V. Hunted
This is a pretty eventful chapter, and it was a lot of fun to write... except for the fact that it was way longer than I expected it to be (over 22,000 words... what the hell, man?), so I had to rewrite it into two chapters to make it even remotely readable for you guys. Warning: this chapter contains best pony. You may be irradiated by the sheer awesomeness. Enjoy.
Solitary Locust
V. Hunted
As the morning sun began to rise, Twilight Sparkle sat beneath the church’s single open window in a shaft of gentle yellow light, fumbling with the wrappings around her broken leg. Her movements were lethargic and sluggish, as she hadn’t slept well the night before, and her actions often felt disconnected from her brain as though her body had started running by itself without really knowing what to do. The former unicorn’s hooves frequently bumped against things and she kept dropping the roll of bandages because they had begun shaking at some point.
Peeling her several-day-old bandages off was a slow and nauseating process as she had to do it with her mouth instead of her magic, and with her clumsiness and inexperience handling things by mouth she had to be very careful not to disrupt whatever healing had occurred so far. Underneath, her broken leg already looked somewhat further along in its healing than a real pony’s would have been in such a short length of time. The place where the chitin had cracked had sealed itself up, leaving behind a jagged line. Twilight didn’t dare put weight on that leg yet, knowing it would be a long while yet before she had healed enough to walk properly, but she felt just a little better upon finding out that something, at least, was going the way she had hoped it would.
Once she’d wrapped up her foreleg with fresh bandages and taken more of the pain pills—there were only a few left now—she went and rolled up her sleeping bag so she could tie it to the saddlebags—it wasn’t heavy either, and it would be better than sleeping on the ground if she couldn’t make it to Zecora’s... or was turned away. She also dug out one of the rain ponchos from the abandoned supplies, randomly struck by inspiration, and put it on. Although it was a silly looking thing that didn’t fit well, and wearing it was kind of physically uncomfortable, it would keep her a little bit warmer if it got cold again, and the drab-green colour would help her stay unnoticed if she had to hide.
She was still cold, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been before the storm had broken. Though she by no means felt better, she at least didn’t have to pace back and forth to stave off hypothermia now. More than anything else, she felt drained and empty. A part of her felt like she was only trying to run from her seemingly inevitable doom because it was better than sitting still and doing nothing at all. Everything she did had a strangely surreal feeling about it, as though she had one hoof in real life and one in a dream. In fact, the last week (with a start, Twilight realized it actually had been almost a week that she’d spent in the wretched changeling body now, give or take a few days’ worth of time muddled by her delirium) really could have been something right out of The Metamarephosis, or one of the cheap science-fiction novels she ordered at the beginning of every month for Rainbow Dash.
The changeling limped around the side of the huge room and pressed her shoulder against one of the great wooden doors at the church’s entrance. She pushed on it with all the strength she could still find, and it slowly swung open with a rusty creaking noise, flooding the rest of the church with the light and heat of the daytime. Twilight held up her hoof in front of her face, momentarily blinded by having the sun shining directly into her oversensitive changeling eyes. She pulled the rain poncho’s hood up and bent her neck down a bit, finally finding relief from the sun’s rays.
She slipped through the species barrier and sat down on the top step of the little staircase, taking in the wild smell of the Everfree and shivering slightly now that she was exposed to the wind, which made the loose ends of the poncho whip around her sides a little bit. Gazing out over the grass, Twilight ran down a mental checklist of everything she had in her bag: the remaining drugs and antiseptic, the roll of bandages, the two water bottles she hadn’t finished off, the parchment with her notes on it (now rolled up inside an empty bottle to keep them safe), and writing supplies (which were never a bad idea to have on hoof, regardless of the situation).
When this was done, she racked her brain, looking for something else to do, instead of venturing out of the physical and emotional safety of the pony-made church into the unknown wilderness of the Everfree. Twilight was no Daring Do; she could only take so much adventure before she started pining for her warm, soft bed back in the library. Certainly, she wasn’t the kind of pony who found any kind of ‘thrill’ in trekking through miles of wilderness with one leg broken and a horn full of holes.
If she’d had her way, the ex-unicorn would have stayed in the church and given her exhausted body some rest, but that wasn’t an option anymore. Fluttershy had almost certainly discovered the mess in her house by then, and it didn’t take much deduction to figure out where an injured changeling with limited mobility would try to escape to once magical scrying found nothing nearby. If there weren’t already guardsponies or concerned citizens (or both) combing through the forest in search of her, there would be very soon, and Twilight wanted to get somewhere truly safe before they got in far enough to find her current hiding place.
Unfortunately, Twilight couldn’t find anything more to help her procrastinate and put off her upcoming journey. She steeled herself, and then slowly struggled to her hooves and descended the steps into the little overgrown clearing around the church. She didn’t climb so much as clatter down them, lacking the energy and the focus to coordinate her steps properly, so it was a genuine surprise when she stumbled off the last one without falling down.
The long grass in the clearing waved slightly in the wind and tickled her legs a little as she shuffled through it, heading to the southwest; toward Zecora’s home. Although she didn’t know the Everfree particularly well, Twilight had made enough trips into it to know the more prominent landmarks that would tell her where she was, and if she couldn’t find any of those, there was always the sun to help her determine her relative location.
Travelling in the Everfree during the day was different from travelling in it at night, most prominently in that there weren’t nearly as many scary monsters lurking in the shadows; and in fact, that there weren’t as many shadows at all. Twilight caught glimpses of the occasional squirrel, but the larger creatures foals were warned about by their concerned parents were absent. There were still manticores and cockatrices to be wary of, of course, but even those usually didn’t come so close to the edge of the forest by day, and timberwolves were almost exclusively nocturnal creatures as well. The things that could truly be called monsters hid much deeper in the Everfree; deeper than Twilight had ever gone (or would go willingly, regardless of the circumstances).
But here, towards the edge, and in the beautiful rays of Celestia’s rising sun, it was almost inviting—nothing like how it had been the night Twilight and her friends had rushed to find the Elements of Harmony and stop Nightmare Moon. Fallen leaves crinkled pleasantly beneath her hooves as the changeling passed under soft rays of sunlight peering in between the branches above her. If she hadn’t been in such a sorry state, and if she hadn’t been under such pressure, she might actually have enjoyed the journey somewhat. She could almost forget the context under which she was making it.
The thick trees eventually gave way to the bank of a river Twilight had crossed over the night she entered the forest. It was a beautiful sight from where she stood, which was an unusually high point in the terrain. Though she would have loved to sit and admire the view, she trekked down the perimeter of the riverbank until she was on more level ground and began searching for the fallen tree she’d used as a bridge. She ran into a bit of a snag when limping up and down about a quarter mile of land twice yielded no results. The rain had probably swept the log away shortly after she’d walked over it, she guessed, which left her with no way across.
It was lucky that the river twisted in the way it did, because the angle allowed Twilight to see the company of white-and-gold-clad Royal Guards moving up the other side before she actually left the cover of the trees. She reared back in alarm, her frazzled nervous system mistaking the colour scheme for an immediate threat, and lost her balance. All the air was knocked out of her when she fell on her back.
She quickly struggled back to her hooves and glanced around. The danger wasn’t quite as immediate as she’d thought, upon secondary analysis, but it still made her insides twist up nonetheless to know that she’d so narrowly missed being spotted.
About thirty yards up the opposite side of the river, a group of nearly identical white ponies clad in golden armor were moving up the bank. They were unmistakably Royal Guards of the Unicorn Division, except for their leader; a slightly overweight older unicorn wearing a black cloak and sporting a pointed grey beard whom Twilight recognized as a noblepony from Canterlot. Either they were doing some kind of patrol of the other side, which she doubted, or they were looking for a suitable place to cross the river. If somepony had remembered and mentioned the old church, they might even have been making their way to the place where she’d just been hiding.
