With Princess Twilight Sparkle's protection, an investigation underway to determine the legality of his last conviction, Fangheart is determined to establish full legal rights to all changelings. There's just a few problems.
Now that Fangheart has been tried, convicted, and sentenced, he's immune to any similar charges. Since his last trial was barely —if at all— fair, Twilight is looking to investigate Celestia's treatment of changelings and other emotivores. Now that he's out of trouble for now, Fangheart wants full Equestrian citizenship and legal rights granted to himself, if not all changelings. And they may need it soon, as a plight is spreading through the hive, and changelings begin fleeing north to escape it. But nothing is ever so simple. Fangheart gets... distracted, shall we say.
Rated Teen for kissing, changeling courtship rituals and (a) feast(s), crude humor, and zombie ant changeling fungi.
In the Golden Oak Library, an alicorn grinned as she made her way towards the bathroom, with a hose in tow. She lit up her horn, and a purple aura surrounded the doorknob, which then turned. She pushed the door open, and stuck her head inside.
A changeling was lounging inside the bathtub, reveling in the warmth of the steaming hot water. He was perfectly normal for a changeling, though he was missing his left fang, not that either showed at the moment, as he'd replaced the space they occupied with much shorter and blunter teeth for the time being.
His eyes, which were a similar green to that best recognized as poisonous, were closed, and a smile was placed upon his thin, chitinous lips. His wings were carefully folded against his back, so nothing would crush and bend them out of shape, which would have been extremely painful and difficult to heal.
Twilight pulled the hose through the open door, and pointed it directly at his head. Pulling the handle down, she declared, "This is a hose!"
Fangheart's eyes snapped open just in time for his right cheek to be met with a torrent of cold water. He jumped, his wings buzzing on reflex, sending up droplets of water from just below them, scattering the liquid everywhere. The plates of green chitin dragged his hooves out of the water, and he hovered for a brief moment, before more water was aimed at his face.
He hunkered down in the bath tub, submerging every part of his body he could, which only left his nostrils and horn above the steaming water.
Twilight went unfazed by this, and simply walked over to the bathtub. She pointed the nozzle down at her recently declared stallionfriend, and lifted him out of the water. She then hosed him down, much to his discomfort, as the water was frigid, and he was not used to bathing in any way, shape, or form.
When she finally decided that enough fun had been had, she set the hose down, and said, "Now, if you don't like the hose, I suggest you bathe frequently, at least once a day. If you smell like a skunk, no one is going to take you seriously." She then lowered him into the tub full of lukewarm water, and turned the hot water back on, unplugging the drain to let some of the colder water flow out.
Fangheart nodded slowly, and said, "I thought you said to bathe if I didn't like the hose."
Twilight paused to figure out where the miscommunication had arisen. She said, "When I said bathe, I meant without the hose. Basically, once every day, sit in the bathtub, fill it with water, and scrub yourself down with some soap. Brush your tail while you're at it, and clean your teeth."
He grumbled about this, but let her show him how to go about the whole process. When they left the bathroom, he asked, "Can I please go to sleep now?"
Twilight nodded, and said, "Don't let me stop you."
He sighed in relief, and pulled himself up the flight of stairs that lead to the bedroom. He opened the door, and let Spike close it on his way out. He walked over to the rug he'd come to use as a blanket, and paused when he heard the door creaking open.
Twilight said, "Just wanted to make sure you made it to the bed."
He looked over at her bed, with its blue quilt, decorated with stars and crescent moons. He pointed a hoof at it, giving the alicorn a curious look. His eyes were glowing, but faintly enough that Twilight wasn't worried.
She nodded.
He smiled thankfully, and hauled himself onto the soft mattress, lifting the blankets up over his body. He let his left cheek fall onto one of the soft feather pillows, and his eyes close. Within a scant few moments, his chest rose and fell calmly, his forelegs slipped underneath the pillow, and he was asleep.
Twilight smiled at him, and shot a silent beam of magic at the window, casting a spell that ensured no one would see him in his natural form. She closed the door slowly as she left him to rest, and sighed when she glanced at the clock.
Her coronation would take place in a few days. That gave her plenty of time to explain to her friends why a changeling was sleeping in her bed.
Twilight led her friends inside, closing the door behind them, and said, "Okay. I found Fangheart. Well, he made his way back here on his own."
Rainbow Dash hovered in the air, beating her wings periodically, and asked, "So what happened to him?"
Twilight took a deep breath, and said, "He'd just escaped from prison, where he'd been tortured, convicted, and nearly executed in the span of a few hours, with no trial, jury, or public defender. He was badly injured, crying, and tried to hurt himself while I was calming him down."
Her friends were all silent, save for the ever slowing beat of Dash's wings as she set down on the floor. "Why would anypony do that? He's such a nice guy. What'd he do?" she asked Twilight.
The alicorn sighed, and said, "P... Princess Celestia did all of those things to him, after I'd spoken on his behalf to her directly. She promised that he'd be given a fair trial, but then tried to execute him for a dozen crimes he didn't commit. He even told me to read his mind if I didn't believe him."
She looked down for a moment, and shuffled her weight from side to side, biting her lip. "And she only did it because of something he can't control. He's good. He'd never hurt a fly," she muttered. She then shook her head, and looked up. "He's under my protection, and I'm going to issue an investigation of Celestia's actions."
Rainbow Dash placed a hoof on Twilight's shoulder, and asked, "And why again did she do that?"
"Because of what I am," a male voice answered. It was declarative, proud, and accompanied by the sounds of footsteps on the staircase leading up to the bedroom. Fangheart was in his pegasus form, with a grey coat, indigo mane, and cutie mark of a heart with fangs on either side. He stopped when he'd gotten halfway down the staircase, close enough to the bedroom door for him to flee in case someone tried to hurt him.
All six mares turned to look at him, and Twilight gave him a nod of approval, telling her friends, "He is good, not evil, and under my protection. Do not tell anypony what you're about to see."
Fangheart bit his lip, and closed his eyes. He went still, hesitating, then said, "I am not my mother's lackey." He erupted into a pillar of neon green fire, against which the ponies held a hoof to block the light from. When the fire went away, the changeling drone stood there, eyes closed, wings quivering anxiously, and every limb tensed to flee. His left fang was still missing.
All but Pinkie Pie and Twilight gasped. Rainbow Dash took off from the ground immediately, only to be held still by her tail, which Applejack had been fast enough to grab between her jaws. Rarity looked mortified, though she'd been informed on accident several days ago. Fluttershy hid behind her wings, and hunkered down on the floor.
Fangheart didn't open his eyes, and could only imagine how poorly this would go for him if anything happened. His gut reaction was to run, run faster than he ever had, and find his mother. But his mother was dead, and he was alone. He heard Rainbow Dash speak, and immediately ran upstairs.
Applejack's grip on the pegasus's tail loosened enough that the Wonderbolt wannabe burst through the bedroom door before the changeling could close it.
Rainbow Dash held the changeling down, pinning one hoof against his back right between his wings, which quivered in fear. She stepped on his tail with a hind leg, and pressed his head down with her remaining front hoof. She asked the changeling, "What spell is Twilight under?"
"None," he told her, doing his best not to move, lest he provoke injury from the pegasus.
"What are your orders from the queen?" she asked, leaning her weight forward, supporting herself on the muscles that moved his wings.
"None," he answered immediately.
"Where is she now?" the pegasus asked.
He whimpered, "Dead. She's dead. They killed her right in front of me, and I couldn't say goodbye." He clamped his eyes shut, and sniffled, tears welling up behind his eyes. "I... I never even loved her back." He crossed his forelegs in front of him, and cried.
"You're a good actor," Rainbow said, unfazed by his display of sorrow, still believing that he was lying.
"I was never trained. I'm a drone. I'd never left the hive until we were driven out," he shouted, and ignited his horn, only for the pegasus to snuff out his magic with a hoof placed on it.
Rainbow Dash was about to ask another question, but was surrounded by a purple aura, and lifted away from the changeling. She kicked against Twilight's magic, and said, "He's brainwashed you! He's lying! Call the guard!"
Twilight didn't respond, and only moved towards the changeling. She gently patted him on the shoulder, and sat him up before her, hugging him. She nuzzled his shoulder, reminding him that he was among good company, and that she would not allow any harm to befall him.
The other bearers stepped into the bedroom, greeted by the sight of their friend comforting the changeling. Many of them simply sat there, trying to process the oddity of this situation. Rarity seemed a bit less on edge than the others, and Pinkie Pie simply walked over to the couple, saying, "He likes pie. There's a good thing."
Fangheart was shivering, his whole body wracked with tremors and fear. He looked to the party pony, and nodded slowly.
Twilight released him, only for his forelegs to pull her closer. She glanced at his eyes, and he only responded by transforming back into the grey pegasus.
He still held her to him, and whimpered, "Don't send me back. Not again. I can't... I won't go back there." He hung his head low, and pressed his head into the lavender alicorn's chest fur, his wings going limp at his sides. "I can't lose you too. Please..."
Rainbow Dash flew over to the changeling, and said, "Drop the disguise. Where's the real pony?"
Twilight looked up at the pegasus, shooting a stern look of warning at her, and said, "There is no pony by the name of Fangheart. This body is his body, and he's been through enough." She looked back at the changeling. "No one is sending you away."
He wiped his eyes with his hooves, and stood up, straightening his back out. "N-no, I get it. Since my mother was such a great tactician, everything I saw must be lies, a part of something bigger, that will lead to your demise. Explain to me how you draw that conclusion, through what factual exclusion," he said. He turned around, and raised a hoof to silence anyone else.
"I was never taught how to think for myself, or how to read the books on the library shelf. I was never taught how to be free. I was never shown what it means to be me. I was a drone, whose sole purpose in life was to be a father, children that you would have slaughtered. I was never important, or confident, or proud," he spat.
"But a hybrid father just isn't a valid one to the changelings, and the defeat led to my mother's unseating," he told the ponies, making his way towards the bed. "I was always that useless lump of flesh the queen dragged around, who would someday father thousands, but now I'm no more than a piece of dirt on the ground." He hopped onto the bed, and turned around to face the six mares.
"I watched the guards drive a spear through the back of her head, so what was it that you said, about calling the guard? Look me in the eye and tell me that after a trial with no judge, no jury, I belong in prison. Spit it out already, hurry, because this week's gone by, and I still can't fly. Discord's saved my life at least twice, and I don't know if he's being nice," he told Rainbow Dash.
He let the following silence drag on, took a deep breath, and shook his head. "I didn't think so," he said. "Now, I'm here, whether you like me or not. I'm a changeling, so what? That doesn't make me any more a monster. It could make me less of one, if you actually think an unfair trial with a death sentence is reasonable just because of what I am."
Nopony could argue with that, and when he changed back into his natural form, no one moved. No one said anything, tried to pin him down, interrogate him, or get the royal guard. That was a victory as far as he was concerned, so he changed back into his pegasus form, marched past everyone, and declared, "I'm going for a walk. I'll be back... eh, later."
The crisp, cool night air soothed what of Fangheart's nerves he needed. He walked briskly, his eyes showing rage, blood red rage. Nothing he did was any good, he felt. No one cared for his innocence or actions, because they all focused on what he was, which he hated to begin with.
If someone knew a way to make him into a pony forever, he would have taken that opportunity immediately. He wouldn't have cared for all the bits in the world if he didn't like pony food. Looking like a pony was the only thing that kept everyone around him from locking him up.
There was a rustling sound to his left, and he froze. He looked towards the source of the sound, just in time for another creature to come barreling out of the trees, pin him down, and deliver a swift kick to where his head had just been. He stood up, took a quick look at his opponent, and hissed at it.
A thin, scrawny mass of black and green, with frills, chitinous wings, and vibrant blue eyes, was standing where it had just pinned him down. A soldier, and a fierce one. It hissed back at Fangheart, though in a changeling language, a very simple one, "What are you?"
Fangheart spoke, in the most noble tongue of the changelings, "Your worst choice of a meal." He flared his wings at his sides, and charged at the soldier, the leading edge of his wings glowing green as he changed them, creating sharp, metal blades just in time to swing his right wing at the carnivore.
The soldier ducked, waiting for just the right moment, slipped its head underneath the pegasus, and threw its head up, launching the grey pony into the air.
Fangheart flapped his wings a few times, pointed his body down at the soldier, and dove straight down at the changeling. He pulled up from his dive to slice his wings at the air in front of him, veering away just in time to avoid his enemy's horn.
The soldier yelped as one of its wings was snapped in two, and lit up its horn with a bright blue light. It gripped the pegasus in its magic, and threw him to the ground as he rose into the air, slamming him into the dirt path. It ran forward, and pinned the pegasus down as he tried to regain his breath. It hissed, "You were saying?" It jumped when his prey burst into flames, and turned around to run.
Fangheart snarled, growling. No, this changeling was not getting away. He grabbed one of the soldier's hind legs as it fled, tripping it, and pressed his forelegs down against the soldier's chest. He set the pointed tip of his horn to the soldier's throat, and hissed, "I was saying that you should find someone stupider to pick on, you ungrateful waste of chitin."
The soldier whimpered, and hid its face behind its forelegs. It hissed, "Please... have mercy."
The drone growled, "Mercy! You want to talk about mercy!" He then shouted, "You never cared about mercy! You're a waste of changeling flesh! My mother should have eaten you the day you hatched, you ungrateful, self centered, heartless piece of-"
The soldier kicked its hind legs into the drone's gut, tossing him a meter or so back. It jumped onto its hooves, and tried to run again, but the drone had already grabbed its tail between his jaws, yanking it back with all his might.
He pinned it down beneath his hoof, still drawing heavy breaths to recover air, and said, "Listen. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not as heartless as my mother was."
"Oh, thank you. Thank you," the soldier chirped.
Fangheart covered its mouth with a hoof, and quickly dragged it off the path, hiding them both in a bush. He whispered, "Shush. You're gonna get us both arrested if you keep using that mouth of yours." He pricked his ears up, and leaned towards the path, peaking through a few leaves.
A pony walked past, not turning its head, not stopping, just walking.
The soldier's breathing quickened as the drone turned to look at it more closely.
Fangheart blinked a few times, and his horn gave off a focused green light, by which he examined the soldier, finding dozens of bruises, abrasions, and one cut along its stomach. He sighed heavily, guiding it deeper into the forest, so as to avoid detection. He sat the soldier down on a rock in a small clearing, and asked, "Why are you so far from the hive?"
The soldier hissed, "I was born from a prisoner's brood, and was not appreciated by the Matriarch."
He raised an eyebrow at that, and asked, "The Matriarch? What is that?"
It said, "When the Queen was overthrown, an infiltrator took her place, declaring herself Matriarch. She commanded that all soldiers attend a grand feast, not unlike those the Queen held, but she demanded that each and every soldier attempt to seduce her. When I failed at such a task, she banished me."
Fangheart shook his head. "She does understand that soldiers can't reproduce with changelings, much less infiltrators?" he asked. He slapped his forehead with a hoof, and groaned, "This is why we needed the Queen. She is the only changeling that can produce eggs. Aside from that, she was smarter than all of you put together."
He shook his head slowly, and said, "I suppose it doesn't matter anymore. She's dead, and I've moved on. This is the end of the changelings. This, I guess, is what we here in Ponyville call history, and it's being made around us." He ignited his horn, and, gritting his teeth, began to heal the soldier's wing, which glowed a ghastly green as it grew back from where he'd cut it off.
He covered his forehead as his horn sputtered out, and staggered a bit as his energy ran low. He grunted, and said, "Now go, T'ap'arrakan. Don't let yourself be seen. Stick to eating smaller things. The vines in this forest are quite fleshy, and you may be able to live on a few of the beasts that wander these woods."
The soldier didn't go away, but stepped forward to help the drone from falling over, and hissed, "You gave me a name." It repeated that sentence a dozen times as it fled from the growling drone. It couldn't believe what had just happened to it. A name, a name. The prince had given it a name, only the highest of honors a changeling could receive.
When it grew tired, it sat down against a great tree, muttering to itself, "T'ap'arrakan. Wanderer. T'ap'arrakan." It slumped against the trunk of the tree, and shook its head disbelievingly as sleep overtook it.
A figure moved between its body and the rising sun. It considered the changeling at its doorstep, and asked, "What have we here, a lost changeling with no fear?"
The grey pegasus dragged himself back to the library, pulled the door open, and quietly closed it after entering the darkness of the tree. He hauled himself up the staircase to the bedroom, and slipped through the doorway. He sighed heavily as he looked the bed over, noting that it was taken.
He didn't want to assume that sleeping in the same bed was okay with Twilight. She'd said to stay out of it if he didn't bathe, but he didn't know if that meant she was okay with sleeping in the same bed together.
He turned around to face the rug he'd used before as a blanket, only for the floor to vanish beneath him as a purple glow encased his body.
Twilight lifted the blankets up with her hoof as she set him down next to her, and let them fall again as she reached a foreleg around his chest. She yawned, her jaws opening wide as she did so, and smacked her lips quietly. She shifted her hips a bit under the blankets, snuggling up to the stallion more closely.
Fangheart's ears stood up as the recently declared princess held his back to her chest, and he turned his head to look at her as she moved to kiss the back of his head. Their lips met in the quiet, the dim light of the stars, and the middle of the night. They both remained still for a long while, only moving when he rolled over to hug her.
When Spike awoke early the next morning, he found Twilight's quilt over his head. He crawled out from under the blanket, and looked up at his friend. His jaw dropped at what he saw, and he tossed the quilt back over the sleeping couple, a persistent, wide smile on his lips. He went downstairs to get breakfast, and when he looked up at the sound of footsteps, he saw the couple making their way down the stairs, their eyes flooded with glee.
A wretched cry emerged from the Everfree Forest, a horrid, twisted sound. It was like that of something dying very slowly, but with a bit more to it. It held a drive within it, and the speaker itself was driven to one baser instinct. As it hauled itself free of the tree line, it grunted painfully.
It was a changeling. It was a worker. It was in pain. It was not following orders. It was dying. It was going insane. It was so helplessly on death's doorstep. Already the infection had crept from a patch of chitin on its leg to its stomach. Thin, short, white stalks of the parasite had already begun to push through its thick chitin from the inside. Its stomach was covered in what looked like white fuzz, and it burned like all of Tartarus was bearing down on it.
