Calling You

by AugieDog

First Century

"More tea, Cadance?"

"Yes, thank you."

Eight or nine decades of burning the midnight oil had made her aunt's tea pretty much an essential ingredient in Cadance's life at this point. Whether the blend had changed over the years or not, she didn't know, but after having to cut it with dollops of cream and scoops of sugar for so long, she'd lately found that taking it as straight as Aunt Celestia did somehow perked her up and relaxed her at the same time. And if she was right about what today had in store, she would definitely need to be both sharp and smooth.

"So." Aunt Celestia sipped her cup, the crackling light from the fireplace only accentuating the cold, pre-dawn darkness outside the windows of the cozy south tower rooms Cadance had adopted as her own. "All's going well, niece?"

Because of course Auntie would have guessed that something was up today. Even without Cadance giving her any information about the project...

"I'm hopeful," Cadance answered. Not that she was trying to keep Aunt Celestia in the dark—an impossibility, anyway. But, well, after all the setbacks, dead ends, close calls, and the one full-fledged disaster she'd been through so far, until she was absolutely sure, she wasn't about to announce that she'd finally solved the problem that had kept her from spending more than three hours asleep during any given twenty-four hour period since Aunt Luna's exile.

"Good." The glow of Aunt Celestia's horn set her cup down and picked her napkin up. "I know this has been a difficult time for you, transitioning from your former way of life to this new one I've forced upon us all, and I don't say often enough how proud I am of you and how grateful I am to you."

Cadance blinked across the little round table, her wings shivering like her aunt's words had scratched an itch she hadn't known she'd had. Shaking herself, she forced a smile and said, "Thank you. I can honestly say that it's been an incredible experience so far, and if all goes well, things'll be getting even more—!" Grabbing her cup, Cadance swallowed her words with her tea, cursed silently, kept her gaze fixed on the teapot Aunt Celestia had given her along with the room, the guard, the duties, and the responsibilities she now held in the living world.

"I see." The gentle smile in her aunt's voice was another thing Cadance knew all too well. "Well, if I can ever be of assistance, you know you have only to ask."

Unable to keep from looking up, Cadance almost felt guilty for not confiding in Aunt Celestia, so open and beautiful and friendly. But— "Yes. I do know that, and it means more to me than I can ever say that you came to me when you needed help after Aunt Luna's...episode." Nearly a century of sleep-deprivation threatened to send her tongue spinning out of control, but focusing her thoughts on her specific feelings of gratitude seemed to settle things a bit. "I've learned so much being here with you, Auntie, and believe me, if I ever need help—" Like if this current version of her experiment blew up in her face like the last one had... "I will definitely come straight to you."

The base of her horn itched with the Call, and it took every ounce of reserve she'd ever cultivated not to leap to her hoofs with a shout. This was it! The final test! A hundred years of trial and error, and now—!

Setting her cup down, Cadance rose slowly and bowed to her aunt. "But if you don't mind, Auntie, I'll let you get on with the dawn. I'll be back in time for lunch, and we can go over the items for this afternoon's court sessions then. OK?"

Aunt Celestia nodded. "I have the utmost confidence in you, Cadance."

Almost as bracing as the tea, her aunt's words made Cadance smile, the magic of her horn turning the air to a shimmer and letting her slip through to the Realm Between, the dark eastern sky here already starting to gray. Taking a breath, Cadance forced herself to slow, forced herself to listen to the calmness of the morning while the light grew around her, forced herself to stop and watch the light stroke over the walls and roof of her little house—and the lumpy brown hive, at least five times the size of the house and stretching up the hill into the trees behind it.

Her heart hummed with the rhythm that began shaking the air. Movement at the hive's entrance, and either drawn by the new morning or by her presence, her dozen assistants buzzed forth: not quite as big as regular ponies; their wings vibrating and translucent; their bodies black and shiny in the dawn; each sporting a stubby, curving horn between their glowing blue eyes. They settled in two rows on the grass along the slope, their leader, the largest of them, as always coming out last, flying over the heads of the others, and landing in front of Cadance with a bow and a single raspy word: "Princess."

