A Kindled Change

by Darkevony

Chapter 8: Unspoken Farewell

Chapter 8

Unspoken Farewell

The whole of my body erupted into a crimson flame. Yet this was no dream. In my sheer panic, I thrashed about in a wild fury as I heard concerned yelling all around me. But my agitation could not be abated this time. Fate herself had reared her cruel, faceless self right before me, and I could do nothing to stop this torrent of absolute terror within my very soul. In a quick flurry, I broke free from the gentle restraints of those around me and flew out the open window with wings made of familiar shades of reds and yellows that shone like a dancing fire in the sunlight. I could not control my forms, changing rapidly and involuntarily mid-air, although not without purpose when I’d begun to plummet to the ground having not been able to sustain a consistent glide in my inexperience. First, I took the form of a cat midfall and landed on my feet, then into a rabbit to dive for cover and hide from would-be pursuers, and finally as a deer with considerable speed to run all the way as fast as I could towards a familiar forest.

All I could do was run. How weak I was... how helpless... I cursed myself from the deepest reaches of my heart.

However, while I ran, I could feel my memories finally falling into place. In my mind, I was taken back to before all of this... to my life before the caging darkness.

With them came a deeper understanding of myself as a whole. Fate... the name I had given to Magic itself to better understand it from within my incomplete mind... That invisible, unknowable force that had gripped at my destiny all my life. I’d called it such that it was befitting of its effects, as it had been fate that had allowed me to meet Twilight back in that forest when I was injured, curing me of my wounds. It was fate that I had been delivered and kept in the darkness for so long by the forces of magic, and fate that I was freed by it as well.

Perhaps it was also destined fate that a natural cataclysm had wreaked havoc throughout the kingdom of the Formless. The magical energies of this very world had sundered the earth as they sprouted upwards to the surface... My home from so long ago. In the end, it had been a shift in the tectonic plates that had caused the massive magic vein underneath the kingdom to erupt. Almost overnight, the Formless were left with nothing and lost so many loved ones.

Was it fate for the Formless to have had their ire and pain bring them to madness when the ponies had arrived too late to save them? With no real outlet to direct their overwhelming grief, they blamed anything and anyone they could... Was fate truly this horrible, this cruel? Could that have been called fate? Or was life just an undetermined series of events and circumstances? The Formless were not always this way... In my memories, they had lived gentle, peaceful lives.

But their broken hearts and unfettered rage drove them into fiercesome revolt against the rest of the world, and as that instinctual hivemind directive replaced their minds, I questioned whether this could've been called 'fate' at all. Their rampant destruction led to a scarred world, and it only ended after the eventual, unavoidable confrontation between the Sun's ruler, and Fate’s Mistress... Queen Chrysalis.

My mother...

To changelings, however, perhaps it was more accurate to call her my 'predecessor'. For we are born and given life through the magical power of those who wished to hand down their life. Since I was her one and only direct descendant, no doubt I had inherited her unique abilities and power as royalty to the Formless. Yet, that was the funny thing about family. To our race, we were all connected by blood, so parental endearment did not exist for us. Blood means nothing to our kin, and no doubt the Queen had made no distinction of me in that way.

What connected us in the end, and the reason why I felt like I could call her my mother lay in my memories as I relived them, scene by scene. In them, I saw that she had acted as loving as a real mother had. In my memories, I could remember her in my first moments after being hatched, teaching me to brave the outside world.

"Feel the world around you. Hear the sounds it makes. Take in the smells, the scents of this sweetened earth. Open your eyes and see what only you can see with them. Experience it all. It's pleasant, isn't it? This is our kingdom. One day you will take my place. That's why, while you're still able to, you should experience everything you can." She would often say as she made time for me in between her royal duties. Every day since I had been born, despite her obligations and the scolding of her advisor, she came to me in any spare time she'd find. Every night she’d see me to my dreams and would whisper lovingly the same words that lulled me to sleep each time. "Sleep now, my dear."

Every memory was so wonderful and warm... they etched away at my heart. I’d asked myself how I could have ever dared to forget them. Then, I remembered what she had become...

