I. Changeling Magic
Special thanks to Garbo802 and Lunard for helping out with this.
Also thanks to unicorn9927 on Deviantart for letting me use revenge of the changelings as cover art.
Solitary Locust
I. Changeling Magic
Ponyville’s town square hadn’t been so packed since the day after Nightmare Moon’s return, when the mayor had given a speech thanking the Elements of Harmony for saving all of Equestria. Almost every pony who lived in or near the town put down or put off what they were doing that afternoon to go listen to the announcement that was about to be made, which was apparently very important. Cheerilee had even let her class out early in order to attend.
The subject of the meeting was of little doubt to those who attended. Only two weeks earlier, the usually static life of the average Equestrian pony had taken a sudden twist when a changeling hive tried to invade Canterlot. The only thing that had spread through the land faster than word of the near-successful attack on the princesses’ capital city itself was the news that Queen Chrysalis and her army of changelings had disappeared without a trace after being expelled from Canterlot. Wild rumors that she was plotting an even more insidious new invasion were rampant throughout Equestria, mixed with wild stories of entire towns being kidnapped and secretly replaced with changelings in preparation for the next attack.
The very idea that the pony one trusted most—be it a partner, a friend, or a family member—could well be a changeling in disguise had brought about a mild hysteria in Ponyille. Suspicious glances, paranoid gossip, and veiled accusations had filled the town almost since the news of the original foiled Canterlot invasion broke. Several incidents had already occurred in which ponies had harmed each other over accusations that one or both were changelings.
There had originally been a small downpour scheduled for that morning, but Rainbow Dash had rescheduled it for the next day and ordered the other weather ponies to move the clouds out into some open fields for the time being. By the time the meeting was about to begin, Celestia’s sun was high enough in the sky that many of the ponies making their way through the packed dirt roads of the town toward the center were sweating beneath its rays.
One particular, somewhat frazzled, lavender unicorn had the good sense to come to leave home early and wait patiently and calmly for everypony else to show up so she could avoid being trampled by them. As it turned out, a significant portion of the rest of Ponyville’s citizens had had the same idea, so by the time Twilight and her two companions got out of the library there was already a large crowd of ponies milling about, murmuring to themselves as they waited.
This proved to be something of a danger zone because of the stack of papers floating in front of Twilight’s face as she walked. It was only sheer luck that kept her from bumping into anypony for as long as she did, and when she finally did hit somepony it disrupted her concentration and sent her notes everywhere.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” exclaimed the yellow pegasus mare she had just run down. “I would have moved out of your way, but I just didn’t see you c—Oh, Twilight! Are you all right?”
“It’s not your fault, Fluttershy. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” Twilight said as she helped Fluttershy back to her hooves. “I’m fine, thanks. Just a little dusty. Are you okay?” Fluttershy replied with a silent nod of her head and a contented smile that spoke volumes about how okay she was now that she knew her friend wasn’t hurt.
“Howdy there, Twilight,” said an orange mare wearing a stetson hat.
“Hey, Applejack.” A lavender glow surrounded Twilight's notes, which had scattered when she ran into Fluttershy, and they began to collect themselves into a pile of their own accord.
“Ah heard you had a hoof in this, but nopony can tell me much more ‘cept it’s about somethin’ to do with changelings. Mind explainin’ what’s goin’ on? Ah’m missin’ out on good work hours and Ah’d like to know what for, if ya don’t mind. Suspense ain’t mah thing.”
“I’m sort of curious, too,” Fluttershy agreed timidly. “If you’re all right with talking about it...”
“Oh, yes, it’s fine,” Twilight replied, looking around to make sure she had gotten all her papers. “Mayor Mare asked me to give the town a quick rundown of safety precautions that should be followed when dealing with changelings. The pamphlets are good and all, but apparently they’re not doing much to help with the paranoia.”
“Ah see,” said Applejack. “Well, Ah’d rather lose a couple hours than miss out on somethin’ important and get somepony hurt ‘cause of it. What kinda ‘safety precautions’ are we talkin’ about here?”
The unicorn consulted one of the sheets from her stack of notes. “I’m going to explain the basic facts about changelings, some ways to spot them without being too invasive or putting anypony in danger, and then the mayor wants me to demonstrate a few spells that are effective against them. After that I’ll go into more detail about keeping yourself from getting replaced in the first place, and after that I’ll explain how the changelings themselves work so ponies have a better understanding of what they’re up against. I just hope I didn’t leave out anything important when I was cutting down the physical anatomy portion to fit into the allotted time bl—”
Her rambling ended; Applejack had pressed a hoof to her mouth.
“Ah’m sure ya did just fine, sugarcube,” said Applejack, chuckling a little. Fluttershy nodded silently beside her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to tell any of you until now,” Twilight apologized. “The mayor came by the library in the middle of the night and offered me a chance to do it because the changeling researcher she booked from Canterlot got delayed. I was up all night preparing and I just didn’t have time to explain it to anypony.”
“So that’s what ya’ll were workin’ on when RD and Pinkie—”
“When me and Rainbow Dash what?” The previously mentioned pink earth pony immediately popped out of the crowd and glanced expectantly from Twilight to Applejack to Fluttershy and back again a few times.
“Waitwaitwait, don’t tell me, Applejack!” she blurted out as the farmer opened her mouth. “Let me guess! Is it when we were swimming together? Or when we were making cupcakes the other day? Or when we went to see The Dark Mare Rises and I said Batmare kinda looked like her and she was like ‘Yeah, you’re right!’ and then we started talking about fighting crime together and got kicked out of the theater for being too loud but Dashie flew us up to the roof and we snuck back into our seats using suction cup shoes to walk on the ceiling so we were watching the movie upside-down and Dashie said it was like being a bat and I laughed and we got kicked out again but then—”
“It was when y’all were tryin’ ta get Twilight at the library!” Applejack almost had to yell to make herself heard over Pinkie’s rambling.
“Oh! Yes! Twilight Twilight Twilight! Can you give me wings?” Pinkie asked, sticking her face in Twilight’s. “‘Cause I really need them to help Dashie make pink cotton candy clouds that rain chocolate milk so everypony will think Discord is back for like five minutes but then they’ll realize he’s not and they’ll laugh because it was a pretty good prank and then they’ll go drink up the chocolate milk and have fun and it’ll be the bestest thing ever!”
“Uh, we should talk about that later,” said Twilight, frowning a concerned little frown. “You, me, and Dash. We should all talk about how making the town think Discord came back isn’t a good idea, and why. Okay?”
“Okie-dokie-lokie!” She bounced away through the crowd in very precise, measured leaps that landed her in empty spots between ponies every time, singing out her pet name for Rainbow Dash.
“Sometimes Ah think those two’re more like overgrown foals than mares,” Applejack mused. “Y’know Ah caught RD paintin’ a gigantic plot on the side’a mah barn the other day? ‘Good thing for her, it washed right off when Ah made her buck a raincloud over it—else Ah reckon Ah’da had her paint over the damn thing herself. Twice.”
“I’ll have a word with them when I’m done with this,” promised Twilight. She glanced between Applejack and Fluttershy a few times. “Listen, uh, I need to be up on the stage with the mayor right now. You two say hi to the others for me, okay?”
“Will do, Twi.”
Fluttershy just nodded.
The unicorn started weaving through the crowd of ponies again. It had swelled significantly in the short time she’d stopped to chat with Fluttershy and Applejack. Upon reaching her destination, she galloped up the short staircase to the podium two steps at a time.
“I’m here!” she panted after she skidded to a halt in front of Mayor Mare, who was near the microphone with one of her aides.
“Thank Celestia,” said the mayor, visibly relieved. “Did you finish the changeling presentation in time?”
“Of course!” Twilight exclaimed with a mixture of pride and mild apprehension as Ponyville’s clock tower bell started to ring in the distance. “Uh, let’s see: introduction to changelings and how to spot them, effective revealing spells and an analysis of the magic they use—I would have put that last but I figured, well, you want me to cast that spell I might as well make it part of the lesson—basic changeling anatomy, psychology, hive structure—”
“I see,” Mayor Mare said, rubbing her temples with her hoof and suddenly looking rather distressed. She sighed and gestured vaguely at one side of the podium. “Just wait over there until it’s time for you to speak.”
