(Past Chapter 35) The Enemies of Their Enemies
Chrysalis coughed up more precious mass as changelings dragged her into the hive, dunking her in the largest pod of love they had.
It was nothing short of horror. The wave of hatred had slain every single changeling in the frozen north. But what was worse, what was so much worse by far, was the pain with which they left. She felt their ragged personae flow into the hive, ready for the next generation of changelings to adopt, once they came of age.
When a changeling dies, they don't truly die. Their spirit may pass on, and their body may fail, but their memories, and personality, the sum of what they are, is kept. Where ponies stumble through life trying to assemble for themselves someone to be as they grew, her precious changelings had no such problems. When the time came, and they were ready to ascend beyond mere nymphs, they would begin the process of choosing from the hive one of the countless personalities of those yet to be reborn.
From time to time, a personality may have muddled with another, and a young nymph would one day take up the challenge of bringing them together, or perhaps untangling them apart. From time to time, a personality might split. It was rare, and required the Queen's express permission, but sometimes two nymphs would take up the same persona. The famous pair of "Brother Changelings" were once one such personality.
She imagined the afterlife must have been odd for her kind, when she mused on it. To meet so many of yourself, some so different as to be unrecognizable, others, practically identical.
In any case, what others considered death, Changelings considered inconvenience. There was no perception of it, and no fear of what lay beyond for the spirit and body, if the mind perceived eternity.
The Revenge Death Ball had changed all of that.
None of the personalities who came with her to aid in the invasion, not a single one was fit to be housed in a nymph. One so young could not be allowed to take up the challenge of coping with the trauma that came with being erased from the world so painfully. Of being hated to death. They would remain in the Archive-Mind for a very long time. Possibly forever.
She was alive, barely. A queen filled with enough love to fight two alicorns and push towards victory was hardy enough to not die outright, but it was fragile survival. Her limbs, and much of her body looked more like wireframes and spider-webs than they did hooves, such was the sheer loss in mass she had suffered.
In spite of this, she pressed on. She ranted and raved, screaming inside her pod about how she would destroy everything that sage held dear. If she weren't immersed in liquid already, one might imagine her filling a pod through flying spittle alone.
She released all the hatred she could, expressing as much of it as possible to burn it off before it could poison her further.
After a while, she had finally run out of hate. There was no more of the emotion left inside her, and she could simply rest, floating in the thick green sludge of refined love.
A changeling approached her. Squiggles, the one she recalled who was so loyal and perhaps adorably determined. She wondered where he could have harvested all of that without her noticing, every once in a while.
With the Crystal Heart, she had been able to take changelings out of their pods, the shield of love around them keeping them safe from the miasma. Squiggles took to his new duties with fervor, and now, it seems, his duty was as her caretaker.
"Are you ok, my Queen?" Squiggles asked, tilting their head almost like a puppy.
'Don't waste your sympathy. I'll live,' she responded with a mental pulse
Squiggles awkwardly scuffed the ground.
"Are we gonna have to fight those ponies again?" he asked awkwardly. On some level, he must have known what it meant for her to be the only changeling to return from the battle.
Chrysalis bit her tongue. Of course they would need to fight again. This was war, and soon, changelings would be hunted. Her scouts already told her what happened with the spell Sombra tricked her into assisting. The Shadow Realm was weak, its population depleted, and what few creatures had emigrated there in response were unfocused. With love refined through the Crystal Heart's power, it would be child's play to mop up what remained of the place, to extinguish the Kingdom Heart, and forevermore protect her changelings from it.
She felt a stabbing pain shoot through her, and looked down with a gasp.
The Crystal Heart had cracked. It had somehow cracked itself. Moments later, she heard the mental call from the rest of the hive. Changelings complaining of a splinter through their shell, a tiny breach in the shield of love that allowed a lance of hate through.
The ultimatum was clear. The artifact, like many of the strongest magical relics, had in some sense, a will of its own. One that had in one subtle threat, conquered her people.
'If I can't protect ponies,' the heart seemed to say without words.
'Then I won't protect you either.'