It pulled itself along by its front hooves, careful not to move its hind legs, as doing so had only caused even more pain in its stomach. It pushed its way through a thick, wooden board, and whimpered, "Your highness." Its legs gave out from under it, and it gave out a frantic chirping sound as its stomach screamed pain to its underused brain.
It began to cry, a helpless, dying mass of parasite and changeling. It didn't know anything. It could only hope. It could only hope that the hive mind had not led it to the wrong place. It had been cut from its knowledge a bit ago, but the struggle to get here had felt like a million years of agonizing pain, and it could only follow one basic instinct.
It had to find him. It had to find him. It had to find the prince. It had to find the monarch. It had to at least tell him, warn him to stay away, even if it would soon die. And it would, of that much it was almost certain. It was already contagious, and the mere fact that it had risked killing him by finding him seemed like madness to the Matriarch.
It had been given this one mission, this one final task, this one last quest. It had to fulfill its last command.
It felt something roll it over, then drop it, and screamed.
Fangheart covered his nose with a hoof, held his breath, and backed away from the infected worker. He had already dragged it inside so he could close the door before anyone could see it. He pinned his ears back as the worker let out an ear shattering scream, and realized that he was in his pegasus form.
He darted forward, and covered its mouth with his hoof, silencing it. He bit his lip, and uncovered his nose. He sighed heavily, and hissed in Changeling, "Why do you bring your plight to me now? I am not coming back, so tell your Matriarch that I am not returning to become her concubine."
He had assumed that the worker was connected to the hive mind, and that another worker would relay his message to their leader. He was wrong, as he quickly discovered, for the worker simply lay there, whimpering like a hurt dog.
Workers couldn't react to pain, he recalled. This couldn't have been a worker, but some other changeling disguised as one. But an infection as progressed as this one would have prevented a transformation altogether, so this had to be a worker. This didn't make sense, and that conclusion was further compounded by the worker when it hissed, "It hurts. Do not return. Do not return to the Hive, your highness."
No changeling was crazy enough to say something like that to the last changeling capable of reproduction.
Fangheart's head swam, and he could only hiss, "Who are you?" He knew that no worker could answer that. Workers were never given the opportunity to become heroes, earn names, or serve the hive in any respectable or noticeable way.
The worker fell silent, save for its timid whimpers, and its helpless crying.
Fangheart didn't know what to do. Nothing made sense to him anymore. The hive was in danger, and already had a decreasing population, and this worker was telling him to stay away, and not to return so he may assist the broken hive. This worker had thought, and done so in a way that acted in the evicted monarch's best interests.
"What happened to you?" he hissed.
The worker covered its eyes with its hooves, and cried.
"Twilight!" he called.
The worker remained as still as a rock, unwilling or unable to move as the water bit at its stomach. It could only whimper in pain as the white fuzz on its stomach released acid onto and into its body as it was met with water. It could only hope that the prince was safe, and that it had not caused him harm.
Fangheart placed a warm hoof on the worker's forehead, and sighed as he dripped disinfectant onto its stomach. He knew that the parasite was of a fungal nature, and that no amount of the fluid he used would get rid of it, but the fungus often brought other infections with it, and anything to prolong or save this worker's life was of value.
He looked over his shoulder as Twilight darted into the bathroom, presenting a vial of noxious purple fluid to him. He nodded to her, setting down the disinfectant on the wall of the bathtub, and took the vial. He carefully dripped a tiny amount of the fluid onto the worker's stomach, watching it carefully.
The worker writhed as the infection reacted to the experimental drug. It gave off a thin, grey smoke as the fluid met its stalks, and the worker whined as her stomach burned all the more.
Fangheart narrowed his eyes at the fungus, watching it appear to fall off of its stalks, only to grow back. He sighed in frustration, and shook his head. He grabbed a blade from a first aid kit, and swept it over the worker's stomach, cutting free several stalks, which he gave to Twilight, who put them in a glass container, and raced back out of the room.
After several hours and vials were spent like this, Fangheart simply inserted a bright red pill into the worker's mouth, closed its maw with his hooves, and hissed, "Swallow." He stroked its neck to help it go down, and sighed as the worker complied. Within moments, the worker was out cold.
Fangheart gulped as he set the nearly unconscious changeling down in the very prison cell he'd occupied just a few days ago. He didn't dare chain it, as such a thing would only cause more pain. He lay it down on its back, and looked up at the doctor, who had come to properly anesthetize it.
The doctor was an earth pony, with a bright white coat, soft pink mane, and blue eyes. She wore a white cap, with an image of her cutie mark on the front. Her mark was a blood red cross with little hearts between the angles of it.
He bit his lip, and watched carefully as the doctor set down a chrome cylinder.
She attached a clear tube to it, and the other end to a big machine Twilight had helped her transport from the hospital. She turned the valve on the cylinder, and set down a mask on the worker's face. She looked into its pained, ghostly blue eyes, and said, "Take a deep breath."
The worker looked up at the pegasus who had spoken the changeling language so fluently before, and did as instructed once he'd relayed the message to it in a way it could understand. It felt its eyes growing heavy, its limbs numbing, the pain in its stomach fading away. And in a few moments, its eyes rolled closed.
Fangheart looked down at the worker's stomach, which rose and fell with each heavy breath, and imagined the pain it should have been in. It bit at some part of him to know that he was helping to deprive another creature of its body, even if it was for the worker's own good. It didn't understand what was happening to it. It couldn't have known.
The doctor said, "Hold the mask on its face while I begin the procedure."
He walked over to the worker's head, and used his hoof to hold the respirator still, and watched the doctor as she made dozens of little cuts on the worker's stomach. He gagged for a moment when his eyes trained on the many stalks of the parasite, and looked away to suppress a reflex he'd come to understand as bad.
He looked down at the worker's eyes, and muttered, "You'll be okay. You'll be okay. You're in safe hooves."
Twilight glanced over her shoulder at Fangheart, who was pacing back forth in front of the jail cell he'd occupied the first night after meeting her. It was now being used to store the anesthetized worker while they waited for it to wake up, which wouldn't happen for another few hours.
No matter how many times she reminded him of that, he continued to simply pace back and forth, like the worker might stop breathing at any moment, and that if he wasn't right there all day, it'd die because of him. He was just as nervous as he had been when they first put the thing to sleep.
Nurse Redheart was still in the basement too, just to make sure that her patient wouldn't suffer from any complications of the procedure, and was plenty capable of watching the worker by herself. He knew that, of course, but it still seemed as though he didn't trust the professional.
Her head made an analogy that gave her pause for thought. She had been about to compare him to a nervous father at a hospital, but something about that comparison made her feel strange.
She knew that it was basically his job to sire children, as his biology dictated, but she hadn't really asked about that aspect of changeling life all that much.
Twilight took a step towards her partner, and asked him, "Fangheart, why don't you and I go work on that book while we wait?"
Much to her surprise, he turned around, and said, "Yeah. Sure."
She followed him up the two flights of stairs, after grabbing her notebook and quill designated for this topic, and shot a beam of magic at her bedroom window when they emerged from the tunnel connecting the second floor to the first. She said, "Just so nopony can fly by and see your natural form."
He nodded gratefully, and led the way up the short flight of stairs to her bedroom, which wasn't really its own room, but an elevated platform above the entrance to the second floor. He sat down in front of her bed, and dropped his disguise in an instant of green fire. "What do you want to talk about?" he asked her.
"Courtship," she answered immediately.
He raised an eyelid at her —for a lack of eyebrows— and said, "And I thought I was the weird one."
"My choice of topic has nothing to do with personal curiosity. It's scientific curiosity," she said, joking, of course.
He thought for a moment, and said, "Okay. So... First of all, each drone has his own way of impressing the queen, thanks to our unique diversity, and the infiltrators, who introduce foreign biological features into the incubating workers' systems." He waited for her to finish with her notes before continuing.
She asked, "So, what's your method?"
He blinked at her, and blushed, pointing his head down at the floor. "Well... I..." he said, and shook his head. "It's nothing special."
"Are you saving it for your eighteenth birthday?" she teased.
"That's a long time from now, so no. It's just... not very spectacular compared some other drones. There was one, my mother always talked about, who could make his fangs act like oppositely charged ends of a battery, and would place the tips of them on her shoulder," he said, somewhat dreamily. "She always said that felt nice, and she named him Zmaylank'."
"What does that name mean?" she asked him, crossing her forelegs in front of her, her quill scratching the page in front of her.
"Ecstasy," he told her flatly.
She crossed out a bit of her notes, and asked, "Do they just do a single attempt to woo her, or is there a more prolonged commitment involved?"
"Well... a bit of both," he said. "Y'see, there's a bunch of drones that hang out around the hive, waiting for the queen to exhaust the supply of genetic material from her current suitors, and she summons them all at once. They each take their turns showing her what they can do, and then all do one big thing as a group. She selects a few of them to mate with, and keeps them well fed and cared for while she lays their eggs.
"They aren't lazy, just to be clear. They clean up her living quarters while she's away, trying to maintain the relationship, and, when she's out of eggs, try to impress her for another round. If the incumbent drones fail, she summons the nearby drones, and the freeloaders get kicked out until she's gone through another few suitors, before they get another chance with her," he said.
Twilight finished jotting down some notes, and looked up, prepared to ask another question.
Fangheart was sitting in front of a large bookshelf on her bedroom wall, facing away from her, and his horn was glowing dimly as the books floated about, all pulling off of their respective shelves for him to examine.
She cocked her head to the right, and tried to figure out what he was doing. She absentmindedly closed the book, and pushed it towards the foot of her bed, upon which she lay quietly.
Some of the books floated up, lifting above the group of remaining books, and another few floated towards the ground a bit. The books that had gone up were all red, while the ones that had moved down were all blue.
The books continued to shift about, and the books below moved to the right, whereas the ones above moved to the left. The red books gently set themselves down in a small stack on the floor, as did the blue ones, followed by orange and green books, then purple and yellow ones.
He brought each stack to the space in front of him, moving the more brilliantly colored ones around within their stacks, before placing them back on the shelves.
When he was done, the red books had all moved to occupy the far left of the uppermost shelf, and the orange ones had taken up the remaining space on the right. The yellow books were on the left of the middle shelf, and the green ones were to their right. The bottom shelf held the blue and purple books.
Any gradient colors were at the ends and middles of the shelves, forming a sort of rainbow, if a rainbow could be chopped up and stacked atop itself.
Fangheart blinked at the books, his green eyes showing a sort of displaced discomfort, like he wasn't satisfied with his own work, and zipped down the stairway to his left, before repeating the entire process with the lower floor of her bedroom, arranging the books into colorful stacks, and sorting through them.
Twilight watched from the edge of the upper floor, her head peaking out over the space above the door.
While his behavior was odd, and she would have to reorganize the books later, she found it intriguing, and besides, the shelves were due for another reorganizing that afternoon, so his minor bought of scaler chromatic organizing was of little consequence.
She tried to understand his motives, like when she had been looking at him from behind the safety of a cell wall, and he had been concussed, sleeping heavily.
Maybe he was just in the mood for a little sorting, like she was on occasion.
He didn't leave the spot at which he sat, and simply turned around with his front hooves when he needed to look at another stack of books. He would crane his neck from time to time, stretching it out to get a better look at the spines of certain books, and turned to face the door when he finally decided that he was done.
The walls were decorated as though a slice of a rainbow had been stretched out to the necessary length and wrapped around the bookshelves, starting from the top shelf to the right of her bedroom door, and moving clockwise from shelf to shelf until it moved down a level after a full revolution.
She looked down at him, and he looked up at her, an anxious look in his eyes, which glowed for a brief moment, flashing in a brilliant green light, before the bioluminescence generated just behind the surface of his ocular lenses faded away.
She considered asking him what he was doing, but then chose not to when his earthen green wings buzzed against his sides, and crossed her forelegs across her chest as he looked back down.
His head whipped around a few times, as though searching for something, and he darted back up the stairs, closing the blinds on her window with his green aura. He sat down on her bed, and puffed out his chest proudly, closing his somewhat luminous eyes, taking a deep breath.
She turned around to face the bed, before his eyes snapped open, and flashed in a series of intricate patterns, showing more brightly in the now dim light.
Now she understood what he was doing.
He moved his wings swiftly, releasing a myriad of gentle humming sounds, and placed a hoof against the middle of his throat, which he cleared. He gave off a short sound, a kind of chitter chirp, high in pitch, and soft to the ear. His eyes blinked, and then flashed in a pattern that lasted around six seconds.
His eyes would flash, slowly dim for a second, flash twice, and then he would do that again after another half second. With an additional flash added at the end of each pair of this cycle, he would repeat the entire pattern after another second of pause.
The display instilled within Twilight a rhythm of thought that began to dictate the timing of her heartbeat, which was thumping hard enough for her to simply feel without trying to. Her breaths came in as his eyes flashed to begin the cycle, and she exhaled when he began the second half of his display.
She wouldn't have considered what he was doing mind control, but she found it interesting that he could coax her body into following his rhythm, all with a visual song that he began to play for her.
It started when the fourth flash in his pattern only occurred in his left eye, and then the final three flashes were from his right, left, and right eyes respectively. He repeated that altered cycle once, and then started another one by only flashing his right eye, and then echoing the flash with his left.
He slowly moved towards her, never encroaching on her personal space, but flashing his eyes in a continually changing song, which followed a basic melody, and became an increasingly complex symphony as he added more and more tricks to his display.
He would hum with his wings from time to time, filling the otherwise empty second between flashes with sound, and chirp whenever he lifted a hoof to come closer to her, as though asking for permission.
She watched in awe as the changeling became his own musical instrument, and felt her wings stiffening against her sides. She glanced over her shoulder for a moment, while he stepped around her, keeping himself in her field of view at all times. She remembered Rainbow Dash telling her that her wings might tense up if she got excited, and she already didn't like it.
He moved in front of her as she looked back up, and cut off the cycle before he could add the third flash to the final pair. He stepped forward, and his lips met hers. His eyes both flashed one last time, a scant few centimeters from hers, filling her vision with green light, like the finale of a great composition, before they closed.
Twilight's wings shot out from her flanks, and remained spread, primaries bristling as she sat down. Her horn gave off a faint purple glow, prepared to cast any number of spells she might need. She didn't know what she would need them for, but being prepared was always a good idea.
He broke from the kiss, and said, "I..." He trailed off, and blinked, the glow gradually fading as the chemical reaction in his eyes continued to exhaust its supply of reactants. He gulped audibly, and said, "I... Sorry. Since I don't have a queen, my head keeps telling me that, since you're as good, and better in some ways, I should... y'know."
The alicorn smiled at that. Whether or not he had meant for that to be so sweet she didn't know, but was willing to guess that he hadn't. Either way, she found herself blushing in what choked light managed to make it through the sides of her window. It was a cute sentiment, that his biology believed that she was his queen.
"Y-yeah," she told him. "I mean, I get it. We're good."
They remained there for a long moment, avoiding each other's gaze, until she broke the silence that seemed thick enough for her to cut with a knife, "I need to sort the books up here, not that your way is bad. It's very pretty. But um... Spike is busy today, so I was wondering if you could... maybe... help me with that."
"Um... Sure," he said at length, and blushed, his cheeks turning a dark shade of moss green. "But then we need to talk about what we're doing with the worker," he noted.
"We can talk about that while we work," Twilight said.
Fangheart looked over at the jail cell, where the unconscious worker's chest rose and fell slowly. He glanced at its stomach, which was hidden by a series of bandages wrapped around its entire barrel, keeping away any new infections, and catching what lymph it could from the holes left by the parasite.
The doctor had removed what she could, treated everything else with a few medicines he didn't recognize, and closed the changeling's stomach back up.
He was glad that workers didn't have any armor, or the whole procedure would have been even more difficult. He still remained in his pony form, so as to prevent any spores from getting on him, and had seen to it that every bit of the parasite had been contained so Twilight could create a cure for it, which she was occupied with at the moment.
He looked over his shoulder at the busy alicorn, who was racing back and forth between machines, pausing every once in a while to drop something from a pipette into a vial of fluid. He would have helped her, but he had no clue what she was doing or how to operate even one of the machines she was using.
He turned to look back at the changeling, and slouched against the wall as he watched it, letting his eyes drift closed. He didn't have all that much to do, save for reading the hundreds of books that surrounded him, but he wanted to make sure the worker didn't feel abandoned when it awoke.
He heard chitin sliding against the rough metal bars, and opened one eye to check on it.
The worker's eyes opened, but it didn't move anything else. It was on an anesthetic, not to keep it asleep, but to deprive it of pain, but it didn't know that, so it didn't dare move.
He sighed, and hissed, "We did what we could, but there are still a few parts of the parasite inside of you. They should die soon if they haven't already, but you shouldn't be able to feel any pain."
The worker glanced at him, standing up, and hissed, "Why are you helping us instead of turning us in?"
He came to the realization that it didn't know who he really was. He hadn't taken off his disguise in front of it, and he'd never explained his situation to it. He stood up, and walked towards the cell. He closed his eyes, and let his disguise down. Green fire crept down each of his limbs, leaving behind those of his true self. His neck erupted into fire, as did his chest and stomach.
He opened his poisonous green eyes, and smiled at the worker before him. A sense of glee washed over him as the worker sat up, and he felt his wings quivering in excitement. He said, "Welcome to my home, sister."
Its blue eyes fixed onto his green ones, and it stood up. It walked towards him, just barely poking its nose between the bars containing it, and hissed, "What of the queen?"
He frowned, and looked down. He shook his head slowly, and turned around. "I... I know a place for you to go. You will be safe there, and ponies will look upon you with respect. You will never go hungry there, and you will be free from the hive mind forever," he hissed.
It hissed, "Where?"
"The Crystal Empire," he answered, and reverted back to his pony form. "No more plight. No more fear. No more oppression, and no more hive. You will become your own person in time, and you will never have to carry eggs."
Its ears perked up at that.
He sighed, and said, "When you meet the destroyer, know that she is good. She will help you, and she will be like a queen to you. She will command you to follow some rules, but not in such an invasive way as the queen."
