Sugarcube Corner
Nothing
by Ezn
There's a rumbling in my stomach as I enter the town. It's a deep, ominous sound, but for now it's just a sound, and I am thankful for that. There's still time before the real rumbling starts.
I take the air in with a long, deep sniff. I smell flowers on the breeze, sweat on the backs of ponies and a faint scent of manure, which I wrinkle my nose at. I take a few more sniffs, and then the real scents start flooding in. The scents of food.
There's a particularly strong whiff of the stuff coming from an inviting, whimsical building. A sign identifies it as "Sugarcube Corner" as I trot inside, taking more brief sniffs of the air. The smell is good – some days I can almost delude myself into feeding on it alone.
Some days. Almost.
"Welcome to Sugarcube Corner, dearie, what can I get for you today?" asks a cheery voice from behind the counter, which I identify as belonging to a plump, pleasant-smelling mare.
"Just a... milkshake, please," I ask, producing some bits from my saddlebag. "Chocolate."
The mare takes my money with a smile. "Coming up!" she says. "You can take a seat now, if you don't mind."
I don't, and I sit down at the table nearest the counter, waiting for my milkshake. My forehooves drum against the table's wooden surface absently.
"What's wrong with your eye?" a young voice chirps.
I look down, surprised, to see a yellow filly blinking up at me. Ah, to be young and curious.
"Oh, nothing too serious," I reply, patting the patch over my left eye. "Just have to wait for it to heal from a corrective operation for a few days, and then I'll take the patch off and see better than ever."
The filly cocks her head for a moment, but then nods and seems satisfied with my answer.
"Sunrise, stop annoying that poor stallion and come over... here..."
I look up at the filly's mother as she says this, and see the last pony I ever expected to see again. Of course, I manage to hide the surprise from my face and the subtle glint of recognition from my eye.
She doesn't hide anything. I can see that quite plainly.
"Do you love me?" she asked, her purple irises quivering.
"Yes," I replied, running a grey hoof through her blonde mane, "with every one of my three hearts."
She pouted. "Psh, show-off! Making me feel inadequate, with just one sorry little heart."
Guilt rose in my chest.
"Honey?" she asked.
"...Don't, dear," I implored her. "Don't ever feel that way. I can sense your love, you know." And I meant it.
I blink myself back into the present as she speaks. "S-Sunrise, darling, why don't you ask Mrs Cake if you can go upstairs and visit Auntie Pinkie?" She sounds almost nonchalant.
"Yay!" The filly gallops off in a hurry, and I'm left staring at Lily Blossom, eye to eyes.
"You didn't change the eyepatch," she says. "I'd recognise that eyepatch anywhere."
"Don't worry, it's only temporary," I told her, rubbing the black fabric over my eye. "Just until my eye heals."
Her worry-creased face deflated into a relieved smile. "No matter how many eyes you have, I still love you just the same."
She was telling the truth.
I try to feign ignorance, even though I've stared silently at her far too long for that to have any hope of working. "Madame, I have no idea what you're talking about."
Lily Blossom just raises an eyebrow. "I can see it in your good eye too... even if it's green now. And in your movements. The way you looked up at me... only you lurch around like that."
I sigh.
"Relax, darling," she said to me. "You always look so tense."
"I just want to know why." Lily's face turns from triumphant to fragile in an instant. "Why did you leave?"
The sweet, sweet smell drifted further and further away from my snout as I reached the city limits. I took one last, longing sniff, but it had grown almost faint enough to blend in with the flowers and the trees. I knew I would never smell it again.
It's been long enough. I was rash back then. Now I don't feel anything except hunger. Still, I think she deserves to know why I did what I did. So I lean in close and beckon for her to do the same.
"The day before I left the hive on my first hunt, my instructor told me something," I whisper, speaking as if I'm disinterestedly giving a dull lecture. "He saw my fascination with the outside world and my optimism and enthusiasm for the journey I was about to embark on – an enthusiasm not found in most changelings – and said that it was important for me to remember that our race is one of pretenders."