A shiver iced down Cadance's back. She'd poured so much love and attention and magic into these bees with their odd ability to make themselves more streamlined during flight; had failed three separate times to fashion anything more than slightly bigger bees; had nurtured the fourth version through multiple generations into hoof-sized creatures with ponyish heads and four legs until their magic became unstable and they nearly burned her house to the ground before she could drain their power and return them to their original state; had watched and coaxed and steered this fifth batch along with even more diligence and care into becoming these, her changelings. And all of it, all of it, had its payoff today.

"Good morning," Cadance said, letting her gaze travel along their ranks to rest at last on their leader. "Are you ready?"

The leader cocked her head, her eyes not the solid blue of the others, a hint of green iris and black pupil there. "Can it be?" she asked. "You're finally letting us work?"

Her excitement overflowing, Cadance couldn't help doing a quick little dance. "It's time, it's time, it's time!" she almost sang. She squelched herself, though, took a breath, looked directly at the leader. "If you're ready."

A flicker of green crackled over the leader's stubby horn. "We are always and entirely what you made us to be, princess."

***

Following the Call brought Cadance to a small house on the outskirts of Fillydelphia, her assistants a string of humming shadows behind her. She nearly clapped her hoofs in joy to see them, and she crossed the first item off her mental checklist of fears: it looked as if her changelings could navigate the passage from the Realm Between to the living world without a single problem.

Now on to fear number two...

She looked back at her assistants, opened her mouth to ask the questions she'd prepared, and stopped when she saw green magic sparkling again up and down the changeling leader's horn. "Their love," she whispered, her eyes halfway closed and her voice rustling as quietly as her wings. "The aroma of it. It's—" She shivered, green lightning now pulsing over the entire hard, black surface of her body, and as Cadance stared, she began bulging and stretching, colors flashing over her where colors hadn't been before. Her neck arched—and a mane burst from it, the hair a pink, purple, and yellow striped pattern Cadance knew well. Limbs and snout lengthening, feathers sprouting to cover her see-through wings, her horn straightening and growing—

Till Cadance was staring at herself. "Intoxicating," the changeling leader finished, her tone a bit pinched but otherwise perfect to Cadance's ears. And for the first time in almost a hundred years, Cadance found herself thinking that this plan might actually work.

Of course, there was still fear number three, and this one, well, it was the biggest fear of all.

Before she could do more than blink at her doppelganger, though, the changeling leader was swooping toward the house, the other eleven trailing in her wake, their forms blurring, fuzzy with green fire. The duplicate Cadance's horn flared, and she sailed through the wall, the real Cadance cloaking herself to become as thin as air and hurrying to catch up.

Peering in the window, she knew at once that the old brick-red mare lying in the bed was a long-retired unicorn firefighter named Douser, another unicorn young enough to be a grandson stretched over a cushion on the floor, and her instincts nearly drove her inside. But Cadance bit her lip, shoved a hoof hard against the wall, forced herself to remain in place, and watched her double drift light as an autumn leaf into the room.

Green magic flared around the changeling's horn, her brow creased in concentration, and Cadance felt something she'd never felt before, something she didn't really have words for. It sifted and shuffled the love and grief radiating from the two mortal ponies in ways Cadance would never have herself even tried in this situation, but the resulting flood of power seemed to fill the changeling leader like water pouring into a balloon. She smacked her lips, pointed her horn at the faint outlines of the other changelings behind her, and sent a cascade of green mist over them, shifting them to have the appearance of ponies that Cadance knew, ponies she'd led through to the Groves Beyond, ponies that were related to Douser and bound to her by love.

The changeling leader turned back to the bed and its occupant then with a confidence that made Cadance's nervousness grow. "Douser?" the changeling called. "It's time."

And it was nothing like a true Call, none of the same boundary crossing magic ringing in it, nothing that would unseal the route between this world and the next; Cadance almost leaped through the window again, decades of doubts crashing through her. This was crazy! How could she have deluded herself for this long into thinking that it might—??