And with the miasma of hate so much more aggressive, and now directed towards changelings instead of Sombra alone, there was only one possible result if the Crystal Heart refused to help any further. It had wised up in the face of Sombra's spell that manipulated it, and would no longer permit love being used as a weapon.
And without the heart, Chrysalis knew there was no hope. She had seen what ponies could do, if pushed to hate instead of love.
She looked at Squiggles, who was scratching his chest idly, still waiting for her answer.
'I promise you, on my honor as Queen, Squiggles, that we will never fight ponies again,' she thought at him clearly, and calmly, only a small movement at her throat as she swallowed implied any emotion at all.
"Oh. That's good. Thank you, my queen, I was really worried!" he says, moving to hug her pod before rethinking the idea in response to her glare.
'Return to your duties,' Chrysalis demanded.
"Yes my queen!" he shouted with a salute, before continuing to stand there and watch her.
'Oh, right. He's been assigned to caretaker,' she realizes, rolling her eyes internally.
The hive was awash with fear. Sombra's time spent there had left the supply of the emotion in vast surplus. With that in mind, Chrysalis felt little shame in expressing the emotion. Expressing fear for the future through her downcast eyes and deep frown.
There was plenty of fear to go around, nowadays.
Parboil bowed deeply, staring out over the caldera before him. As he did, he saw the cloudy orange eyes of the Dragon Lord leering out from under the lava.
"We have yet to discover if he plans to do this to any others," Parboil finishes, bowing once again.
The mountain rumbles, and lava begins to bubble up as a figure rises from beneath it. Like molten glass, the lava sloughs off of the figure in thick gobs, revealing dark, heavily scarred scales.
The new dragon spreads his wings, towering over Parboil by more than double his height. Leadership required personal strength, first and foremost. Without it, one could not lead and command dragons.
"Is he mocking us? Playing tricks on the mind of a dragon. Making them think themselves lesser than a mere pony... It's disgusting," Dragon Lord Torch says with a snarl.
"But what exactly do you expect me to do about it, Parboil. We dragons of Equestria are mightier than that little puny pony, but the alicorns, those are a different story. Why should I provoke them over one careless whelp who bit off more than he can chew?" Torch demands.
"Answer me! Is this another of your little games? To make me seem weak?" he shouts, waves of molten rock rippling around his form as he roars.
Parboil frowns. Torch may have been younger than him, but in terms of strength, there was no comparison. To insinuate such was a fantastic way to prove exactly why Torch was not weak.
"No, of course not, Dragon Lord. Rather, it is simply different from what you suspect. The Shadow Realm, as they call it, is separate from Equestria. They are close, yes, but perhaps not as close as you might think. Do remember, their pony master has shamed dragonkind before," he says calmly and factually. The two things required for a steward to such a violent class of ruler as the Lord of All Dragons to speak to him of things he doesn't enjoy.
Torch pauses, his crooked, ragged-looking lips twisting as his expression turns thoughtful.
"He thinks himself fit to institute his own justice over that of the Dragon Lord. To make a dragon think themselves his lesser through pony magic. To claim part of a dragon for himself, without the lust for wealth, for power, that makes us worthy of the name!" Torch growls, as angry as he normally is when made to think particularly hard on anything.
"It's arrogance, pure and simple."
Torch scratches his chin with a single razor-sharp claw. "But ponies are not afraid of threats. They frolic and play or whatever it is they do, even when dragons such as myself exist a mere flight away. They only fear what is right in front of them. I will make him respect a real dragon, Parboil. Now leave me," he says, sinking back into the bath of boiling lava.
Parboil pauses. "What of the alicorns?"
He waves off his steward. "What about them. They have no reason to care, if I teach one single whelp respect. A pony arrogant enough to fancy himself a dragon will come alone, if I demand it."
There was a lot of cleanup to do, and not a lot of ponies to do it. No outsiders could be allowed to even do the cleanup, in a lot of these places. If you weren't a Longma, the Wacky Workbench Zone was little more than a rumor to you.
To Bruto, however, it represented an opportunity.