The earth pony politician turned to the microphone and tapped it to ensure that it was working properly. The resulting amplified thumps quieted most of the talking throughout the crowd and turned their attention to Mayor Mare.
“Citizens of Ponyville,” she began, voice echoing slightly. “As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, Canterlot was recently threatened by a changeling hive. Fortunately, the changelings’ plot was uncovered and foiled by some of our own townsfolk—”
There were a few cheers from the crowd at this, including a particularly loud one in Pinkie Pie’s voice, and some light applause from other ponies.
“However, it has come to our attention that many of you are still worried about the possibility of changeling agents impersonating your loved ones,” the mayor said, her tone turning grave. “The changelings have been thrown out of Canterlot, and we’re all aware of their presence by now. But until they’re located by the Royal Guard, we must remain diligent. We will all have to do our duty and protect each other against these parasites.
“They’re powerful, mindless, and practically impossible to detect; they want to steal your love from you to feed themselves. It may be unlikely that one of us is a changeling in disguise—indeed, I, for one, like to hope we’re all who we say we are—but it’s also not impossible. That’s why we need to stay vigilant and keep an eye on each other.
“Right now, you are probably asking yourselves: ‘What can I, an ordinary, everyday pony, do to keep my loved ones safe from the changelings?’. Those were my own thoughts after I heard what nearly happened in Canterlot. I was very anxious to learn as much as I could about the creatures threatening the ponies I’m responsible for, so naturally I went to see our local librarian—the Element of Magic, defender of Equestria, personal protégé of Princess Celestia, and the first pony to identify the changeling threat in Canterlot... Twilight Sparkle.
“Once I had heard what she had to say, I felt it was my duty to inform the ponies of Ponyville of the same things I had just learned. Miss Sparkle and I worked together to prepare a presentation that would answer a lot of questions for you for all of you and help to improve our town’s security. Miss Sparkle?”
Here, Mayor Mare stepped down from the microphone and motioned for the lavender-coated unicorn to take her place. Feeling rather like she’d swallowed a parasprite or three, Twilight edged across the podium until she was in the very center. A mild sense of claustrophobia washed over the unicorn as she shuffled her floating notes a little. Everything except her suddenly seemed about ten times bigger than it had been just moments before.
It was one sort of thing to make a short speech about the achievements of one of her friends, or to organize a Winter Wrap-Up group, or to assume the role of leader to restore order when things weren’t going so well. But this time it wasn’t Twilight’s leadership or friendship ponies were scrutinizing; it was her ability to convey knowledge on a particular subject to an audience.
A test of her lecturing abilities.
Already uncertain about how well she had put together her presentation, she now found herself frantically rechecking to see whether she had forgotten to put anything in her notes the night before. The long hours without sleep caught up with her all at once and made her head spin wildly when she tried to form coherent thoughts. That an uneasy flutter of panic had begun to grow in her stomach only made things worse.
Horrifying scenes played through Twilight’s head; scenes in which she was laughed off the podium for having put together a stupid, useless mess that didn’t tell anypony anything; in which some respected modern scientist happened to be passing through Ponyville and saw her make a fool of herself; of receiving rejection letters based on her screw-ups when she tried to teach at Canterlot University years in the future:
‘Miss Sparkle,
We regret to inform you that your application for a professorship at Canterlot University has been denied. This is a very prestigious school and we do not employ ponies who have a history of being laughed at by their students because they didn’t prepare the necessary notes/said stupid things/are terrible teachers in general. Though we strongly advise you to never consider teaching again, there is an opening teaching magic kindergarten if you’re truly set on a career in education.
Her name would become a verb within the intellectual community. To sparkle would be synonymous with making oneself look like an imbecile. Worst of all, it would reflect poorly on Princess Celestia’s own teaching methods! She’d never even be able to look at her mentor again without feeling ashamed of herself.
Twilight’s right eye twitched just a little. She shuffled her notes a little and coughed, feeling the gaze of every pony in front of the podium boring into her. Oh, no, they were staring at her, waiting for her to say something. How were you supposed to address your first class ever? They weren’t really a class, but they were there to learn from Twilight so the difference wasn’t that great.
Would she be blamed if one of them got replaced by a changeling after hearing everything she had to say about preventing just that? Would she awake in the night to find a mob of ponies demanding her severed head because she failed to explain what they needed to know? How disappointed would Princess Celestia be? Would she be banishment-level disappointed or just you-are-no-longer-my-student disappointed?
The lavender unicorn took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. At least she wasn’t accidentally levitating things when she got nervous anymore. Lifting her entire class off the floor while giving a presentation on the history of earth pony society had been one of the most embarrassing—No, best not to start thinking about that again... Taking another deep breath, Twilight sized up either end of the podium, trying to how quickly she could make an escape back to the safety of her library, as well as whether running away like a coward would be less unpleasant than getting herself blacklisted from any major university on grounds of complete incompetence.
“Don’t let stage fright beat ‘ya down, Twilight!” Pinkie Pie’s voice broke through the otherwise painful silence. “Imagine we’re all wearing silly clown costumes! Or tons and tons of really bad makeup! Or embarrassing lingerie! Or cupcake hats! Or party hats! Or cupcake party hats! Party cupcake hats! Hats party cupcake! Party hats cupc—” Rainbow Dash stuffed her hoof in Pinkie’s mouth to quiet her.
A few ponies chuckled at Pinkie. Twilight felt a weak smile tugging at the corners of her mouth in spite of her anxiety.
Leave it to Pinkie Pie to take the deadly serious out of a deadly serious town meeting.
The momentary distraction allowed her to take a mental step back and look at her situation more clearly, even as her face fell back into an apprehensive grimace.
It had only recently come to Twilight’s attention that she had a tendency toward irrational hysteria when she under stress. She was still learning to recognize when thoughts were becoming irrational, but fearing that Princess Celestia banishing her to the moon if she didn’t do a good job lecturing the town about changelings became a huge red flag once she had snapped out of her runaway train of thought. Princess Celestia didn’t banish ponies to the moon for giving a bad lecture any more than she banished them back to kindergarten for forgetting to send a letter about friendship.
Twilight had worked hard and done her best in the time she had been given to work with, and though the end result might not have been perfect it was at least adequate enough that Spike had understood it when she used him as a test audience earlier that morning. It wasn’t even to put Ponyville’s citizens on further guard so much as to educate them and put a stop to all the paranoia and strife that had broken out. Personally, she was quite sure there were no changelings hiding among the townsfolk of Ponyville anyway given how tactically unimportant the town was to any invasion the changelings might mount. The chances of somepony being replaced because she hadn’t made herself clear enough were minimal.
She took a deep breath and counted to ten, willing herself to calm down. There was nothing to worry about. Everything would be fine. Some of the anxiety eased up a little bit, letting Twilight crawl out from beneath its crushing weight. She looked around the increasingly restless crowd and turned her mouth up into a stronger but still nervous smile.
Okay, Twilight, she thought firmly to herself, straightening her back. You can do this...
As she opened her mouth, Twilight realized something else. Her notes were all out of order because she’d been shuffling them around for who knew how long!
Stupid, stupid, stupid—
“Ah, hi,” the unicorn said apprehensively into the microphone as she rapidly sorted through the stack of papers with her magic. “Some of you, ah, know me from around—but for those of you who don’t—” Where was the first page? “...I’m... uh... Twilight Sparkle...”
Another pause followed this. Somepony coughed. Twilight started to sweat a little.
“Mayor Mare asked me to, ah... I... Aha!” The first page of her notes after her checklist now sat on top of the stack. Now she was prepared. “Mayor Mare recently came to me and requested that I help clear up some of the rumors surrounding the changeling threat. To that end, I put together a brief presentation for all of you.
“I’m going to assume you know nothing about changelings and start right from the top. There’s a lot of misinformation flying around out there, so you’ll probably be surprised. First things first: This,” she said as her horn lit up brighter than the soft purple glow that was holding her notes aloft, “is what a changeling drone looks like in its base form.”
An enlarged, translucent image of a changeling drone materialized in the air near Twilight, surrounded and connected to the tip of her horn by the same purple magical glow. The changeling looked around and shifted on its chitin-like hooves every so often, and its wings buzzed sporadically. A few ponies in the crowd vocalized expressions of distaste or outright revulsion upon seeing the insectoid emotional parasite.
