Collateral Damage

Chapters

Chapter 2: Picking Up The Package
Chapter 3: Storm Over the Everfree
Chapter 4: Betrayal in the Sky
Chapter 5: Betrayal in the Hive
Chapter 6: The Bereaved
Chapter 1: A Special Assignment

Chapter 2: Picking Up The Package

The Everfree Forest fell away far beneath his hooves, and Falcon Punch relaxed. He never felt comfortable over the Everfree. Some of its denizens were capable of flight, though they rarely flew very high, and at night strange shadows gathered around the old ruined castle. Somepony from the University had once told him that there was once a great city in there, surrounded by rich fields and prosperous towns, but Falcon found this hard to believe. Anyway, even if true that had been a thousand years ago, and all that he'd ever seen was a vast wilderness, over which the weather was never even slightly dependable.

He wished he could have flown around the woods, but he wanted to make good time to Appleloosa, to impress Orange Streak with his capability as a courier. Military contracts could change his whole life, the lives of his whole family. Blackcherry -- his sweet little Cheerilee -- she was smart as a whip. He wanted to send her to a good college, a decade from now. And Raspberry would also need a good education. A decade -- two decades from now -- heck, he was only 49, he'd get to see his daughters graduate and marry and have good lives, before he passed on. Hopefully not before a long happy retirement, spent in the arms of his dear Strawberry.

But he had to complete this assignment first, prove himself to the Watch, so that future plums would drop into his waiting mouth. He gave the sky a careful scan once more to make certain that nothing nasty had followed him out from the haunted woods, just to be on the safe side. In safety is survival, he thought, repeating an old Guards adage. He'd never been the most cautious Pegasus in the Guard, but he'd been cautious enough that nothing had ever blindsided him. Most air fights are decided by the first attack, he remembered having heard somewhere, and half of the losers never even see what killed them.

He did not want to be a loser.

The sky was clear. He could see the scar of Ghastly Gorge far to his right, just at the edge of his visibility. He thanked himself that his eyes were still sharp -- when those start going, the active career of a Pegasus is starting to end. He thought to himself, That'll happen in a decade or so, anyway, I'll have to hire assistants then. By that time the military contracts should make it possible. He peered ahead. There was farmland -- orchards -- yes! The little town of Drumbeat, growing up around a Guards detachment, and running through it a brown track. There was a camp between town and the gorge, and he could see white steam rising. Oh yes, they've bridged the gorge, and the rail will soon run all the way to Appleloosa.

It would be a new world when the railroad was in regular service out to the frontier. All the towns in between -- even sleepy little ones like Ponyville -- would mushroom. New age coming, he thought. For real. I'll see some of it, Strawberry and the fillies'll see a bit more. Wonder if there'll be airships and railroads everywhere someday, and only crotchety old Ponies like me remembering what it used to be like when everything was a matter of wing and hoof? He smiled to himself. Five hundred miles on wing each way, I'll tell them. And every yard of it in a downdraft!

He swooped over the fort, wing-saluted the garrison. He saw a sentry return the salute. Technically he was still Guards Reserve, so the mutual military courtesy was proper.

It'll be a long, lazy run now, he thought. Just cruise over the road -- I'll lose a little time on the curve, but that's a whole lot better than losing a lot of time by getting lost. I'll be in Appleloosa within the hour, meet this Thermal Soar fellow, rest a half-hour or so and get him and his package safely to Canterlot. No problem.

The green land unrolled beneath him, starting to subtly brown as he swept out into the plains.

***

"The courier is in view, my Princess," reported Coxus, putting down the wide-angle binoculars. "Still at least four miles out."

"It's about time," said Ceymi sharply. "And my name is Thermal Soar, remember? I hope you can remember it when the courier is present, or this special assignment will become dangerous very fast."

"Of course, your ... Thermal Soar," Coxus replied.

Ceymi sighed to herself. She liked nothing about this mission. Coxus was allegedly an Infiltrator, but he never would have passed one of her demanding courses of instruction. Good genes or no good genes, she reflected, some lings are just plain dim. At least he has good eyesight.