Douser's eyes fluttered open, and all the changelings focused on her, the green mist swirling from them to her and back again. "Oh," she said, her voice as soft as rice paper. "You're here. You're all here..."

A shiver shook Cadance so violently, she almost pitched forward into the wall, and she could only stare as love bloomed up from the old unicorn, the force of it exactly as rich and full-bodied as if Cadance had been there Calling it forth herself. And the changelings, they took her love, and they...they—

She didn't know what they were doing with it. But somehow, Douser was sitting up, leaving her body behind, following the spinning strands of love that connected her to her actual friends and relatives in the Groves Beyond, and wafting out to...to join them, Cadance could tell. Yes, the changelings weren't opening a path directly, but as she'd hoped and dreamed and planned and still hadn't quite believed till this very moment, they were able to take in the love around them and focus it much in the way that a lens focused light. They could then direct that focused love back along the paths that connected all ponies and could send a pony's spirit on in nearly as efficient a fashion as Cadance did with her Call.

It worked, in other words. And that meant—

"Grandma?" a voice asked from inside, and Cadance blinked, saw the younger pony pushing himself up from the cushion and staring around.

One of the changelings squinted and became the very image of Douser, nodding and smiling to her grandson, and the changeling leader stepped to the colt's side. "Never fear," she said, touching her horn to his. "This is the cycle of nature, and those who are now parted will someday soon be reunited." Another flare of green, and she absorbed the love he felt for his grandmother, stretched a portion of it back out into the everlasting mosaic—not quite as skillfully as Cadance, of course, but that she could do it at all made Cadance want to do some more dancing—and made the necessary connections that would lead this pony to the Groves Beyond when his time came.

His eyes seemed to wobble in his head, then he slid back onto his cushion, his breathing relaxed and regular.

The leader of the changelings gave a look around the room, nodded to her troop, and with a flare of her horn, wrapped a green bubble around them and vanished. Cadance swooped after them and popped into the Realm Between just behind them, the sun completely risen by now and sparkling on the black carapaces of her new—and perfect—assistants. "Yes!" she cheered, spinning in a circle above them before landing so she could dance properly with the ground under her hoofs. "You did it! You really, really did it!"

The changeling leader arched an eye ridge. "Was there ever any doubt?"

Cadance couldn't keep from giggling, the results so much better than she had ever dared hope. "There were so many variables to account for! So many details that could've gone wrong!"

"And yet," the changeling said matter-of-factly, "in the end, we triumphed."

"You did." Cadance looked into those blue-green eyes and felt a surge of pride. "Thank you. Thank you for making my life so much easier!"

The changeling leader took a breath. "Chrysalis," she said.

For a few seconds, Cadance could only blink, the word seeming to hang in the air like an unexpectedly odd-smelling butterfly. "I'm sorry?" she finally asked.

"My name." The changeling leader drew herself up to her full height...though Cadance still found herself looking down to meet her gaze. "Ponies all have names, so if I'm to deal with them regularly, I must have one, too." She looked back at the other eleven changelings, all of them watching her with an intensity Cadance could suddenly almost hear. "So I will be Chrysalis. For we are not yet finished being born." Those peculiar eyes came around again to fix on Cadance. "If you don't mind, of course, princess."

The quiet little clattering of their wings against their shells made Cadance shiver again, made her look at them in a way she never had in all the decades of helping them along. Because they weren't a project any more. They were a people, a people who weren't ponies or griffons or dragons or—

Or anything that had ever been seen anywhere before.

"Princess?" The leader—Chrysalis, Cadance reminded herself; her name was Chrysalis—was looking at her with that little sideways tilt to her head.

Cadance struggled to keep her ears upright. "Yes, of course, Chrysalis. You...you've more than earned a name, and...if there's anything I can do to help you and your changelings, please let me—"

"Changelings?" Chrysalis's tiny ear flaps perked. "Oh, I like that. I like that very much."

Comments

[heynow]

Changelings!

[djthomp]

Cadence! Stop!

[Snowstreak]

This...

[AugieDog]

4657027

I tell ya:

It's as shocking as the day is long!

Mike

[Razzy]

Yay changelings!

Cya
Raziel-chan