“The majority of the changeling army consists of drones like that one,” said Twilight once the murmurs had quieted down. “Like all changelings, they have the ability to mimic the physical appearance of any other sentient being they come across—within reason, of course. A changeling can’t carry out a transformation that consumes more energy than they possess. But assuming they have sufficient energy to make the change, there’s almost no limit on what they can mimic.”
The conjured drone began to cycle slowly through various combinations of pony traits. Twilight had carefully prepared that particular effect in advance so she could avoid accidentally making it look like anypony from Ponyville. She didn’t want to seem like she was hinting at anything. Once the changeling had returned to its base form, she continued with her lecture.
“In spite of rumors to the contrary, changelings do not reproduce by abducting normal ponies and transforming them into more changelings. They’re spawned by a queen,” (the drone transformed into Chrysalis for a moment), “who leads their hive. A changeling’s ultimate purpose, regardless of their designation or rank within the hive, is to serve the queen and carry out her will.
“Though they consistently show blind obedience and devotion to their queen, to the point of fanaticism, they’re actually quite intelligent. That’s part of the problem with identifying them—they’re able to not only impersonate their victim, but also manipulate ponies who get suspicious of them.”
“So how do we tell who’s real and who isn’t?” a big grey-green stallion near the front asked, looking at Twilight as though he thought learning anything about changelings besides how to find them and squash them under your hoof was a waste of time.
“There are several ways of identifying possible changelings,” said Twilight. “Despite taking on their victim’s appearance, they can’t absorb memories or personality. If they can they’ll interrogate the pony they intend to replace to learn the key facts about their lives, but there’s almost always going to be something or other that they’ve missed, and they don’t always have an opportunity to get more answers when they’re in need of them.
“Sometimes they don’t have a chance to pay their captive a visit without attracting suspicion, and sometimes... well... after studying the appearance of their victim, changelings typically either lock them up somewhere safe or—” She swallowed thickly. “—kill them.”
Twilight had to pause after this because of the murmuring that was going around her audience. There were sounds of fear and outrage, as well as disgust. She couldn’t help shuddering a little herself; the conjured-up changeling seemed just a tiny bit more nightmarish after that reminder of what could have happened to Cadance—and, potentially, her brother, her mentor, and every one of her friends. Maybe even her.
“As... I was saying...” the unicorn spoke up hesitantly when the noise had died away. “Changelings often don’t even know their victim very well unless they’ve been watching them for a long time. They rely on the ignorance of ponies to keep themselves hidden until they learn how they’re expected to behave. If somepony starts acting very abnormally—by which I mean they suddenly seem nothing like themselves at all, not just a few small changes like a dyed mane or a new hobby—that’s a sign that there’s something going on, whether changelings are involved or not.
“As you’ve likely heard by now, changelings feed on love and other affectionate feelings. They have a tendency to gravitate toward ponies who show others a lot of love, for this reason; typically, they abduct somepony their target is close to and replace them in order to absorb the love that would normally be shown to the pony they’ve replaced. They can also ‘feed’ by... um... bodily contact...”
She blushed, her face twisting into a grimace as she thought about what Chrysalis had probably done with Shining Armor at some point.
“...or by using a spell that forces a pony to believe they love them unconditionally. All changeling magic has a green aura, but they have the ability to crudely mimic unicorn and alicorn casting when in disguise. The spell they use to steal love, however, is always green, regardless of their form. This is because certain spells are innately tied to their species, much like the bonds earth ponies and pegasi have with the earth and the clouds.”
To illustrate the spell she had mentioned, Twilight’s drone illusion charged up its horn and cast a sickly green spell at the crowd. It dissipated before reaching them, but Twilight belatedly realized she had probably startleded a lot of the ponies in the crowd more than she had meant to, if the startled cries and leaps backward were any indication. She laughed nervously and managed an apology that would have been inaudible if it wasn’t for the microphone amplifying her voice before getting back to her planned lecture.
“Um... right... yes... Hu-hungry changelings can... become really, ah, desperate if they haven’t fed for a while, especially if they’re not able to use their own magic to get what they want without, uh, revealing themselves. Instead, they might try to manipulate other ponies into showing them... uh...” She faltered again. “...physical love.”
“What if they’re just a regular pony trying to get laid?” one stallion said, rather irritably. “Just because we want to do it doesn’t mean we’re changelings.”
Twilight, shook her head. Her purple curls bounced about as she did. “It’s not about... sex... It’s about how they go about... getting it... Changelings just don’t understand that it’s not right to force another pony to love you in any sense of the word. Besides, anypony who gets to the point of using threats, magic, or blackmail to make other ponies do what they want is a danger to those around them, regardless of their motivations. It isn’t only changelings that do... those sorts of things.”
“But,” the big earth pony stallion from earlier began, “you’re not saying how to tell if they’re a changeling or not. All you’re telling us is how to notice ponies who are acting weird, and those of us with common sense already know how to do that.”
“There is no completely reliable way to pick a changeling out in a crowd, which is why it’s more important to watch out for each other so they don’t have opportunities to replace ponies in the first place,” said Twilight.
“However,” she went on, “there is a spell that, if cast properly, strips away the changeling’s disguise.”
“Why didn’t you just mention that first?” demanded a unicorn colt who looked like he was barely old enough to have gotten his cutie mark (a hammer with three nails crossing it).
“Because it’s not practical, and I don’t want to make any of you think it’s the answer to all your problems.” Twilight shuffled her notes a little, leaving a deliberate pause to let this statement sink in before she went on. “This spell, it’s not something most unicorns will be able to cast. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only pony in Ponyville who’s able to cast it.
“As I said, changelings have their own brand of magic. Tapping the magic of another race or species is extraordinarily difficult; very few ponies have the magical skill and power necessary to do so. The spell I mentioned is based on changeling magic, not unicorn magic, so for most ponies, casting it would have the same effect as an earth pony trying to teleport or a unicorn trying to summon lightning. It’s very, very difficult. I’m able to cast it because, ah, I’m a little bit more, uh, adept at magic than most ponies.”
She blushed slightly, feeling a mixture of discomfort at having said, in so many words, that she was better than the other unicorns in ponyville, and pride at being able to cast such a spell with ease.
Before the invasion of Canterlot, the existence of changelings had been known to only a few equinologist ponies in the corners of Equestria’s universities and thought of as an insignificant remnant of a dead civilization. The study of their magic was even more limited; it was so difficult to pick up that only a few unicorns were able to cast reliable spells with it at all, and even then only after years of practice.
After the invasion, attempts to cast the changeling-revealing spell were suddenly widespread. Twilight had discovered that, with the exception of the alicorn Princesses, she was one of the only ponies in all of Canterlot who didn’t have any trouble tapping the alien energy.
It wasn’t that much of a surprise, of course. One of Twilight’s greatest strengths was her ability to easily pick up the magics of other equine (and non-equine) races. The same reason she could make non-pegasi able to walk on clouds was the same one she could cast changeling spells like they were basic foalhood levitation exercises—except that there were thousands and thousands of unicorns, as well as a few ponies of the other two races, that had mastered the cloud-walking spell, and only about a dozen in all of Equestria who could competently cast a changeling-revealing spell.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t try it,” Twilight informed the townsponies, some of whom looked put-out after hearing that they probably wouldn’t be able to cast the spell. “Most of the ponies who can cast it had to practice for years to make it work, so it requires a lot of dedication—but if you want to stick around after I’m done speaking, I made some copies of the—”
She was interrupted by a bony green pegasus filly with a cutie mark of a pinwheel. “Why would the changelings have a spell to destroy their own disguises?”
“Excellent question!” The unicorn almost clopped her hooves together in appreciation for somepony showing that they were thinking about what they were hearing.
“This spell works by disrupting a changeling’s innate magic and making it impossible for them to maintain a transformation. The ponies searching Canterlot with the Royal Guard discovered that it also prevents them from casting spells for a brief time after being hit by it. If I had to guess, I’d say they probably use it as some sort of non-lethal battle spell for inter- and intra-hive conflicts. It’s probably cast when they want to identify and disable spies or criminals within their ranks.