Twilight only just caught the incoming formation of pegasi in the periphery of her vision in time to flatten herself against the ground in the bushes again and avoid being seen. This group of six or seven ponies, traveling along the river, was heading in the direction opposite that of the unicorns, their leader lazily flying backwards the way Rainbow Dash sometimes did when when she was bored and wanted to show off.
She stayed low in the bushes until both the pegasi and the unicorns were gone around the riverbends, and then she slunk out and looked around for a way to get across without having to go too far in either direction. Surely there had to be a fallen tree or a natural bridge where she could cross the river. But there was nothing. The water had risen because of the rain, probably dislodging any other natural bridges as well as the one she’d used.
It wouldn’t be long before unicorns simply cut down a tree to bridge the gap, but Twilight couldn’t do the same. None of the ones she could see near the bank were tall enough to go all the way over when they fell, and dragging something that heavy with magic was absolutely out of the question. She gazed at the fast-flowing water, and immediately crossed the idea of swimming off her mental list. Were she to try that, she would drown the moment she got far enough out for the water to overpower her weak three-legged paddling.
As though in answer to her plea for a quick fix to her predicament, the changeling felt something pushing the poncho up off her back. She turned awkwardly and reached behind her back with her hoof to feel around, and found that this could be attributed to the one of her two wings that wasn’t trapped beneath the strap of her saddlebag. Quietly, Twilight moved further back into the woods, away from the riverbank, until she reached a small clearing.
She unstrapped her saddlebag and put the poncho inside it, and then let her newly freed insectoid wings open up. Then she refastened the saddlebags under her now open wings, which had taken her a moment to learn how to open and close. Her wings had buzzed frequently and loudly when she was particularly anxious or nervous, but she had never actually devoted much time to studying them. Though now wasn’t the time to give them an in-depth examination, Twilight couldn’t help taking a moment to sit down and look at the appendages a little bit before she tried using them.
When they weren’t buzzing, they were concealed snugly beneath a pair of black outer wings that blended well into her back. The inner wings themselves were transparent and light blue, like jagged sheets of glass. Unlike pegasus wings, they didn’t seem to have any muscles in them; only at the joints. In fact, they seemed less like the wings of a pegasus or a gryphon and more like those of an oversized insect. They were made of the same hard chitinous material that the flexible shell around Twilight’s body was, and when she touched them, they produced a strange, muted feeling, like touching a limb that had fallen asleep.
Flight for changelings apparently worked similarly to that of insects as well. Twilight’s wings didn’t flap; they rotated. This in itself was a strangely relaxing activity for her, as though she were exercising a muscle she hadn’t used in ages—which, of course, she essentially was, but it was somehow more than that as well. She wondered if this was how a pegasus felt when they stretched their wings in the morning.
She could buzz them individually, and experimented with this a little, but hovering was a different process altogether that already seemed to be wired into her brain. Commanding them to lift her off the ground was like pressing down a trigger that caused both wings to go off much faster than she ever could have done consciously, much less in a synchronized manner. Her hooves lifted off the ground, though she tried to do it as slowly as she could and keep control through the unfamiliar sensation of flying. While she’d used the butterfly wings spell once, she’d never actually cast it on herself, and floating around slowly in her hot air balloon had very little in common with what she was doing now. And the more range she allowed herself in trying new things, the more she realized this was absolutely nothing like how pegasi flew.
There was some kind of subconscious mastery of flight that had been planted in her mind by the transformation; an understanding of how to go up, down, faster, slower, and so on, like an insect that knew how to fly the moment it came out of its cocoon. It wasn’t that she was actually good at flying by any means, though—she wasn’t used to it, after all. The first time she tried flying around the little clearing, she managed to crash face-first into a tree and fell half a meter to the ground, flailing wildly.
For some time, she lay where she fell, panting, limbs splayed out to the sides, and then she carefully felt her aching body over to make sure she was still in one piece. Thankful that she hadn’t been going fast enough to break her nose and hadn’t fallen far enough to hurt her already broken leg, the changeling got back on her hooves for another go.
This time around, she made a concentrated effort to avoid hitting things or crashing. Doing this, Twilight soon discovered just how different this really was from ordinary types of flight available to equines: whereas only the most talented of pegasi could fly sideways—not even Dash could do it—she was able to slide side to side, and even diagonally, through the air with ease.
Twilight returned to the riverbank and peered out from the treeline to look around. On the left, she saw no unicorns. On the right, though, she saw a couple of tiny dots in the distance that were probably pegasi. She didn’t know if they were the group from before or a different one, but she felt it was a good idea to not stick around and find out.
“Okay, Twilight. You can do this,” she murmured, trying to talk some confidence into herself. It didn’t work particularly well. “All you have to do is fly across a raging river that will drown you in an instant if you fall in, using wings you’ve never even tried to utilize in any way, shape, or form until less than two minutes ago, after only even having them for less than a week, on the third attempt you’ve ever made at becoming airborne with them (keeping in mind that your first was a miserable failure and almost broke your nose) and there are pegasi coming toward you who might spot you at any moment...”
Shuddering, she reluctantly opened her wings and lifted herself slowly into the air, then moved equally slowly toward the other side of the river, zigzagging erratically from her fear-induced inability to control her flying properly. She wasn’t unused to mortal terror—being chased by manticores, hydras, and angry mobs had given her that experience far too many times—but having felt it before didn’t make it any less debilitating.
It actually took Twilight quite a long time to realize how foolish her nerves were making her act: the river wasn’t particularly wide, so there wasn’t any reason to go slowly other than that she was too afraid to fly fast. She didn’t even realize she’d had her eyes shut since she began the flight until then, and was appropriately embarrassed by her inability to face her fear.
Against the will of her subconscious mind, she compelled herself to look ahead, and discovered—to her complete surprise—that she was already on the other side of the river. It had hardly even taken a moment for her to cross it, and where she had expected to be exhausted after that small amount of exertion, her wings didn’t feel tired at all when she landed on the riverbank. A small, relieved smile crossed her fanged face as she looked back at the river, which suddenly seemed a lot smaller and less threatening than it had before.
The changeling opened her wings back up almost immediately after closing them and took off again into the forest, doing her best to avoid tree branches and other flora. Twilight wasn’t normally an impulsive mare, but from time to time she, like anypony, could make decisions on a whim, and this was too good a whim to pass up: with the power of flight, she could pass over every bit of terrain she’d have had to go around on hoof, saving her both time and effort.
It turned out that she was very fortunate to have the option of passing through quickly available to her: the general state on the other side of the river was very different from that of where she’d started out. The ground on this side was slightly lower, and consequently a lot of the rainwater had collected there and stayed there, leaving the ground sodden and swampy.
She flew over numerous spots of it that had turned into small ponds literally filled to the brim with insects, all of them breeding madly. Some had already hatched in the short time since the storm—the air was thick with mosquitoes that bounced off Twilight’s armored body as she flew through their swarms. They couldn’t bite her, of course, but even at the speed she was going, Twilight could hear their high-pitched buzzing with her oversensitive hearing. She was certain she’d go mad if she had to walk through them and listen to that noise for hours without end.
Mosquitoes aside, though, this almost would have been fun under other circumstances, she thought. Her top speed wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Rainbow Dash insisted on going when the pegasus carried her friends somewhere—something she deeply appreciated. Twilight was certain even Fluttershy could have outstripped her with ease.