It blinked its ghostly blue eyes, and hissed, "Will you come with us?"
He shook his head. "My place is here. My home is here. My life is tied to my... to my friends, and my partner, but you are not safe here," he told it. "Now, let's begin. I am going to teach you everything you'll need to know in order to make it to The Crystal Empire in one piece."
Fangheart presented a few coins to the ticket pony, and said, "Two please."
The pony didn't look up at him, and swept the bits off the counter with a hoof, replacing them with two pieces of paper.
He grabbed the tickets in his mouth, and passed one to his companion with a hoof.
The younger mare took it, her horn glowing an earthy green, and quickly shuffled out of the way for the next pony, following him. Her vibrant pink mane was a stark contrast to the unsaturated blue color she'd chosen for her coat. Her amber eyes still looked back at the ticket booth as she boarded the train alongside the relatively unattractive pegasus.
At least, he was unattractive by pony standards, from what she knew, most of which she had learned from him in the last few hours. He had specifically described his disguise as "intentionally boring" and "not very eye catching".
He had told her to craft her own body, and helped her through the process of picking a pseudonym. Blueberry Crisp, a name she didn't much understand, but thought fondly of, as he had given it to her. Royalty were only supposed to give names only to heroes, and she was no hero, which had made his next point of discussion particularly strange.
He had offered her a name, a real one, an honorary name. Such things were hardly even comparable to pony names, and better fit the description of titles. He had offered to make her a hero, and not only that, he had said that she was "very brave" for having dragged herself all the way from the hive.
She wouldn't call herself brave. She was just a worker.
She had noticed a few things changing about herself though. When had she decided to be a mare? Workers were genderless —unless having a place designed to carry another creature's eggs made her female— and she had simply decided to be female after a certain period of time.
Why, as well, had she stopped referring to herself as plural? That was just the way workers spoke, as they were indistinguishable from one another, until, as it appeared, they were released from the hive mind that tethered their beings together. She had begun thinking with words like "I" and "me". This frightened her, to some extent.
Was she already an individual? Was this what it felt like to be alone, to be contained within one's own body? When had she ever decided that this was her body? How could she tell if it was hers? Could she even own a body? Did she actually own this body?
As these questions flew around her head like an extremely irritated beehive, the scents, or tastes, or perhaps textures, of feeling, of nearby emotional energy, began to make themselves known to her. In the confined space of the train, she was surrounded by more ponies than she ever had —as far as she could remember.
She sat down next to Fangheart, and looked around. Ponies were simply everywhere. Every other booth filled with ponies as they waited for the train to set off. And they came in so many different colors, from blue to white, red, green, and everything in between.
A pegasus stallion, with a pearly white coat, blue eyes, and a blue mane, stopped walking when he came to their booth, and politely asked Fangheart, "It okay if I sit here?"
Fangheart looked at him, then nodded. "I don't see why not," he said.
The pegasus sat down across from them, and ruffled his wings for a moment, as though uncomfortable. He eventually settled for leaning back against the wall and the back of his seat, and said, "Sorry. I'm not used to being so... unprotected without my armor."
Fangheart looked directly into the pegasus's eyes, and asked, "You're a member of the guard?"
The pegasus nodded, as though he had intentionally said that for the purpose of bringing up this topic of conversation, and said, "Yeah, just got sent off on a forced vacation because one of my prisoners escaped without a fight."
Blueberry could smell Fangheart's interest peaking, and gently nuzzled against his side, letting her eyes close. She was tired despite the long, empty sleep she had just awoken from an hour or so earlier. She yawned, her mouth opening wide, and smiled as his wing gently wrapped around her, keeping her warm.
"That must suck. At least you're going somewhere as beautiful as The Crystal Empire," Fangheart said.
"I have a date, so that's nice," the guard told the grey pegasus, and sighed heavily as he relaxed against the wall.
The train's doors closed, and there was a distinct shout of, "All aboard!" The train proceeded to lurch forward, shaking the passengers inside, and snapping Blueberry awake. She sat bolt upright, then pressed closer to the more experienced pony beside her, closing her eyes as the train accelerated.
Fangheart tightened his wing around her, and reached a hoof to gently stroke her mane. "You'll get used to it. It just takes a while," he told her.
The guard opened one eye at the trembling filly, and asked Fangheart, "So, why are you guys going so far north?"
He responded immediately, "Taking my little cousin to her new family." He wrapped his forelegs around her, and hugged her closer to him for a moment.
"Oh," the guard said.
The train continued to go faster and faster, until it finally steadied, and Blueberry began to calm down as she became acclimated to it.
No one spoke, at least, that she could remember, because as the train continued to move, and the pegasus next to her held her, she fell asleep, safe, and, for the first time, happy. She had achieved something. She didn't know how significant her actions were, but she had still done it. She had survived, found the prince, and made it to something she had never known; freedom.
Fangheart sighed as he slumped into the booth, while ponies filed onto the train. He glanced at the window to his left, and considered the crystalline landscape beyond. It sparkled and glimmered in the warm sunlight, and reflected back to his tired eyes the strength of this place.
He had been glad to return to The Crystal Empire, if only for a short while. He had essentially marched north from the train station, dropped an unconscious changeling into Princess Cadance's lap, and said, "So... I know this could have been better arranged, but there may be more of these on the way."
Cadance had been more than welcoming of the unexpected visitor, and discussed with him a few policies regarding future transactions of changelings. She had spent the days since their first meeting formalizing a few laws regarding changeling citizenship, and was probably currently working to pass those laws.
Fangheart smiled as he thought about his options. While those laws weren't currently active, they would provide protections to changelings, so long as they remained in The Crystal Empire.
Maybe he would live there someday, safe.
A stallion sat down across from him, and said, "Hi again." He had a pearly white coat, deep blue eyes, and wavy blue mane. With such a fine build, neither bulky nor lean, neither short nor tall, but a good height and not without muscle, he was the kind of pony fit to feed the queen until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Fangheart decided to at least learn something about the guard. Perhaps he just wanted to understand him better, or was too bored to simply sit there all the way back to Ponyville. "So, how'd your date go?" he asked the white pegasus, and sat up straight on his side of the booth.
"It turned out to be a prank by some other guys in my platoon. They're gonna regret that," he answered, bashing his forehooves together.
"And you didn't stay to tour the city?" Fangheart asked him, raising an eyebrow.
The guard snorted, and said, "It's the same as the rest of the world; calm, quiet, and boring."
"I would argue that The Crystal Empire is much more interesting than you give it credit for," the false pegasus said. "The ground itself seems to simply flow with energy. Does the grass not glitter in the sunlight? Do the ponies not love their city? Does it not love them back?"
The guard raised an eyebrow at him, sitting upright, and said, "I suppose so."
And with that, the conductor's shout pierced the air, and the train began its long journey. A long silence fell between the two pegasi, though much of the train car was filled with other groups of ponies, who talked about their trips and their families.
Eventually, Fangheart asked him, "What's your name?"
"Stoic," he answered, and reached his hooves into the air as he yawned. "Stoic Saber. Yours?"
"Fangheart," the grey pegasus answered, and allowed the silence to resume its spell.
Princess Cadance guided the undisguised changeling towards the center of the city, and paused when she came to the place most vital to its existance. She stepped out of the worker's way, allowing her to see the Crystal Heart as it spun above its pedestal.
The changeling sat down, and stared at the crystalline artifact, tilting her head a bit in awe.
Cadance smiled at the worker, and said, "This is the Crystal Heart. Charged by the energy of the crystal ponies, it serves to protect the entire city and its citizens. It once fed an entire hive of changelings for many prosperous years, and now, it will allow you to live here without ever needing to harm anyone."
The changeling turned to look at her, and blinked. A crowd of ponies, each with a coat as brilliant as the heart that defended their city, and with eyes that held her in a reverent light, as though she had done something to deserve their respect. She glanced over her shoulder, and her eyes scanned over the crowd.
Cadance's soft hoof touched her shoulder, and her even softer voice said, "Go on."
The ponies all nodded, and collectively made quiet sounds of encouragement.
The worker blinked again, and looked down for a moment. Her mind wandered to the small deformation in her stomach, which was masked by the series of bandages that still surrounded her barrel, and the egg that the queen had given her, and the idea that she would never have to go through that horribly painful process ever again.
She would be free as soon as she touched the heart, which thickened the air with its love. She would be free forever, and neither she nor the egg she carried would ever suffer through the pain of losing one's identity to the hive mind, the endless blackness that consumed the mind as the hive took control.
But could she do it? Was she prepared to live as an individual forever, and what if the egg became a worker with no hive mind to guide it? What if it became an empty husk if a changeling with no mind or purpose? Just because she had managed thus far didn't mean that an infant worker could do so well.
She stood up, and began to walk towards the heart.
She was willing to take that chance.
Better to see a worker starve than to watch it become another mindless slave to the hive mind. Better to let it die without knowing than to force it into a world of endless pain. Better to know that a child was naïve than to teach it nothing but pain. Better to be a real mother, like so many of the tearful prisoners this body had been used to separate from their children, who had fought every single changeling that dared touch them in order to protect all that they had.
But then, those prisoners had still lost their children, and her body was the vehicle that the hive had used to do such a thing.
She froze, hoof lifted into the air, and hesitated.
Better to take a chance on freedom than to know nothing but slavery.
Her hoof thrust through the air, and collided with the now steady Crystal Heart. She forced her left eye open, and squinted against the blinding light that radiated away from the Crystal Heart.
Her blue eyes were replaced by two orbs of white light, and she drew her hoof back. She blinked at her surroundings, trying to understand what had just happened. The four roads leading to the Crystal Palace were all empty, and the crowd of ponies from just a moment ago had all vanished.
She looked to where Princess Cadance had just been, only to find a much less friendly face looking back at her, and yet, it seemed less aggressive than it always had. Almost nothing about it was familiar anymore. It lacked its gnarled horn, its ragged mane, and its vicious snarl.
It now had a long, smooth wand, with dozens of small ridges spiraling towards the tip, an ethereal cloud of green and cyan keratin, and a kind, warm smile.
Even its horrible tongue had changed, which had always spoken so softly of love, but lied too many a time to fool her again.
But it was the eyes that she suddenly found trustworthy, no longer with the concentric irises of moss and neon green, or the slitted pupils that hid the will of a tyrant, but a pair of soft, loving irises, with whites around the edges, and large, round pupils, which reflected hexagons of white light.
Everything about her had changed. Even her wings, her tattered wings of elytron, had been replaced, with a pair of beautiful, delicately made gossamer plates, that sang a gentle tune as soothing as the wind itself as they hummed. They were composed of geometric shapes, each a different color from its neighbors, to make a general shape of a butterfly's wing.
The queen looked different, very different.
Her legs had no holes, and it didn't seem to weigh her down in the slightest, because her chitin was also gone, replaced with a thin coat of black fur that shimmered like glass. Her head bore no crown, but a shimmering helmet of aquamarine, with a luster that reflected so finely the image of the Crystal Heart on its pedestal.
The reflection didn't show the worker though, and she blinked to be doubly sure. She was sitting right between the Crystal Heart and the queen's helmet. She should have appeared in the reflection.
Was she dead? Had she come all this way just to die?
She moved out of the queen's way as she walked towards the heart, and watched intently as she lifted her hoof to touch it. Sighing heavily, the queen placed the tip of her smooth horn to the crest of the heart, and staggered back after a spark of magic passed between the two entities.
The worker gulped, and gently tapped the queen's foreleg with a hoof. "Um... Your highness?" she hissed, and jumped as the queen's head turned towards her, only to realize that she had been looking at something else.
A small crystal pony was sitting where the worker had just been, and looking up at the queen with wide eyes. It was a filly, with a shimmering white coat, and purple eyes, with a matching mane. Her foreleg reached out to touch the queen's, and she asked, "Whew aw yoo going?"
The queen closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath. She froze, holding the breath in, and only moved when her breath caught, a drop of clear fluid falling from her chin. The liquid broke against the shimmering ground, and burst into a dozen smaller drops, scattering themselves across the ground.
The filly's eyes filled with tears, and the queen allowed herself to sit down. Pulling the pony towards her, she said, "I don't know. I have to find a good home for them. They need my help, and I can't help them here." Her voice seemed choked, like her words themselves were suffocating.
The queen's breath came in short, pained sobs, and she hugged the pony to her chest.
A changeling soldier ran up to the queen, and its chest heaved as it recovered from the exertion of running so far. It hissed, but so softly and so nuanced was the sound that the observing worker couldn't understand more than a few words, "Have... solution... stay..."
The world began to spin, and the worker's eyelids grew too heavy for her to keep open.
Twilight looked up from her notebook, and asked Fangheart, "What sort of bodily fluids do drones feed on? You talk about this liquid love as though it's a touchy subject for you."
He said, "Well..." He trailed off, and rubbed his chin with the front of his lower leg, the holes in his leg brushing against the chitin of his lower jaw. "I don't want to tell you directly."
"It's that gross?" she asked him, raising an eyebrow at her stallionfriend. She had been prepared for a direct answer, prepared to struggle against her gag reflex, but not for even him, a changeling, who had shown no discomfort whilst openly discussing a fair amount of changeling biology to her, or the fact that she was writing it all down. That caught her off guard.
He sat down in front of her, and said, "I'll give you a hint. I'll tell you what process in which it is produced."
She placed her quill to the paper, steeling herself for anything, and, looked up at him.
He leaned forward a bit, and said, "I find that the term "making love" is quite telling."
She thought that over for a moment, and then, on reflex, began to write, before stopping in the middle of the first word. Her ears flopped down against the sides of her head, and her nose wrinkled in disgust. She grimaced, and shook her head frantically, maneuvering the quill to scratch out the incomplete word in front of her.
He laughed, without restraint or remorse, and with the most vehement expression she'd ever seen on a changeling's face. He fell onto his back, and wrapped his forelegs around his spasming chest as he rolled across the floor. "Ha... Hahaa! Woohoo..." he exclaimed, his eyes screwed shut.
Twilight shook her head at the page in front of her, and crossed out the last two sentences of her notes, which might have been a bit suggestive, save for the term "certain bodily fluids", which she figured was vague enough to get past a real scientific publisher without too much trouble.
She glanced at her calendar as the changeling laughed. Her coronation was tomorrow, and her parents would be there. She knew that she'd have to introduce them to Fangheart at some point, but the coronation was not the place for that.
After her coronation she'd have a few weeks free. Plenty of time for them to get to know him, and for her to gauge their reaction to his identity.
She just had to convince him to wear a suit.
Fangheart sighed as the coronation came to a close, and waved his hoof at Twilight as she took off from the balcony. Watching her soar off into the distance, he couldn't help but wonder what would become of him, if she would become so preoccupied with her new responsibilities as a princess that he just sort of slipped into the background.
He shook his head. He couldn't doubt Twilight. It wouldn't be in anyone's best interests if he did, but still, something gnawed at the back of his mind, like an itch. It was bothersome to him, like a faint whisper on a gentle breeze, something carried through thousands of molecules of air, trying to simply be heard, and he had to at least try hearing it.
He looked over his shoulder, not that he could explain why, and glanced at the heavily decorated form of Princess Cadance, who was bearing the traditional crystal vail that he had once seen Rarity finish on her. Her eyes were warm, gentle, and her gaze was just as soft as her eyes met his.
She motioned him towards her with a quick tilt of the head, and he quickly moved to stand before her, though off to one side so as to not draw much attention from her. She lifted her hoof to obstruct the other princesses' views of her lips, and muttered, "Your little cousin is sick in bed, suffering from magic poisoning, after touching the Crystal Heart."
He glanced to either side of them, his tuxedo collar chaffing his neck, and pulled her aside so he could speak above the volume of a whisper. "But... You sai-" he began.
"-Upon further inspection, I discovered that the heart has a sort of anti feeding spell placed upon it, and it is an integral part of its aura. Someone has essentially poisoned the well, and I don't know the counter spell," she told him. "I don't know who they are or what they did, but I promised that your friend would be safe in my city, and she will be well fed."
He blinked at her, and furrowed his brow, wondering how exactly she planned to feed a changeling who had no friends. There were less orthodox methods of course, but he couldn't imagine ponies partaking in such activities. He nodded to her, and said, "Thank you, Princess Mi Am-"
"-It's just Cadance," she insisted.
"Thank you, Princ-" he reiterated.
"-We're beyond titles now, Fangheart," she corrected him with a smile. "I should hope to be an aunt soon." She turned to face the cheering crowd of ponies alongside the other princesses.
He didn't know how to respond to that. Twilight had told him that having children wasn't necessarily a part of being a couple, which hadn't really added up in his rather —admittedly biased— reproduction centric mind. He was a drone, and drones had lots of kids. That was just how things worked in his head.
Then again, his head hadn't been raised in a world where friendship, contraceptives, or romance existed. His mind had been built in a world of nearly constant intimacy with some other living creature, be it a griffon prisoner one day or his concubine the next.
He paused at that thought, wondering how the hybrid mare was getting on without him. Quite well, he imagined. Pick was tough, levelheaded, and assertive, all things the hive had admired in the queen. Not only that, but she was a bountiful source of love energy, and, even if she couldn't hold much sway over the Matriarch's decisions, likely enjoying herself as the main course at a feast —which almost always turned into semi controlled orgies. She had always had a thing for group activities.
Then again, she hadn't exactly been happy with him the day before his eviction. He hadn't really been paying attention, truth be told. Between the monarchy collapsing and his only home being literally turned on its head by a bunch of angry soldiers, he'd been rather preoccupied. Either way, she was an upstanding mare, a calm, proud one, and she was probably doing fine for herself.
He sighed as he turned around, planning to get on a train back to Ponyville, as the schedule Twilight had made dictated.
He couldn't help but wonder if she was still mad at him, if she would have approved of his recent choices, if she was even thinking about him.
He hoped not, he decided. He had been a very different person back then, and the memory of her face seemed a lifetime away. He wasn't that brash, narcissistic prince anymore. He was a pony, a real one, and his name was Fangheart, no longer Love Bite, or that drone. He was Fangheart, a real pony.