“Now, I know a lot of ponies are still anxious about the possibility of changelings hiding in Ponyville, so with your permission I’d like to cast the revealing spell on all of you at once. I doubt there are any impostors here, and I know you’re all hoping that’s true, but I think many of you would feel better once you see there’s nothing to worry about, right?”
Her words prompted some murmuring from the crowd. Twilight paused, hoping they wouldn’t get mad at her for suggesting such a thing. She knew using the revealing spell could easily be interpreted as a different way of saying ‘I don't trust you’, and casting it on a whole crowd of ponies could easily become ‘I don’t trust any of you’.
It didn’t help that she felt like she was half-lying to the whole town by leaving out how the mayor and her aides had insisted that she cast the revealing spell. It wasn’t that she objected to casting a spell that revealed changelings, but the idea of those in power forcing ponies to undergo a ‘changeling test’ regardless of whether there was evidence that they were pretenders bothered Twilight somewhat.
On the other hoof, she completely understood the logic behind the mayor’s order, as well as her insistence that the truth be hidden. Twilight herself didn’t believe there were changelings about, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. After all, Princess Celestia had been wrong about there being an impostor at the wedding, as horrifying as the thought was. It was better to be safe than sorry in the situation Equestria was in. As for the cover-up... there were probably a few ponies who were reluctant to let ‘the state’ cast a spell on them as opposed to their local librarian; ponies who didn’t see the other side of the bit, as it were. In the end it was probably for the best that she hadn’t mentioned it.
Still, Twilight wasn’t the kind of pony to compel others to do things against their will. It was reasonable for Mayor Mare to stipulate that she use the revealing spell if she wanted to give a lecture to the town, but there was no way Twilight was going to order everypony to let her test them.
“I’m not going to make anypony stay here if you don’t want to,” she clarified over the murmuring that was still going around the crowd. “If you’re not comfortable with having it cast on you, you’re free to leave; it doesn’t mean anypony's going to accuse you of being a changeling. I for one think it’s perfectly reasonable to have some reservations about another pony casting a strange spell on you—”
Apparently she’d said the wrong thing, because this was subsequently met with total silence. Twilight began to feel increasingly awkward, wilting under the intense stares of hundreds of ponies. Were they angry at her? Had she said something to upset them? The unicorn ended up voicing her insecurities regarding the subject in a torrent of fragmented sentences:
“...I mean, um, if I cast that spell it kind of i-implies that I don’t trust any of you, and I really do! I mean, I don’t want to seem like, ah, like I’m this, uh, paranoid, ah—look, it’s not mandatory for anyone to stay and have it—Y-you know what, if nopony wants me to cast it, then I won’t, it’s up to—”
“Just cast the friggin’ spell already!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “None of us are leaving! Right?” She looked around as if daring anypony to do just that.
“Okay, just tell me—do any of you have any objections to having this spell cast on you?" asked Twilight. Some small part of her kept insisting that there should be outrage over the fact that she was going to cast alien spells on hundreds of ponies. “Anypony at all? None of you want to leave?”
A few ponies shuffled nervously, like they wanted to say something, but no actual objections were voiced. There was a general chorus of affirmatives and a cry of ‘Get on with it!’ from the crowd. Twilight smiled weakly, relieved that she hadn't upset anypony or been accused of invading their privacy. It didn’t really make her feel much better.
She wondered suddenly if any of them actually understood why she was surprised they weren’t protesting. It really was a small series of steps from casting spells in the hope of finding a spy, to assembling ponies and casting spells that identified criminals, to going into the homes of innocent ponies and casting truth spells to find political dissidents, to an Equestria that feared speaking up when they saw something amiss. Not that Twilight believed Princess Celestia would do anything of the kind, but there were a lot of ponies with political power who would become tyrants in a heartbeat.
But that was neither here nor there at the moment, she reminded herself. She had agreed to cast the spell as part of her presentation, and the ponies in front of her had indicated that they were comfortable with her doing so. As much as Twilight would have liked to educate the town on the dangers of appeasement, her job at that moment was to show them that there were no changelings in their town, not to try and change their minds.
“Okay, then,” the unicorn finally said. She canceled the translucent image of the drone and prepared to cast the spell. “You should feel a tingling sensation when the magic touches you, but there aren’t any other side effects if you’re a pony.”
The spell began as a sickly greenish glow of energy swirling around the tip of Twilight’s horn. As she poured more of her magic into it, the glow became a brilliant, shining light. A green bubble emerged from that spot, slowly expanding outward to encompass Twilight, the podium, and eventually ponies in the crowd.
Normally, the revealing spell produced a thin beam that could be cast at individual ponies, but it was easy enough for Twilight to cast (after a lot of practice on her friends) that by her calculations she would be able to affect an entire area with it if she put the right amount of magic into it. She knew she was powerful enough that she could create a blanket effect without running the risk of overtaxing her magic.
The light became blindingly bright and her horn heated up from the strain of putting such powerful magic through it, but Twilight kept going, feeding it still more power. The sphere of energy she had created moved slowly through the crowd of ponies, making them temporarily light up like green light bulbs.
Though she wasn’t looking down, she could also see the glow coming from her own body as the spell affected her too. Her body began to tingle slightly, something she had never experienced before because it had been impossible to cast the revealing spell on herself until then. It wasn’t a bad feeling, really; just very odd. A little thrill ran through Twilight’s midsection; rather like she had butterflies in her stomach except it was accompanied by a wave of nausea as well.
She started to feel very dizzy all of a sudden. Her horn was still heating up, despite having already passed the point where it should have adjusted to the enormous input of magical energy. The tip spat out a stream of green and yellow sparks in a manner rather like a rogue sparkler, accompanied by small popping noises, and then it began to vibrate with such force that it made her teeth rattle.
Nothing like this had happened to her when she cast the revealing spell on any of her friends; not even when she doubled the energy input to cast it on both Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash at the same time. Twilight cancelled the spell immediately—or tried to. That the bright green light kept flowing out of her horn like a broken pipe made it clear that something was very, very wrong.
Losing the ability to control one’s magic was one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a pony of any kind. Depending on what was going on at the time it happened, the connection either stayed closed forever, meaning the pony in question could never use it again, or else it stayed open until their power was exhausted or they were torn apart by the excess energy. Since Twilight was far more powerful than the average unicorn, and her horn was most certainly connected to her magic, it was likely that she would die a painful death unless the situation changed very soon.
This, if anything, was worthy of panic.
I shouldn’t have put that much magic into the spell! I forgot I have limitations! I’m not a goddess! Now I’m going to die and I can’t do anything about it! Oh Celestia, please don’t let me die! I should never have done something so stupid—
A steady stream of energy swirled around the unicorn’s body and materialized into a cyclone of bright green flames revolving around and around her. The tingling grew into a raw tearing sensation that quickly spread downward over her head and neck. The closest thing Twilight could think of to compare it to was having her skin slowly peeled off. She tried to scream; to let everypony else know there was something very wrong; but her body was as paralyzed as her magic was.
Everything in front of her eyes seemed to split apart as her vision fragmented, leaving behind a confusing array of blurry shapes that didn’t match up into anything recognizable. The only thing that remained constant was the color green. Twilight was surrounded by a storm of bright green.
Her legs gave out beneath her, weakened by a combination of the sheer agony and shock of what was happening to her and the trauma of having so much magic forced through her horn in such a short time. She collapsed limply onto the podium floor, still wreathed in flames and her horn still spewing a stream of green magic out its tip. The furious tearing sensation burrowed deeper into her body, steadily permeating every organ and bone in it until Twilight Sparkle was a twitching, burning mass of pain and nothing else.
Even as she lay there, the flow of magic from her horn began to slow down. Within a short time it had halted entirely—and then it reversed itself, sucking the same magic back in like a vacuum. The shimmering green bubble—which had still been expanding the entire time—burst violently, and for a moment the air was full of green and white magical residue before that, too, was drawn in.
All the magic Twilight had expelled through her body funneled back into the tip of her horn in just a few brief seconds. The unicorn, who had only moments before felt as if she had been squeezed dry, suddenly felt like her insides were being jostled aside and stretched to their limits to accommodate all the extra power she had accidentally channeled and was now absorbing. The green flames, also caught by the pull, evaporated around her.