This new body seemed to be geared toward maneuverability over speed, the wings designed to be used in close quarters and narrow spaces instead of in the open sky. She found it easy to navigate the twists and turns of the denser parts of the forest with hardly any thought at all. It was almost as though she had yet another sense helping her make her way through, though it seemed to be more of a collaboration between her normal senses creating a sort of mental diagram of the landscape through which she had to maneuver.
Unfortunately, Twilight’s inexperience with flight eventually caught up with her. Her wings began to get tired after a while, but she didn’t realize just how tired she was until she felt a sharp pain in one of the bases, and suddenly she could hardly move one of them anymore. It was lucky she was already so near to the ground, or she would never have been able to land before her wing gave out completely.
As it was, she ended up smashing through some branches, sliding through some mud, and slamming into a tree. The changeling ended her little adventure upside-down on the ground, curled up into a passable imitation of the basic crash damage prevention position taught to pegasi in flight school, with pain flaring through her entire body; particularly her broken leg.
For some time, she lay on her back, unmoving, and just stared up, not actually looking at anything. Twilight was afraid to move at all, as she feared she might discover that what felt like a horrible bruise—her entire body felt like one, really—was actually another broken bone. Finally, and with a heavy groan, the changeling turned onto her side and levered herself back onto her hooves so she could check for any serious damage.
To her surprise, there were no new breaks (although there were several spots where her armor had been battered, and she was bleeding green blood from nicks and scratches) and her already broken leg hadn’t snapped in half, despite feeling like it had. She sat down against a massive tree—or, rather, against its roots, which were almost big enough to be trees themselves—and went about cleaning and bandaging her more severe lacerations.
Her left wing was throbbing agonizingly at the joint, and it wouldn’t close all the way without causing her even more pain. She concluded that the muscles that rotated it had cramped from overuse toward the end of her flight. Twilight tried massaging it a bit, but she wasn’t exactly spa-quality material, especially with only one hoof, so she just ended up making herself more uncomfortable until she stopped.
The pain in her leg bothered her a lot; it didn’t feel like it had broken again, but she’d probably set her healing back significantly by bashing it around so much. A lump formed in her throat as she thought about Rainbow Dash’s cheesy science-fiction novels again. In those stories, the protagonists always solved their problems and ended the ordeal with no lingering ill effects. Unlike them, however, Twilight’s life would not go back to normal when everything was over.
Even if she did get herself back to her old form without further incident, it was likely that her injuries would carry over. There would be painful, life-changing surgeries to repair the massive trauma to her horn, and that was assuming she even had any magic left by the end of the ordeal, or a horn to cast it with. The inadequate medical care she’d received and the abuse she’d taken over the last couple of days would probably leave her with a permanent limp, regardless; she’d likely never be able to move faster than a canter ever again.
And that was just the physical aspect. Twilight could already imagine the endless, expensive, painful psychotherapy she’d have to undergo before she ever felt safe casting a spell more powerful than basic levitation again. She was afraid of herself, somewhat; her talent had betrayed her and put her into this awful situation, and she didn’t know what else she might do to herself. And there were the ponies who had attacked her and wanted to cut off her horn... how could she ever really trust another pony again after an experience like that?
With nothing better to do for the moment, Twilight occupied her time by attempting to massage the wing muscle again while she waited for the drugs to work. Once again, she wasn’t very successful; all she did was make it spasm painfully until she finally gave up and pushed it back down and closed the outer shell. In the end, she took two more of Fluttershy’s painkillers and resolved to keep limping along once they kicked in.
She was twisting the cap off her last water bottle to wash the pills down when she realized the distant ‘bird’ in the corner of her eye was rapidly getting bigger and bigger. The realization hit hard, and she began to panic, knowing there was no way she could possibly outrun a pegasus pony, even with four good legs. Desperate, Twilight did the first thing that came to mind: she threw herself between the tree’s massive roots, where there turned out to be a dip in the earth.
It was awful down there—several inches of warm, putrid water housed the eggs of what had to be a million mosquitoes and Celestia only knew what else. The smell alone made Twilight gag and want to throw up, but she pressed the unsoiled saddlebag over her mouth and nose and breathed through the material as a filter, which helped with the smell a little bit. She dragged herself upright against the tree itself, putting herself in as much shadow as she could, and pulled the rain camouflaged poncho over her body. The action almost negated what she had done with her bags, as it prevented fresh air from reaching her, but she managed to keep from vomiting.
She would have felt silly, and quite relieved, if it had turned out to be a false alarm. But she had hardly pulled the discoloured poncho out of her saddlebags and thrown it over herself when she picked up emotions that could only be equine, and heard a loud whump noise like the one Rainbow Dash often made when she landed.
“I know you’re in there somewhere...” a tomboyish mare’s voice said, making Twilight’s whole body straighten up with alarm. Twilight could feel her grinning as she moved around nearby, probably looking behind trees.
When she heard the hoofsteps moving toward her, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to move as little as possible, willing whoever it was to just go away and leave her alone so she could fix her life. To her utter surprise, it worked. Twilight heard the mare stalking away again to check elsewhere. The changeling guessed she must have overlooked her shadowed, half-submerged, camouflaged form when she peered down, probably expecting to see either just a changeling or nothing.
A series of several more pegasus landing noises almost made her jump out of her exoskeleton. There were at least five or six of them there now, and Twilight knew without a doubt that she was going to be caught—one of them would have to notice her if they looked again—until they started talking.
“What the hay was that about, Lightning?” Twilight was certain she recognized this voice as belonging to Rime, Scootaloo’s uncle who took care of her along with her aunt, Drizzledrop. “You need to stop dropping out of the formation, okay? You’re supposed to be leading us!”
“I saw the changeling,” replied the tomboyish mare. “It was hiding here. I think it probably teleported away, or some other magic horseapples like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you saw it?”
“Kinda assumed you guys weren’t completely blind. Sorry, I’ll remember to yell my head off and get its attention next time. Now come on—it’s gotta be around here somewhere. We can still catch up to it if we hurry.”
“Lightning... enough is enough.” That sounded like Raindrops, who didn’t have the same Cloudsdale accent as most of Ponyville’s other pegasi, and who tended to speak more slowly and measuredly than they did. “We all want to help out, but we’re not supposed to actually try to capture it ourselves. We’re supposed to go tell the Guard.”
“So we should just let it run back to—wherever it is they live?” argued Lightning. This was accompanied by a noise that sounded like a hoof stamping on the ground. “Come on, guys! What’s the matter with you? This is our chance!”
“More like your chance,” a stallion’s voice spoke up. He had a posh, upper-crust Canterlot drawl that Rarity would probably have appreciated, but Twilight didn’t actually recognize him. “I’m absolutely loathe to be the one to point this out, but she often disappears right after altering our course in a seemingly random direction.”
Lightning was silent for a while. She eventually blurted out, “So what if I do?” in a slightly smaller voice than before.
“You’re clearly sending us away from wherever you’re headed. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that whenever you find a place you think our wayward impersonator may be hiding, you try to send the rest of us away so you can go capture it yourself.”
“I—I-I do not send y-you in the wrong—what?”
Twilight could literally feel Lightning’s aggravation, as well as her nervous desire to change the subject, but to her surprise there was no outburst after that indignant statement; only silence for a while. Then she heard agitated, impatient hoofsteps pacing back and forth nearby. Silently, she lifted herself out of the disgusting, dirty water, thankful that she no longer had to lay in it to hide herself.
Through a tiny space between the tree’s roots, she was able to see the group of pegasi that had landed amidst the trees. Rime and Drizzledrop were indeed there: a big, somewhat rough-looking tan stallion and an opposingly dainty and frail little sky blue mare sitting together in the grass to the left side of the clearing. Also present were Raindrops and the wall-eyed Derpy Hooves, the latter of whom was the only member of the group who didn’t look thoroughly frustrated. There was a bluish stallion near Derpy and a similarly coloured mare toward the back, neither of whom Twilight recognized.
