A Kindled End

by Darkevony

Chapter 1: The Proof of Love

Let me ask you a question. How do you wish to be born? To whom? And under what circumstances?

Do you have dreams of being brought into a normal life where you're well off and want for nothing?

Or are your dreams much grander and opulent, imagining yourself with overwhelming riches and status? Or maybe even power? Like that of a princess born to a thriving kingdom of a race in Equestria known for their magical aptitude and unique abilities.

If that is your wish, then congratulations. You've been born to the changelings as the next heir to the throne. You have all that you wanted. Money, status, power. The one who hatched you from your egg is none other than Queen Chrysalis, renowned for her magnanimity, grace, and magical ability. She is every sense of the word Queen, inspiring loyalty and reverence at just her mere presence.

And now she's right here before your very eyes, standing above you and smiling so dearly at you as you take your first uncertain and wobbly steps onto the ground below from your egg and breathe the first breaths that life can offer you. But you don't know anything about royalty or grace or even magic. You're a blank slate ready to be molded and know nothing of the world save for what you see before you for the first time.

There's something to be said about the miracle of birth. Falling down to your stomach after finding it difficult to keep your balance, you hold your tiny hooves out to the tall Queen before you, instinctively knowing that she will comfort you if you do. Maybe because of the way she looked at you, perhaps? Or maybe that's just how we all are from the very moment we are born? Wanting to connect and be loved by others.

You don't know anything about mothers, fathers, or even what a parent is. All as well since your kin don’t have those normal familial conventions that other races do. But you feel her love, and you know it to exist from how she hugs you so warmly and gently, you practically melt in that embrace.

You are wrapped by more than just her physical body. In the unique way that only changelings are able to sense, you can feel the very manifestation of her love for you in the air like a mist.

It's warm. So very, very warm. You've no doubt in your mind about what love is and what it means. It's the thing embracing you with absolute care and nurturing tenderness. It's the very heart of this creature before you.

Well, if you even knew to speak the word "love", blank slate as you are, then you'd no doubt associate that word with this moment in time. But it'll take a while still before you know how to use words or how to formulate your thoughts with language. Still, this moment has been forever engraved into your very soul. Soon as you figure it out, I've no doubt you'll learn to connect the two.

This moment, unbeknownst to you, is far more special than you realize. You've just inherited a heavy crown. Even before your birth, there have been many clamoring over who shall preside with the title of heir to the throne. The Queen had never entertained the idea until very recently due to the toils of her duties. And out of thousands of eggs adorning the Great Nest’s walls, she picked you. Like some divination or an act of a greater power, you were the lucky one.

Or unlucky, depending on who you ask.

The fact is, this was nothing short of Fate at work. The Queen didn't just pick randomly or blindly. She felt you. From every egg in that massive room, your signature was so distinct to her, she knew from the moment she walked in that you were the one.

Certain superstitious folks would call that a "motherly instinct". But changelings don't have parents. Not in the same way other races do, as I’ve mentioned before. To changelings, you are known as a successor. Queen Chrysalis is your predecessor. She did not carry you to term or even lay your egg herself. Like all changelings, you originated from the magics of the Great Nest. And it is by the Queen’s magic infusion that you were shaped within your egg and incubated for months on end to arrive at a new generational cycle of changelings.

As far as learning what magic is, you're dead in the water. You couldn’t comprehend it in your mind even if you tried at such an early stage of your life, but again, it’s a compelling force for your kind that goes beyond understanding and delves into the realm of instinct. You feel its tickling presence wafting through the Great Nest’s corridors, and even the Queen’s unique version of it too around you.

Yet, something about the magics in the room makes you shiver.

Were you just sensitive to magic in general? You will think back to this very day often. If not just to remember your first moments with the Queen, but also for the tremor and rumbling in the earth that happened at that moment. An inaudible growl from the very depths of the ground you stand on shakes you ever so slightly, enough to knock you onto your back from where you sat on the floor upright.

The Queen chuckles at your imperfect motor functions, not having noticed it herself. She drapes you over her back and cocoons your resting place on top of it with her crystalline wings. The rocking of her footsteps lulls you into a sleep eventually, and you let a bit of drool make its way out of your mouth and onto her mane.

You’re not conscious for it, but if you were, maybe you’d feel how happy she was. Just about everything you did, she adored. Like all new mothers to their children, she was smitten with every bit of you. All those tireless days of infusing her magic into your egg had made her very excited and impatient to see you with eager anticipation. And now that you were here, to her, the amount of joy and love she was feeling was indescribable.

Yes, she truly loves you. From your imperfect, twisty horn to the tip of the tail. She loves the way your chest slowly rises and falls with every tiny breath. She loves the cute, restful sleeping face you make while you slumber.

And so the drool on her back bothers her none.

You could do no wrong, and luckily for her, in taking after her and with your own unique personality, you would turn out to be a rather docile child who really would do no wrong.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves in your story.

