A Queen's Grace
Dreams were a blissful thing, once you got used to them. For most creatures, they are too brief for them to realize the worlds they bring one to; to fully realize them anyway. You play out your scene and then return to the waking world none the wiser.
Unfortunately for some, such as those doomed to comatose, dreams became the only world they knew. Their memories became lost in the painted blurs, making them indistinguishable from the new reality.
For Queen Chrysalis, it meant sitting atop the dais of Canterlot, her emerald eyes fully aglow and the air about her crackling with sheer magical power. She was victorious monarch on her rightfully claimed throne. Most importantly: she could still feel them all.
Her subjects, ranging from drones to guards to workers, scurrying and fluttering about the changelings’ conquered lands. She could feel their every thought in the hive mind, their every feeling. It was in some form of joy or elation, whether it be mockery or genuine, towards their captive food sources or one another or even in general.
It was this power she felt course through every inch of her body. Green flickers of static lit up the holes in her legs and danced across her transparent wings. She could have all the energy she could ever want and more.
There were no princesses, no elements that dared oppose her. The ponies of Equestria still milled about their business, but none raised a hoof against her. Not when she held their precious princesses below Canterlot, doomed to raise and lower the sun and moon at her behest now. The other two were held in the Crystal Empire under lock and key.
Still, there was a feeling Chrysalis couldn’t shake off. She frowned as she looked at the room about her, then at herself. She lifted one foreleg and shook it, and then the other. Despite the immeasurable power being channeled to her by her subjects, she felt sluggish. Like she wasn’t as flexible or mobile as she as she should have been.
As if she were weighted down by stone.
A bright light caught her attention. It came from the ceiling, seeping through growing cracks that dared snake across her castle. She hissed, baring her fangs – there was no way the princesses had gotten free. There had been no sensation of alarm arising among her ranks, after all.
Her horn lit with brilliant emerald energy, like a thousand fireflies, and she aimed at the crack. But no decimating blast came, nothing shot from her glowing, crooked horn. As she watched on in disbelief, the light grew and grew until it swallowed the world around her, blending the dream back into memories.
Birds chirped, and the scent of flowers and shrubbery crossed Chrysalis’s muzzle. She opened her eyes but was immediately forced to shut them as the light blinded her. Then she felt her body move – not on its own, and not naturally. Without any effort from her wings, she was lifted off her pedestal and set on a lower perch.
She squinted her eyes open; normally accustomed to the shadows of the Changeling Hive, they were incredibly sensitive after her long exposure of darkness. Four glows appeared before her, and it took a moment before she recalled them with bitter resentment.
Four alicorns in total had her at horn point, and each had a varying degree of hatred on their face. The angriest stepped forward until her horn tip was practically against Chrysalis’s muzzle, but the queen didn’t flinch. She stood taller against the threat, as a queen should.
“I hope you’re right about this, Twilight,” Cadance said to the alicorn behind her, with her glaring eyes fixed on Chrysalis.
“We don’t have a choice,” Twilight replied with a sigh. She dimmed her magic, but didn’t stop the spell entirely. Chrysalis could taste it on all four of them – under all the anger was the semi-sweet taste of desperation.
“You need me for something,” she surmised, eyes narrowed.
“Not us, Chrysalis,” Celestia said sternly. “If we could replicate it ourselves, we wouldn’t have woken you up.”
“Then if not you four ponies…” Chrysalis began with a spat of distaste.
“It is your hive who needs you,” Luna said solemnly.
“My hive?” Chrysalis hissed with disgust. “Those traitors? They can go rot in the pits of Tartarus for betraying their queen!”
“They may very well soon, if you do not help them,” Celestia said. She glanced at Twilight, who nodded in response.
“Your hive has become dangerously ill. The changelings call it ‘mite rot.’ They grow incredibly weak to the point where they can’t sustain themselves, nor can they even feast on love willingly given to them. After that, they wither from starvation. We’ve tried every cure we could in all of Equestria, even a few from other lands, but nothing has cured them,” the youngest princess explained.
“Thorax, as an act of desperation, has told us you possess a cure to all changeling ailments, though he could not remember its name,” Luna continued.
Chrysalis growled. “What kind of fool do you take me for? The changelings haven’t fallen under a plague for as long as I can remember.” She narrowed her eyes. “What is it you really want from me?”