The last pegasus, Lightning Dust, was pacing back and forth between Twilight and the rest of the group. Sleek and athletic, with big, powerful wings, Lightning had that roguish look Rainbow Dash was so good at pulling off—although in the former’s case there was something very artificial and vain about the way her amber-streaked mane was pushed back, like she’d styled it to look that way on purpose instead of letting the wind do it. The shining gleam of her coat, which was an opal colour, reminded Twilight of Rarity’s when she came out of the spa, lending even more credibility to the theory that Lightning’s look was engineered by a combination of product, expensive conditioning, and acting. Overall, the effect was that she seemed very fake and unrealistic; like a model showing a dress nopony in their right mind would ever wear off the runway.
“Look,” Lightning Dust finally said acidly, taking to the air and jabbing a hoof at the posh blue pegasus, “I don’t know what the hay your problem is, but Spitfire said I’m in charge here. I know what I’m doing, okay? Is it really so hard for you guys to just respect that?”
“Yes, it is,” said Raindrops softly. “You aren’t acting like a leader right now. You keep talking about teamwork when you’re giving orders, but then you keep sabotaging the rest of us—your team—whenever you think you could benefit more from doing something alone.”
“I am not sabotaging you guys! I’m going at a reasonable pace. You should be able to keep up with me!”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t just magically make my wings stronger,” said Drizzledrop.
“Then you shouldn’t have volunteered,” Lightning shot back.
Twilight saw Raindrops put a hoof to her forehead and shake her head slowly. The Canterlot stallion sighed a dramatic, Rarity-esque sigh.
“So we shouldn’t help our friend, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, I’m saying you guys should... should make yourselves useful... where you can actually be useful, instead... of slowing down ponies who can... do more useful... stuff... than you can!” The opal mare was starting to sound a bit less sure of herself, probably finally coming to the realization that she was crossing lines she shouldn’t cross.
“Buck this. I say we make Raindrops the new group leader,” said the stallion whose name Twilight didn’t know. “Rain Runner and I went to flight school with Lightning Dust in Pegosea, you know. She’s a spoiled, manipulative rich filly who thinks she can do whatever she wants and get away with it.”
“Nopony cares what you say, Wrong Time! Spitfire said I’m—” started Lightning angrily.
“I’ll second that,” Rime interrupted, glaring at the opal pegasus. “Anypony’s better than the one running my wife out of the sky.”
Lightning started to say something to him, but stopped midway through the first syllable. Twilight got the impression that hearing ponies agree to have her demoted had finally made it clear what a hole she’d dug for herself; that she was turning the entire group against herself with her own behavior.
“Wait, wait, wait! Waitwaitwaitwait, okay, okay!” she exclaimed before anypony else could voice their opinion, waving her hooves in front of her in surrender. “You win!”
“What do we win, exactly?” Raindrops asked, folding her own forelegs skeptically.
“I guess... I can... slow down a little.” The opal mare spat the words out like they were cyanide, rolling her eyes as she spoke them. “And... not leave as much... and let you guys take breaks once in awhile... and all that.”
At least two of the ponies that Twilight could see rolled their own eyes right back at Lightning’s melodramatic reluctance to give even a single centimeter on such a simple issue.
“So, uh, you guys can, uh, take a break now,” Lightning added awkwardly. The way she said it was almost offensively apologetic; a transparent attempt to get back into the good graces of the ponies she’d wronged. Sensing this, she tugged her flight goggles down over her eyes (she was the only one of the seven wearing them). “I’m going to, uh... I’m going. To do stuff. I’ll come back. In a bit.”
“Take your time... Lots of it,” said the blue mare, making some of the others—namely, Derpy—giggle.
Lightning glowered at her with a mixture of anger and disgust. Then she opened her wings and took off, sparing only a glance back at the team of ponies she was leaving behind, yet again failing noticing Twilight despite flying right over her. Behind her, she left a trail of residual pegasus magic that looked like a streak of lightning.
“Five bits says she won’t come back at all,” Right Time added to the group once Lightning’s trail had dissipated. “Coward.”
The stallion snorted. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she went to look for it herself.”
“I think maybe she’s just trying too hard to help out,” said Drizzledrop, smiling a very strained smile. “Catching the changeling that took Twilight, I mean... although I can’t see how sending us in the wrong direction would help much...”
“Oh, trust me, she couldn’t have cared less about changelings until the Wonderbolts showed up looking for volunteers. Apparently, she was going to go to some exclusive boot camp they run later this month, and when it got canceled she threw a fit and decided the next best thing to do would be treating this as her opportunity to show off her ‘awesome leadership skills.’ Ha... ”
“No more about Lightning Dust’s social life, please,” groaned Raindrops. “The less of her there is in my world, the better. Let’s focus on how we’re going to manage without her for now.”
“I second that motion,” said Rime with a nod.
“I think that for the sake of everypony here,” Raindrops continued, “we should finish today without her, and then deal with everything when we get back, instead of having her fight us every wingbeat of the way. She’s smart enough to make her way back on her own. We’ll deal with her attitude then, and see Spitfire about it if we have to.”
The other pegasi voiced their agreement, save for Drizzledrop, who said, “I’m still winded from flying for so long. I’m sorry, but I think she was right when she said I shouldn’t have volunteered—my wings aren’t up for this kind of duty. I just wanted to help Twilight, though...”
“I understand. We all do.” Raindrops, having apparently taken on the role of acting leader for the moment, paused to consider this. “There’s not much to do without Lightning Dust giving us random zigzag directions to follow, so if you don’t think you can make it through the rest of the search, I don’t see anything wrong with you going back to Ponyville. Just catch up to us and tell us first, so we know where you’re going.”
“We’ll come after you when she’s feeling up to it,” Rime told them. “It shouldn’t be too long.”
“I’m starting to get better already,” agreed Drizzledrop cheerfully.
“Alright. Just don’t stay on the ground too long if you can help it. It is the Everfree, after all,” said Raindrops, spreading her wings as she spoke.
The blue stallion added, with a snicker, “If You-Know-Who comes back here, tell her we all got eaten by a pack of manticores.”
Twilight flattened herself against the tree as Raindrops, Derpy, and the other two pegasi she didn’t know took off, though to her relief they flew in a different direction than Lightning Dust had and so didn’t pass directly over her. The concentration of emotion drained away, for the most part; the remainder was just a blip on her radar.
Peeking out through the space between the roots again, the changeling saw only Rime and Drizzledrop remaining. Now that the others were gone, Drizzledrop had abandoned the act of pretending to be all right, and was leaning on Rime for support, breathing heavily.
“I’m going to carry you back home as soon as you can handle the movement,” said Rime softly, draping his wing over her side. “No more of this, Drizzy. I told you, you should be taking it easy now. You’re almost four months in.”
“I guess you’re right,” Drizzledrop murmured. She brushed her own wing over her belly. “Lightning Dust is right, too. I’m just slowing the rest of you down. I’m sorry, Rime. I just wanted to help...”
“Don’t listen to any of that garbage Dust was saying about being useless if you can’t help, or whatever it was. I’m going to have a few words with that aqua-feathered turkey later. You’re just going to go home and sleep until you feel better, ‘kay?”