Maybe he'd stay in his pony form forever, throw Celestia off his trail for good, lose those memories altogether.
No longer the last drone alive, but a pegasus, just another pegasus, who was dating a princess.
Yeah, completely normal. Nothing weird about that. It must be Tuesday, here in Equestria.
He chuckled to himself as he backtracked through the many halls of Canterlot Castle, back the way he'd come.
His mother had died in this building.
That felt like forever ago. That never happened, as far as this pegasus was concerned. He didn't know anything about changelings, or the revolution, or the hive.
He froze, his left forehoof hovering just above the floor. The itch at the back of his mind was getting worse, and the scratching sounds began to ring clearer in his head. The hive, the hive was still full of infected changelings. Changelings were dying, and he was just standing there.
He snorted, and continued walking. Those grubs hadn't cared about him, not when they'd decided that he was just as bad as his mother, when he had never commanded even one of them, sired a single creature, or given an order. He hadn't attacked Canterlot. He hadn't done anything to them, and now their ranks were dwindling without him, and without a queen to make eggs.
The changelings would die out, replaced by their hybrid offspring and prisoners. No more workers would be hatched. The hive would become the home of the changelings' descendants, of veterans desperately trying to maintain order while the prisoners died out, until only their hybrid children remained.
And that would be it, until the infection could find no more chitin on which to fester, and die along with its hosts.
He stepped into the sunlight, allowing its warmth to sink into his grey coat, and blue mane. He adjusted his fiery red bow tie with a hoof, and closed his eyes, drinking in the mild humidity that accompanied the cloud covering the base of Canterlot with its promise of rain and shadow.
The world felt clearer, crisper, sharper, like it finally accepted him as a part of itself, like he was finally free of the world he'd left behind, free from the memories of pain and of suffering, of the last drone's disregard for life and happiness of others. Those memories made him cringe now, when they had happened only a few weeks before.
He was Fangheart, and he was free.
A white pegasus in golden armor ran up from behind him, and another guard's aura shoved the grey pegasus into a burlap sack as the first one shouted, "Nice try, changeling. I ran into that pony on the train yesterday."
And then, as they were hauling the bag back to the castle, a group of ten changelings dropped from the rooftops, surrounding them completely. An infiltrator hissed, "Fresh love, straight from the heart of Ponyland."
The armored guards dropped the bag, which kicked and thrashed about wildly as a changeling moved to untie the knot holding it closed. Fangheart stuck his head out of the bag, took one look at the infiltrator above him, and slammed his head into the changeling's flank, knocking the wind out of it.
The two guards exchanged nervous looks as another changeling ran towards the grey pegasus, only for the stallion to spread out his wings in an attempt to intimidate it, and charge forward when that didn't work.
Fangheart launched himself at the changeling, pinning to the ground underneath his weight, and prepared to strike it before a blue aura surrounded him, freezing him in place. He growled as best he could without moving his lips, and only went silent when a blunt object struck the back of his head.
Fangheart groaned as he came to, and reluctantly opened his eyes.
A pair of deep blue eyes were looking back at him, and the guard gave him a nod of acknowledgment. Stoic Saber was missing his armor, spear, and anything else of military purpose. Behind him, the wooden wall of the cart they were in stood, propping up his back as he lifted a leg up, showing the grey pegasus a metal shackle around his hoof.
Fangheart's eyes widened, and he immediately began to panic. The events of their previous encounter ran through his mind, and he looked down at his right foreleg. He recognized the metal object immediately, and the ancient patterns engraved on it as they emitted a cool green light, the only form of written language used by the changelings for one purpose alone, to mark their prisoners.
He whipped his head around, and surveyed his company, consisting of a unicorn with a brown coat in the front left of the cart, Stoic Saber further back, and an unconscious changeling, a soldier of some sort, in the front right corner. He was sitting opposite Stoic, behind the sleeping soldier.
Stoic spoke up, drawing his attention, "Sorry. I thought you were that prisoner, the one that escaped on my watch, that I talked about on the train."
Fangheart gulped, and glanced down at his shackle. It wasn't physically attached to anything, but he could sense the magic that tethered it to a large metal block on the center of the cart, which was also engraved with the ancient changeling writing. He experimentally moved his hoof away from the box, towards the back right corner of the cart, and it resisted being pulled beyond a certain distance from the box.
"No," he murmured, unable to think of anything else. He couldn't go back, not to the hive, not to that place, not to the subterranean moshpit of brainless bugs. He had just gotten his new life in one piece. He had just sworn to leave it behind. He had just wanted to be a pony, be normal, be free.
And now it was over. He was going back to the hive, at the very bottom of the hierarchy he'd been raised in the top of. He was a prisoner now. He was a meal, a well treated meal, by any standards, and certainly not a slave, but a meal nonetheless.
Prisoners were citizens of the hive, able to serve it as a worker might, but with more freedom, able to think for themselves, and volunteer themselves at feasts and the nursery. He would have to earn his way to the top, by standing still, while a dozen changelings all tried to make him love them, by submitting himself to the hive's will, to the world he hated.
"No," he repeated, more firmly this time.
Stoic's eyes met his again.
Fangheart's chest began to move rapidly, his breath coming in shallow pants, his heart threatening to jump out of his throat, his ears pinned back, his wings stiff at his sides. "I..." he choked, and closed his eyes.
His thoughts wandered to Twilight. What did she know? She wouldn't know of his capture. She wouldn't know where he was. She wouldn't know if he was alive. She wouldn't know anything, but that he had vanished.
Tears began to form at the corners of his eyes, and his breath caught as another thought came to him. What was the hive like now?
What if the infection got to him? What if one of the other prisoners saw through his disguise? What if the Matriarch learned of his true identity? What if Twilight thought he had run off on purpose? What if she hated him? What if she stopped caring?
Whether or not he would ever see her again was out of the question. No one escaped the hive —unless someone kicked them out— and prisoners were likely becoming increasingly valuable. Without the queen to select targets, the hive was likely experiencing a drop in its overall intake of prisoners, which made any existing ones all the more precious.
And the plague. What of the plague? He was fine so long as he remained in full pony form, but not if anyone removed it.
Stoic was sitting beside him now, and wrapping a wing behind his back. Softly, he said, "It'll be okay."
Fangheart crossed his forelegs in front of him, and sobbed into his grey fur, unable to even think anymore. Nothing was worth thinking about. It all hurt to think. It hurt to imagine. It hurt to simply exist, and the crying only made it worse, but he had to cry, if only to remind himself that he could, that he had feelings now, that he wasn't an insensitive jerk like the drone who had fled the world he was doomed to.
The cart rolled down a slope, where the grassy ground gave way to a pitch black tunnel, one of the hidden entrances to the hive, and the mouth of the tunnel closed up behind them, the ground lifting back up to meet itself. He knew that was the last shred of unobstructed sunlight he would see for a very, very long time.
He could hear the hushed hissing sounds of their captors' voices, and Stoic's comment, "I wish I knew what they were saying."
As the changelings spoke, Fangheart grew more and more aware of the dire straights their current leader was in. Losing her mind, and running out of time, the Matriarch talked of a daring plan, to invade Canterlot and rule the land. If confidence in the leader was already unstable, it could be easy to turn the tables.
He hissed under his breath, silencing the changelings around them, and startling the two stallions in the cart with him. He told Stoic, "Revolution drove out the queen, and their new leader is bedridden. It seems that we were lucky to be captured at a time like this."
Stoic whispered, "Are you okay?"
Fangheart couldn't help but smile faintly. The more the changelings talked, the more and more easily he imagined this going. If he could just put someone in charge of the hive who had the best interest of pony and changeling in mind, perhaps everything could work out.
Princess Cadance, he decided, would be a fine choice, but she was a long way away, and he had one more problem.
He had no way of getting someone in charge of the hive. He'd have to think this over more carefully than anything else he'd ever done in his life, but, if it worked...
His options were to do nothing, live as a prisoner, and never go home, or to take a chance on solving the major problems in the hive, and maybe go home afterwards. When he thought about it that way, he had to at least try, or he would surely never see Twilight again.
Fangheart stood in a line of roughly a dozen ponies, which accounted for all of the prisoners taken in by the hive that day —nothing compared to the usual gross under his mother's leadership. Stoic Saber was standing behind him, followed by the other guard, and then a bat pony, who had been wearing a very convincing changeling costume on the trip here.
He stepped forward as the pony at the front of the line was escorted down the tunnel that he knew connected to the prisoners' city, more colloquially known as the kitchen, because it contained all of the food. All but a few of the prisoners lived there permanently, and every single prisoner at least got their start here. This was the Manehattan Harbor of the changeling world, where immigrants from all walks of life began their journey.
This was where every prisoner lived at first, with a month spent free of changeling interaction so they could adjust to their new lives, before they were provided opportunities to serve the hive, from nursing the grubs and hatchlings, to feeding the masses on a velvet cushion.
He tried not to think about it. It all reminded him of his mother, and the many hours he'd spent at her side, watching the feasts begin, observing the many habits and nuances of these activities, so that he could someday show her what he had learned. But he never would now. He would never commit to his queen, as he had always been taught to dream of.
And then there had been that one pony, that powerfully enthused terran equine, who had made him forget all about the queen, who had whisked him away on the clouds, who had come into his life as a servant of the hive, and whose destiny had been untied from his on one of the worst days of his life.
He couldn't think about it. He couldn't think about Pick. She was probably off doing her own thing with the Matriarch. There was no way the leader could overlook her. There had been reason behind his mother's decision to move her into a suite next to his, and permit her to retire from service, to serve him in the most beautiful ways.
He shook his head forcefully, trying to dispel the memories, and reminded himself that he didn't love her, because he truly never had, and she had never loved him. They had been doing what was natural, and normal by the standards of the hive. Young drones could take concubines, so he had. Even if he had only ever married that one, they had both shared multiple partners between them, and with one another.
He had never loved her. There was no love in that union, but it had been fun, and he had enjoyed it.
She had once said that he was the most tender changeling she'd ever met, and that he was free to do as he pleased with her. And oh, he had.
The spy in front of him waved a hoof in his face, and Fangheart blinked away the hearts from his eyes. Sighing, he slipped into the royal changeling language again, "I'm sorry. What?"
The matured soldier narrowed its eyes at him, and spoke in pony tongue, "Quarterling? Been here before?"
He panicked, and instantly did everything his mother and Twilight had taught him about making a good alibi.
First, don't panic.
Too late. Move on. Hurry.
Second, assess the question.
Quarterlings were the result of a disguised changeling mating with a non changeling creature of the same species as their disguise. They produced as much love energy as normal non changelings, and could learn to speak changeling from the hive mind if brought to the hive during their infancies.
He wasn't a quarterling, but knew for a fact that he did produce significantly more emotional energy than a normal disguised changeling.
Then there was the issue of having spoken in the royal tongue. Quarterlings didn't learn that on accident. He could say that he had learned parts of it from the last drone on a night spent together.
Third, don't give more information than you have to.
No one escaped the hive once they got in, unless they were serving the hive as an infiltrator or spy, or got kicked out.
Fourth, speak calmly.
"Halfling," he said cooly, "Got kicked for using the royal tongue in front of the queen."
Technically, the first part wasn't a lie, so long as one stretched the definition of halfling to fit any changeling hybrid that wasn't a quarterling, rather than just the hybrid children of undisguised soldiers.
His mother hadn't been disguised for his conception —don't ask how he knew— and his father had been an alicorn. He gave off less emotional energy than a full pony, and less than a quarterling, but could be of functional use to the hive if it ran low on able bodied workers.
The second part was basically unprovable, because the queen was dead, and all of her memories were locked away in her personal hive mind, which no one could access without her horn, which Twilight had back at home.
The spy snorted at him, and lifted his right foreleg up in front of it. It placed its horn to the brand new magic shackle around his hoof, and carefully moved the shackle around so the tip of its horn traced intricate shapes on the thick metal ring. "Name?" it scoffed at him.
"Fangheart," he said immediately. "Could it be arranged that my cell is neighboring to those of the three stallions behind me?" He glanced over his shoulder at Stoic Saber, who was looking at him in a state of bafflement. "This one looks tasty," he explained, licking his lips suggestively, causing the former guard to take a step away from him.
The spy continued to move the shackle about, inscribing its bearer's name and race on the bonds that he would bear for the entirety of his life, unless he behaved incredibly well and served the hive extremely often, in which case he would be fitted with a featherweight earring, which looked really cool.
The soldier looked up at him when it was done, and nodded as it guided the grey pegasus to be weighed and measured by a group of other spies, who then engraved his dimensions on the shackle. "Come back in a month early in the morning," one of them told him.
"Can't we just get to the more intimate measurments now?" Fangheart whined.
It was standard policy for every prisoner to be measured before they began their services to the hive, especially their more private features, as much of the voluntary work involved some form of intimacy, from feasts to feeding individual visitors at one's doorstep. Of course, prisoners did grow older, and creatures born in captivity weren't first measured so thoroughly until they reached maturity, and then periodically after that.
His false identity would have known these things, as it would have already been through this process before, though he actually knew a lot more than it would have. For example, he knew that they told prisoners to come back in the morning so that they didn't always have to put on a show in order to do their job.
One of the infiltrators overseeing the entry process gave him a sultry look, and he smiled goofily as another changeling guided him out of the processing room, where he waited in the wide tunnel for his new neighbors.
Stoic Saber came first, followed by his partner, and then the bat pony, and they were all led through the torchlit tunnel as a single group. When they emerged into daylight, all three ponies allowed their jaws to drop, whereas Fangheart didn't give the place a second glance. Both he and his persona had been here a hundred times, and didn't behold it with as much awe as the others did.
The prisoners' city was deep underground, about a kilometer or so beneath the surface, which had been replaced by a large fake terrain made of what was basically one way glass, allowing sunlight and starlight alike to be viewed as though from the surface world, but not so much of the former as to get anyone sunburned.
The walls were made of a black stone, and formed an ellipse, which was two kilometers long and a bit more than one and a half wide, around the center the city, stretching the whole distance between the city and its great ceiling. Lined with many torches and hundreds of kilometers of stone railings tall enough to keep anyone from doing something crazy, a single platform about four meters across spiraled down from the top of the large cavern, maintaining a constant distance of five meters from the platform above it —which was actually the same one— and at an angle close enough to horizontal that no one noticed how tilted it was unless the looked out across the city, and at the platform on the other side.
At one of the sharper ends of the ellipse, the platform met the base of the cavern, and gave way to a plane of soil. From that, an earthen road stretched across the primary axis of the ellipse, splitting into circles around the school and arcade, which each sat on a different focus of the ellipse.
At the very center of the city, stood the marketplace, which the main road formed a box around and cut through. It was about half a kilometer long, and just as wide, lined with wooden stands and full of ponies —who looked tiny from half a kilometer up. It was surrounded by other stores; a salon, a bakery, et cetera.
Apple trees and grassy clearings took up almost half of the ground down there, and creatures dotted the landscape, with children of all species playing in the grass and climbing the trees to collect apples. A clean blue river flowed roughly perpendicular to the main road, cutting it between the market and the arcade, where it became a quaint wooden bridge.
Always level with the long platform, and equidistant from one another, regular hexagon shaped holes lined the wall, each two ponies in height, with a flat edge lining up with the platform. One in every eleven of them was replaced with a similarly sized archway, a torchlit tunnel leading to a different level of the spiral.
These were the homes. Each hole led to a different home, one for each person, save for the families, which lived closest to the ground so the children didn't have to walk very far to attend school, and in larger suites. The bottom two floors were dedicated to families, and a few orphanages.
Their guide paused to speak with them and take questions, most of which Fangheart ignored, before leading them up one of the nearby tunnels to their new homes, four neighboring suites, each with four rooms, kitchen, bedroom, restroom, and living room. The entrance led directly into the living room, which was a square prism, about twice as wide as the door was, with a couch, coffeetable, desk, and chair.
From the inside looking out, the entrance made up the right half of the front wall, and the left half had a cute one way window. The wall to the left was the same off black as everything else, bland, with the far right quarter cut out to connect with the bedroom. The back wall was missing its far left quarter, and then the horizontal third of its left half, which gave way for a counter between the kitchen and the living room. The right wall was blank.
From inside the bedroom, which was three fourths as wide and just as long as the living room, looking towards the living room, the front wall was blank, save for its missing far left quarter. The left wall had a circular one way window with a pair of yellow curtains, decorated with outlines of white flowers. The back wall had nothing going on, save for a small mattress and a nightstand running parallel to its left corner. The right wall was missing its left third, which contained a wooden door leading to the bathroom.
The bathroom wasn't spectacular, with its far right third being taken up by a bathtub and shower, and the sink and mirror located just next to that. It was a pretty boring room, as far as Fangheart was concerned, with the right half of the left wall being taken up by another door to the kitchen.
The kitchen was twice as wide as it was long, with a small stove and fridge located along the back wall, and then a sink and cubboards to the left of them.
Of course, not all of the suites were identical. The furniture and decorations varied from home to home, but they all had the same internal structure, and were each built for one person, and an occasional overnight guest to feed. The family suites were larger, and very different, but they were similar in design, being small enough to be cute, but large enough to live in.
Fangheart quickly shuffled the other three stallions into his designated suite, and sat them down in his bedroom. He sighed, and asked, "Okay, does anyone have any questions for me? I can tell you that I know a thing or two about this place, and how life works in the hive."
The three stallions exchanged nervous glances, before Stoic spoke up, "You called yourself a halfling back there. What does that mean?"
"My biological father was a changeling," he told him. "Halflings are the offspring of a changeling soldier and another creature, a pony, in my case. Soldier doesn't mean what you're thinking. It means one of the biological classes of changelings. Soldiers are hermaphroditic, and capable of reproducing with anything except for other changelings. And believe me, some have tried."
"Unfortunately, halflings tend to be near perfect clones of their non changeling parent, with a few changeling quirks thrown in. For example, I could easily get a nice meal if I just kissed you, a buffet if I let you mount me," he said, sticking to his new persona as best he could, as rowdy as possible without actually scaring anyone.
His case was probably helped by the hidden behavioral spells and pheromones that hung around the prisoners' city, raising the prisoners' sex drives and mildly suppressing fear reactions to changelings. They all took about a month to fully set in, which was largely why they were given a month to themselves after being captured, as opposed to say, three weeks, which was plenty of time to get used to living with a free arcade.