Too bad Thermal wasn't a Changeling, she reflected. He was clever -- cunning -- among his other good qualities. The brood he'd sired on her had done fairly well. I could get results with one such as him. Why did he have to be born prey?

She had respected Thermal. Did respect him, actually, as he wasn't dead, and hopefully would last for many years cocooned back at the Hive. The other two members of her team were already on their way back carrying his sleeping form. Surprising amount of love in that Pony, she reflected. I'll make sure to tap him directly, at least once. For old times sake.

Ceymi did not like the plan. If she'd had her way, they'd have taken the notes and package along with Thermal back to the Hive, quit this Pony town, leaving behind only a mystery. There'd be a brief sensation about how Appletree had seen Greenapple and Longnose when both had been sick in bed at home -- wonder if they'll even realize Greenapple was drugged? -- then it would all blow over. Just another prospector running off into the desert, just some incompetence in a sleepy desert town. Instead, I'm supposed to first hand the goods over to the courier, then ... ugh. This is just too risky!

She knew exactly why Queen Chrysalis had given her these orders. It was a test, one of her never-ending tests of loyalty, of utter devotion to whatever new whim she had, or -- more frighteningly, to the new ideology she had developed ever since she'd begin reading that damned book.

In secrecy lies saftey, Ceymi thought. Deliberately terrorizing the prey, fighting them directly, even by ambush -- this is stupid. Picking off one old scientist near the Hive is one thing, attacking a courier of the Watch deep in Equestrian territory quite another. Chrysalis talks about "sending a message" -- but that's exactly what we must never do to them! She looked around at the life of the small town -- just a frontier settlement, yet with more bustle and vitality than in the whole Hive. They are a sleeping giant, she thought, and if we ever make the mistake of awaking them, their wrath shall be terrible. Why won't she believe me?

If she had been Pony it would have bothered her that she couldn't convince her own mother of the folly of this course. As it was, she felt a dread creep down her back at the imagined scene of the Equestrian Guards storming the Hive, invading its inmost chambers, slaying the Queen, destroying the nymphs who were their future. Primal fears briefly shook her.

She thinks I'm soft, Ceymi knew. That's why she insisted that I perform this mission personally. She wants to see if my supposed liking for Ponies will keep me from killing one in cold blood.

Nonsense! One can admire a prey species, even enjoy their presence, without mistaking them for lings. I admired Thermal, and I captured him without difficulty. But one does not charge into the midst of a herd of buffalo and challenge them face to face! Nor does one kill or torture them just because one can. There is a difference between courage and rashness, between feeding and cruelty.

I wonder sometimes if the Queen remembers this.

***

Falcon landed in the town square, sauntered over to the small structure which said "Sheriff" and "County Jail" upon it. The door was open, and in it stood a yellow Earth Pony stallion with an orange mane, wearing the hat and badge of the Sheriff's Office.

"Hi," said Falcon. "I'm Falcon Punch, civilian courier on contract to the Watch. I'm here to pick up a Professor Thermal Soar, and a package, both for delivery to Canterlot." There was nopony else in earshot, so he felt safe saying this aloud in front of the jail.

"Good," said the Pony. "Longnose. Deputy Longnose. He's inside."

The pony's speech patterns were a bit odd, but one heard all sorts of strange dialects out here on the frontier. Why, even in Ponyville, some of the Apples from Sweet Apple Acres sounded a bit rustic, and the folks out by Dunnich ... Falcon dismissed his odd feeling, and stepped inside.

Sitting at a desk was a wiry little dark-tan Pegasus with a graying brown mane and alert eyes. Orange Streak had said that Professor Soar was in his sixties, but the life of a geological prospector must be a healthy one, for he looked to be a decade younger. Falcon could well believe that he was up for the flight to Canterlot.

"Professor Thermal Soar?" Falcon asked. "I'm Falcon Punch, Lt. of the Day Guards, retired. I'm on civilian contract from the Watch, to escort your person and package to Canterlot."