After that unforeseeable mass incident that ruined the Formless Kingdom, her madness had all but consumed her entirely. She had assumed responsibility for that tragedy. She had accepted every ounce of anger and sadness from her people in trying to save them from it by consuming those emotions. All of their indescribable hatred and all of their overwhelming grief, having welled up over time into a massive frenzy. But you see... feelings were the source of magic for changelings. We could only harness the incredible power of Fate herself if given shape by our own emotions and the emotions that others gave to us.

She alone was at the center of all of that malice... She alone was left to fight the physical manifestation of that overwhelming power... The inevitable result was the birth of the monster that now held dominion over her body.

But she was still in there, I knew that she was. I had observed it so many times before... Why it had struck me so odd that she could look so terrifying and so beautiful at the same time. Even the reverberation of the two voices as she spoke was proof that there was a bit of her old self in her soul. Why had I never noticed all of this before?

I got my answer when I began to remember the last of those events. After the tragedy of the Formless had happened, the Queen was in a private audience with the Sun's ruler, a white alicorn of royal descent. Strangely, my memory of their conversation while they talked was shrouded and blurred, as though I were blind. Queen Chrysalis... it seemed like she could feel herself slowly losing her grasp on reality and in her desperation, she confided her plans to the regal pony.

She warned her about the changes that were beginning to happen to our kind, and how she could not stop the storm anymore. How she was losing herself too... In quiet, hesitating agreement, they made a promise of sorts. Only now did I realize that this promise of theirs... the conflict of the Formless and that of ponies... the darkness that had sealed us away... They were all connected.

In the final moments of that memory, I could feel the Queen using powerful magic on me... A spell... a one-of-a-kind to be used only once. A spell only born from the most powerful of emotions. And she had used it to protect me. She had sealed away my memories and even my very sense of self. Even though she could've used that magic on herself... Even though that might've been the right path to take as a ruler after she had sensed that our kind would be lost to madness... It was no exaggeration to say that she had given the last of her right mind to me.

The weight of my reality was overwhelming. My old self would've been crushed by what it had all meant, no doubt. But I had grown a lot as an individual, and I was thankful for what the Queen had done for me. I understood my purpose in this world better now and what I had to do to protect everyone. It seemed my moral obligation had been right from the start. I would have to seal us all back into the depths of that darkness and lead the Formless into a deep, unbreakable slumber. To do that, I would have to face off against the Mistress and her mastery over Fate.

That prospect absolutely terrified me as the thought alone had made my stomach drop. My paltry attempts to convince myself were not reassuring while I repeated in my head unconvincedly that I had inherited her powers and could stand to reason there was a chance of me winning that confrontation. But even just wielding Fate myself for my own purpose felt like an impossibility as I could not even control my deeply rooted fear of it.

The veil of night had finally arrived when I reached a familiar pond, collapsing in front of it in my emotional exhaustion. The stillness in its glass-like surface was unmistakable. My body still fevered and ached all over, but it had considerably improved since earlier that day. I looked upon my reflection in wonder of myself. Even with all my memories returned, it seemed I didn't know the full extent of my past. I’d begun to question why it was that my eyes were not the same shade of green as the rest of the formless, as even the Queen's eyes, both past and present, were that color.

(Illustration by Spirefall on Deviant Art.)

My life had been just one big mystery after another for so long, it exhausted me to think about these things. Perhaps I would get my answer if I'd asked the Queen directly, but it was no easy feat, even in my thoughts. For one, I still labored to speak clearly.

To no one in particular, I began to recite the vocal lessons that Twilight had tried to get me to go through. I practiced and I practiced, but my voice shook while a steady stream of tears disturbed the pond's surface. To the point that nothing could be heard but the whining and wailing of my cries into the empty night sky. I had long made up my mind even before the events of today. But having just been separated like this did not make this any easier whatsoever.

It hurt. It hurt so very much. It hurt more than I could fathom. More than I could describe with simple words alone. As I cried my heart out, it felt like I understood the plight of the Formless of the past. The loss of their loved ones. The rise of their mindless madness. Their ire at destined fate and Fate's design. The more I thought of my time with Twilight and my memories of the old Queen, the more I felt as though my heart would break and shatter.