Twilight’s horn didn’t stop sucking in magic until the last remainders of the revealing spell and the unfocused energy she had channeled were gone. The blinding green glow around it finally died away at last, although a little bit of magic continued to trickle out of the tip even after the light was gone.
It could have been ten seconds, ten minutes, or ten hours that Twilight lay motionless on the floor before she was even aware of herself again, and when she did it was under a thick veil of confusion as her brain slowly rebooted itself. The first thing she registered was that she was in pain. Every single nerve in her body screamed at her that she was on fire, inside and out. Twilight had never felt such pain before until just moments earlier. A blinding migraine took hold of her head as soon as she opened her eyes, distorting everything in her vision with overly bright lights.
Regaining her sense of proprioception, she had a strange impression that her body didn’t quite fit right anymore—though what, exactly, that meant was beyond her current ability to comprehend. Twilight was very familiar with the normal proportions of her limbs and body, having used them all her life; and so she instinctively knew there was something different now. Every little movement felt clumsy, alien, and uncoordinated, like she had been ripped from herself and placed in a crude manequin slapped together by someone who didn’t know much about the size and shape of a normal pony.
The unicorn made an effort to sit up, slowly and carefully. It took several tries to actually accomplish this, as there seemed to be two conflicting destinations for her hooves when she moved them: the places she thought they were going to go, and the places they actually went. Twilight had difficulty even holding herself upright; every muscle in her body felt impossibly weak and tired. Turning her neck to look around felt like running a marathon, and furthermore it only led her to more confusion.
Her previously coherent surroundings had undergone an intimate fusion with the very mind of Discord himself since the last time she examined them. The harder Twilight tried to pull her thoughts together and focus, the more garbled and incomprehensible the world around her turned. The overall effect was terrifying, as if she’d stepped out of the real world and straight into a nightmare.
All her senses had been drastically altered to the point where it was almost impossible to process any of the input she was receiving through them. Her vision had become a mess of fuzzy colors that bled into each other from partitioned hexagonal sections, all of which showed different versions of the same sight. It was like trying to look through a tunnel made of so many broken kaleidoscopes and make some kind of sense out of it.
The crowd of ponies had turned into a frightening blur that resembled a mass of equine-shaped colored lights. Each figure had its own unique blend of glowing shades that lit it up and made it stick out from the others, and yet at the same time they all exuded similarly colored auras. The whole thing was so confusing to Twilight that she would surely have developed a migraine if she didn’t already have one strangling the life out of every coherent thought that tried to form in her brain.
Every sound came to her as a blast so loud it felt like a thunderclap. The incomprehensible things the ponies below were saying in louder and louder voices made her head rattle and spin even worse than before, further foiling her attempts to collect herself. Even her own heartbeat echoed in her ears. Sounds Twilight had never even noticed before pounded against her brain and made her migraine worse by the second. As if from very far away, she heard a raspy voice yell for everypony to please be quiet because it hurt when they shouted so loudly at her.
Almost as overwhelming were the smells coming from all around her. Her brain had somehow developed a sort of olfactory compass that told her exactly which smells came from where, and there were things associated with all of them that were too complex for her to fathom just then. They didn’t even smell like anything she had ever smelled before, except for one or two that triggered blurry, fleeting memories of things she knew she should have recognized but didn’t.
A solid wall of emotion sprang up around Twilight, one so powerful she barely tell where it ended and her own feelings began. None of it was pleasant, either; it was all rolling waves of fear and rapidly growing anger, both of which were almost physically repulsive to the unicorn. Every part of her brain that wasn’t still swimming in tar began screaming for her to get away from it before it swallowed her up. There was something evil about it, something that hurt her on a level she had never even consciously known existed. Twilight was afraid of the wall; of the way it seemed to loom over her, waiting to crush her with its negativity.
Still dizzy and still in pain, the unicorn tried to stand up on her shaking, poorly coordinated legs. The sudden burst of movement made gravity abruptly turn itself sideways. Twilight stumbled to the right, trying to regain her balance, but she failed and toppled over. A new wave of nausea washed over her as she lay on the floor; seconds later, she threw up some a small amount of yellowish-green bile onto the podium.
At that moment she saw—though it took a moment to focus her eyes enough for it to make sense—that the hooves and forelegs trying to push her body back upright were not her own. Twilight’s lavender coat had vanished completely and her legs were now sheathed in a chitinous black armor-like material reminiscent of an insect’s exoskeleton.
She lifted one foreleg and stared incredulously at it, then rotated it from side to side, trying to make sense of the gnarled appendage, which reminded her more of a hoof-shaped branch from a burnt, dead tree than an actual hoof. Her side and stomach were encased in a sort of shell with the same texture as her forelegs, although the latter part was a bit softer and a bit more yielding when she put pressure on it than the former.
Moving her hoof up to her face, Twilight felt a pair of long, sharp processes on either side of her mouth that could only be fangs. The length, shape, and texture of her horn had changed; from the short, stubby spire typical of Canterlot unicorns to a jagged and sharp thing that had a texture similar to that of driftwood. Her ears had become smaller and thinner in spite of their increased sensitivity, and each had two short, flat antennae-like protrusions atop them.
When she felt the rest of her head, and then her neck, she found another shocking anomaly: her mane had also disappeared entirely. In its place was a thin membrane like a little sail, held up by a series of sharp spines, that started at the base of her skull and stopped halfway down her neck. Touching these with her hoof momentarily doubled her headache and thrust a spike of something resembling static interference into her brain. Twilight’s sight swam like a poorly projected magical image and a sonic boom seemed to go off inside her head.
Even more disorienting was the way the wall of emotion around her exploded, suddenly filled with hundreds of confusing feelings with no source at all. She whimpered and immediately took her hoof away from her neck, and the emotional bombardment immediately ceased and everything slowly returned to the still-confusing state it had been in before.
There was something on Twilight’s back that shouldn’t have been there as well. At first she couldn’t figure out what it was her hoof was touching there, so she forced herself up onto her forelegs to look over her shoulder, fighting a wave of both pain and nausea, and also the shaking of her weakened limbs threatening to give out beneath her. Though it was difficult to turn her head far enough to look properly—like the rest of her body, her neck was incredibly sore—Twilight could see what were unmistakably two sets of thin, translucent, insectoid wings jutting out of either side of her back, fluttering agitatedly with muscles she only just then realized she was even using.
Twilight’s thoughts caught up with her senses at last as she stared at her wings. Her body was that of an insect, protected by an exoskeleton; she had wings that looked like they had been taken from a gigantic dragonfly and attached to her. Yet she was still undeniably an equine shape under all the armor, and she had a twisted parody of a unicorn’s horn that was, even then, still dribbling sickly green magic from its tip. Fangs protruded from her mouth and her hooves were perfectly adapted not only for manipulating objects but for use as weapons—a single blow could easily knock a pony unconscious, or worse...
Despite her confusion, and the pain, and her nearly blinding headache, Twilight was still able to carry out some semblance of intelligent thought, albeit at a torturously slow pace. After what seemed like an eternity, her hazy mind finally put together the pieces and she realized she had gone from a unicorn...
...to a changeling...?
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...” she mumbled to herself. “No, that’s not right...”
It wasn’t possible that she could be a changeling, despite the fact that she was currently a changeling. Therefore the only explanation was that her senses were lying to her; she was dreaming, or she was insane—or something else rational like that.
The confused unicorn(?) staggered to her hooves, swaying to and fro as her ataxic brain tried to learn how to use the limbs it was suddenly connected to. Though she wasn’t floored by vertigo this time, the world spun dizzyingly around her as if she had just finished attending one of Pinkie Pie’s particularly outrageous parties. Twilight took a few steps without really knowing where she was trying to head. She didn’t make it very far before her shaking body gave out and she collapsed onto her rump, legs splayed out in an awkward sitting position, fighting a terrible urge to be sick again.
Changeling. She was wearing the body of a changeling.
How did that happen? One moment she was a unicorn, and the next she was a changeling.
It didn’t make any sense at all.
Wasn’t it impossible to turn a pony into a changeling?
No, no, not impossible; the changelings just didn’t do it. That didn’t make it impossible. Improbable?
No, that wasn’t the right word.
Maybe it was?