I see the beginnings of tears in Lily's eyes, but she makes no protestations, so I continue. "'We feed on love because we cannot generate it,' he told me."
"Thank you for the advice, sir," I said back to the old changeling, dotted with more holes than any other in our hive, "but I shall make it my task to test your hypothesis out in the world."
The old master chuckled. Had I been a younger changeling, he may have had me disciplined for backtalk, but I was one of his favourites, and I imagined some small part of him hoped I would be right.
"Even then, I felt he must be incorrect, and when I met you, I thought I knew for certain that he was wrong."
Lily smiles hopefully, but I hold up a forehoof to stop her from speaking. I may be an uncaring, unfeeling beast, but I don't need to go about giving her false hope.
"You loved me, Lily, and I knew that it was for me, not somepony I was impersonating. I took the form of someone long dead, and our romance was real, between you and me. Your love for me had the most delicious smell I've ever encountered."
"Lily, there's something I haven't told you about me..."
Lily frowns. "I don't care about what you are! You know that! You told me, and I accepted it. Doesn't that count for anything?"
"What you are on the outside isn't important to me," she said. "The father of my child was a pony through and through, and yet he was not half the stallion you are. I love you for what's on the inside."
I sigh. "Lily, I was hungry. For months and months you were the only thing in my world, and everyday I would smell that delicious love but know that I could not feed on it. To do so would have been sacrilege. And to feed on the love of others, as I'd done before... it disgusted me."
Lily's expression is blank. I can tell she's thinking hard, but she has no idea what's coming.
"So instead of feeding on your love for me, or on the love of other ponies for each other, I tried something else. I fed on my love for you."
"And?" Lily forces out.
I take a deep, long sniff of the air. "When you loved me, your love smelt like the most delicious of meals – the most nutritious, sustaining feast. Like the smell of a cake made specially for you on your birthday, mixed in with the first proper meal after a long, long journey. It felt as if one bite would last me a lifetime. Of course, I couldn't let myself take even one bite."
Lily lets me continue.
"The love I smell right now... it has a comforting, stable scent. Like the smell of a familiar place, or a fresh bale of hay for breakfast. It is the smell of the mature, sustaining love that the husband and wife who own this shop have for each other – a love that has brought new lives into the world."
Lily bites her lip. She wants me to get to the point.
"The love I had for you, Lily," I say, "had no smell. At first, I imagined that that was simply because it was an everpresent part of me I'd gotten so used to the smell of that I didn't even notice it. After all, one doesn't generally smell one's own scent, unless it's particularly foul. So, undeterred by the love's lack of a smell, I set about feeding on it."
I pause, perhaps for too long, but open my mouth again before Lily can open hers.
"I lied about how I lost my eye," I say. "There was no accident at the factory. I just didn't want you to know the truth. In fact, I lied about even losing my eye at all."
I flip up my eyepatch, and Lily stares at the solid blue of my real left eye in horror. "But – can't you just –"
"The day I tried to feed on my love for you, I lost the ability to disguise that eye."
I lay crippled on the ground, a pain pounding through my temples and the taste of bile strong on my tongue. It felt like somepony was rubbing my left eyelid with a hot coal.
I reached up to touch the skin around it. It felt hard and unyielding, just as it had during my days in the hive. In horror, I surveyed my reflection in a nearby puddle, worried that I had lost my pony form entirely.
With my reflection came momentary relief, followed by panic. I still looked like a pony, but the skin around my left eye had returned to its natural appearance. I tried to change it, but in vain. I'd known it would be impossible the moment I glimpsed my reflection.
"But why?" Lily asks, her eyes big and hopeful. She still hasn't connected all the dots.
I know that this is the part that's going to hurt her the most. I try to be dry and factual about it. "Love is a kind of magic," I say. "When I feed on love, I feed on magic, and in the unexpected absence of love, a changeling might accidentally feed on other types of magic."
Realisation is slowly dawning across Lily's features.
"I couldn't feed on my love for you because there was none. I couldn't love you."
"I love you for what's on the inside."
Lily just buries her head in her forehooves and cries.
I sit and watch, not moving to comfort her because there's nothing inside of me.