"Why?" I’d asked myself out loud. "Why me? Why us?" Those must've been the very same questions my kin had asked themselves. The same questions that they'd repeat over and over, becoming ever angrier at questions with no answer.

Truthfully, they did have an answer, just not one we could accept. No reason in particular. That was the truth of this world. Of ANY world no doubt, not just this pastel-colored one. The immutable fact of life itself. We were all born to be free. And freedom, as it turned out... did not come cheap.

Being different did not change the past. Being different did not change the truth. Being different did not change Fate's design. Being different did not change the cowardice... the pain. I struck at the water with my foreleg near the reflection of my eyes, frustrated to no end. Where was I to direct this seething frustration? The answer was obvious. At myself for my own powerlessness. But what could one little changeling do in the storm of these events?

I was left in shambles. It had been the longest ten days of my life... My tattered soul spread across the cosmos while I gazed into the stars defeatedly, feeling emptier than I had ever felt before, burnt out from the flickering and wavering of my own soul. I distracted my mind by counting each individual dot. Eventually, I moved on to making drawings in their connected patterns. I drew first Twilight, then Spike, then the rest of her friends. From there I drew the baby birds and their parents. Finally, I drew the Queen in her prime as well as her present. I remembered the monologue she had given me before I was cast out into the outside world, and I smiled and laughed at the thought we were all one and the same, all of us trying to help one another regardless of intentions. All connected.

As twisted and selfish as her mind had become, it seemed the Queen's intentions were still very much to elevate me to a throne of her own design. Her wish was still, somehow, to create a world for me to live in. One unbound from that sad, unnatural pitch-black darkness. Perhaps the lights she grew in the form of crystals deep within those cavernous corridors were her way to stave off the darkness for my sake, unbeknownst to her how much I'd come to fear them. How could she have known? I actively did all that I could to show no resistance. No complaint. Not even a second thought for her or the rest of my brethren. Even though she had bid her time for so long to pool enough magic to free us from that darkness...

My conscience stabbed at me at that thought. Even incomplete as I had been, how could I have been so thoughtless? To live for only yourself was such a lonely and harrowing existence... Amidst all my strife I felt that I had finally found meaning in my life. I'd found self-acceptance in purpose. Slowly but surely, I unshackled the chains of fear that bound my heart against Fate, against magic.

With lady Fate's power, I tore away the blackened gunk around the flame of my own soul. The suppressant I had subconsciously created against the commanding, controlling siren call of the Queen's magic to her kin. I could feel the explosiveness of my own magic as it poured out uncontrollably. At this, her song had finally reached me, and our Fates intertwined. We were both made very well aware of each other's intentions in that connection.

I stood to cancel everything she'd done in the name of creating a world for me. And she... she would destroy the world if it meant seeing her plan through.

I couldn't be sure that answering that call was the right thing to do there and then. I could only feel like I absolutely needed to move forward with my life in some way shape or form, even if I had to, in this case quite literally, move backward to meet my fate dead on. I was more or less ready to challenge destiny. Walking down those first steps to the mouth of an unnervingly dark and familiar cave, I was filled with uncharacteristic confidence.

If a person's life could be read like a book, I wonder what it would say about me and my kind?

What would it say about Twilight and her friends?

For whom was that story meant for? Of course, I knew the answer to that. With a big smile and overwhelming pride in my chest, I yelled into the cave with all that I could muster my unspoken farewell to every soul that had helped shape my life.

"For everyone's sake!"

(Illustration by JodTheCod)

Comments

[hmaf43]

"For everyone's sake!"

Go go you anime protaganist horsebug thingy!

[Codiert]

So.. She run away? I hoped of more Twilight/Changeling screentime. Should know it would be short with a "Sad" tag instead of a "Slice of Life" tag.

I see you are in some Groups now. Much more views with this chapter. Congratulations.

[Darkevony]

11343003
I hadn't written for FIMFiction for over 9 years, so I don't know the ins and outs of the website. I went and looked at some groups at your advice, so many thanks for letting me know!

And yeah... I know what you mean. I reeaaally wanted to write more slice of life things before arriving towards the conclusion, but I had to consider the narrative of this one.

But you know... maybe I'll write a follow-up story in the not so distant future.

[Thyrrnatf]

😱😱
Noo!