For now, the Queen was walking in the slow procession of new predecessors in the annual hatching ritual down the length of the Great Nest’s halls. It was a sacred moment that even the Queen had no special or unique part in this play, so her tall figure made for a funny sight as she walked down with the rest of the normal-sized changelings and into the world above outside of its dim cavernous halls. It was a long-standing tradition that all predecessors and successors should see the dawn break together, and so most other successors had already been walking alongside their predecessors to do just that.

It was not unheard of, to be sure, but in this batch of kids, you were the only one to be given a ride to your destination and asleep to boot.

The hatching ritual always had its fair share of spectators at every turn, but none had ever seen the kind of turnout that came of this one. In large part due to the Queen and to you, of course. From the crowd gathered, it truly was a very important moment with all eyes staring at your sleeping figure. So many different individuals wanted to see what their future entailed in you and were resoundingly disappointed by first impressions.

It’s an ugly thought, I know, but it’s simple politics. To them, it felt like a slap in the face that you were not the proudest, most graceful, most poignant of the bunch. Despite just being a newborn, they had already found fault in you. They’d been banking on Queen Chrysalis getting an heir apparent for decades now so they could make plans moving forward with a new crown. To train and mold the coming clay. And so it must’ve been like an insult to see, in their eyes, low-quality putty.

After all, they could not feel what the Queen felt in you. They did not love you unconditionally in the same way she already had from the moments she first laid eyes on you. And I’m sorry to say, but this would not be the last you hear of this terrible first impression souring your prospects moving forward in life. None of that would deter the Queen any. Her love was an insurmountable mountain that none could speak against. And she aimed to prove it there and then.

The tip of her nose nudged you awake with such gentleness, one could believe you would break at the slight tap of a breeze. She let you down carefully to your hooves, but you immediately collapsed from the effort of standing. If you had, had a sense for all the conflicting positive and negative emotions in the air, you would've been bothered by the onlookers staring in your direction feeling all sorts of things over the obvious runt in the litter. From wonder, to anger. But you were far more busy being entranced by the sight of a rising sun breaking through the horizon for the first time.

The sight of it was truly majestic, and the memory of it would be forever ingrained in your mind, no matter what may become of it in the future.

The Queen took this time to speak a few certain phrases that you could not have been purview to just yet, in the absence of language. Not to worry. You would hear them throughout your early childhood many times, so it was no real loss for now.

Still, her words carried importance with them and at such a poetic time for them to be uttered. So for the sake of your story, they went a little something like this:

"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, my dear Chrys. And know that I'll love you always."

These were the words of the Queen before she decided to go against tradition and leave those solemn practices of silence and abstaining behind during this pivotal moment of dawn break. Her magic surged through her horn and it lit up with her unique colors, pushing the very air aside now that a saber of light had replaced it. From her hair, she drew a tiny crystal barely the size of an acorn.

Despite the break of protocol, both the watching crowd and the Great Nest's guardians were silent at what she intended to do. Even the untrained eyes of the common folk could see the sheer beauty and infinite depth of that tiny stone. It was nothing short of a true, priceless treasure. A Kingdom's very heirloom, you could say.

The Queen brought her horn to its surface and imparted her incredibly powerful magic into it. All at once, the force, wind, and light of her magic vanished and swirled into that crystal creating a denser, thicker, and milky foggy sheen on its previously translucent surface.

The crowd was stunned. Never had they seen such a gem house that magnitude of power. It was the Queen's ultimate symbol of her love for you. With it, you could sunder the world or even stop the very hands of time.

But you being who you are, you would treasure this gift for a very long time until you would need it no longer.

The Queen embeds it into a necklace and lifts it up to your eyes with one hoof, holding it aloft right in front of the gleaming morning sun.

The two were now eternally connected to one another in your memories from then on. Every time you looked into its swirling energies you could picture this very scene somewhere deeper than just in your head. Your heart, perhaps? Or maybe your soul?

None but you can say, and not even you could know.

You take a hold of that gem without really knowing its meaning. It's your very first gift. Somehow, you can feel just how truly delicate it is. More so than you, almost. One drop and it could shatter. Yet, inside of you is the deep desire to keep it close to your heart.

As a newborn, you don't have the energy to stay awake through the proceedings thereafter. You fall asleep again on that quiet, silent morning when the Queen takes you up on her back once more.

The memory of your first waking moments ends in the darkness of your sleep, with only one other thing bothering you in the back of your small mind like a faint premonition.

Now that you're grown and searching your memories, you swear you felt it at that time too.

The quiet rumble in the earth...

Comments

[TheGJ90]

"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, my dear Chrys. And know that I'll love you always."

If these words could be made into a song, I would cry happy tears.

[Starlight Nova]

Are the changelings connected to the love poison story from Hearts and Hooves Day?

[Darkevony]

11449900
Not sure what you're referring to, so I'd have to guess not.

[nioniosbbbb]

11449917
So it's like a rewrite??