“Mmh... sleep sounds nice... You don’t have to carry me, you know... but it would be very romantic of you, and also I think you ought to get out of the way, because I’m about to get sick... That water smells awful. It’s making everything even wor—”
For the sake of the frail pegasus’s dignity, Twilight looked away. Listening to Drizzledrop vomit made her wince—but somehow, listening to Rime talking to her softly to soothe her was much, much worse, especially because it made her feel so good inside to overhear something so intimate. She suddenly felt like she was spying on some of the couple’s most personal moments together; a voyeur listening in on things she was never meant to witness. It put a tight knot of shame in Twilight’s stomach to know that she, just like a real changeling, was now intruding on the lives of other ponies in such a crude manner.
Even from where she was, she could feel the love they shared between them. It was like feeling the sun’s rays as the weather pegasi cleared the clouds away after a snowstorm during the winter—a bright beacon of hope to which she was inexorably attracted. The mere shadow of what Rime and Drizzledrop felt for each other was enough to warm Twilight inside and chase away some of the dreariness that had resided within her for days. Even the guilt she had for eavesdropping on them couldn’t overshadow the feeling it brought her.
But merely sensing it wasn’t enough. She needed to have some of it for herself. Somewhere deep inside, and soon less deep inside, she felt an overpowering desire to taste the emotion—for science, she rationalized. Nopony else would ever have a chance to tell firsthoof what eating love was like, now, would they? It would contribute so much to the understanding of something or other, and the way ponies thought of something, and how something something something, and if there were any other excuses to try it, Twilight spontaneously decided that she agreed with all of them as well.
Therefore I have conclusively proven, she thought to herself, almost hysterically, that there are numerous reasons why casting the love-eating spell right now would be beneficial to ponykind. I am not doing this for myself, but for the advancement of knowledge!
Unfortunately, she didn’t even know what it was that she was doing, exactly. Her body and magic seemed to be running on automatic now, drawing on magic she wasn’t even consciously looking for. Eating love was a bizarre experience in itself, and like the hunger it would have been inexplicable in pony terms—but it was also one of the most amazing things Twilight had ever felt, even in that tiny amount from her friends. Twilight could easily have categorized the experience as one of the most amazing moments of her life, right up with the day Princess Celestia had asked her to be her student.
It seemed to fill a void that Twilight hadn’t even noticed until then; made her feel comfortable for the first time in days. She closed her eyes and sat back with a silent sigh, letting the glow wash over her body and relax her.
It was then that Twilight finally identified the source of the chronic coldness within her: it was hunger. Twilight hadn’t eaten anything since the day before her transformation, unless guzzling caffeinated pegasus energy drinks to keep herself awake while she worked counted. She had never fed as a changeling at all, nor did she want to, but after three or four or five or however many days it had been—she didn’t even know anymore; everything seemed to have blurred into a timeless mess—she could identify the gnawing emptiness she’d felt before for the first time.
Changeling hunger didn’t feel like pony hunger, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Twilight thought she would ever be able to put down into notes. It was a vacuum; a heart-shaped hole in her chest that seemed to eat up every positive feeling she experienced as though her own emotions were trying to cannibalize themselves. She hadn’t even known it was there until she looked for it specifically, but now she knew that her depression and dysphoria had covered a hunger she hadn’t understood. Even if there were some way to feed herself, she would never have had enough. If this was how Chrysalis and her changelings had felt every day when they hadn’t fed, Twilight could, at that moment, completely understand why they would invade a city to make it stop.
And siphoning small amounts of love from the air wasn’t much of a fix for that—if anything, it just made it worse, like eating some hay fries after a week of starvation. A part of her wanted to simply jump out and take it all for herself; to bind the unsuspecting pegasi with magic and forcibly feed on them until they were cold and empty and she had all their love. It would be so easy to ambush them now, when they were distracted and would never see it coming, and then Twilight could stop feeling so empty and lost, and everything would be perfect, and she would never be alone again, and—
At that point, Twilight stopped herself and choked back a sob, horrified by what she was imagining. She had just been plotting to murder two ponies so she could steal their emotions from them. Equally horrifying was the realization that she was eating love. She wasn’t just eating ordinary food; she was stealing the very essence of devotion away from ponies who had gone out of their way to come help her.
Not waiting for her body to catch up with her brain and shut down the spell, she put a hoof up against the base of her horn and pressed down. It was painful enough to make her whimper, but it did what it was meant to: put out the glowing green light atop her head and prevent her from absorbing any more of their love. In spite of how uncomfortable it was, Twilight held that spot until she was sure the spell had ended completely.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to placate the two pegasi, who had certainly realized there was something else there with them, manipulating their feelings, by that point. The tender emotions on the other side of the tree suddenly gave way to fear and protectiveness, a sure sign that she’d been noticed. Remembering the colour of fear brought back memories of the town square and her own terror, and she panicked. She suddenly couldn’t see the sense in hiding anymore; it just seemed to vanish, all replaced by a desire to get as far away from that place as she possibly could.
Without thinking through her next course of action, Twilight darted out from her hiding place and tried to make a break for the next large tree as fast as she could. But she was running in a blind panic, and so she completely forgot that she had a broken leg until it gave out under her and she crashed to the ground. She scrabbled back onto her hooves and started back toward the second-best option, which was the safety of her previous hiding place.
She heard somepony say the word changeling behind her. That single, awful word, and the frightened, somewhat hostile tone in which it was said, triggered a landslide of memories Twilight didn’t want to relive; an immersion into the past, where she was surrounded by mile-high ponies made of red and black, unable to escape their calls for her horn to be ripped from her head and the magic bled out of her until she was nothing more than an earth pony in an insect’s body.
Every word, every inflection was burned into her brain: “Look at its horn! 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!”
“Stay away from me!” Twilight screamed, spinning around wildly to try and keep up with the world, which was also spinning nauseatingly. “Don’t you dare touch me! I ha-haven’t done anything wrong, so don’t you... don’t you... don’t come near... Just... stay away!”
The tip of her horn flared up into a fiery green glow that burned atop her head like a three-meter-high mushroom-shaped torch. It was the most effective weapon she could think of against two unarmed, untrained pegasi: fear. A changeling with a swirling green cloud of hellfire above it, just waiting to strike, would certainly drive most rational ponies away in an instant.
But Rime and Drizzledrop—and indeed, most ponies—weren’t capable of being particularly rational when confronted with such a sight. As terrified of her as she was of them, they cowered on the ground and tried to protect one another instead of taking to the air. Seeing them in such a state before her, and hearing their pleas not to be harmed, jarred Twilight badly enough to snap her out of her altered state.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to them, backing away again. She cancelled the fire illusion and just let herself tumble back behind the tree, into the putrid water, where she lay for a moment before sitting up and pressing herself against the roots, shaking badly and trying to control her breathing, which had started to get out of hoof again. “I’m so, so sorry... I should never have done any of that...”
A stream of green sparks dribbled out of her horn and bounced off her thigh. Part of her was absolutely terrified that she was going to go through another explosion again, but the short burst of very simple illusion magic she’d used to create something very uncomplicated didn’t seem to have triggered one. There were only a few moderately painful pops from the tip, accompanied by more sparks and that peculiar fizzing sound that rapidly wound down into nothing.
Twilight would have run, but even if she’d had the energy left to do so, she knew she had nowhere to go now; nowhere that she couldn’t be taken down with ease. Even the frail Drizzledrop could have overpowered her in the state she was in at the moment. At least here she had the tree in between herself and the two pegasi.
For what seemed like hours, the changeling sat there, sniffling a little and wiping at her face with the less filthy of her two forelegs. Rime and Drizzledrop didn’t go anywhere or say anything, either, and after some time the uneventfulness began to make Twilight very uncomfortable.
“What are you waiting for? Aren’t... aren’t you going to... do something...? A-attack me... hurt me...” Twilight choked back a sob. “Or run away... or talk to yourselves... Make friends with the mosquitoes! I-I don’t c-care! Just please, do something!”