“Your subjects are in danger!” Cadance exclaimed, her horn flaring brighter. “Are you going to stand by idly and let them suffer and perish?” Twilight set a hoof on her shoulder. Cadance looked back at her, huffed a sigh, and backed up some steps.
Chrysalis smirked down at them. “Even if you were telling the truth, they are no longer my subjects. If Thorax cannot heal them, then it serves him right for usurping my domain from me. Let him and his rebellion perish.”
“We thought you wouldn’t believe us,” Celestia said with a tired sigh. Her horn lit up brighter.
Before Chrysalis could flinch away, the five of them were gone in a golden flash.
Familiar scents mingled with greenery crossed the queen’s senses as she opened her eyes. Before them lay the Changeling Kingdom, or what had become of it.
Without workers to maintain its exterior, the fortress of a hive was beginning to chip and fall away. Pegasi and Earth ponies on scaffolding were busy doing their best with repairs, but Chrysalis looked on unimpressed. Ponies knew nothing of changeling buildings.
There were tents and canopies all over outside of the hive, with nurse ponies rushing between them. Under the chorus of their voices were the distinct sounds of hacks and coughs. Chrysalis felt a pang in her hollow core, but she stifled it.
Her defensive instincts caused her to hiss as Thorax and Pharynx walked over to them, their wings drooping at their sides. If not for her history with the traitors, Chrysalis would have relaxed at their current states.
Instead of their normally colorful hues, or even their original black chitin, they had dulled to a stone grey. Their eyes remained the color of their transformations, but they were clouded over – Chrysalis wasn’t sure how well they functioned, if at all. Their transparent wings, unmaintained, resembled worn tapestries.
“Chrysalis,” Pharynx snarled. Apparently his eyes still worked, but the same couldn’t be said for Thorax, who perked up at the word.
“Queen Chrysalis,” he rasped. “Please, you must help us!”
The alicorns turned to Chrysalis, who stood with a poker face as she looked between them and the tents strewn around.
The desperation she had tasted from the princesses had indeed been real. Nothing like this would have happened to the mighty changelings if she had remained queen. It lit a fire of anger in her gut that superseded everything else, even the fact that she couldn’t sense any of them.
She snarled, stomping her hoof down so hard the brittle ground cracked. “You traitors think I would ever help you after you betrayed me the way you did?” she demanded. “Whatever plague you have brought upon yourselves is your own fault, and as you are no longer my subjects, none of my concern!”
“Please…” Thorax rasped again, before his legs wobbled. He tilted slightly, but Pharynx stepped to his side to support him. He growled at Chrysalis, unafraid of the old monarch even in his current state.
“We were right to renounce you,” he said in a low voice. “A queen who abandons her subjects is not fit to live, much less rule.”
Chrysalis narrowed her eyes. “And yet, look who’s dying,” she said in a low voice.
A few medics walked over to the two changeling brothers, and with some encouragement, they pried Pharynx away from glaring at Chrysalis. They led Thorax to another tent closer by, but he stopped them.
To Chrysalis’s surprise, he looked back towards her as if he could see. He didn’t say anything, letting his pleading gaze speak for him, before the medics let him into the tent.
The queen snarled angrily, wings flaring out. Before any of the alicorns could stop her, she was in the air. She looked around the Changeling Kingdom, and before any of them could focus their magic, she flew off over the tree line surrounding the kingdom.
“We have to stop her before—!” Cadance was stopped by Celestia setting a hoof on her shoulder, shaking her head.
“There is no need. Alone, she poses no threat.”
Chrysalis stopped when she felt she was far enough away from the alicorns that she couldn’t even taste their magic – which, though inedible, served as a good enough warning.
Thoughts swirled in her mind as she paced about the clearing she found herself in. She had only scratched the surface with those duplicates – more magic than that resided in her mind, it was only a matter of how to use it.
There was also the matter of the changeling hive. She’d have to start a new kingdom there, or perhaps elsewhere, once the infection had purged the rebellion from Equestria. Once she got enough strength in numbers, the things she could do would be greatly expanded.
Suddenly, she let out a startled gasp, stumbling back with a hoof to her chest. It had felt like a miniature heart attack, strong enough to knock against her exoskeleton. She took a few deep breaths to steady herself, then stumbled again when another struck her. And another. And another. And another.