Unicorn to changeling was improbable. That made sense, didn’t it?
How had she gone from a unicorn to a changeling? Magic. So what magic made her turn into a changeling?
She’d been an ordinary unicorn until she somehow botched a changeling-revealing spell and lost control of her magic. Therefore, there was a very high probability that her transformation had something to do with the changeling-revealing spell she had cast using changeling magic—
Twilight’s disjointed attempt to analyze the situation was interrupted by a growing feeling of claustrophobia. A great many blurry colored shapes that resembled ponies were moving toward her from all directions at the same time, and as they got nearer the distance between her and the intangible emotional mass surrounding her shrank accordingly.
“Look at its horn,” a worried voice thundered. “I think it’s trying to do magic.”
A few of the glowing pony-shaped things backed up a little.
“What’s it magicking?”
“I don’t know. It looks kinda woozy. Maybe it’s too confused to do anything else,” said the first speaker.
Twilight's eyes rolled upward near the end of this exchange. She could just barely see a couple of green sparks shoot out of the tip of the misshapen thing on her head that had once been her horn. A brief jet of raw energy followed the discharge, but it never materialized into a spell and quickly dissolved in the air. The only response she received from her horn when she tried to stop the random outbursts was a strange prickling sensation, as if it had been paralyzed and was just starting to regain feeling.
But at that moment, figuring out what had happened to her was less important to Twilight than fixing it, and she was still in too much of a panic to see how illogical her priorities were. Stripped of her ability to use magic properly and surrounded by a moving wall of sensory overload, the unicorn—former unicorn—was consumed by blind terror. In desperation, Twilight tried to back away from the advancing mob of ponies. Her atrophic wings buzzed frantically, instinctively trying to carry her away to safety, but she had neither the strength not the knowledge necessary to fly.
“Stay—stay away f-from me—!” she babbled. Her voice sounded nothing like it usually did; it was scratchy and raspy, like that of a pony with a very sore throat. “Please, just—stay—No, no! Don’t—”
A pair of hooves seized each of her forelegs and dragged her upright. Two more ponies held onto each pair of her wings, pinning them to her sides. Twilight tried to squirm out of their grasp, but she was in no state to do so; not with her weakened body and blinding headache.
“Let me go,” the ex-unicorn begged. She knew she could figure everything out if she had a chance to think about it. “L-listen, I’m, I’m not—I don’t know wh-a-at’s g-going on, please let m—”
“Hey, it’s still trying to use magic,” exclaimed one of the ponies suddenly. “What if it, I dunno, what if it attacks somepony?”
“Aren’t there things you can put over a unicorn's horn to make it, uh, not work?” Twilight could barely differentiate the second pony from the first in her hazy state, much less put an identity to it—they all seemed featureless save for the differences in color, and Twilight’s vision was swimming so badly she wasn’t even sure if she was really seeing the colors she thought she was.
“D’you mean a limiter?” another asked. “Oh, I think—don’t the police use—”
“Look at its horn!” interrupted a fourth. “Do you think you could get a limiter on that thing? We’ll have to break it off if we want to keep it from escaping or hurting somepony.”
“Break—break it—What?” Twilight cried, horrified, as several other voices chorused their general agreement to the suggestion. “Nononono, don’t break it off!”
A ghostly white aura grew in one of the fragmented pieces of Twilight’s vision—the one most like what her old eyes saw—and her natural self-preservation instincts kicked in. Barely comprehending what she was doing in her stupified haze, she lowered her head and blasted the source of the growing spell with a burst of sickly green magic before it could harm her precious horn.
The two energies met in midair and fought with each other, each trying to push the other back toward its caster. For a short time, it could have gone either way: Twilight's own fluctuating magic was still barely within her control and she was still too overwhelmed to think clearly. What she cast didn’t even qualify as a real spell—it was just a jet of raw magic, rather like water spraying out of a fire hose.
In the end it was her spell and her desperation that won out. Both spells rocketed toward the other caster at lightning speed. A small explosion parted the crowd and left a pony slumped against the wall behind him, his horn cracked in half. Shocked by the sudden outburst from their captive, the ponies restraining Twilight had fled when she first used magic, leaving her to stand by herself on her four wobbly legs. Ordinarily she would have been horrified at what she had just done, self-defense or not, but her combined confusion and the terror of nearly having her horn sheared off left Twilight in such a panic she could only think about escaping the immediate danger.
Seeing that she had some measure of control over her magic again, Twilight focused and tried to teleport herself away from the town square. Instead of making her disappear, the tip of her horn exploded in a flash of green and emitted a bang loud enough to rival a sonic rainboom. A couple of ponies hastily dove out of the way of the shower of sparks and the discharge of green lightning that accompanied the blast.
Twilight herself skittered clumsily backwards, terrified that she might hurt somepony else by accident. Even her fear couldn’t override that concern, though it did a lot to further cloud her ability to think rationally. Seeing an opening, and thus a potential route for escape, she lunged through the gap the frightened ponies had left and launched herself off the back of the podium.
It was a disastrous move at best. Twilight’s right foreleg hit the ground the wrong way and made a sick cracking sound, causing her to lurch forward and slam face-first into the road. Blood erupted from her broken nose and left both the dirt and her muzzle spattered with bright green fluid. As though from far away, Twilight heard her own raspy screams ringing through the air.
The screaming soon died down to a shaky, distracted whimper as she struggled back to her hooves tried to stumble onward—but her injured foreleg wouldn’t support her weight anymore and she tripped over herself. By the time Twilight had completed yet another painstaking journey back to her hooves, her only escape route was blocked off by the mass of ponies and feelings and noise and other things she just couldn’t deal with.
She tried to teleport to safety again as they closed in around her, but the only result she got was a flurry of sparks and a crackling fizz of sickly green electricity. A few of the ponies recoiled at the unexpected action, but no openings appeared in their ranks this time. Magical auras began to glow in the midst of the undulating mass as other unicorns started charging up their own spells.
“Stay away from me!” Twilight sobbed, stumbling wildly around and pointing her glowing, sparking horn at parts of the mass that came too close or lit up too brightly. “You can’t take my horn! I haven't d-done anything wrong!”
“The hell you didn’t!” A particularly rainbowy thing removed itself from the mass. “You took our friend! Where’s Twilight?”
“I-I’m Twilight! I'm not a changeling! I’m Twilight Sparkle!” She was shaking from the effort of holding herself up for so long. “Don’t c-come near me! Just let me—let me th-thi-ink! And stop making so m-much noise! It hurts!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever!” said the rainbowy thing, very loudly. “I’ll make as much noise as I want until you tell—”
“Shut up! I need to think! Can't you just shut up?”
“Best just turn yerself in, sugarcube,” an orange pony wearing a stetson hat said. “Looks like you ain’t goin’ anywhere on yer own anytime soon. Not on that leg.”
“Just stay away from me!” Twilight repeated, with no small amount of hysteria beginning to creep into her voice. She jabbed her horn warningly at the orange pony and almost overbalanced, unused to both her body and moving on only three legs. “I-I’ll use magic on you if you try to—if you try—I-I-I can fix this, just let me—let me think, let me figure this—”
There was a sudden, terrific tug on Twilight’s horn like something had latched firmly on and was trying to rip it out of her head. It was so forceful that her hooves left the ground entirely, and her legs gave out under her when they touched down again. A sharp bolt of pain shot through her spigafigural core—the center of her horn; easily the most sensitive part of a unicorn’s body. Twilight let out another scream, this one somewhat gurgly due to the blood that had collected in her mouth.
Her assailant tugged on her horn again. A panicked squeal left Twilight’s mouth as she was dragged a short distance through the street on her stomach, limbs flailing uselessly. It wouldn’t be long before her horn either snapped or was pulled right out of her skull if the abuse kept up the way it was going. Whatever magic the other unicorn was using to grab her was obviously not made for safely holding onto unicorn horns, or indeed any part of of any living creature, because Twilight felt like hot nails were being driven through her horn each time it was enveloped by the spell’s grayish aura.
If she’d been able to, she would have been bawling her eyes out in terror. They were going to take her horn away from her, and of course there was no way to regrow a severed horn. Twilight could hardly imagine living life without ever using magic again. It would have been hard enough to adapt to living like an earth pony, but magic was also her special talent, her passion, and a sizable part of her very identity. Without magic, her cutie mark would be nothing more than a fancy but meaningless bit of decoration on her flank. She couldn’t be the Element of Magic anymore if she didn’t even have magic.