"Heh! Pleased to meet you," said Professor Soar, smiling. "I've got the package right here beside me," he said, pointing to a tarpaulin-wrapped object on the floor, secured by knotted ropes to keep it from unwrapping. "Treat it delicate like," the Professor instructed, "it's mummified remains, and is fairly brittle -- I have some padding in there, but I don't want it falling part."

"No problem, Professor," Falcon reassured him. He gathered up the package and attached it to his undersling. It was sufficiently compact that it would only interfere slightly with walking, and not at all with any but the most tight aerial maneuvers. "Do you have any other luggage?"

Professor Soar threw on and buckled a harness with closed bags to either side. "Got my papers here," he jerked his head to the right, "and my personals there," this time jerking it to the left. "I'm ready an' rarin' to go!" He sounded jovial.

"Very well," said Falcon. He waited, looked at Longnose expectantly. When Longnose did nothing, he said: "The paperwork? To sign?"

Longnose stared at him blankly.

"He means to sign so that you know he's taken charge of me," Professor Soar said, with a hint of exasperation in his voice. "Over there. On the desk."

Longnose did a double-take and grabbed a clipboard with papers. He passed it over to Falcon.

Falcon looked for but did not see a pen. Fortunately, he had one of those new fountain jobs in his own sidebag. He put the clipboard on the desk, pulled out the fountain pen, and signed at the usual places. Then he handed the board back to Longnose, who took it without expression or thanks.

Mystified by the deputy's odd silence, he turned to Professor Soar. "Well, are you ready to fly?" Falcon himself felt slightly tired, but he decided that he would take off right away rather than spend any more time with the taciturn deputy. If he got a cramp, he could always roost somewhere for a few minutes, as long as they weren't over the Everfree. And Professor Soar seemed like much more pleasant company than did Longnose.

"Sure thing," said the Professor. They left the jail and launched themselves together into the sky.

***

Back at home, Strawberry was getting bored. She had left her last job, as a bartender, to take care of little Raspberry full time, and that was fine, but it did mean that the days dragged when Falcon was away. Soon, Raspberry would be going off to school, and Blackcherry would be big enough to watch her little sister after school. It would be nice to go back to work.

There were chores, of course -- with two energetic growing fillies running and bumping around the house, there were always chores. But these were routine -- nothing interesting happened such as happened at a bar, and when something interesting did happen it usually just meant another mess to clean up. Like when Raspberry had redecorated the whole kitchen, with flour and molasses. That had been interesting.

At least drunks usually left their messes in a single spot, or at worst a trail. They had nothing on toddlers.

Thinking of drunks made Strawberry think of liquor. She liked liquor. She liked liquor entirely too much. And when she had gotten pregnant with Raspberry, she had sworn off alcoholic beverages. Strange -- keeping this resolution hadn't been as difficult back when she was carrying Blackcherry. But she'd been younger then, and not under as much stress. Blackcherry had been only five when Falcon had knocked her -- visited the miracle of life upon her for the second time, and taking care of a five-year-old and feeling that her belly was as big as a cow's at the same time had not been a pleasant experience.

Since Raspberry's birth, she'd occasionally drunk, but only in moderation. She wasn't going to wind up a raving drunkard like her Aunt Blueberry. It seemed to run in the family, a weakness for drink, and while in some of them it manifested itself as a constant amiable semi-inebriation, in others it hit them hard, until they lived only for the next glass of liquor. It was really a shame that the main family fortune came from their vinyards, but some of the amiable and functional ones had obviously decided to turn their hobby into a source of income. What could a pony do about that? It was family tradition.

She rarely felt she needed to drink with Falcon around. He was almost fifty now, but it was so difficult to believe -- his eye was keen, his muscles firm, and his voice still resonant with the timbre of a Pony in the prime of his stallionhood. And his -- other -- parts still worked as well as they had ten years ago. She blushed slightly as she thought about the homecoming she'd promised him. He could still, after ten years of marriage, make her feel like the tender maiden she'd been when he first caught her eye at that dance.