It was then she remembered the connection to the hive. It was always there, the hive mind: a way to connect with her subjects to ensure their safety and efficiency. She still remembered the pain it left her with when they had rebelled, that void of emotion where there had once been a buzzing of many voices.
It was back now, and it was alive with activity. Pain coursed through her limbs and she collapsed to the ground. Her breathing became ragged and her mind overwhelmed by thousands of thoughts.
Her eyes shot open when the first plea came through. Not from the volume of it, for it came from a hoarse whisper, but its appearance at all. Then more came, one after the other. Cries of desperation as feeble as a kitten’s swat. Her collapsed limbs trembled.
“We need you…” came Thorax’s. “You’re not our queen… but you’ll always… be our mother… We need… the queen’s grace… our mother’s grace…”
The queen did her best to quiet the pleas to at least get room in her head to think. The only explanation she could come up with, for this phantom sense’s abrupt return, was entirely the changeling’s doing. They reconnected to her, not the other way around.
She sat up on her haunches, unfamiliar deposits of water forming at the corners of her eyes. It was as if she could see them all before her, all the changelings of her hive. No longer did they look rebellious – their brilliant hues were gone, their joy and laughter with it. No, they were scared. They were small. They were helpless.
They were hers.
She reached out to try and touch one in her mind’s eye, and found herself grasping empty air in the real world. Chrysalis blinked, and realized for the first time she was crying. She looked at her empty forelegs, then in the direction of all those pleas.
Her horn ignited with a flare of magic unseen since the failed attempt at the Canterlot wedding, and Chrysalis took to the skies. She threatened to tear her already weathered wings apart from the sheer power she pumped into them.
“I’m coming,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m coming home.”
The countryside blurred beneath her until the crumbling hive loomed in the distance. Her horn’s glow grew brighter and brighter, her entire body becoming alight like a nest of fireflies.
The four alicorns looked up in surprise as she cleared the tree line. If not for the faint buzz of her wings, they would have mistaken the ball of green energy for an attack. All four instinctively threw up shields when her course veered to the ground.
The glow blinded the alicorns and ponies around the nest, but the changelings all looked towards it. Their horns lit up as the queen’s magic coursed through them, lighting their eyes, and then their bodies up to their former glory.
It lasted only a minute, before the overwhelming magic subsided. The alicorns risked lowering their shields and sneaking a peek at where they had last seen the queen.
The ground had cracked from the impact, enough to down most of the tents. The princesses looked on in awe as the changelings began to reemerge one by one. Some stopped to help the ponies who had been knocked over from the blast.
At the epicenter of it all, still smoldering from the outpouring of love and magic, was a lone, shadowy figure, crumpled on the ground.
Dreams were a blissful thing, once you got used to them. For most creatures, they are too brief for them to realize the worlds they bring one to, to fully realize them anyway. You play out your scene and then return to the waking world none the wiser.
But should you wake up and find the dream has not left you, then that’s all the better.
Chrysalis looked up from her book, removing her reading glasses as Thorax approached her. Her smooth, curved horn lit up with lavender-colored sparkles and set it on top of the neat stack by her throne.
“Twilight says she’s gotten more books for you when you’re done with this batch, your majesty,” Thorax said.
A smile, broken only by two downward fangs, crossed Chrysalis’s muzzle as she nodded. “I’m almost done with these.” A pair of butterfly-like wings, embroidered with hearts, flared open behind her as she flitted off her throne. “Who knew Equestria had so much knowledge on love to offer?”
“If only the princess of love was so willing to offer,” Thorax said with a sheepish smile.
“These things will take time, I’m afraid,” Chrysalis said with a sigh. “Is there anything to report in the hive?” As if she didn’t know.
“A few sick drones. We think its mite rot trying to make a comeback.” Thorax followed her as she stepped out of the throne room with a sweep of her membrane-like hair, now curled at the ends.
“You head onto the leadership summit. I’m sure the princesses will be eager to hear your report on the hive… and of me.” She smiled fondly at him. “I will tend to my changelings. After all, a queen’s grace lies in the content of her subjects.”
Thorax watched her flitter down the corridor. She was practically thrumming with the power of the hive’s love, to the point it could almost dance upon her wings. It was all the power she could ever want, but she knew better.
For love was to be shared - not taken.