She heard somepony shifting around over there, and she felt their nervousness in addition to her own. Rime spoke up, nervous but determined nonetheless.
“L-listen... we don’t want to hurt you. We—that is, the two of us—don’t have anything against changelings. But Twilight Sparkle’s one of the best ponies I’ve ever met. We all just want her back safe and sound.”
The ‘changeling’ couldn’t hold back her sob this time. “I’m Twilight Sparkle! I tried to tell you all that in the town square, but you just wanted to rip my horn off!”
“Please don’t treat us like we’re dumb,” he said. “We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. We just want to help our friend. Just tell us what happened to her, and we’ll leave you alone and tell them to call off the search.”
“I am her! I am!” insisted Twilight hysterically. “The first time we met, it was because Scootaloo and her two friends tried to get their cutie marks in ‘garbage disposal’ and decided the mathematics section in the library was the largest concentration of garbage in Ponyville. You offered to pay for new books, but I made them do algebra study sessions with Snips and Snails and Twist every weekend for a year so they’d appreciate math. I had my mane cropped short and I was wearing an eyepatch that month. Do you remember? The first thing I said to you was ‘Congratulations, your daughter is on her way to getting a cutie mark in being a weapon of mass destruction’. Do you remember? Please remember!”
The two pegasi were silent for a long time. Twilight held her breath, growing more and more anxious, as she heard them whispering—but she couldn’t make out exactly what it was they were saying to each other. After some time, she breathed in deeply, and explained:
“I miscast the revealing spell when I was up on the podium, and it did something it shouldn’t have, and now I look like this, and everypony thinks I’m a real changeling, and I’m injured, and I can’t do magic without my horn blowing up, and I made a foal out of myself in front of all of Ponyville, and I’m being hunted by the Royal Guard, and I’ve hardly made any lists at all in the last few days... and my last friendship report was due on Monday, so now I’m tardy!”
She fell silent, shuddering and running her hooves over the tree’s bark as she attempted to return to a normal breathing rate after bringing all of that to the forefront of her mind. Of course, Twilight knew Princess Celestia wouldn’t penalize her outright for being late with a friendship report, but she could just imagine her mentor sitting in her study, waiting for a scroll that would never come.
The very thought of the Princess feeling so completely alone hurt her in an almost physical way; prompted a voice in the back of her head to begin wailing that she needed to prevent it from happening. Princess Celestia deserved better than a student who couldn’t keep up with her studies, and she certainly deserved better than a student who couldn’t provide a simple distraction from the court games of the squabbling, petty nobles in the form of a weekly letter...
Twilight was jarred out of her gloomy scenario by the realization that somepony was talking. She blinked a few times, confused, and tried to catch what had just gone in one of her ears and out the other; but it was too late for that.
“I-I’m sorry... could y-you repeat that?” she stammered. “I got a little d-distracted...”
“I said, if you come with us, we can get all of this figured out,” said Rime. “And if you really are Twilight, nopony will hurt you.”
“No. No, I’m not going b-back to town like this. Did you hear what they s-said? They said they were going to break my horn off,” Twilight replied, fidgeting anxiously and rubbing her hoof in circles against her side. “I’m not going to let them do that. Nopony has the right to do anything to my horn without my consent. I learned that in magic kindergarten. Didn’t anypony from Ponyville ever go to magic kindergarten? I’m not going back there right now. I need to fix this...”
“That’s a problem for us, because... well... I don’t know whether I can believe you or not, but I don’t want you or Twilight to get hurt. I don’t know what to do...”
“Just let me go... Please let me go...” she begged, realizing she actually might have a shot at getting away again.
“Twilight is our friend,” added Drizzledrop bravely. “It’s just, if it turns out you’re not her, and we let you walk away, then we’ll have let our friend down, and we just can’t do that.”
“I’m not going back to Ponyville like this. I’m not going.”
“We... we can’t just let you go, either,” the pegasus mare told her in a faint voice.
Twilight hung her head sadly, overwhelmed by the situation. “I guess w-we’re just stuck where we are, then...”
“...I guess we are.”
They fell silent again. Twilight could feel the tension and discomfort coming from Rime and Drizzledrop, adding to her own, while she struggled to hold herself together. She didn’t know whether to be angry at the two of them for not believing her, or to want to thank them for being so concerned about their friend. It was too confusing—they wanted to help her, but by helping her they were just hindering her own attempts to help herself.
Her broken leg was starting to throb again, in spite of the fact that she’d just taken painkillers less than fifteen minutes before. Though she knew it was probably psychosomatic stress-induced pain—all in her head—Twilight wasn’t in much of a state to resist the urge to unbuckle her saddlebags from her sides and open one of them, rationalizing that she’d probably miscalculated the dosage for changelings and would need to take a bit more.
The bags were soaked with the same fetid-smelling swamp water that the first inch or two of her flanks were submerged in. Twilight shook out two of the four remaining pain pills onto her hoof and swallowed them dry, then screwed the cap back onto the bottle with her mouth. As she dropped it back in, she noticed the empty water bottle with her magically dictated notes inside it laying at the bottom of the bag.
And she had an idea.
“Rime? Drizzledrop?” she called, voice still shaking. As expected, they were still there, and they answered in the affirmative. “W-what if I... what if I gave you... something... that would prove it’s me... if you showed it to Princess Celestia...?”
“What... would that be?” asked Rime neutrally.
Twilight dumped the contents of the saddlebags onto the ground and awkwardly picked up her message-in-a-bottle between her fangs. It tasted horrid, being covered with the disgusting water that had soaked through the bag, but she didn’t care at the moment. Carefully, she stuck her good foreleg up around the side of the tree roots and waved a little to get their attention.
“Ah’m commin’ uf,” she said. “Pleaf don’t huwt me.”
She deposited the saddlebags on the higher ground and clumsily tried to swing one of her hind legs up onto it. It didn’t work particularly well and ended in her sliding back down into the water again, as the muddy earth had given out under her other one when it suddenly bore all her weight.
Her second try was marginally more successful: she made it halfway over before the mud slid out from under her again, her chest striking the upper edge with a low oof. Winded and panting, Twilight rolled over onto her back, still clutching the bottle firmly between her teeth, and then she struggled back up onto her hooves. Very slowly and cautiously, she advanced toward Rime and Drizzledrop, keeping low against the ground to show her submission.
Up close, the two pegasi seemed like extreme opposites. The former was as big as Big Macintosh, and as strong everywhere but in his rather ordinary wings, and his dark colours and gruff temperament made him very intimidating at times—like now. Drizzledrop was small, frail, and wispy, like a leaf that might blow away at any moment; and pale as a ghost. Both looked as afraid of Twilight as she was of them, and yet they neither ran from her nor attacked her as she came closer to them.
When she was about two meters away, Twilight dropped the water bottle on the ground and rolled it toward them with her hoof, then skittered back to where she’d left her saddlebag, never taking her eyes off the couple. She did take her eyes off them for a split second to reach down and retrieve her poncho, which she put on again despite how it was soaked with water and smelled awful.
Rime opened the bottle and slid one of his primaries inside to retrieve the changeling’s notes. Twilight watched as he and Drizzledrop read through them slowly, and she could tell in only moments that they were lost the moment the technical language about magic began.
“They’re my notes,” she explained feverishly. “I made notes on my condition yesterday... last night... sometime. Please, if you can get those to Spike and have him send them to Princess Celestia, she’ll know it’s me. And she’ll know I was only tardy on my friendship report because I didn’t have a chance to write one before I was... changed... and then she won’t feel abandoned by her faithful student, and she won’t become so depressed that she can’t raise the sun anymore, and I’ll be able to drink cider with her and Luna and the girls next cider season because Applejack’s trees won’t die from the lack of sunlight... and... and... and...”