Desperate, she gathered what little of her magic she could control and lashed out at her attacker. Though her horn sparked and seared with pain, Twilight was able to conjure a long, thin green whip, which she directed at the source of the offending spell. It coiled around the other unicorn’s throat like a serpent and tightened until it became a strangling noose. The pressure on her horn eased up immediately as the choking unicorn’s spell flickered out. In its wake it left a throbbing, white-hot residual pain almost as debilitating as the initial attack itself.
Other spell auras appeared elsewhere in the mob almost immediately, coming from ponies clearly prepared to take over where the other had left off and fight her into submission—but Twilight was not a warrior; she had neither the strength nor the knowledge nor the desire to battle the mob that was after her. With her world turned upside-down and inside-out, a wall of anger and contempt bearing down upon her, and half a dozen different kinds of pain tearing her nerves to shreds, she could think only of escape and the solitude it would bring.
Twilight’s magical whip let go of its victim, who collapsed onto the ground, and vanished back into the tip of her horn. Now knowing she had a small amount of magic to work with, she focused and made one more attempt to teleport herself out of danger. It was a risk, since teleportation required a significant amount of energy and concentration, but having to think on her hooves was something fairly new to her. Twilight was used to having the time and mental capacity to weigh her choices before making a decision, and the ultimate result was that she impulsively chose the first option she thought of in her panic.
A sickly green aura flowed out of her horn and wrapped around her body. Jolts of excruciating pain shot through her horn as she fed all the magic she could muster into the teleportation spell. Twilight felt like it was splintering into pieces atop her head, and for one short moment she could only think how she had just destroyed her most treasured possession with her frenzied casting.
The ocean of noise around her suddenly coagulated into a howling sound; her surroundings bent in bizarre ways and vanished into the distance; Twilight felt as though every piece of her was being simultaneously torn apart and rebuilt into a new body. For one moment, she found herself teetering halfway between the physical world and the intangible magical one, unable to move backward or forward.
Having never experienced the interstitial in slow motion before, this bizarre gap in her teleportation routine was not only confusing but horrifying. Twilight felt like she was trying to swim toward the other side through an ocean of molasses, including a feeling that she was rapidly running out of air. Her magic proved just strong enough to get her all the way through, however, and she burst through the interstitial into the magical world.
Thankfully, the singularly uncomfortable experience of having her body magically deconstructed, molecule by molecule, and then put back together again did not happen in slow motion; rather, it took less than a fraction of a second. Her vision filled with darkness as she passed through the interstitial again, this time at the normal pace, before becoming a mix of two blue and green halves.
At that moment, everything returned to normal, though the welcome return was accompanied by pain, confusion, and a violent lurching of her stomach. Twilight rolled over where she lay and retched onto the grass beside her, then frantically ran her uninjured hoof over the sharp, twisted spike on her head make sure it was still there. Though it was still hot to the touch and the action sent a painful electric jolt through her skull, her horn didn’t seem to be damaged—on the outside, at least. However, the relief that came with this discovery was quickly overshadowed by the dismal realization that it wasn’t really her horn sitting on top of her head.
After letting her exhausted, abused body rest for a short time, Twilight rolled over and made a halfhearted effort to stand up. She sank back down onto her stomach before she even rose all the way, having lost the will halfway through the act. The transition from sensory overload to next to nothing at all was so overwhelming that she needed a few minutes to adjust to it. When she did, it wasn’t as pleasing as she had hoped it would be: her headache remained, she hurt all over, and all the adrenaline in her kept pushing her to get up and do something, regardless of what it was.
Twilight’s eyes flicked nervously back and forth, taking in her new surroundings. In her panic, she had teleported without first choosing a destination—a very dangerous thing to do, as she could have ended up anywhere, or nowhere at all—and it seemed she had materialized in a meadow filled with tall grass, as well as the occasional wildflower blooming here and there. There were some gentle hills spread around the landscape, through which a dirt road lined with groves of trees led toward the distant silhouettes of Ponyville’s homes and buildings. A butterfly landed near her face, stared at her, and then took off again when she stirred.
More than anything, Twilight wanted to close her eyes and let herself slip into the gentle, waiting arms of unconsciousness, where she wouldn’t have to deal with any of the pain or the shock of what had just happened to her. But after several minutes of lying in the grass, the ex-unicorn came to the realization that it wouldn’t be long before there were pegasi looking for her from the skies, and she would almost certainly be spotted if she remained where she was. Then they would take her back to town and break her horn off and she would never be able to use magic ever again.
Thoughts like those should have had adrenaline pumping through her system again, but somehow she couldn’t find the strength to panic anymore. A feeling of emotional numbness had settled over her sometime while she was laying there in the field, making every thought Twilight had seem as if it were being thought by another pony and related to her without the slightest sense of connection.
She rose sluggishly to her hooves, trembling with the effort of holding herself upright. Merely standing was a laborious feat, but walking was even more difficult—the fastest she could manage without risking falling on her face again was a slow three-legged limp. The entire process of moving herself from Point A to Point B rapidly became a single smear in time which neither began nor ended, broken only for brief moments to look back and check for other ponies coming after her from Ponyville, or when Twilight’s wobbly legs gave out and she had to rest for a bit before trying to get back up again, or she stepped in a hole and lost her carefully-maintained balance. By the time she returned to her senses, she had left the tall grass and her hooves were crossing the dirt on the path.
The earth on the other side was raised slightly; a foot and a half, maybe two feet at most. Twilight stared intently at the embankment, knowing she wasn’t strong enough to lift herself onto it. Part of her wanted to damn the consequences and lay down right where she was, but another part was still singularly fixed on survival and refused to let her do that.
Twilight cast another tired look back at Ponyville—and she was thankful she did. A rainbow trail was rapidly making its way out of the town by way of the skies. Although it wasn't heading directly for her, it was moving on a path that would certainly bring it very close to where she was if it kept going in the same direction. The sight of her pursuer forced one last burst of adrenaline out of her body, allowing her to scrabble halfway up the embankment and then dive into the bushes before her body could give out.
From there, she struggled back onto her hooves and limped further into the grove. Its foliage was thick enough that the clear blue sky was blotted out for the most part, leaving only shafts of light where there were spaces between the clusters of leaves. Twilight found the darkest spot she possibly could, then finally allowed herself to collapse and crawled into a small space between a tree and a large boulder.
Her wounds still throbbed and her head still pounded, and her system was full of adrenaline again, but now that she was finally somewhat safe, Twilight allowed herself to uncoil just a little. Curling up between the tree’s roots, she closed her eyes and fell asleep almost instantly, so exhausted she didn’t even have time to think before passing out.
1. This story works on the pretext that all magic is available to all the pony races, but certain types of it come more easily to certain races. In this universe, a pegasus with a strong connection to the pegasus race’s magic and a lot of dedication could theoretically levitate objects, cast cloud-walking spells, make butterfly wings for other ponies, etc., and an earth pony could (theoretically) walk on clouds without casting a spell or become invisible if they worked enough at it. And so on.
2. I predict that this will be a very long story. There are countless X-is-a-changeling fanfics, so I must write things that aren’t just ‘hur dur imma cause dramatics’, and that will take a lot of work to pull off decently.
3. The next chapter or something will involve Royal Guards. I suck at coming up with names and I’m lazy as hell so I’m going to offer anybody who’s interested a chance to have your OC namedropped once or thrice. PM me if you are (interested), don’t give me your character’s tragic sob story in a comment you could be using to praise/despise me. I’ll give you credit for the character and everything.
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I love it!
have some mustaches!
interesting
Twilight is best Changeling!
Very interesting story you got here. I love the 'X=Changeling' thing (writing one myself) so I'm looking forward to what you'll do with this
I'm always a sucker for the "Twilight becomes a/n x" fanfics.
Interesting idea I'll be waiting for more
....Moar? Plz?
This is amazing! Please, continue.
Fav'ed and voted even before reading. I just love those kind of fictions. I know they aren't the most original ones, but with the amount of fiction the fandom produce it's hard to be original these days.