Practically an entire zone to himself, and all he had to do was tap a few buttons to sign up as a janitor via the automatic systems, ones that were too automatic, and staffed too poorly at present, to scrutinize him beyond checking if he had the prerequisite burning head and scale-covered hooves that marked one as a Longma.
As he swept the empty silent halls, he watched an entertaining little cartoon, projected by a nearby golem floating alongside him. It was one of those shows that Lord Weiss Noir had transcribed and released to the public.
"You know, it's funny, in a way. So many of these stories are about fighting, but so few of them express the real righteousness of violence. Friendship, Love, Trust. So many redundant reasons to fight," he mutters to himself, adjusting the janitor's cap on his head. He opens a door that slides open at his command, slipping inside one of the most important rooms in the Shadow Realm.
Possibly even more important than even the Chamber of the Kingdom Heart itself.
Bruto smirks at the server room. Dream Crystal Fragments were everywhere, smashed apart in a hasty bid to keep the precious data within out of enemy hands. It would probably take years for Lord Weiss to regain the knowledge that lay destroyed in this room.
Blueprints, secrets of magic, secrets of the Shadow Realm's operation. Even recordings that perhaps implicated him. It was certainly a lovely consolation prize for the disappointing showing that the changelings had given when they invaded. Bruto barely got to fight them for an hour before they had been wiped out. The few he slew had hardly been worth implicating himself to give them little hints to get in.
The stallion walked over to where some of the crystals yet remained. Lord Weiss was still screaming his head off on the surface, Bruto could tell. It wouldn't take long for the sage to make his way down here, and begin repairing what he could in a mad scramble to prepare for war hundreds of years in the future.
With a whistle and a hum, Bruto grabbed the remaining crystals in the server room, and swept up the fragments that remained into a bin. Perhaps whoever broke these was in too much of a hurry to destroy them properly, or maybe they didn't know how to properly dispose of a magic crystal. Either way, Bruto could tell just by looking at the pile of fragments that he placed into a little silk satchel, that it would only take a trip to an unscrupulous Equestrian Jeweler to fuse the shards back together, and he would have a collection of the Shadow Realm's darkest secrets at his disposal.
"Strength to make the most learned techniques outmoded. That is strength absolute." he heard the cartoon character say in one of the scenes. His ear twitched towards the golem projecting it, and he smiled.
"Maybe there's something to these shows after all..."
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I do hope Bruto gets his just desserts for his actions. Little backstabbing piece of trash.
who was Bruto again? a merc?
What a dickhead.
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His only other appearances before this point have been:
Past Chapter 18: Punch Drunk
(Bruto is in a street fighting competition, and cheats with a sleeping-drug coated hoof.)
Past Chapter 32: Darkest Hour Part 1
(Bruto, seeking a chance to get a good fight in, helps Sombra and a changeling by informing them of where ventilation systems are hidden.)
10865362
Huh, neat. Now hes using the shadow realm secrets for nefarious intent.. color me intrigued.
Considering these past/present chapters it's obvious just how little Chrysalis understands Weiss and his Longma. To her he is The Anathema, and that's it. She never aparently considered him to be something more than just hatred... Sad, considering that, with her ability to sense emotions, she could have helped him in the past.
Wait... He's not talking about THE show is he?
Oh, so the future transport thing was localized? Or did it leave Bruto out for some reason?
10865464
Everyone who tried to evacuate to the Crystal Egg Zone was sent to the future. Those who were outside of the Crystal Egg Zone were left behind.
Sombra's Vanishing Curse was based on structures dug underneath the Crystal Empire, and required the Crystal Heart's own power to make it work. Only those in the range of it were affected.
And thus Chapter Black was born
I have a feeling that Bruto was directly responsible for some of the more horrible things yet to come. I'm really hoping he gets hydra'ed
Yay, I finally reread and caught up to this again.
10865421
I could see why she wouldnt, as he is now he is nothing but hatred pure and simple. The only thing keeping him alive is that emotion in of itself. Even Luna who he cant even bare to hate can even get close to him in his current state.