Twilight exhaled sharply, realizing belatedly how utterly psychotic that entire comment had probably sounded. Indeed, both pegasi were looking at her with expressions that suggested they didn’t know what to think of her anymore.
“Just please have Spike send it to her. Spike is the dragon I live with in the library; he’s small and purple with green scales, if you—if you didn’t... know... H-he might be staying with my friend Rarity right now...”
Nodding dumbly, Rime said, “Okay... but we still can’t... let you...”
“Rime... what if we let her... it... leave, and wait five minutes, and then we go and tell the Guards up the river,” Drizzledrop blurted out. “I... want to believe... but I don’t know...”
“Oh, thank you so much,” Twilight sobbed, almost rocking back and forth on her haunches with relief. “Thank you, thank you so much... Oh, thank you...”
The stallion looked from his wife to Twilight and back several times, and then stammered, “I-I guess that... would b-be... I guess that’s... o-okay...”
“Thank you... thank you... thank you...”
Hoof shaking badly, Twilight frantically strapped on her saddlebags again and, after a final ‘Thank you’ to the pegasus couple, took off through the forest at the closest thing to a gallop she could manage on three legs, not looking back. The idea of just going until she was far, far away from Ponyville occurred to her, but she enthusiastically banished it from her mind. By then, the painkillers, and the associated clouding of her thinking, had kicked in, leaving her a little bit loopy and euphoric. She wasn’t sure how much of it was the drugs and how much was her own glee.
Ponies had listened to her, and helped her.
For the first time since her ordeal in the town square—her brief outburst the evening before aside—she felt genuinely hopeful. In particular, she was hopeful about Zecora being able to help her, or even mediate the whole disaster so that nopony would harm her. With everything that had happened over the last couple of days, she had forgotten something fundamental; perhaps not in her mind, but in her heart: that while there were indeed ponies in the world who wanted to hurt others for little or no reason, there were also ponies who didn’t. The incident with Rime and Drizzledrop had served as an excellent reminder of that.
By the sound of the conversation that had taken place between some of the other pegasi, they weren’t even the only Ponyvillians who’d come to look for her, and the realization of just how many ponies seemed to have put their lives on hold for her, and not for their fear of changelings, reminded her just how powerful the magic of friendship could be. Some of these ponies hardly knew her, and each other, and yet they had come together to find her and make sure she was safe. It was true that they were also unwittingly hunting her as well, but she did her best not to dwell on that fact. Those ponies had come into the forest to search for her not out of malice, but out of a desire to help Twilight Sparkle.
Soon, Princess Celestia would know the truth, and she would be able to put a stop to what was going on, even if it was through a simple letter calling off the Guard. Then Twilight would have time to figure out what to do at her leisure. Perhaps Zecora could tell her when it was safe to return to the town and see her friends again. In any case, the unicorn-turned-changeling was a lot more optimistic about her chances at convincing Zecora now than she had been before.
She wasn’t completely on her own. That thought alone brought a mangled but genuinely joyful smile to Twilight’s inequine face.
Eventually, she had to slow down again. Her cramped wing still ached the entire time she fled, despite the painkillers, and by that point so did her legs. Though both the encounter’s outcome and the fact that she’d fed seemed to have strengthened her a little overall—she felt more energetic and much less stiff than before—Twilight got the feeling that the amount of love she’d absorbed from the air around the two pegasi wasn’t very much, at least compared to what her new body required in order to function.
The trees were less thick where she was now. In fact, Twilight actually thought she recognized it as a place she’d passed through with her friends that first night when they’d all come together to find the Elements of Harmony; or, at least, somewhere near it. The ground was a mess of fallen leaves and branches, and shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy above to illuminate parts of trees that vaguely resembled scary faces if she looked at them right.
“Giggle at the ghostly,” she recited under her breath. “Guffaw at the grossly.”
For some reason, humming Pinkie’s silly song actually helped relieve some of her stress a little. Twilight wondered if Pinkie had some kind of earth pony magic in her that let her infuse calming magic into her showtunes. It was only tangentially related to party-throwing, but then again so were her Pinkie Sense and the ability to appear out of spaces far too small to reasonably contain the rest of her body.
“Crack up at the creepy...”
When everything was back to normal, Twilight decided, she would ask Pinkie about that. She doubted she’d get a straight answer, but it was better to get an incomprehensible wad of unfiltered thought than to never ask the question in the first place.
“Whoop it up with th—”
Twilight heard a funny twanging sound just as she pressed her hoof against the leaf-strewn earth. Before she could react, a circular line about a meter around suddenly burst into a brilliant display of golden magic, and then the ground exploded beneath her hooves, propelling her upwards in a flurry of dirt, leaves, and stunned changeling. She stopped moving just as abruptly, and was showered by much of the displaced dirt as she crashed against something curved.
Bruised and dizzy, she scrabbled around on the surface of the golden bubble that had formed to contain her, until she managed to balance herself so that she could stand upright. The bubble was suspended in the air about half a meter off the ground, bobbing up and down with every movement she made. Pushing on the bubble did nothing more than produce some ripples in the soft golden aura.
The terrified changeling panicked and threw herself against the side as hard as she could, to no effect on anything but her own body. She did this a second time after picking herself up, and this time she left a greenish smear behind. Panting heavily, Twilight fell back onto her haunches and powered up her horn, prepared to run through whatever spells were necessary to get rid of the shield—magical traps like these always had some weakness if you looked hard enough.
But this attempt was cut off before it ever began: the green on Twilight’s horn attracted a bolt of gold electricity that came out of the inside of the shield itself and struck the base, where it connected to her skull. Immediately, her horn went numb—no tingle of magic, no pain, no anything at all. No amount of effort could bring it back to life; whatever the bolt had done seemed to have paralyzed or cut off her connection to her magic—temporarily, she desperately hoped.
There was no way out of this bubble except being let out by whoever created it, Twilight realized as half of her partially formed spell dribbled down her face in a river of green sparks, accompanied by that familiar fizzing noise.
She was trapped.
Notes
—From now on, I’m going to cheaply inflate my wordcount by 300 words or so because lol I’m lazy make shit a little more organized by putting notes that have to do with the actual story content at the end of the chapter, and meta/credits stuff in the A/N box, because I have such a shitload of them every chapter. Also, it should get rid of some of the needless exposition people have occasionally complained about. It saves me the trouble of working it into the narrative, so lol I’m not complaining.
1) The part about Twilight’s wings being ‘triggered’ works like this: You want to fire two handguns repeatedly at 200000 rounds per .000001 seconds or whatever at the exact same time every time (for some ungodly reason). Do you try to do it by hand? Do you get some ugly urban crip gangsta to do it with his epic motherfucking dual-wielding skillz? No, you get a motherfucking computer to trigger it. Except the guns are Twilight’s wings and the motherfucking computer is her brain sending an impulse to tell both wings to rotate at the same motherfucking time instead of two motherfucking consecutive ones telling each one to do so individually. You get me?
1a) Alpha151 says I should just compare them to hummingbird wings, but the gun analogy is 20% funnier because I read it in Sam Jackson’s voice.
2) Four of the primary feathers on each of a pegasus’s wings also function as fingers in this universe. Each one has joints, muscles, and bones at the center of the ‘feather’, allowing it to bend in four places (and thus have about the same range of grasp as a human finger, except for the one closest to the body. Three of these are on the outside group, and one is on the inside. The inside one functions as a thumb, and only bends in three places (one more than a human thumb).