I'm going to read later, but I'm sure it'll be good.
"Twilight becomes/is a Changeling" fic #51029375!
This fits rather well among my interests, dood.
As a side note, can someone answer a simple question for me?
When Twilight turns out to be a changling, the worst things possible seem to gravitate towards her; When Rarity turns out to be a changling, she gets sex.
Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this, and why people think it's fair, dood?
I like it, very good style and interesting enter to promising plot
My internal prediction algorithms are predicting a 70% chance of Celestia being a changeling queen.
Great start!
Wow, you people are insane. I'm trying to reply to comments and literally every 30 seconds I get notifications.
Edit: NOT THAT I MIND IN THE SLIGHTEST, CONTINUE BOMBARDING ME WITH DELICIOUS NOTIFICATIONS
1498963
My life is now complete. I have drowned in mustaches.
1498967
I've seen that! I haven't had time to read it, sadly. But the art is badass. I'll probably wait until I'm done writing SL to read it because I don't want to accidentally rip anything off.
1498968
Isn't there one where she turns herself into a cloud or something?
1499071
Yessss
Beg meeee
1499091
OH YOU BET I WILL
1499099
I'm the original MC Parasprite, yo! Nuthin moar original than me!
Now I'll go check the 22 notifications I got while writing this comment... I don't know whether to rejoice or be horrified by the number of favorites I'm getting in such a short time.
I got a 23rd while I typed that sentence, ahahaha.
Thanks for all the appreciation.
hmmm, been done before but like I have said elsewhere, "Some ideas are like potato chips, you can't have just one"
I would normally read the whole thing before commenting but this is almost 13k words! Perhaps you should have broken this first posting into two or three chapters?
Oh well, maybe there weren't any good points to break it off *shrugs*
In any case looks like I got me some more reading to do!
best x becomes a changeling story evaar!
this is quite interesting, I look forward to more of this.
1499121
I think it's because in addition to being a changeling, Rarity is actually a robot like her little sister. Except Rarity isn't a normal robot. She's a changeling sex robot. Twilight is just a regular, depressingly ordinary robot with a huge brain, like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Everything bad happens to her because everyone hates her. Don't deny it. You all hate her. That's why she sits in the corner and rusts when Rarity is having changeling sex. Robotwilight hate.
1499130
What does that make Luna?
1499141
Well there was that one time...
hey keep it up i love the story so keep it up
1499148
You know, I thought about doing that, but it would have interrupted the flow. It's one continuous scene, so there really wasn't anywhere I could cut it without resorting to
you need OC's?
well this was long and good and a bit of a change from other chengeling fics
Personally I am glad you kept this together as a single chapter. Longer chapters means that I've got something to read for longer rather than being left bored waiting for an update.
I like this story. Its interesting both in the conditions of discovery and what the possible results might be. I can't wait to see what happens in this.
The greatest story with ponies-are-actually-changelings was the comedy where ALL the ponies turned out to be changelings. That was so beautiful... the way it turned the absurd concept so utterly on its head and pointed out the flaws in such a cunning fashion.
That said, I shall be VERY harsh in my criticisms if you don't have a very good, well-formulated reason for this set-up.
And I am a master at logical plot analysis... especially Twilight's plot... mmmmm, dat plot...
Adult fear. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultFear
That is all.
Congrats on the feature box.
Woa.
Heh, yeah.
If you need OC's, i can give you a bunch just off the top of my mind. They'll be all yours.
1499146
I bucking hated that one. The Fridge Horror in it nearly broke me.
Reminded of this for some reason. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTss-ueSQvo&feature=relmfu
1499188 I don't hate Robot-Twilight, she is my favorite pony, dood.
Wow this just came out and it's already this popular, nice job guy!
Love the story by the way.
1499230
Would you kindly have a nervous breakdown and make everyone think you're crazy so no one believes you when you say your old foalsitter is actually the queen of the changelings?
1499274
I could come up OCs on my own, but I want to interact with my readers a little.
1499310
There are so few good ones out there! Actually that's true of cliches in general. They can be the best stories, but only if you write them right. Ex: all the Cupcakes/My Little Dashie sequeripoffs out there. It's not the idea that's bad, but the way it's written...
1499313
I fucking hate short chapters of anything arghghghh
1499321
Fear not the dark unknown of the future, my son. I wouldn't write something as complex as this without determining how it would work first.
oh. mmm... you can use my OC Storm Shadow.
1499440
Bioshock changling Twilight mashup? Hm... would Twi need plasmids? Oh bugger you lot have me pondering things now.
[youtube=P3ALwKeSEYs]
images.wikia.com/totalminer/images/a/a0/Duck-Sauce-Charlie-Sheen-Spinstyles-Bi-Winning-Edit.jpg
2.bp.blogspot.com/-O_sDhE7aiY4/UFgjM9mSO-I/AAAAAAAAAvM/VtKmrtr3vzw/s1600/this+is+the+best+thing+ever1.jpg
dotallyrad.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1912-so-much-win_inline.jpg
A CHANGELING ROMANCE YES
Wow this is great I can not wait for more.
I have a possible picture for you:
lh5.googleusercontent.com/--CWdRe4IXKA/UFzJGiqWr_I/AAAAAAAAHow/iTU1CqP0-LA/s640/ChangelingTwilightSparkleElementofCurses.png
She may not look particularly distressed, but she looks less like it's a gradual thing.
Status?
Curiosity: piqued
Favorite: commencing
Thumb: waiting...
could of left twi with her mane
I was pretty sure this was going to get featured from the moment you mailed the first version to me. This is the best "X is changeling" story i've seen, and it was a pleasure to preread. This story is going places. Congrats on the feature.
I'm curious. Is this one of those things were "X was secretly a changeling the entire time and never knew it", or "X was turned into changeling at some point.". I kind've hope it's the latter, because the former usually opens up a bunch of plot-holes if it's one of the mane 6.
My OCs name is Borderline hes a grey and black unicorn with a dark red secondary ^^ if you use him great if not ill still love ya ^^
1499703
Thanks. It wouldn't have turned out half as well without your help!
1499753
You'll find out... eventually...
My OCs name is Borderline hes a grey and black unicorn with a dark red secondary ^^ if you use him great if not ill still love ya ^^
Im not sure if i already posted this and it derped or I posted this on a now very confused author's page who is now wondering why i sent him this... oh well what happens happens
Wow, great job! =O I really felt the panic and desperation, man! You got me right in the feels XD
1499239
Lol, Yeah, I finely read through all of it, extremely well done and very descriptive without breaking story flow. Though there definitely are limits, for the most part even the most bland or simplistic story can be made a work of art with proper imagery, or likewise a wonderfully thought out and intricate story rendered worthless by the lack there of. Your story has both a well constructed backbone and flesh to go with it.
Big thumbs up!
As for why it was one big chapter I can see what you mean, its the same sort of issue that leads to many of my sentences becoming run-ons whenever I write anything.
But I think I could find a few places to make a couple breaks, I mean all three chapters would need to be posted together to make sure and hook a worthwhile hunk of readers while its still on the front page but I think you could place cuts around here,:
and over here,
Tee-hee, anyways that's where I would put it, also if you don't already have a head cannon on how/why changelings need love see what you think of my explanation in my blog, hopefully I can get around to altering it soon myself as I have decided to write the story it contains and want to eliminate what now amounts to a giant spoiler not to mention thank the ones who did reply, anyways love your story, keep up the good work.
Man. That was intense...
saw this in the new fics page, decided to skip over it, refreshes the fimfiction later, same fic is now featured, very well you have my interest
I don't usually read non-gore, non-violence, non-profound-evil-killing-a-lot-of-characters-taking-over-the-world stories...
i282.photobucket.com/albums/kk256/Hana-The-Sex-Bunny/icameplz.gif
But you just gotta love 'em changelings... Especially when someone turns out to be one not even knowing about that before... Sort of like a sleeper agent y'know? And this, thing right 'ere seems to be this kind of story and who knows... Maybe I'll find just a little tiny bit of gore there? Small amounts of violence? One can only hope... Will read this splendidly promising story for sure!
Bloood!
You just always have to put something like this in every single comment?
Well, technically I'm YOU so YOU'RE putting it there...
Well played...