As long as she had her Falcon, she would never need any inebriation but that which she felt in his strong embrace.

***

They swept over the scrub plains, the land becoming increasingly arid as they went north from the oasis of Appleloosa into the semi-aridity of the Northeastern Palomino. This was nowhere near as bad as the deep desert, but it was still a thirsty land. One day, Falcon thought, there'll be towns all along the rails, and wells, and irrigation ditches, and orchards stretching far out into what used to be desert. Maybe some of my descendants will settle these parts.

"Do you think this'll be good land for berries?" he asked Professor Soar. He figured the old geologist had to know this country well.

"It's pretty dry," the Professor said. "Takes hard work to get anything out of the ground. I wouldn't advise coming out here to farm. Especially not toward the Badlands -- the land's pizened from whatever blew that huge crater."

"Crater?" Falcon asked. "I've done recon flights out over the Badlands, never seen much in the way of craters ..."

"No," said Professor Soar. "The whole Badlands is a crater. You can see it on the really large-scale survey maps. Something really big blew up there during the Cataclysm -- a very strange explosion, as if it affected some materials differently than others. The Macintoshes are part of the crater wall. Nigh on four thousand years ago whatever it was blowed up, but the land ain't mostly come back from it."

Falcon tried to imagine what could make a detonation so stupendous, and utterly failed. Even if one built a black powder works the size of the Palace at Canterlot, and set it all off together, he didn't think that even that would be enough to explain a crater the size of the Badlands. He remembered old legends, of earthfire and sunfire bombs, and wondered if something like that had done it. They could supposedly destroy whole cities -- but this must have been an explosion of much greater magnitude.

His wings were getting a bit tired.

"Mind if we roost for a bit?" Falcon asked his companion.

"No problem," said the Professor.

They set down on a green patch, by a small lake that still had a little water in it. There were some stunted trees, and they sat in the shade.

"Thanks," Falcon said. "I flew all the way over from Ponyville. Meant to rest in Appleloosa, but that Longnose was a bit creepy -- I decided I wanted to leave right away.

Professor Soar winced. "Yes," he said, "Longnose is a mite dim. Don't know how he got his badge."

"Have you ever been to Canterlot before?" Falcon asked the Professor.

"Yes -- went to the University there, taught a bit -- that was a donkey's age ago."

Both did the automatic look-around and then chuckled -- there were no Donkeys within miles to whom they might need to apologize for the expression.

Falcon grinned at Soar. "You don't seem like most professors I've known."

The Professor tensed. "In what way?" he asked.

"You're not all stuffy and academic," Falcon explained. "You seem kind of plain and homespun, if you catch my course. More like some grizzled old prospector."

"Well, I've been a prospector over twenny years now. Left the University just cause it was a stuffy place." The Professor gazed off southward. "Pony like me's gotta think on his feet, face the challenges of the land, keep my eye out for what I can, another eye peeled for danger. I've had some close calls out there, deep in the desert, beyond in the Badlands where there ain't nothing and nopony who'll welcome you. Had to be tough, to survive." There was a strange look on his face. "Won't come back, someday. Hope whatever gets me respects who I was."

"That's an odd attitude," said Falcon. "Most Ponies are scared of predators."

"Most Ponies don't ever have to face them up close," pointed out the Professor. "I've faced things that wanted to eat me, closer than we're sitting together right now." He looked at Falcon. "I think they respected me, when we came to the clinch. I think a good predator respects her prey. She has to, you see. Or she'll find the tables turned."

"She?" asked Falcon, then thought a bit. "Oh, I guess the fiercest predators probably are female, at that. It's mostly stallions in our military, but I suppose the most dangerous predator would be a mother hunting for her children, now wouldn't she?"

The Professor nodded. "Or protecting her children from someponies hunting them," he added. "Anyone -- pony or otherwise -- will go pretty far to protect their kinfolk."

Falcon thought about it. "Hmm, I don't generally think of predators as prey."

"Any critter can be predator or prey, in context," Professor Soar said. "Big predators hunt smaller ones. Bigger predators hunt the big ones. And even the biggest predator can get `et from the inside by diseases ... or drained dry by parasites."