The changelings didn't tell their prisoners that, but he had been the queen's confidant, so, again, he knew a lot more about this place than maybe even some of the changelings guarding it did.
"How'd that happen exactly?" Stoic asked.
"It's a long story. Dad found mom after she got kidnapped and dragged all the way here from Las Pegasus. She spent a night at a feast, and someone wasn't in their right mind, if you know what I mean," he said, spinning his hoof around in a circle next to his head. "Long story short, here I am."
"Quarterlings?" the bat pony asked.
"What happens when you accidentally mate with a changeling in disguise," he said quickly. "Gimme another one."
"Queens?" the unicorn asked.
"All dead. Don't worry about it," he said.
"Drones?" Stoic asked.
"Only one left, that changeling you let out of his cell," he said.
Stoic winced at that, and asked, "How do you know it was a drone, or the last one for that matter?"
"Oh, I know him. Nice lay, that guy. Next," he said, mentally patting himself on the back for complimenting himself while leaving room for knowledge of his escape.
The bat pony asked, "I've heard that lust makes changelings drunk. That's bogus, right?"
"No, actually, though your optimism is appreciated," he said.
"Can you transform," the unicorn asked.
"Only the external changeling bits, but I wouldn't right now. There's a fungal infection going around, grows through chitin, nasty stuff," he explained. He pointed a hoof at Stoic, who he guessed was about to ask how he knew so much, and said, "I may have intoxicated that drone I talked about earlier. It's a long story."
Stoic slowly closed his mouth, and asked, "What intimate measurements were you talking about earlier?"
He grinned, and said, "Here's the thing, Stoic, in a month, you're going to wake up, go down there, and a changeling is going to do at least one of two things with you."
The pegasus shuffled his forehooves on the floor uncomfortably, and asked, "I have a feeling you want me to ask what she'll do?"
"No," Fangheart said with a shake of his head.
Stoic relaxed a bit.
"I want you to ask me what it will do," he corrected him, and smiled again. "They're all hermaphrodites, unless they're genderless. But you'll probably see a soldier of some kind when you get there. Maybe it'll give you a lap dance, but it'll definitely put a number on your dignity."
All three stallions looked at each other, and then at him, blushing madly.
"The better question, gentlecolts, is am I going to wait a month for my next meal. Because it's gonna come from one of you, or..." He paused, letting them glance at one another nervously, and smiled slyly. "Ooh, all three at once would be fun," he said, and chuckled.
He blinked, and all but one of his guests had vanished out the door, likely into their own homes, leaving the flustered bat pony to sate his hunger alone. He chuckled at the increasingly uncomfortable stallion, and said, "Let's go see if the fridge has anything you'll eat. I don't let my guests starve, and why don't we chat for a bit? Don't worry. I'm not that hungry, and have yet to make your acquaintance."
Fangheart froze mid stride, his legs stiffening, and his eyes widening. He had to stop thinking about what was in front of him, but he couldn't think of anything else, so he simply stood there as the mare walked past him.
Her coat was the color of coal dust, and, though it lacked the luster of the crystal ponies', still seemed to glitter in his mind's eye like the most carefully polished gem. It was emblazoned with a symbol he knew too well, a brown wooden handle with a blue pickaxe head attached to it. Her mane and tail were woven from the finest veins of iron, rusted over time by the clearest streams, and her irises were made of pure, polished gold.
Her chiseled chest was as solid as the stone she seemed to have been carved from, as if the forces of nature themselves had conspired to craft her from the earth upon which she trod. Her sleek legs moved with such agility, but he had seen them support thrice her weight in stone —and soldiers.
She was an earth pony quarterling, and a fine one at that. Even as she passed, Stoic emerged from his suite in time to watch her go, and said the only thing running amuck in Fangheart's head, "Damn."
Everything in his being commanded swift condemnation of that stallion. No one was supposed to compliment her but him. No one, but no one, was allowed to advance on her, and she was supposed to speak highly of him as he would for her. She could sleep with whomever she pleased, but her words were for him, and his for her.
Stoic looked over at him, and raised an eyebrow, asking, "You okay, dude?"
Fangheart stared back at him, eyes narrowing, ears burning, heart pounding. His wings stiffened at his sides, and he brushed his hoof against the ground, as though preparing to charge. Every fiber in his being wanted to simultaneously speak with the mare, confess his true identity to her, return to a time when he had been proud and brash enough to call her his, and show the stallion who was boss.
He wanted to call out to her, to call back through the mists of time to a day when he had been young, when he had convinced himself that he was both her owner and her property, when he had been bold and happy. But that drone had never cared for anyone but himself, and had never truly cared for her in the way he now loved Twilight.
Twilight. That thought soothed the ache in his chest, and the fire in his eyes, allowing him respite from the longing for a past that never could be, that never was.
Twilight, like the sun as it set over the mountains in the west, and extinguished itself on the crest between two peaks. Like the sky, set ablaze in its absence, so calm and empowered. Such a lovely soul she was, such a kind pony, and such a gentle heart.
He drew in a deep breath, and lifted his hoof across his chest, closing his eyes. He exhaled slowly, lowering his raised hoof, as he had seen Twilight do in times of frustration.
He sighed, and looked back at Stoic, whose slender form was now tensed, prepared to answer any hostile action with swift retaliation. He smiled faintly, and asked, "You are aware that she isn't a pony, right?"
Stoic didn't relax, but did allow the supposed halfling to take several strides towards his dwelling, and said, "She looks perfectly normal to me."
Fangheart was just barely containing a grin, showing only an expression of mild glee, and said, "She's a quarterling. She's many other things, an avid partygoer for one, but the one you should know about first, is whom she's married to."
Stoic leaned against the side of his suite's entryway, and asked, "Changelings have marriages?"
Fangheart nodded, and said, "Keep a few things in mind when I tell you. If you don't like polygamy, stay in your home. If you don't like having another stallion above you, don't sign up for a feast. If you don't like the idea of your bedmates sleeping in another person's bed, don't talk to-" He looked up for a moment, stroking his chin. "-basically anyone."
"In the hive, you are a meal, a source of love. The best ways for you to feed the changelings involve intimacy, and you are a guard, so a lot of the changelings you meet are going to be rough with you. They expect that you'll willingly engage in intimate activities for the purpose of feeding them," he said, audibly licking his lips to make Stoic uncomfortable.
"There are events called feasts, which prisoners can sign up for. She really likes going to them, and she actually met her husband at one of them," he said matter-of-factly, before leaning forward until his nose was a mere centimeter away from Stoic's.
After the guard remained silent for a few seconds, waiting for him to continue, he asked, "Why's that important?"
Fangheart grinned from ear to ear, and paused. He couldn't help but remember that night, at least not the most personally valuable moment of it, when she had first kissed him.
How the entire world had simply fallen away, and how the mind had been doomed to so hopelessly melt in that instant. When his eyes had closed, and her lips had locked with his in the most passionate embrace he had ever known. And her eyes had met his, and her short fur had done so little to cushion the impact of her muscular chest against his.
Oh, how that memory plagued him now.
He bit his lip, and glanced at the floor.
He had to think about something else, anything else. He had to escape the past of a dead drone, and get used to his life as a pony, masquerading as a halfling in the hive. He had to put it behind him, bury it, lock it away, burn everything that could ever remind him of that life.
But he still couldn't stop thinking about her.
What would have happened if he had never been kicked out with his mother? Would Pick have continued to serve him? Would he have become the Matriarch's pet? Would he have lived in tranquility with his wife by his side, until one day, the last drone died, and the changelings finally went extinct? Could Pick have still been his?
And then he remembered —or chose to believe— something; if he came back as the drone she had married...
Bad! Bad! Bad thoughts!
He inwardly cursed himself for even imagining it, not just because he had moved on, but because he had other obligations. In the Hive, having sex was a necessity if he was going to get the public standing he needed in order to overthrow the government, but his motivations behind engaging in such activities with Pick were more personal.
He didn't love her, of course, but he still felt as though he would be betraying Twilight, forfeiting all of her trust in him, all the progress he'd made, all the love she'd fed him and all the kindness she'd shown.
He'd never be able to live with himself, whomever that was, if he simply turned his back on the one person who'd ever truly loved him, whom he had actually, measurably loved.
He sighed forlornly, and, without really thinking about it, answered Stoic's question, "Prisoners can only attend as meals. They stand still while the changelings... Yeah. She married that drone, and..." He wasn't paying attention to Stoic's reaction, though he could at least be amused by imagining what it must have been like.
Fangheart took a deep breath as he came to a stop beside the hexagonal entryway to his destination. He didn't like the idea of what he was about to do, much less the notion that he wanted to do it.
Before he could alert the inhabitant of his presence, a deep, smooth voice sang out from within. It was both familiar and alien to him, and wrought upon his being a perceived comfort, a sensation of both longing for his previous life and disdain for his past self.
It reminded him of his mother, and how she had sang to him on the day of his "wedding", which had really been an excuse for her to call another feast, and spend some private time with her soon to be daughter in-law because, as the saying went, "Either spoil the queen, or let her be spoiled."
Of course, no saying ever said to spoil the drone, but that wasn't the point. The idea was; pander one's superior, or let others win her favor in your place.
He stepped inside, and followed the sound of a familiar song through the expensively decorated suite, until he located Pick.
She was singing clearly, and sliding her hooves across the carpeted floor in time with the more exuberant syllables in her song. She was facing away from him, leading to the awkward situation that arose when she turned around to find a pair of brown eyes fixed on her hindquarters, and a pair of wings standing at full attention.
She continued singing without pause, and slowly slid towards her unexpected guest, "I'm a classic mare. You can call me when you own this scene. I'm a classic mare. Callin' on me like a young filly. I'm a classic mare. Your knees gettin' paved by the street. Elegant, old fashioned mare. Yeah, baby, I'm a classic mare."
She only stopped moving when her golden eyes filled his vision, and her quicksilver tongue thrashed within her open mouth a few millimeters from his nose. She rolled her neck, swinging the smooth metal ring attached to her left ear around, and pecked him on the nose.
He almost screamed.
She smiled coyly, confidently as she always had, and said, "You can drop the disguise, darling."
She silently turned around, and slowly made her way to the lavish bed that he had so many times joined her on, that he had so many times broken with a halfhearted chuckle. He had laughed at the sounds of its black curtains ripping, giggled at the creaks of its dark oaken frame, grinned at the snapping of its boards, and, when it had given way, playfully said, "The queen's never gonna let me have you now."
He permitted his disguise to evaporate in a flash of green light, and the flames of transformation to lick at the smooth surface of his chitin.
And, when that was done, he froze.
Pick didn't react negatively, and instead cooed at his new look.
He looked down at his hooves, and blinked in disbelief at what he saw. His left hoof remained identical to its previous rendition, covered in grey fur, and warm to the touch. His right hoof, on the other hoof —literally— was as black as he knew it to be, dotted with a somewhat familiar arrangement of holes, and mostly chitinous, with the exoskeleton softening and thinning out near the top of his leg.
He quickly took inventory of his body, mildly freaked out. A botched transformation was a dangerous thing, and often difficult to rectify. On the bright side, he looked like a halfling, which fit with his alibi quite well, even if he couldn't understand what had messed up his transformation.
His mane had been replaced with a set of frills, and his left eye wouldn't rotate independently of his skull. One of his upper right teeth had been replaced with a familiar fang, and a smooth, curved horn sat atop his head. His barrel was protected by a series of green armor plates, which were currently rigid in preparation for self defense.
Most disturbing of all, was a pair of elytra that attached to his torso in the limited space between his wings, and clasped to his sides when they encased his feathery appendages. They were similar in coloration to his armor, but with one individual plate each, rather than being composed of several.
He glanced back up at the bed, where Pick was quietly lying on her stomach, holding her lower jaw up with her hooves, and said, "I... I bring a message... from..."
He had a plan, dammit. He had to stick to the plan. He just had to inform her that her former husband was fine, ask a favor of her, and get the heck out.
"Your husband... He's living happily, with a pony, and he's sorry for being such a narcissistic, undeserving..." He trailed off, before punctuating the statement with a word he'd never used with such a forceful tone of voice, "-klir!"
Her eyes narrowed, and her gaze focused on his left eye.
He tried to return to his fully pony form, but struggled to work around the fact that part of his chitinous leg wasn't responding properly, failing to recognize that it was part of a changeling. He forced upon that part of his body an excess amount of his reserve love energy, attempting to basically unclog the misunderstanding in his aura, and only managed to transform after a pair of words had left Pick's mouth that he dreaded.
The name she had spoken echoed through the air, and both creatures remained entirely still.
They both spoke at once, before going silent at the same instant, then offered to let one another speak first.
Silence filled the room, dominated the existence of both creatures involved, and gave way when Fangheart finally said, "He... He wants you to know... that he regrets almost everything about his life, especially failing to be a good, or at least not a terrible husband. He... He hates himself for failing to even recognize you as a person, and promises that he won't let anyone suffer in a place like this ever again."
He held a hoof up to quell her interjection, and choked, "He... He should have been a friend, not just a bedmate, or a lover, or a whiny mouth to feed. He should have treated you with the same- Neigh! -more respect than that which he showed the queen. And he failed to even listen to you on the last night you spent together."
He swallowed the lump in his throat, and stomped his hoof in time with the end of each clause as he said, "He knows that you can't forgive him, that you shouldn't, but that the least he can do is apologize!"
He stood there, taking heavy breaths as he watched Pick's expression for any sign that she saw through his act, that he was busted, and for any indication that she was satisfied with his apology.
She walked towards him, a sympathetic look in her eyes, and sat down in front of him. She craned her neck so her eyes were level with his, and said, "Answer me honestly. I won't tell a soul what you say, or that I even met you. Tell me the truth, and I will gladly do whatever you want me to."
He nodded slowly, looking down at the floor.
"Is your name Love Bite?" she asked him.
He shook his head, and murmured, "Not anymore, I promise."
She nodded solemnly, and asked, "Where's the queen?"
He clamped his eyes shut, and wrinkled his nose. Pinning his ears back, he began to cry, all the while commanding himself not to. He'd never get over Pick if he showed any attachment or trust in her that his alibi wouldn't have. And yet, a tear rolled across his left cheek, which the mare in front of him wiped away with a hoof.
"Hey, hey," she cooed, lifting his chin up with her left hoof. She waited for his eyes to open before she added, "I miss her too."
He sniffled, and held back his sobs by speaking over them, "I... I fell in love... but I still miss you."
She reached her right hoof behind his back, and softly said, "I miss you too."
He closed his eyes again, and thrust his head against her chiseled chest. He allowed his breath to catch and his tears to flow, wrapping his forelegs around the mare he had once spent so many a night with, for the first time, in such a way that was not of a purely physical nature. He had no ulterior motives, he wasn't hungry, and he wouldn't pretend to love her like the husband he should have been.
He was just sad.
He was far away from home, from his best friend, his marefriend, his only companion, the only family he had ever known, and from his late parents, one of whom he had never met, and the other of whom had never really been a mother.
His only family was probably in the process of forgetting him, of moving on, of giving up on him, and he couldn't even scream loud enough to make her hear him. He could almost see her turning away from him, walking away, letting him fade from her mind as he drifted further and further from his commitment to her.
"T-Twilight," he sobbed, as Pick's remaining foreleg added to their hug. "Don't go." He clenched his jaws, and held his breath, trying to will her back to him, to explain why he was even speaking to Pick, why he simply needed it to keep going, that if she gave up, he'd never get home.
He tightened his grip on the mare in front of him, and shook his head against her chest. "Do-o-on't..." he cried, and the blackness surrounding his senses engulfed him completely.
Fangheart chuckled as the white pegasus followed him out of the clinic, and whirled around to face Stoic. Walking backwards, he asked, "So... What'd you think?"
The former guard grumbled as the supposed halfling fell into step beside him, and, head held low to the ground, said, "Well, you could have warned me about the straps."
"They only had to use them because you wouldn't sit still. Really, the more cooperative you are, the more you'll enjoy this life. You're never gonna be happy here unless you learn to take it all in stride. You gotta keep moving, long, fast, and hard," Fangheart insisted, before glancing down at Stoic's newly documented measurements. "Geez! Now I wish you'd been less squeamish when I asked for a meal."
The white stallion's ears perked up, and he lifted his head, blushing deeply as he pieced together his intended meaning. "W-well..." he stammered, and pulled his wings tighter against his sides self consciously. "I... Wait, you can read this?" He lifted up his right hoof, and pointed at the vibrant green characters and symbols carved into his shackle.
Fangheart stumbled for a moment, and said, "Um... my mom sorta... deciphered them in her spare time."
Their bat pony neighbor, who Fangheart had learned was named Honey Moon —seriously— ran up from behind them, and walked alongside Fangheart, asking, "What're you guys talking about! How does their measurement system work? How do I read this?"
Fangheart stopped walking, and whipped his head from side to side, checking to see if any changelings were nearby.
How the changeling texts were written was a closely guarded secret, knowledge held solely by the queen and a few select infiltrators. Odds were, the very changelings who had been engraving their records in the library didn't even know how to write. They were likely receiving the information on how write from an infiltrator, but had no clue what the actual symbols meant. Well, they knew what they were writing, that it was about the prisoners, but not how to write it.
It occurred to Fangheart that he may have been the only living creature in the subterranean city with any knowledge of how the changeling writing system worked.
Not even Pick, smart, clever, and skilled mare that she was, had a clue how to read anything other than the symbols on her earring, which she had worn since the day they'd gotten married.
He still remembered the look on her face, when he had been allowed by the physicians around her, who were busy checking that her measurements were all accurate, to present the torus of gold to her, and the spark of intrigue that had filled her eyes when the cold metal shackle that she'd worn for most of her life was finally removed.
She had been, for lack of a better word, happy.
He jumped when Stoic's unicorn partner, Throwing Spear, shook him free of his reverie.
"Are you okay?" he asked the halfling.