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A question to all:
derpicdn.net/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTMvMDIvMDQvMjJfMDVfMzJfNDMyXzIzMzczNl9fVU5PUFRfX3NhZmVfcHJpbmNlc3NfY2VsZXN0aWFfdGV4dF9fZndkc2xzaF9tbHBfZndkc2xzaF8uanBnLmpwZyJdXQ/233736__princess-celestia_questionable_text_-fwdslsh-mlp-fwdslsh-_why_unbirthing.jpg
Scootaloo’s aunt and uncle
Is that canon or how am I supposed to know that?
Proofreading this was an honor and my pleasure!
2435574
i just made them up for the story
2264606
the change in writing style is probably more due to the change in editors than anything... also, the first two chapters were written in twice the amount of time these were, so they were edited more thoroughly, i think
2371134
why are you talking in third person?
Seeing the new artwork makes it so much better.... Very nice picture for it.
As for the chapter? Damn good as usual. You really know how to keep the pace going!
~Skeeter The Lurker
2435643
blame my editors for that
i can't pace for shit
DAMN is this Picture AWESOME
! That makes the Story 20% Cooler 
Oh dear!
I appears like our heroine is in peril!
Ponykind, wherefore is thy compassion?
A thousand curses upon the pony who hurts another!
Yes, this is that thrilling.
Awaiting further releases.
Update, woohoo!
Somehow the chapters are much too short... oh, well.
This was, like always, pretty great. And if you have a finished 22k chapter and divided it into two shorter ones... please tell me the next one will come soon! Like... tomorrow. Or this Sunday. Please?
2435752
you have a silly name.
I would never trust anyone from ponyville ever again. I am moving back to Canterlot with my mother!
What about your dad?
Shut up Rainbow! You were the worst one!
lol. Very good I am glad you updated this.
FUCK EVERYTHING!!!
This is awesome.
2435840
oh geez...I Celestia doesn't believe her....
ugh...I just shuddered from the image of them snapping off her horn like a candy cane....with blood.
OH gawd...I feel sick now....
No, Celestia will not believe her.
Will Celestia believe Twilight? I don't think so, but she will certainly start doubting things.
Ooooh yeah I have waited for this moment!
cuddlebuggery.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/shit-just-got-real.jpg
I don't understand, you said best pony would be here, but Sweetie Belle never showed up
Wee inconsistency in phrasing:
"a tomboyish mare’s voice"
"replied the tomcoltish mare"
OH [BLEEP], YOU CAN'T END THE CHAPTER THERE! When's the next one due?! When?!
Very, very good chapter… but I really want to know what happens next!
(Sorry if I'm bothering you; I'm hoping that you'll take my enthusiasm as a compliment, though. :))
You should have left the size at 22k you silly filly. We all ENJOY bigger chapters. I guess 12k is ideal - keep it that way.
>Will Celestia believe Twilight?
I'm not so sure if Celestia even gets those notes. The royal guards will confiscate them long before they get to Spike.
I can not parse this statement.
2436003
your batteries need recharging
2435994
I would have done, but it's hard to get through something that lengthy, and I don't want to drive away what's left of my audience, lawl
Did I overlook where Rarity was in this chapter? I could have sworn I didn't notice Rarity.
>_>
2435989
Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out!
Why do I feel things are about to either go horribly wrong or go horribly right?
2436015
SHE WAS HIDING IN THE BUSHES
images.wikia.com/mlp/images/2/25/Rarity_In_Forest_S01E09.png
Twilight mistook her for plant life.
2436012
Don't sell yourself cheap. You know the story is good. Don't end it too soon - I want it to last. And post the goddamn second part of the chapter ASAP you tease.
2436019
I should have known...
That does look amazingly like plant-life.
2436024
nein nein
i mean it's hard for people to stay with something that long unless it's broken up into sections
a lot of us (myself included) read things in pieces
so it'd actually be difficult for someone to get through a 22,000 word chapter at all
2436027
it's like an anemone!
animalsgallery.com/gallery/sea-anemone-pictures/sea-anemone-pictures_2.jpg
2435985
t4ak.roblox.com/85dca19eafafc98c5f56168312cc4575
2435752
as soon as it's done yo
2435973
well she is celestia
she's infallible
If you are actually asking for a vote, then I think Celestia should give Twilight a chance to prove herself.
It's been too long since I've read an update, I'd almost forgotten the storyline D:
Oh wait I've read 2 400k + word stories, no wonder…
Long chapter is win!!!!!! Hmmm not much of a cliff hangar at the end but I'm still looking forward to the next, you have not made me dissapoint :D
Poll answer: yes, if Celestia is as much of a sucker for sob stories as the other fics make her out to be then she will believe her.
Your new picture is amazing!
goodno, EXCELLENT choice!I preferred evil fluttershy for your profile pic though XD
Good morrow to you! I'm greatly looking forward to the next installment of this.
Celestia will believe her because Celestia is also a changeling.
2436052
what we have to remember here is that with celestia it's a question of principle
she's setting an example for equestria
and that means leading them either toward hatred or closer to tolerance
so it all depends on how i characterize her royal cakeyness
2436055
how did you know
have you been hacking my computer
2436054
what 400k word stories did you read?
Celestia will probably believe those are Twi's notes, but she has no evidence that the changeling wrote them.
2435998 I agree. but they'd better not.
2436067 diaries of a madman and living thier dream, read ominous' travels atm.
2436070
arch.413chan.net/1288859782062.jpg
2436055 you read that story too?
I believe I can fly! She believes in the bug thingy hiding in the creepy haunted forest who claims to be a pony she knows personally to be both intelligent and psychotic and who also claims to have done the impossible, which only the pony it claims to be can do, when those bug thingies are known for being expert deceivers, and just convinced two ciivilians of its honesty and innocence, after the bug thingy was the pony who can do the impossible botched up in an undecided way a spell designed to be detrimental to its own kind, in such a way that either it wasn't supposed to reveal itself, in which case it was possibly attempting to spread false information, and would then have used a dummy spell, or was supposed to reveal bug thingies, but should not have been botched, and is unwilling to cooperate in the direction of least resistance on the off chance that a mob would be mobby enough past shock with the presence of professional guards from the place of the Holy Sunbutt.
Hail to the bug thingies, cause this argument makes no sense.
Okay, unless Chrysalis was the Royal Retard, the changeling counterpart of Blueblood, it is unlikely that a changeling could be that convincing, especially without visual aids. Just gotta BELIEVE!
2436080
Meanwhile, in Ponyville:
[youtube=1VvKlwfVKyI]
i7.photobucket.com/albums/y275/DPV111/Possiblenewavatar.jpg
2436128
Makes sense, he did put "best pony".
If she had gotten to zecora she could have used that flower that only grows when it hears the truth (it was shown in the cutie pox episode and used to cure the effects of hearts desire).You cannot lie to the flower
2436128
>Will Celestia believe Twilight?
Celestia is Twilight's teacher and they've known each other for many years now. Unless our dear Alicorn of the Sun has suddenly turned stupid, she will very quickly recognize Twilight's writing and THAT means she will most likely want to investigate the matter personally, just in case. This is about her beloved student, after all. Like hell she's going to take any unnecessary chances.
Frankly, I'd be very surprised if she doesn't at least consider the possibility.
...You know, if the inquisitor dude captures Twilight and, I dunno, tortures her for info or something and then Celestia flies in, convinced that Twilight really is Twilight, and she finds her favorite little unicorn-turned-changeling whimpering in a pool of her own blood, then the explosive excrement is going to hit the industrial rotary device and someone (other than Twilight) is going to have a very, very bad day.
Your explanation of Twilight's wings and how they work was most amusing. Unfortunately, I don't remember what Sam Jackson sounds like, so I can't imagine it in his voice. Damn.
As always, good chapter! If I could, I'd upvote you again.