"So where do we Ponies fit in here?" asked Falcon.

"Ponies don't eat other critters, but Ponies do kill critters what threaten em," said Soar. "Far as those weaker predators see it, they might as well be prey to the Ponies -- don't matter nohow to them whether their bodies getet or not by the Ponies, only iffen they get killed by the Ponies, see?"

"But Ponies aren't predators," Falcon pointed out. "We only kill things that try to prey on us."

"Like I said," clarified Professor Soar, "We ain't predators in terms of our vittles. But that don't matter to what we kill. Ponies're spreadin' out everywhere, explorin' and settlin' everything, -- coverin' up the whole wide world and convertin' it into more Equestria. Predators -- true, old-fashioned predators what might try to eat Ponies -- you ever stop to think that they might be afeered o' us?"

"Well," said Falcon, stroking his chin with a hoof. "I suppose -- when you put it that way ..."

"When you was in the Guards," the Professor asked him, "did you ever have to put down beasts?"

"Of course," said Falcon. "That's one of our regular duties -- monster hunting. There's always something coming out of the Everfree, or the Ice Wastes or the Badlands or the Deep Desert, something that thinks it can make a meal of Ponies. We show them they can't -- not if they expect to keep living."

"An' as far as the predators know this," the Professor said, "they're darn tootin' skeered o'you. Many of them're stronger'n you Guards one-on-one, in what Ponies call a 'fair fight,' but that ain't how you meets 'em, now is it?" The Professor's eyes were unreadable, his expression somehow dark even in the full light of noonday. "You have numbers, an' organization, an' fancy weapons like these repeating crossbows we're both packin'. So, face-to-face, they don't stand much of a chance, now do they?"

"No," said Falcon. "I guess they don't. And if they were stronger -- strong enough to stand up to massed crossbow fire, we'd just send airships to hit them with bombs and rockets until they died. And if they were strong enough to stand up to that, Princess Celestia would unload a can of Sun right at them, like she did to Syhlex and his sons in that old poem. We'd use whatever level of power we needed until they were dead." His jaw firmed in pride, at the might of his own nation.

"And why not?" he continued. "Why should we lose Pony lives fighting monsters? Ponies have friends and family, they have meaningful lives. Predators are just -- wild beasts. What do they love?"

A strange light flickered in the Professor's eyes.

"They may not see it your way," he pointed out. "They may have friends and family too, and care for their own lives right well enough."

"Then they should stay off Pony lands," replied Falcon. "We leave them at peace in their homes."

"But Pony lands keep spreadin'," the Professor said. "What do the predators do when the Ponies -- when us Ponies -- eat up all the best land, and force them out into the wastes?"

"I suppose they perish," said Falcon. "Aside from the fact that we are Ponies, and hence should favor our own kind, isn't that the Natural order of things? The strong survive, and the weak go to the wall? Survival of the Fittest?"

There was at that moment a Pegasus foal in Cloudsdale -- surprisingly enough, closer kin to the one calling itself Professor Soar than to Falcon, who twenty years later could have greatly enlightened both of them as to the actual implications of evolutionary biology. However, right now she was just one year old, and thus her main philosophical musings were limited to feeding times, diaper changes, the fascinating exploration of her own sensory and motor capabilities -- and getting attention from her mother. And neither of them would ever get the chance to meet the High Lady Fluttershy. At least not in these lifetimes.

"I wouldn't know rightly," said Professor Soar. "I'm a geologist, not a biologist. I just know predators the hard way, from makin' sure not to get et by them, and I know t'aint safe to press beasts too hard. They might turn on ye. Pressem hard enough, they darn tootin' will turn on ye."

"I suppose there's always that danger," said Falcon. "But we Guards will always be there to meet them, in such an eventuality." It did not matter to Falcon at this moment that he was retired. 'Once a Guard always a Guard' was the saying, and it was quite true, in a far more profound sense than the fact that Falcon was still listed on the Reserve rolls. One never really retired from the Guards, at least not in one's heart.