Fangheart nodded, and quickly led his three friends up to his suite, and then shuffled them into his bathroom. Closing the door behind them, he said, "Pardon my choice of venue, but this is the most privacy you'll ever find in this place." He sat down, holding up his right hoof, and rotated it so he could point his other hoof at a particular line of green shapes, which was elevated above the other information on his shackle.
He said, "I don't entirely understand how this works, but, when they translate from Equish to Changeling, they put the direct translation of a certain word into some sort of function, and they put the rest of the information they need through it, they get a seemingly random string of Changeling letters, and that's what they write. They do this with most written things, but the prisoners' numbers need to be understandable at a moment's notice, so every changeling should be able to read this."
Honey Moon leaned forward, his star shaped pupils widening as he did so. "So... They encrypt their written word," he observed.
Fangheart cocked an eyebrow at him, and said, "Pardon?"
The bat pony cursed under his breath, "I wish I had my notebook."
"You can probably buy one at the market, but wha-" Fangheart began, before the door slammed shut behind the aforementioned bat pony. He shrugged after the stallion, and asked the two former guards, "Do you know what he's on about?"
The two remaining stallions looked at one another, before Spear said, "Encryption. I think I remember that from my math class. We were learning about matrixis... matrices."
The door burst open, and Honey Moon slammed it behind him as he sat down beside Fangheart. He held a notebook between his forehooves, and a pencil in his mouth. He mumbled around its eraser as he opened the book, "If we use your name as the key, then I might be able to translate it. Or..." He looked Fangheart in the eye, and asked, "Wait, did you say that your mother cracked this?"
Fangheart looked down, forgetting for a moment that he wasn't the same Fangheart that Twilight had found on the street, that he was supposed to be another lowly halfling, and not an orphaned drone with an unknowing lover half the continent away. He saw, for a brief moment, his mother's face, and then her eyes rolling closed.
He firmly said, "Unless Elysium can spare her a few minutes, she isn't of any use to us here."
No one dared to speak.
After a long, tangibly thick silence, everyone turned to the alleged halfling, as he quietly whispered in as much a singsong way as a whisper can, "This day has been just perfect, the kind of day of which I dreamed since I was small..." He choked on the words, before storming through the remainder of the verse, as though it was the only way he could ever remember the great being he had first heard sing it. "Every 'ling did gather 'round, said I look lovely with my crown-" He sniffled, and wiped his tears away with a hoof. "-What they didn't know is that I have ruled at all."
It was one of his mother's favorite songs, one she had written for the day of her coronation, and had continually modified and amended over the course of her reign. Not an eventful month went by in her reign that she hadn't added to the song. It was, nowadays, the basis for the most sacred of songs in the Changeling world, sung only in small units, a few verses at a time, for it was very long.
It was the piece into which the vast majority of their many battle cries, poems, and historical texts were built. There were other poems, of course, but none as highly acclaimed or popular as the songs of the queen.
He had never been taught the meaning of her words, for he was just a drone. The arts were reserved to be taught to those upon which it would not be lost, such as the soldier caste, and the infiltrators, who definitely needed a diverse set of problem solving skills for their primary job.
While his mother had gone out of her way to raise him in a fairly unorthodox fashion for a drone, she had not taught him everything. She had shown him how to read and write the language of the raw, unchanged translations, but not the subjects the soldiers cited as boring, such as higher mathematics and history.
He clenched his jaw, now on the verge of tears, unable to think of anything but what he was missing, what he was in the process of losing with each passing moment. Every second that went by, Twilight likely grew less trusting in him, and he would have another world of explaining to do if he ever got home.
When he got home, he assured himself. It would happen. He would go home, and everything would be better. He would never leave her side for as long as he lived, not ever again. No force in the world would separate them until death came to their door. No circumstance nor evil conjured in the depths of Tartarus would compel him to leave her.
A whole month had passed, and he had not fed in all those days, not in the most efficient ways anyway. Pick had spared a few hours to chat with him, and get to know one another as friends would. He had felt her friendship, refueling him, revitalizing the part of him he needed to simply bear the pain of losing what he couldn't replace.
His heart still ached, throbbed with the strain of simply continuing to beat without Twilight's love to empower it.
And he had done some good to feed the physician taking his measurements, but that had only drained him, in a way that he was not used to. He was not familiar with the sensation of being used, of being emptied momentarily of his very lifeblood as a pony —or, half of one.
As a drone, he had been at the top of a great food chain. Sure, his mother's own social pyramid had always dwarfed his, and sometimes he had seemed more like a stray brick, just barely free of the responsibility borne by every other participant. He had never given up a shred of his gains. He had never been subordinate to any living creature.
But, he had, on some level unknown to him, enjoyed the infiltrator's reaction. He had willingly offered his services to it, and it had rewarded him with a good word to its superiors, along with a very fine dirty look.
But, no matter how intimately that changeling had touched him, he still felt more distant to it than Twilight, whom he had never touched in an intimate way. They had shared many deep, and heated moments of contact, from a peck on the lips, to a full scale invasion of one another's open maws.
They had discussed the many differences in culture, mating behaviors, and sexual habits between their worlds of origin. He had allowed her to take incredibly extensive notes of his distinct anatomy, and even made a few wise cracks that she enjoyed staring at his haunches a bit too much, but they had never done such intimate and primal things as those he would undoubtedly engage in on a daily basis during his captivity.
And yet, despite his changeling logic, and his knowledge of psychology and physiology, he was still baffled by his unprecedented connection to the lavender alicorn. He had never shown her the full extent of his experience and prowess in the intricacies of sex. He had never expressed himself to her as he had only ever known how.
And yet, despite the lack of such bonding activities, he loved her so much more than he had ever loved anything. He loved her more than the very air he breathed, and he had never engaged in the throws of passion with her. Love didn't make sense, he supposed.
He promised himself, right then and there, that if he ever saw Twilight again, he would correct this error. He would show her the full extent of his love, of his undying longing for her. He was a creature of a single cause, of a responsibility as old as life itself, to continue the grand story of life through any method possible.
Even if he never sired a single child, even if he never became the father his hive had trained him to be, he would at least do what his body was always designed to do, and he would do it with her, with his love, with Twilight.
He felt a soft hoof resting on his shoulder, and glanced at Honey Moon.
His promise wouldn't mean a thing if Twilight didn't trust him. If she had moved on, if she had stopped caring, he would be just as lost as the day they met, when his mother had died, without a purpose, without a home, without a reason to live.
He stood up, and marched through the door.
He had a revolution to start. That was his purpose now. Twilight and tears would have to wait.
Fangheart bolted into the mess hall, looked around, searching for Pick. She had said that she had a job later that day, but he still needed to formally discuss his plan with her.
It was utter chaos. Changelings piled atop one another, ganging up on prisoners three to four at a time. The air was thick and heavy with the scents of sweat, sex, and pungent, overpowering lust.
Intoxicated changelings sat against the walls, passed or waiting out their euphoric highs as the dozen or so prisoners were harvested for all they were worth. So many changelings were gathered in one particular pile, that his search came to an end right then and there.
That was definitely Pick, though he couldn't make out her figure against the black chitin of her hungry mob.
He rolled his eyes, which felt really strange, given how changelings couldn't move their eyes independently of their heads. He muttered, "Great. She must have used that stupid perfume." He was being a hypocrite, since he was more than publicly known for enjoying the scent, particularly when she went into heat, but this really wasn't the time for it.
He froze at the sound of a commanding, authoritative voice, and slowly turned around to face the changeling who sat at his mother's seat, on an elevated platform, with a largely ceremonial table in front of it. The table was only their to give the queen a choice between sporting her ovipositor or preserving what she had, for lack of a better word, called dignity.
An infiltrator, with ghostly blue eyes to match those of every other changeling alive —not counting him— leaned forward over the stone table at the back of the room. Its right shoulder was adorned with two white stalks, one twice as long as the other, and was wrapped in a bundle of thick cobwebs.
It looked old, like the other members of the elite, as the softer chitin around its eyes and joints was wrinkled with age, and that around the holes in its legs had cracked. It narrowed its eyes at him, and spoke in such fluent Equish that it caught him off guard, "Halfling, a halfling has chosen to attend?"
He then realized that everything had stopped. Not a changeling moved, and all eyes were directed at him —aside from the prisoners whose respective pony piles got in the way. He gulped, and bowed his head low to the ground, figuring that he was probably talking to, if not the Matriarch, then someone of incredibly high status.
The infiltrator cocked its head to the side, and said, "Halfling, come, speak."
He reluctantly stepped over incapacitated workers and soldiers, making his way along the wall to his left, and up the short staircase to the nobility's deck, whereupon the rampant orgy resumed in earnest, all at once, as if every changeling knew exactly when to continue.
The infiltrator running the whole affair watched him as he stepped towards it, biting his lip, examining his ragged indigo mane, and misaligned grey feathers. It patted the ground beside his mother's throne with a hoof, and, when he sat down, dug its nose into his mane, inhaling deeply.
It drew its head back, and stated, "You smell familiar."
He tried not to let his flat expression change, and instead glanced down the length of the grand dining room. It was nearly twice as long as it was wide, with the only exits located along the wall to his right. He said, "I have been here before."
It reached a riddled foreleg to his right shoulder, and gently ran the cold pad of its hoof down his spine, causing his wings to bristle against his sides, and his tail to flick. It said, "You have heard of me."
He nodded, and said, "Yes, Matriarch. I heard you were unwell, when I was recaptured."
"The plague is not undefeatable. I am strong, one of the many reasons I possess my current position," it said. It then sighed, pulling the end of his left wing towards it, spreading his avian appendage with a single motion. "Alas, others have been less fortunate, and even I did not escape unscathed." It turned its head to face him, and pointed its left hoof at the bandage on its right shoulder.
"So I've heard," he nodded.
"My personal physician says that you were a rather grateful patient, a uniquely... willing participant," it said, fondly running its hoof along the leading edge of his wing. "I was also informed of your... peculiarities."
He looked straight at the far end of the room, and said, "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
Its tattered wings began to hum, vibrating back and forth in a display of mild amusement. It smiled dryly, which was as good a smile as an infiltrator could produce, and asked, "May I see your numbers?"
He nodded, and, without shifting his gaze, raised his right foreleg across his grey chest, presenting the cold metal binding that fit snugly over the leg below his ankle. "I have not yet begun my service to your... administration," he told the Matriarch, and allowed his gaze to shift towards the group of six or more changelings who all staggered back from Pick, visibly exhausted.
Its humming stuttered, as though it was chuckling, and it said, "Funny. I'd like to call it an administration." It leaned towards him, and whispered into his ear, "But I've barely had the guidance Chrysalis enjoyed."
He flinched, and turned his head to look at the infiltrator. Speaking the queen's name was only done in times of necessity, such as to distinguish between queens, but not in daily conversation. It was wrong, it was blasphemy, it was disrespectful. It wasn't a punishable crime, but it wasn't the kind of thing a plebeian did without expecting some backlash, without implying that the leadership was weak.
"Ah..." it said at length, gently running its hoof through the feathers on his now erected wing. "Forgive me. I was not certain of your relationship to the queen. But she is no longer sacrosanct. Our slaveholder is gone. We are free."
He still wrinkled his nose at the idea, that one could simply speak the names of gods without worry. He had been the queen's confidant, and even he had only ever spoken that name once aloud under her care. He had been understanding to Twilight for using the name out of naïveté. He didn't hold ponies to the responsibility of understanding his culture.
"You must be hungry," the Matriarch told him, and licked its lips suggestively. "Why not take a bite out of your friend, that delightful gem?" It lifted a hoof to point at the dwindling group of soldiers about Pick, and added, "She was the prince's only concubine. You'd be missing out if you didn't at least try."
He nodded, understanding by the tone of its voice that it wasn't a suggestion. "Yes, your..." he asked, leaving the title empty.
"Motherliness," she told him, and added, "I'll be watching. My bed always has room for a more... seasoned meal."
"Yes, your motherliness," he said, folding his wing at his side, and licked his lips, trying not to think of how this infiltrator would be watching him indulge his friend/former concubine, from his mother's seat at the table. He had to consciously suppress his gag reflex at the thought. He wasn't new to the concept of being judged on his prowess. It was what a drone did: show off, charm the queen, buck until her brains fall out.
That was that, but now he was performing for a common infiltrator, an old one, and a powerful one, but a plebeian nonetheless.
He reminded himself that he was currently of a lower status than Pick, which had never been true before. Not only was he a new, inexperienced prisoner, but a halfling, a simple, bland halfling.
Some halflings did have their own flavors and flare to show, but no one knew if he had any such gift, not even him.
Grinning as he made his way down the stairs onto the mess hall floor, he decided that he'd just have to find out. Orders were orders, after all.
Pick sat down on her side of the booth, groaning as the aches and pains that accompanied her line of work began to manifest, and glanced at Fangheart as she dropped her saddlebag onto the spot next to her.
He hadn't stopped blushing in the entire span of time since they'd given the Matriarch a show in the mess hall, though the forest green glow on his cheeks was harder to see in the dimly lit restaurant she'd dragged him to. He wasn't smiling, nor was he particularly proud of what he'd done, but he had been following orders, and he was at least satisfied with the results. His ears were pinned back against the sides of his head, and his wings were resting uncomfortably at his sides.
She grimaced at him, and said, "Dammit, I can't believe she's gonna replace me with you."
He couldn't help but smile at that. "Well, well, calm down. I'm not stealing your job. She only said that I'd take over for you on Sundays."
"But Sunday's swimming day," she groaned, and dropped her head onto the table.
"Look, I'm sorry I turned you into a merpony that one time. I would've done it again if you'd said something about enjoying it," he told her, smirking. "It's not my fault you didn't tell me what you liked. I'm sure I would've let you drag me to one of the water caves every other hour if you'd really wanted. Besides, you can just reschedule the whole thing. What's wrong with say... Tuesday?"
"Tuesday's the only day I have off," she explained, not looking up, and slid her bag across the surface of the table for her forehead to rest on.
"And now you have Sunday off, so there," he declared, leaning back against the booth, and picked up a menu from the rack to his left. "Look, it's not my fault that she liked what she saw."
"Yeah, it kinda is," Pick argued.
"She ordered me to do it, and so I did. You'd rather I flunk my only chance at a quick rise to the top than remind you what you're missing out on?" he asked her, raising an eyebrow at her. "If I do recall, you got married after just a year of service."
"I worked my flanks off for a whole year, and now you're gonna march in and steal my spot on her bed, after less than a day of work," she said. "I practiced in my spare time. I spent so many nights with my guests. Do you know how many hours I spent trying to make my tongue wrap around things? My tongue didn't always do that, because, y'know, I'm not a changeling."
His blush returned, deeper this time, and he said, "Well... I learned a lot from you."
"My point remains, you just marched back in here and stole my job," she told him, straightening out her back.
He shook his head slowly, and said, "Well... I haven't technically stolen the entire thing yet. I'm just taking over for you once a week. Calm down, it's just one day of the week. It's one less day you have to work."
"But I like my job."
"That's not my problem," he said defensively.
She groaned, and hissed, "Buck you."
He raised an eyebrow at her, and asked, "Again? There are kids all over the place. I mean, I'll do i-"
She leaned forward, and placed the underside of her hoof against his lips, shutting him up. "Fine. Bug you," she corrected herself.
He pushed her hoof aside, and nodded, "You are being pretty annoying."
"Shut up."
He sighed, allowing a faint smile to form on his lips, and glanced to his right, where a yellow unicorn dressed in an apron stood, looking from side to side between her two customers. After they ordered, and the waitress left, he took a deep breath.
If this went wrong, he'd be snuffed out before his plans could gather steam. If Pick wasn't on board with his plan, she'd probably rat him out to the Matriarch's face —or haunches, depending on the circumstance. He was putting everything on the line, and he was either going to pay for his mistake with his life, or get the most powerful prisoner on his side.
He leaned forward across the table, and spoke in a hushed tone, "Pick, I know a place where the changelings can live, where they will never need another prisoner, and can live safely under pony rule."
"The local population is already familair with changelings, and anyone old enough to remember anything at all knew at least one changeling. The princess who runs the place allowed me to sneak a stray worker into her kingdom, and is personally taking care of it," he whispered, not taking his eyes off of Pick.
She raised an eyebrow at him, and slowly set her menu down, before looking around carefully. She leaned forward, and whispered, "You sound like the Matriarch when she started her revolution."
He stretched out his right wing across the table, something he'd often seen young pegasi do when stealing a kiss without the knowing of the parents —they had always looked like idiots, and gotten caught, but he'd rather be accused of stealing a kiss than plotting against the government. "The Crystal Empire hasn't been around for the last millennium. It was dualy inhabited by ponies and changelings before the latter group left during a military coup," he said.
"How far away is that?" Pick asked him, her voice absolutely dripping with skepticism.
"North of Canterlot," he admitted. "Look, I need someone powerful and well respected to be the figurehead of this movement, so, naturally, you were my first choice."
She took a deep breath, and said, "You're nuts."
"Yes, you are quite familiar with them, but I need an answer," he shot back.
She sat still for a moment, either thinking it over more carefully or internally groaning at his joke.
Just in case she's missed it, he said, "It's a pun on you're, the contraction of you and are, and the word your, the second person possessive pronoun, along with the adjective, nuts, and the slang word for a-"
She nodded, and said, "-Yeah, I got it, I got it. Allow me to reiterate." She cleared her throat quietly, and said, "You're insane."
He gulped, and said, "So... Um... You're out, I suppose."
She stroked her chin with a hoof, and said, "Well... I'll have to think about it."
He nodded, folding his wing against his side, and said, "Yeah. I suppose that makes sense."
A distinctive clacking sounds filled the restaurant, whereupon both hybrids turned their heads to search for its source. It was followed immediately by a vehement exclamation, "Yes!"
A group of three griffons was gathered around a billiards table, with the two eldest ones each holding a pool cue. One was fairly old, enough that, if he died right then and there, it would be said that he'd had a good run, but he had another few years ahead of him. He was of a fairly standard complexion, eagle head, striped tiger body, blue feathers around his eyes and on the tuft above his forehead.
"Six-Pockets," Fangheart sneered, the very sight of the griffon and the clacking of billiard balls drawing him back into memory.
