

Evoli’s outer probes reported only a few hundred guards flying about. Manipura had trusted to the pact and many spies to protect her. She is a great fool. Even so, Evoli knew she would only enjoy this advantage once. No matter how well Evoli concealed her intentions from the other great queens, there would be signs. Even if she slaughtered every drone in the hive, all any of the other queens had to do was capture a single drone and demand who her master was. All the wording of “protecting themselves from the Outsiders” and “preventing an advance of extermination from arising among the prey population” couched in the pact was just a polite way of saying “we’ll make sure not to kill each other.”

Evoli could still turn around—though it would probably cost her the better part of her army. She could preserve the pact her mother had worked so hard to build. Her stomach rumbled, a terrible emptiness that never seemed filled. She could barely remember the day where she had felt whole, six months ago. It would not come again unless she fought.

So she fought. Her great age and experience made each of her drones terrible warriors. They came quickly, washing over the battlements, slaughtering every drone they found. Controllers had one chance to surrender—and most did. Fickle creatures. Not worth the glamour they cost. But her drones spared them, if only because this was war as she had ever known it. Drones were the soldiers of war, the costs they paid, and the primary targets. Even the most ruthless queens typically recognized controllers as a rare resource to be preserved.

Some—males, mostly—refused to put down their weapons. The hive had been so completely unprepared that a few weren’t even armed, and they tried to fight with their bare hooves. They died.

Evoli herself caught Queen Manipura trying to flee, once it was clear that Evoli’s forces were overwhelming and she stood no chance of victory. Manipura had not been so foolish that she trusted to distance and words alone to protect her—she had a teleportation spell hiding in the darkness of her den, and intended to transport herself alone to some distant corner of the world to seek refuge.

Evoli never learned where that teleport was intended to go. One of her drones burst through the door as the spell was being prepared. Before the changeling was cut down by her remaining circle of loyal males, Evoli used its location for a teleport of her own.

It wasn’t much of a fight once she involved herself. There was none of the old dignity of war. Evoli just pointed her horn at the enemy one at a time and sucked the glamour out of them until they were withered husks. She was much too hungry for dignity and ritual.

Of course Queen Manipura was no opponent to be crushed by such a simple spell. That was why Evoli had come armed and armored—real armor for herself, with runes worked into the metal to give it greater strength. She might not have the old pony craftsman to make her great works—only her mother had ever won his service—but she could imitate based on what they had reverse engineered.

“You’re so thin,” Manipura said, her voice echoing strangely in the vaulted room. Even with her spells shattered and her servants dead, she managed to keep calm. An admirable trait from an enemy.

Yet her words managed to enrage her. “Do you think you’ll be able to persuade me to stop?” Evoli advanced on her. The room was almost perfectly dark now—but changeling queens had other senses. She could feel Manipura’s magic, a bright glowing spark. More magic than she’d had in months. A buffet compared to what she had managed to subsist on lately. “You can’t even see me.”

“I can sense it,” Manipura said. “You should’ve gone into the ice, cousin. It is exactly as the honored ones wrote. Madness and hunger can undo all we create.”

She wasn’t just empty words, though. Before Evoli could say anything else, she lunged. The queen wielded six blades, all unseen—but the magic that lifted them was not. Evoli battered them away with a dozen of her own, each one just as visible to Manipura. At first the other queen’s greater supply of glamour gave her the advantage, but not for long. Evoli had lifetimes of experience on her. Manipura slipped on one of the corpses, and hesitated. Perhaps she was overtaken with a moment of grief for this male she had cared for.

It didn’t matter. A second was all it took for Evoli to slice into one of her legs. The gash was deep, leaking deep green blood onto the floor that neither of them could see.

Manipura screamed with rage, filling the room with a storm of thrown objects. Dropped swords, rocks, nails and other construction materials. A lesser queen might’ve been overwhelmed by the number, since once the objects were thrown their magical signature vanished, making them invisible.

Evoli had enough threads of mind to follow each one. She knew how fast they’d been thrown, and from what angle. She dodged or parried each one of them, stopping a few against her shield. “It’s good you were here, Manipura,” Evoli said, as the other queen began to weaken. “I don’t know that I would’ve had the strength to fight one greater. But you were too young. Your mother could’ve stopped me.”

Manipura spat a mouthful of blood and slime at her. “Don’t speak of her. My mother wanted to see what she built endure. How much of what you build will endure, Anja? What inheritance is waiting for your children?”

Evoli stabbed her through the neck with two swords at once. Manipura’s weapons dropped out of her magical grip, clattering to the ground all around them. “I don’t care,” Evoli said. “After I’m dead, nothing matters. You and the other great queens chase a myth. There’s no Timeheart waiting for you. There’s no repair for our souls.” She began to feed—she couldn’t let Manipura take this feast of magic with her out of this life. She drew in magic faster than she ever had before, harvesting every drop.

The other queen’s body withered before her, drained of blood and glamour both. It dropped to the ground an empty husk. “They don’t need repair,” she said to the dead. “We are mighty. The world is ours to take.” Her head swam, a rush of color and energy and her insides no longer felt hollow. Her mind could stretch again to things beyond the next meal. More importantly, her magic was coming back.

There was no time to set up a new domain here and slowly expand into the hunting grounds. Evoli had four great queens left to take. She would have to make the glamour last until she could get her next one.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

It's not Evoli I feel bad for. It's all the other changelings. They worked so hard, and all it takes is one overpowered addict to bring it all down, chasing the next high.

[Lightwavers]

Even with her hunger-induced stupidity, turning down the offer to become a crystal changeling seems super dumb. Like, she knows the hunger will just keep growing. No matter how much she expands in the conventional way she's going to hit a hard upper limit, since the amount of glamor required never seems to stop increasing. All of her efforts are a delaying action and unless she thinks in terms of actually achieving her goal (which just seems to be survival) she's not going to get anywhere.

But I guess that's madness for you.

[Yami Vizzini]

Hopefully Queen Eevee won't regret getting involved in a land war in Texas....