"Is there anypony you love?" asked the Professor. "Anypony you'd do anything for, especially to protect them from harm?"

It was a strange question, but understandable in light of what they had been discusssing.

"Sure," said Falcon. "My wife, Strawberry, and our two foals, Blackcherry and Raspberry." He thought about them. "I'd die for them -- but I'd much rather live for them, if you see what I mean."

The Professor scrutinized him minutely.

"Yes," he said. "I reckon your love for them is very strong. What a waste --" he paused, "-- if it turned out you died for them, instead of living for them. You should look out for predators."

"Well," said Falcon, "that's why I have this crossbow." He took out and inspected his weapon. It was a beautiful Rammy Tong `54 special, six shot spring-wound action, capable of firing one shot per second as long as it was kept well-maintained. The bolts were light, but enough to kill or seriously wound a pony-sized target, and rate of fire was often more important in an air fight than stopping power, as a wounded foe would be at a serious disadvantage in any subsequent maneuvers.

The Professor copied Falcon, taking out and inspecting his own weapon. Falcon looked at it too. It was an older, Colt '48 three-shot repeater, with heavier bolts but slower action, capable of bringing down slightly bigger game. A single shot from one of these would definitely stop anything Pony-sized, at least long enough to pump another bolt into the target.

Falcon noticed a muzzle guard. "What's that for?" he asked. "Shielding the tips from the air?"

"I coat my bolts with a paralytic agent," the Professor explained. "Basilisk venom. Even greatly diluted, a scratch from this will quickly render a buffalo-sized target immobile."

"Yeowch!" commented Falcon. "One shot, one stop, eh?"

"A necessity," said the Professor. "I don't have the luxury of too many shots, as you can see from the magazine. And I'm not the world's greatest shot either, so I wait till the varmint's almost on me afore I pull the trigger. So I want to stop him fast."

"I can see that," said Falcon, smiling. "Be careful where you point that thing -- I'd hate to get paralyzed somewhere over the Everfree!"

"Sure," said the Professor. "Wouldn't want something to happen to the feller who's protectin' me, now would I?"

"Well, my wings are nice and rested now," commented Falcon, rising to his hooves and flexing the aforementioned members. "You feeling up to resuming our flight?"

"Oh yes," said the Professor, following suit. "I was cooling my wings back at the Sheriff's office, and the Sheriff left me a nice little meal too."

"Then let's be off. We can cross the Everfree before sundown, mabye even get you and your package delivered before it gets too late. Heck, maybe I can even sleep tonight in my own bed!"

The Professor smiled at him.

"Can only hope," he said. "Can only hope."

The two winged creatures, Pegasus and otherwise, took to the skies and headed north.

Chapter 3: Storm Over the Everfree

The sky ahead was darkening, and not with oncoming evening -- the Sun was still easily a couple of hours from setting, that was one of the benefits of these long summer days. Briefly, Falcon remembered the fun he'd had at the Summer Sun celebration last month: Raspberry had finally been old enough to take out with them, and she even understood some of what she was seeing around her; Blackcherry had had a great time, being her Daddy's happy little Cheerliee; and Strawberry had giggled and cuddled with him as if it had been one of their dates during that month of whirlwind courtship. Falcon loved the Summer Sun Celebrations -- it would be three years to the next Equestriad, maybe they'd go to whatever city Celestia was visiting for that one -- he'd seen her do the full Equestriad ritual once when he was in his teens, and it had been a spectacle he'd never forget. It had made quite an impression on him: he'd already been interested in the Traditions but that was what had convinced him to actually join the Guard.

He wished he was still a young stallion now. That short rest with the Professor hadn't really been enough -- it would have been, back when he'd been a teenager, but he was now more than three decades removed from that magic day he'd seen the Sun rise right behind Celestia as she led it over the horizon, golden light shining through her supernally-lovely rainbow mane onto the awed multitude, including his barely-out-of-colthood self. Now he was middle-aged, and his wings ached with each beat.