He remembered the end of the tournament like it was a dream, the white fog of nostalgia obscuring the edges of his vision, the blue dust of chalk drifting down to the ground, the griffon's smile as the drone lined up his shot. He remembered the very spot at which he'd hit the cue ball, just down from the center, and a bit to the right, attempting to keep it from continuing after it glanced off the eight ball, which was a scant few centimeters away, so it wouldn't sink one of his opponent's balls.
He remembered the griffon's firm talon shake, the pat on the back for making it so far in the tournament, the hearty laugh, and the odor of scotch on his breath. He remembered watching out the corner of his eye, the griffon's son running up to embrace him.
His eyes wandered to the griffon's companions, and instantly recognized the aforementioned son, named Eight-Ball, now a handsome young adult in his own right. He was half eagle, half tigon, as his mother had the lioness half required to give him the cool orange and tan coat for his stripes to rest on.
The feathers around his ocean blue eyes and the tuft above his head were a shade of light grey. His dextrous tail curled as his father dropped the white cue ball into his taloned hand, and turned to consider the scattered arrangement of balls atop the green table.
Gripping the edge of the table with black and gold striped talons, by which he held himself up so he could watch the game unfold, was a hybrid fledgling. His left eye was an unmoving globe of vibrant blue, and the immature feathers around it were edged with black chitin, unlike the keratin that made up his elders' feathers.
His left wing was a mosaic of black and green feathers, against the standard brown that made up its right counterpart. He also had a smooth black horn, which curved back from the front of his scalp.
His orange and white fur had horizontal black stripes on it, not unlike that of Eight, which led Fangheart to presume that he was looking at the third generation of pool champions. He guessed from his size that he was three years familiar with the world around him, though he was larger than a normal griffon of that age, as changelings and their hybrid offspring grew more quickly than the other creatures that inhabited this world.
Halflings tended to learn more slowly when compared to the soldiers, though their non changeling parents never seemed to worry about it, even said that they learned faster than the other children.
The fledgling's unfixed eye darted from side to side across the table, then locked onto his father's cue stick. He followed the white cue ball with his gaze as it knocked other balls aside, before stopping just short of a corner pocket, transferring the last of its momentum to a striped ball, which completed the journey by rolling over the edge of the hole.
Eight smirked as he caught the halfling's gaze, and slunk around the table, ruffling the plumage on the child's head as he passed, careful not to touch his horn. He glanced up at his father, who was sipping a steaming cup of coffee from a black mug with a white spot on the front, in which the number eight was placed, and said, "You're losing your touch, old bird."
Six slowly set down the mug on the table's edge, not looking away from his son, and said, "Don't tempt fate, kid."
Eight rolled his eyes, and placed his foot on the corner of the table behind the cue ball. He spread out two of his talons, forming a right angle between them, where he rested the cue. He closed one eye, and drew the stick back a bit, before smoothly sliding it back and forth a few times as he adjusted the angle at which it would hit the cue ball. Suddenly, he struck the ball with the blue tip of his cue, and stood up a few moments later.
The white ball rolled across the table, making a wide arc as it narrowly slipped between other balls. It forcefully clacked against the blue striped two ball, which sank into a nearby pocket.
All three griffons watched the cue ball intently as it glanced off a solid ball, and then rolled towards a corner pocket. It almost stopped, but then fell over the edge with the last of its momentum. The room filled with a familiar clamor as the ball navigated its way through the network of tunnels within the table.
Eight sighed heavily as he looked down, shaking his head.
Six grinned at his son, and said, "Don't tell Lady Luck who she's dancing with." He produced the white cue ball from the end of the table, and cast his grandson a knowing smile. "Let him think he's winning, and you can't lose."
Fangheart looked back at Pick to avoid Eight's gaze as it swept over the surrounding tables, and told her, "Don't worry about me. I'm not interested. Besides, I don't have any money."
Pick raised an eyebrow at him, unconvinced, but said, "That never stopped you from offering... other things as rewards."
He glanced up at her, and said, "Well... I'm not that guy anymore. I don't just... There are minors all over the place... I'm not giving Eight another holejob. He likes it too much. It's unsettling."
She shook her head, and said, "Look, you're getting hungrier and hungrier. What'd your marefriend do to me if I told her that you starved to death because you wouldn't swallow your pride?"
He grumbled something under his breath, and hemmed thoughtfully, looking down. As he became more engrossed in his thoughts, the faint semblance of a smile touched his lips.
Though he kept his head pointed at the table in front of him, Pick could see a familiar spark appearing in the areas around his eyes. She could just feel his gaze locking onto the cue ball as it clacked and bounced off its numbered counterparts and the cushions lining the edge of the table.
He lifted his head up a little bit, his smile growing contorted, bordering on one of madness. His right ear flicked once, then twice, and he leaned forward to tell his friend, "Just for the love of the game. That'll be enough for me."
Pick argued, "You don't have any money. Your only option is t-"
He held up his right forehoof, presenting to Pick a small brown bag, and gently juggled it in his hoof, letting its contents jingle to prove her wrong.
Pick's ears stood up, and she immediately reached a hoof below the table, digging through the contents of her bag. She narrowed her eyes at him, and asked, "How did you-"
"-You really need to stop carrying this with you while you're working," he explained, now looking straight at her. He dropped the small bag onto the table between them, and gingerly pulled the crumpled mouth of the bag open. He produced three gold coins, and held them in an upturned hoof as he slunk out of his seat.
Pick swiftly pulled the bag over to her side of the table, and yanked the drawstrings out, closing it, before dropping it into her saddlebag. She grumbled to herself as she watched the pegasus make his way towards the trio of griffons. She smiled, and said, "This'll be fun."
Fangheart didn't really think about what he was doing, for he couldn't even be said to be doing anything. His senses still fed qualia to him, allowing him to see and hear and smell the many things around him, the small forms of the white hatchlings in front of him, the looming weight of the nursery's curved ceiling, and the chirping pleas for attention that followed the sounds of eggshells cracking open, and the pained grunts of incubators in labor.
He was a servant now, as his body obeyed the commands of the hive mind, as his hooves gently lifted the young changelings from the ground, and hugged them to his grey chest as he carried them to the entrance of the nursery, where workers waited for the children, and would carry them to their respective homes.
The worker hatchlings would be carried off to a new nursery, where their restricted brains would hold the reigns of choice for a month or so, learning the shapes and patterns they would need to understand by playing with one another, until they were called upon by the hive mind.
The soldier grubs would be brought to a separate section of the hive, where they would be taught the fine arts, and the sciences known by the nobility, the heroes who had dedicated themselves to the hive for decades, even ceturies, who would teach them for as long as they could be controlled. Then they would grow, and they would desire.
They would want food, and closeness, and passion, and their lust for flesh and blood would grow until someone finally fell over from the pain that came with the rapid, even violent final stage of their development. They would become unmanageable mating machines, and rut anything that moved or breathed, including some of their worker brethren, often whilst they were unconscious.
His eyes saw, and his ears heard, but he was not in charge. The use of his body and control of his actions was entirely held by the hive.
And for hours he worked, though time seemed to lose meaning. His body grew tired, and he felt the monotony of his task taking its tole.
After what felt like days, he requested relief through a few simple thoughts.
His body snapped back into his control, and he looked around, having mostly ignored the information his senses provided. He felt strange. Walking took some getting used to, and he missed the strange sensation of flying, though he had never learned how to use his bulky feathered wings.
He spotted a worker nearby, panting from the exertion of its task, and the few grubs at its side, with white segmented bodies, and eyes that would one day open for the first time. He staggered towards it, and smiled warmly at the newly relieved incubator.
Its eyes were empty, cold, and the same ghostly blue shade as any other changeling. It didn't see him until he was standing right in front of it, and even then, did nothing to react. It was without instruction now. It had completed the only task the hive mind had given it before disconnecting.
He propped his back against the wall next to the worker, and reached a fur covered hoof to gently stroke the back of its neck. He listened to its haggard breath, the beat of its spent heart, and caught it in his forelegs before it could fall over. He gently set it down on its side, with its head in his lap, and watched as the young it had borne were gathered by the nearby workers.
He watched its eyes flutter closed, and smiled at it. He tried to imagine all that it had sacrificed for its hive, all the pain it had gone through in the previous few hours, but couldn't. He'd never given birth before, and he didn't feel like he'd ever want to.
His thoughts wandered to the changeling he'd escorted to The Crystals Empire, and that medicine Nurse Redheart had given her. It had taken away her pain.
He focused his attention on the sleeping form in his lap, and wondered aloud, "What if... What if you had some of that?" He pondered this for a moment, and then considered the gains that could be made if the hive could study pony medicine. He didn't know exactly how effective their methods were, but he knew that a pony had healed a worker that he had considered past the point of no return.
The worker's head shifted a bit, and it snuggled more closely to him, pressing its nose into his fur.
He could... save more of them. There was a museum, a room as large as a warehouse full of items from the pony world. Surely, some useful medical supplies could be salvaged from it. Surely, some prisoners were trained in medicine. Surely they could learn to practice their science on the sick and wounded changelings that grew more numerous by the day.
Not only was an opportunity to save lives staring him in the face, but so to did a potential for popularity. If he could make himself the figurehead of such a movement, then he could win over the soldiers, and perhaps even the nobles of the Matriarch's court, who were likely suffering the worst of the plague's effects.
After a short rest, Fangheart took to the street, conversing with anyone who identified as a doctor or surgeon. He didn't take notes, and he didn't ask about medicine, but asked if they could spare time and thought for the changelings who were dying en masse. Most of them agreed to support him, and others said things like, "I'm not that kind of doctor."
He then spoke to Pick about the revolution, who, again, said that she needed more time to think, whereupon he was left with a decision to make. He could either lead the movement himself, or find someone else to speak with the Matriarch and the high ranking officials he needed on his side.
He had drafted a bill with Honey Moon's aid, and sent it to the council of heroes and retired infiltrators, inscribed on a clay plate. He had everything planned, and needed only a trusted person to defend it before the senate.
In the end, he marched into the courtroom by himself. He had spent many a day at his mother's side, hearing the cases of many bills and patrons, but now, his mother's throne was occupied by her usurper, and he stood before the Matriarch, whilst the council of aging heroes sat at their large stone desks behind her.
And so, he stood before the old, acclaimed changelings who would hear his case out, and decide whether or not he should be taken seriously. He cleared his throat, and said to them, "I have witnessed the miracles of pony medicine firsthoof. I watched a worker, with stalks covering its stomach like fur, stand up after a day of rest and treatment, and it walked. It flew, it could disguise itself. I had deemed it mere hours from death, and watched it live.
"There is medicine without parallel, that can put creatures into a great sleep, from which they will emerge after a chosen period of time, and cannot awake from disturbance. One can open a patient's body with a blade, and they will not wake. They can take away all pain, prevent further infection, and bring the plague to its knees within its host.
"To deny your people this technology and salvation would be to deny the value of their very lives. To deny them this would be to spill the blood of thousands more who might yet be saved. To deny the potential possessed by this medicine would be inexcusable!" He stomped his hoof for emphasis.
"I do not espouse the notion of disregarding our ancient ways, nor do I demand that you pass sovereignty to the many doctors and nurses that I have assembled, but that the lives that pass as we stand here are worth more than any hubris and pride, or the traditions of many a millennia, for it can and will prevent the deaths of every other changeling who could otherwise be working, who could be doing you good, who could bring to you the finest love on a velvet pillow, decorated with silk and gold. The longer we wait and stall, the more lives are lost than need not be so!"
The court was stunned. This was more a pointed defense of a bill than had been seen since the days of the darkling epidemic. Not since the time of rampant and uncontrollable revolts had such fiery words been loosed upon the highest court. This was hardly legal rhetoric. This was an accusation of negligence on their part. They weren't about to let some prisoner guilt trip them into anything, much less overhauling the ways of old.
But the Matriarch simply smiled, and, when a noble sitting a few meters away from her shouted for the halfling's arrest, laughed. She laughed like this whole thing was some grand ruse, like the very gates of Elysium had been thrown open before her while she still lived.
Some noble behind her rose from its seat, and, lifting a hoof to the ceiling, which had a purple cloth wrapped around it, declared, "You come before us with the expectation that we will pass your legislation simply because you claim that it will solve all of our problems?"
He closed his eyes, slowly shaking his head, and said, "No. You have a plethora of problems, many of which are beyond the scope of anything one person can achieve."
Another noble stood as its coworker took its seat. This one had a purple gem hanging from a string around its neck. "Then why should we trust you?" it asked Fangheart.
The Matriarch was leaning forward on her throne now, all but stroking her chin at the halfling's proposal. She seemed engrossed in her own thoughts, though ones that likely bore meaning on the situation at hoof.
Fangheart still didn't open his eyes, though a smile began to form on his lips as he considered this last question.
Another changeling rose from its seat, but the Matriarch held up a hoof to silence it.
"Riddle me this: how do you plan to enjoy your opulent lifestyles when the lives lost to the plague begin to outweigh the dwindling ranks of the eggs that yet remain, or after you succumb to its effects?" he asked.
No one could really argue with that.
In the very back of his mind, he allowed himself a slight indulgence in pride, but a little voice told him, "And that's how you steal the spot(light) in the queen's bed."
The buzz of wings and clanging of metal rang out across the museum. Workers and able bodied volunteers flew up and down the mountains of junk, scanning their surfaces for gas canisters, medical supplies, and surgical masks.
Recorders stood at the bottom of these piles, tracking each of their designated searching parties in their field of view, marking down on a clay tablet how many of each item their groups collected as they were flown down.
A doctor named Florence Nightingallup ran back and forth between the gathered items. She put examples of each item they would need in a line for a focus group of workers, who would relay the patterns and shapes of these objects to the hive mind. That way the searching parties could get realtime updates on what to look for.
Florence sat down in front of the group, and began spouting off information on what each piece of equipment did and what she needed to be done with them.
Fangheart sat behind her for a moment, then, without interrupting her speech, made his way over to the first object, a large, white and green machine with small wheels underneath it, and gently rolled it away from the other items. He went back, and then did the same thing for all of the others, until each object had at least two meters between itself and its nearest neighbor.
Florence paused to look over at him, and then raised both of her eyebrows as he began to push the members of her audience into a circle around the objects, with her in the center.
When that was done, he looked his work over, and then took a seat behind one of the workers.
Florence asked, "What was that for?"
He leaned forward against the worker, which didn't react aside from applying its own weight to keep them from falling over, and said, "They were so close together that the hive mind might have mistaken the collective arrangement of objects for the shape we need to identify. If you don't let them see what the objects look like from several angles, they'll only recognize those objects in that configuration."
She blinked at him, then said, "Ah. I see. Is that all?"
He nodded, then traced the end of the worker's frills with the tip of his nose, allowing a small trickle of love energy to pass between them. He paid close attention to what the doctor had to say, then joined a searching party himself.
Fangheart's mind was slowed, dragged down by his exhausted body and the deficit in love energy he was running for a brief moment. Then, like water being poured from one half of a tub to another over a wall that had been lifted away, what excess energy the Matriarch didn't need bounced back to him, and so it went as the energy found equilibrium.
It lasted no more than a fraction of a second, but it left him drained, and he felt hunger gnawing at his stomach even after the connection through which he fed her snapped.
So he lay there, stunned, tired, used, but glad that he had gone through with the act despite the moral questionability. Circumstance was a temperamental beast, and he had to do what he could if he could preserve hope.
The Matriarch's blue eyes drifted closed, leaving him alone in the darkness of his mother's private quarters. It reached out a vile appendage to take hold of his mind, as fear and abandonment began to claw and scratch at his limited fortitude.
He was no stranger to fear, and, while he had never been so heartlessly mocked for his fear as some young ponies might have been, he knew that every soldier, every bedmate he'd ever had, even the queen herself had thought him lesser for his weakness.
And, though his mother's usurper lay less than a meter from his side, he could feel it creeping in, sinking through the fur and the skin of his lies, through the pony he tried to be. It knew him, and when it found its way to his bones, he was left alone, without light, without warmth, with nothing but the repeating sound of his client's breath and heartbeat.
His teeth began to chatter, a reflex he had never been told of, and thus, he failed to understand where the sound of bones clattering against one another was coming from.
He knew that there was nothing, nothing that could harm him. He had always been safe.
But he had only been safe because of his mother, because he was important, because he was necessary for the continued existence of the creatures that surrounded him. But now, as the cold and the dark assaulted his mind, he was just as vulnerable and just as weak as the pegasus who had collapsed in the street for Twilight to find.
Something moved, and he gulped, still not allowing his eyes to close, as if the instant he looked away from the plain black wall he knew to be there, some spectre, something would make itself a meal in him.
He missed having eyes that could glow. He had always used them for things like this. He had known that it was considered unhealthy for a drone to make separate uses of his features than to charm the queen, but he was the last drone, so who exactly was going to hold him to that standard?
A smooth, cold object touched his back, and the Matriarch's tender voice soothed his nerves, "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you did some research on me."
He felt himself blush in the blackness. He had asked Pick for some advice about the Matriarch. He believed in making use of his resources, and this was a task of high importance to him. If he could gain more publicity through the reigning monarch, he'd have a much better chance of winning over the populace.
All he had to do was convince the court that he was just as viable an alternative to the Queen as the Matriarch. If she lost her backing, and he was better liked, he might be able to win a war before a first shot could be fired.
"I..." he said. He could have sworn she was smiling.
Her chest pressed against his back as she wrapped her forelegs around him, and she carefully trailed her pointed fangs down the back of his head, brushing his mane with her well sized incisors. "Don't worry. I like a meal that can play along with my games," she told him once her fangs had reached his shoulder blades.
"Only because I've played before. I'm sure that any of your guests would play if they just understood the game in question," he told her, trying not to let his wings speak for his awareness of where her fangs were headed, though he didn't worry for long, as she extended his right wing with the use of her horn.
He allowed himself to find solace in the soft blue glow of his mistress's aura, leaving his mind more focused on the way her fangs were tracing the leading edge of his now spread wing.
He must have let his relief show somehow, because she paused at the tip of his first primary feather to ask, "Do you not enjoy the dark?"
He shrugged, and said, "I don't dislike it. I am glad it exists, for light cannot show through a world of light."
Her frown was visible thanks to the shadows her forehead and other facial features cast on one another. "You're avoiding the question, dear. You can tell me anything," she told him.
He didn't dignify her with a physical reaction, and kept his eyes fixed on the wall that he could now see. "I am not content to spend my entire life without light," he said, which was as close to an admittance that anyone was ever going to get out of him. Even Pick had never been verbally informed of his fear, though she had probably inferred from his behavior that he wasn't as strong of will as his mother.
She nodded slowly, and a part of the wall behind the headboard glowed with blue light for an instant, before it was overpowered by a calm, warm flame. A candle was lit on the nightstand, and its small, timid flame flickered, wavering above the wick. "Thank you for being honest," she told him, and released the wing she'd been playing with, though it didn't move from where she'd left it.
After a few seconds, she chuckled, "Round two?"
He smiled to himself, and said, "I have no more love to give, your motherliness." Even now, that title left a bad taste in his mouth.
"That doesn't mean we can't play a bit more," she argued.
He knew that this wasn't as much an order as the last time she'd suggested he do something, but he got the sense that anything he did to please her was worth more that just a few brownie points.
Her hoof turned his head, and lifted his chin towards her. "Besides, I won't ask my closer companions to call me something they find so..." Her frills extended, and her wings hummed for a moment as she searched his eyes for the right word. "...narcissistic," she finished, and smiled coolly as his eyes widened in shock.
He was caught a bit off guard that the ruler would allow anything to be spoken of her that could denigrate her moral standing, even more so that she would call herself something like that. While making a joke at one's own expense could make one seem more appealing, it also allowed some to consider her a weak leader, whereas stifling any negative thoughts towards oneself could either extinguish rebels or harden their resolve to fight.
She was either a genius, or entirely unprepared for her job.
Maybe he was biting off more than he could chew by going against her. Maybe her familiarity with the plebeian class would prevent him from ever garnering the support he'd need to maintain supplies and logistics during a war.
He had to try.
Maybe if he at least pitched the idea of a massive relocation to the Matriarch, he could appear to those in court to be the more reasonable candidate, seem willing to use diplomacy before resorting to the extremities of violence.
But then, if he mentioned that he was in cahoots with Princess Cadance, his case would be thrown out without further consideration, maybe even branded as treasonous. Not to mention the fact that only so many changelings could make it so far north on their own. He'd have to explain how he'd met her on good terms, possibly even rat out the worker he'd escorted to The Crystal Empire.
He couldn't risk exposing his identity just for a low chance of an early advantage.
He'd have to gather followers the old fashioned way; hard work and transparency, combined with endorsements by popular public figures. Pick came to mind immediately, as did some of his other former bedmates —he was popular. He'd have to pay a few of them a visit —without being sniffed out, for a change.
Then there was the question of raw firepower. The closest things to weapons he'd ever seen a changeling use outside of biting was to sharpen the leading edge of their wings on rocks, and then using them as makeshift melee weapons. Some changelings had gained such conscious control of the holes in their legs that they could secrete a veritable arsenal of noxious substances.
But what about him? He'd never been trained for combat. He'd never touched a sword. And, heck, he still didn't know how to fly with the wings he'd lied his way into using for the entirety of his stay here.
His thoughts focused around one particularly ingenious diamond dog he'd spent a few nights with, and a blueprint he'd dismissed as unnecessary at the time. But, now that he had need of weapons, and a whole world of anesthetic available to him, he found its implementation feasible.
Fangheart inhaled slowly, deeply, gathering the mental fortitude he'd need to maintain his act during the explanation he'd have to provide about how he knew what the weapon he needed was, and why he needed it.
The tunnel that led to the tinkerer's workshop was damp, and Fangheart didn't appreciate the sensation of his bones chilling as he walked.
He rounded a bend in the tunnel, and came to a very abrupt stop, before taking three steps back. He stood still for a moment, blinking blankly at the dark, yawning interior of the cave. The sunlight had faded away for the most part, and the only torch in sight was bolted to the wall on his right.
He didn't remember this bend, and the torchlight only reached so far into the abyss of the cave. The cave had used to be a scant few meters into the ground. Perhaps more diamond dogs had moved in with the inventor, and he'd been forced to expand, but, no, he had always been an outcast.
Maybe he'd escaped from the hive. Diamond dogs lived in caves, so maybe they dug them, rather than simply inhabiting any they stumbled across. Maybe the tunnel just spiraled down so far that all of the light that kept the workshop lit got choked out.
Maybe if he just stumbled his way forward, he'd find the light eventually.
He gulped at the blackness.
He doubted that anyone in their right mind would ever design such a thing.
His halfling form had a horn, so he could use that, but, in doing so, he'd expose a patch of chitin for the plague to infect. He wanted to keep such risks to a minimum. Besides, the diamond dogs didn't have magic, so they wouldn't design a home that required such powers to access.
He considered the torch on the wall out of the corner of his eye, then stepped towards it.
The inventor had always enjoyed adventure stories. Fangheart couldn't exactly remember what his favorite series had been called. Daring To Do, maybe. He had enjoyed going on rants about secret passages, hallways, and compartments.
He lifted his hoof to the torch's metal sconce, and brushed it over the horizontal bar to which the wooden cone was bolted, pushing aside the dust that had accumulated over time.
As he set his hoof back down on the floor, he smiled at the six cursive letters that had been engraved onto the sconce, and read aloud, "Diesel, you sly dog."
He hooked his hoof around the back of the torch, and gently pulled it down an eighth turn.
There was a loud click, and Fangheart stepped back from the wall as the sound echoed through the cave.
Stones ground against one another, and a rectangular section of the wall to Fangheart's left receded, dropping dust and sand as it went. Similarly sized blocks did the same, sliding back into the wall, and then off from side to side.
A few seconds later, Fangheart stood before a well lit passage, and smiled to himself as the sounds of machinery and stones died down.
He stepped forward, and cautiously made his way down the tunnel.
Barely had he taken five steps than the entrance closed behind him, prompting him to freeze where he stood, and glance over his withers. He gulped, and, slowly trotting forward, called out to through the tunnel, "Hello?"
A gruff voice, one of a creature engrossed in its work, answered, "What do you want this time?" There was a clang, a hiss, and someone saying, "Shi-" A loud pop echoed throughout the caves.
Fangheart stepped out of the narrow passageway, down a pair of steps, and into a —barely— more open cavern. He said, "Um... Is this a bad time?"
The room was a mess, stray mismatched arrangements of wires and metal shapes strewn about the floor. A cloud of black smoke dissipated from one side of the room, leaving exposed the lumbering frame of a diamond dog, who, upon turning around, was revealed to have a thick layer of soot covering his front half, and a blackened ring of ash surrounding the middle of the desk he'd been hunched over.
The canine's eyelids opened, bringing the soot away from his yellow and blue eyes with them. He dusted himself off with his heavy forepaws, and straightened his loose-fitting vest, which was seaweed green, and had pockets filled to the brim with tools of various sizes and functions. He was also wearing a black collar with emerald green characters and jewels on it; the equivalent to the shackles worn by pony prisoners.
The diamond dog's head shook so rapidly that it became a blur for a moment, then pointed at the pony standing at the front of the room.
Fangheart cleared his throat, and said, "Hello, Diesel. I'm Fangheart, and in need of a particular invention of yours. I've heard many things about your work, and um..." He trailed off as smoke began to rise from behind the diamond dog. "Your tail's on fire."
Fangheart stood quietly behind a wall sized window, watching listlessly as the pony doctors instructed their first patient.
The worker's stomach was heavily laden with a few of what would likely be the final clutch of eggs. It was still connected to the hive mind, but the pain was beginning to manifest in its expression. Its lips were curling back, eyelids twitching, ears pinning to the sides of its head.
It had just managed to lay down on its back before the hive mind cut it off, when it began to whimper.
Fangheart winced in sympathy, and turned his head to look away from the whole thing as one of the doctors inserted a needle into the incubator's leg.
He glanced at his right foreleg, trying to imagine himself undergoing a similar experience. He'd spoken to a group of surgeons about installing Diesel's weapon, and knew that he wouldn't experience any pain during the actual procedure, but just couldn't work himself up to the idea of having something pierce his skin.
His ears pricked up at the muffled sounds of kicking and hissing, and he gulped as his eyes focused on the now flailing incubator. He had always known that workers weren't capable of moving without the hive mind's aid, but, considering the worker he'd transported north, and this incubator, it appeared as though intense pain changed that.
He spotted another pair of blue eyes in the periphery of his vision, and found himself beholding his employer of sorts.
She wasn't moving. She wasn't reacting. She was barely breathing. She was simply staring at the scene before her.
The Matriarch simply watched as the surgeons worked to calm their patient down.
He stepped towards her.
Her chest expanded for a moment, before expelling a long, heavy sigh, the kind only produced by sages, mares who've seen more of the world than most fillies ever want to, and her jaw alone moved to say, "You know, when I overthrew the Queen, I wanted to stop this from happening. I wanted to ensure that none of us would bear the pain of the Queen's malice. I wanted to erase the damage she'd done to the Hive."
He blinked, suppressing a remark that the Queen was anything but malicious, and that anyone who espoused otherwise could say so to her dead body, the body of the Queen they had killed. He believed that anyone who said those things didn't actually think them true, but claimed to for the sake of assassinating her character.
The Matriarch cleared her throat, shuffling where she stood, likely reading his emotions like an open book. She continued, "When I applied for my first assignment, the Queen told me that I was too weak to serve on the field. I had never been the most able bodied of my class, and an unfortunate accident had rendered my left hind leg useless."
Fangheart approached her, very slowly, cautious of what his "queen" would do to him if she could pick up any more of his reactions.
She didn't acknowledge him, but kept talking, "I went back after it'd healed, hoped that she'd give me another chance, but I... I was brash, and I suppose my temperament rubbed her the wrong way. She told me that I could still do the hive some good, provided I was willing to turn around and lift my tail up."
He froze dead in his tracks, his left forehoof caught in midair, and he looked down at the floor, searching it for something to say. It wasn't an entirely new idea, using soldiers to incubate eggs, but it was rather unorthodox.
"I wasn't too warm for this idea, but, knowing better than to disobey direct orders, did so," she told him, the frills on the back of her neck extending a bit. "Many months later, I wished that I'd told her off. There is no other pain, not after that, that can be considered traumatic. There was no such thing as escaping the pain. There were no medicines to make the experience any less horrible."
He set his hoof down, and hung his head, genuinely empathetic towards his mother's usurper. He murmured, "I'm very sorry, your motherl-" He cut himself off, realizing that, if she had once gone into labor, it would make her a mother in more than just title. He couldn't understand why she'd chosen such a word as her name if the memory of childbirth was such a bad one for her.
"What made it worse was that, after the whole thing was done, she said that I'd done a great service to the hive," she added, and huffed. "Said that this one was special. I don't know about that. The damn thing turned out to be reckless, backwards. The only things I called different were its eyes."
His hoof traced circles above the ground idly, and he stammered, "Wha... What caste, if you don't mind me asking?"
"To Tartarus if I know. It started walking before I could sit up," she spat, her voice loudening with the ever mounting pressure of her spite. "It just stood up, looked at the Queen, and sat back down. It knew that she was in charge, like the little bi-"
The Matriarch bit back her words, and took a deep breath. Like a dam, she held back the wall of venomous emotions, none of which he could identify properly. Anger and pain were so often products of one another that he couldn't tell how she felt.
Perhaps she was in a state of denial, convinced that she had no feelings at all, just as he had recently been.
No matter what she felt, she scared him. Seeing the monarch all but stripped of regality and composure terrified him. The last time he had been in close proximity to such an event had been quite upsetting, when his mother had returned to hive after her defeat at Canterlot, and the ensuing pity party had ended with Pick spending a night in the Queen's bed to calm her down.
She closed her eyes, and lifted a hoof to press on her forehead as she spoke, "She made a pet out of it, and I..." She paused, biting her lower lip with her fangs, but her expression was more akin to one of disappointment than anger this time. "I never got to say anything to him."
Him? Who? What was she on about? Had she been hanging around the gardens all day, and simply getting high on oxygen? Was that even possible? Twilight had mentioned that plants gave off oxygen, and that it was necessary for all living things, but also that too much of it was bad.
The Matriarch shook her head, and sighed, "I never saw him again. But it doesn't matter. The Queen is probably off somewhere starting a new hive with that stupid toy boy, who doesn't know any better. I suppose he wouldn't like me very much anyway, seeing as how I've spent more time in his wife's bed than he ever did."
Was that an insult? Was she on to him?
She turned her head to address him, and down to focus her gaze on his equal parts pitying and terrified eyes. "I want to thank you, now that you've made sure no one will ever live that pain again," she said. "You've done what I wished to do, and I hold no hope that you shall have reason to serve the hive again. You have done something nopony has done since I stepped onto the throne."
He waited for a moment, trying to understand if he was allowed to relax yet.
"You got the people's attention," she said, closing her eyes.
He stood straight, and half faked a smile.
She smiled to herself, and made a low, contented sound in the back of her throat. She turned around, and whispered into his ear as she strode past him, "Don't let them look away."
He nodded, and looked over his shoulder as the Matriarch stepped through the stone door that separated the operating room from the rest of the Hive.
None of the doctors were immediately happy with her, but none reprimanded her as she made her way to the wreck of an incubator. She placed a hoof on the worker's forehead, and all at once, the mindless changeling calmed down. Its kicking and spazzing limbs went still as the Matriarch spoke softly into its ear.
Fangheart continued to watch from behind the glass wall. "I won't," he said.
Fangheart awoke from the deepest sleep he'd ever experienced, though, experienced wasn't the right word. He'd had no dreams, no sense of time passing. He had simply closed his eyes, and then he was awake.
Nothing had happened. For a moment he wondered if something had gone wrong, if he had mistaken blinking for going under, but then considered what his eyes were seeing.
The ceiling was black, as the surgery room's had been, but this one was closer, and a nice little clock was located on the wall in front of him, just at the edge of his peripheral vision. When he tried to move his right leg, nothing happened, so he tried to move his eyes, and they too wouldn't respond. He couldn't blink, move, or feel his body.
That wasn't normal.
A low, raspy voice caught his attention, "Good, you're awake."
He focused on trying to locate the source of the voice, anything to distract his otherwise panicking brain.
"Don't worry. Your nervous system just doesn't realize that you're awake. You'll be able to move in a little bit, but since you aren't going anywhere, I figured this was the perfect time to have a little chat," the voice said, and a griffon's head moved into his field of view.
Its feathers were mostly blue, but a few white patches made short lines against the sky colored background of its face. There were no white areas around its eyes, which were a delicate shade of lime green, and its slim, black beak shimmered in the cool bioluminescent glow given off by the beetles inside the ceiling, who climbed over one another as they traversed the one tunnel necessary to light the room.
They had been domesticated long ago, and were responsible for illuminating most of the hive, though the prisoners' city was solely lit with magical torches in case some of the prisoners were creeped out by the bugs.
Fangheart wondered, for a moment, what they felt like, to be simple, to understand exactly what they had to do, and how to do it. They were unconcerned with the meaning of life, the mystery and wonder that was love, and the paradox of their responsibility as masters of the world, capable of changing it, for better or worse.
The griffon looked at his wrist, where a black watch rested, and, just as Fangheart emerged from his thoughts, said, "Okay, so, here's the thing. I know what you have to do, and how you have to do it. Listen to me, and everything will be fine."
Fangheart wanted to ask if he was reading his thoughts, but couldn't move.
"No, I'm not inside your head. You'd know if I were. You've received thoughts through psychic links before, and you know how being read feels," the griffon said, as though knowing exactly what he was thinking.
Fangheart felt compelled to say something snarky.
"Just to keep you entertained, I'll argue with myself from your perspective," the weird bluejay head said, and cleared his throat. He spoke in a voice that Fangheart recognized as his own, but wasn't quite as deep, "I know that this feather brain is using my voice, because I hear my own voice through my own skull, which makes it sound deeper to me."
The griffon then spoke in his first voice, "You know that Pick isn't gonna risk losing her job for the sake of another revolution. You know that she isn't gonna get behind you. You know that she isn't gonna rat you out, but she's not so selfless that she'll throw away her cushy life for you."
Going back to his Fangheart impression, the griffon asked, "What other choice do I have?"
"Well, you could always toughen up, and spearhead this movement yourself. Stop modeling your political life after the Matriarch. She's all about democracy, and letting the peoples' voice be heard, so play her game. Do things her way, instead of what she had to do when the system was as inflexible as the Queen's ovipositor at a feast," he said in his own voice.
"What ever do you mean, oh handsome and glorious one?" he asked in Fangheart's voice.
"Propose that the plebeians make themselves heard. Write a law that says a vote shall be held on your migration plan, and campaign against anyone who stands in your way," the griffon told the paralyzed patient, now glaring down at his eyes.
"Don't let anyone be left out. Let each of the workers cast their own vote. Let each soldier's vote count just as much as the council members'. Let the prisoners vote. Show them the power of the individual, and make sure you read each of these letters in order, and when you need them most," the griffon said, dropping three envelopes onto Fangheart's stomach, which he could now feel.
Spots of purple magic began to coalesce around the griffon, and covered patches of his feathers. The griffon glanced at his watch, and cursed under his breath. He glanced up at Fangheart, and said, "Consider that your first hint." And with that, he vanished in a flash of purple light.
Fangheart sat up, blinking at the air where his visitor had just stood, sparks of purple magic sizzling out on their way to the ground. He looked at the envelopes, and then at himself.
His lower right foreleg was wrapped in gauze, and attached to the side of the bed by a telescoping metal pipe attached to a swiveling joint on a guide rail that allowed him to sit up and move his leg around within a reasonable distance of the bed, and would hold his hoof in the air where he had last left it until he moved it again.
He couldn't really feel most of that leg, and only knew it was there because he could see it, and feel a light pressure on the parts he could feel whenever he applied pressure to the brace supporting it.
He looked at the envelopes in his lap. They were plain, white, lacking stamps, addresses, names, and numbered one through three in thick black ink. The first one was laying open, and was completely empty, presumably the one the griffon had said was spent getting that suggestion.