And he still had altitude to gain, if he was to reach Canterlot early enough this evening to fly back to home and Strawberry and the two little ones before the next day. He was facing four choices, none of them good ones.

He could set down, wait for the storm to pass. But the storm didn't look to be passing, it looked to be building, as if malign forces were gathering against him, unseen but too close to his course. If they did that, they wouldn't be in Canterlot until tomorrow morning, and he could kiss his chances at regular military contracts goodbye. Orange Streak was his friend, but he was only a Captain. Orange would shake his head sadly at this proof that his old buddy was no longer up to the job, and there would be no Realm coins to pay for a comfortable retirement with his love, or the educations of his two littler loves. He rejected that alternative.

He could cut east, but that led over more of the Everfree; the ruined city and old castle and Rambling Rock Ridge, and how did he know that the storm wouldn't spread there? Again, he wouldn't impress the Night Watch with his time -- it wouldn't be as bad as trying to wait out the storm, but it wouldn't look good on the books. He might get future contracts -- but probably not. And he certainly wouldn't be seeing Strawberry until the morning. He dismissed this route as a ghost-image of Strawberry's face, flushed with lust and love, passed before the real scene in his inner vision.

There was the westward route, over the gorge and the eastern White Tails. That would get him to Canterlot losing only an hour or two. He could still see Strawberry, though he'd be a little late getting home. He would probably get a few future contracts, but he wouldn't impress them with his speed. He weighed this option -- but he really wanted to make a splash. He wanted to found a successful courier business, one that could support him and his wife in their retirement, leave a major pile for his family when he was gone. He knew that he would probably predecease Strawberry -- it had been the fate they'd both accepted when they'd fallen in love, aged 39 and 16. But he wanted to ensure she'd be all right when he was gone -- sometimes she could be a little bit immature, a little bit helpless before the buffeting of fortune's winds, even now at 26 years of age. He loved her so dearly, but he wished she could be more self-reliant.

The vision of a middle-aged Strawberry, alone and in need, decided him on the fourth alternative.

He turned to Professor Soar, and started with surprise. The scruffy scientist was already flying close beside him, and his crossbow was already out, as if the stormclouds ahead had made him nervous. Soar was staring at him with an odd fascination -- almost hunger -- obviously, Soar felt great need of protection at this moment.

"Whoa," said Falcon. "You're close -- no, don't veer off, we need to talk." He pointed ahead at the dark clouds massing before them. "Okay, I'm sure you see that storm. Typical for the Everfree -- unscheduled and nasty. The one good thing about it is that we're less likely to run into the beasties -- most of them won't want to fly either. Except, of course, for those who actually like storms -- there are enough of those that we'll still want to stay alert and frosty, and keep our weapons ready for whatever decides we might be dinner."

"Can we climb over the storm?" asked Professor Soar. "It looks possible."

"I don't think we can get completely above all the clouds," Falcon said, surveying the skyscape with a practiced eye, "but yeah, higher up there's less of them and we can go between. Now, I'm sure you know, but we don't really want to go too close to them, cause they're building up a charge and we've got metal. So I'm going to lead the way, find us a safe passage, and you're going to follow. Close behind, though, I don't want us losing each other over this forest, specially not in a storm. Did you get that?"

"Loud and clear," said Soar. "Don't fret none -- I'll obey orders." The last phrase was said with emphasis.

Falcon was glad to see that the Professor was taking the situation seriously.

Falcon led them over dry ground, still shimmering with the warmth of the afternoon. They rode a thermal up until they could rise no higher without expenditure of energy. He took them into a long, shallow climb as they approached the Everfree itself. In Falcon's mind was the lay of the land, the position of the Sun, the maps he had memorized until they were as familiar to him as the countours of his own anatomy. Since they were to dare the dangers of the storm, he wanted to cut as straight through the forest as possible, maybe jag left a little so that they'd come out over Ponyville, then fly straight to Canterlot. Before they even reached Ponyville, they should be able to see Mount Avalon directly -- the peak was huge -- and navigation would become foal's play.

Occasionally he glanced back at his companion. Professor Soar was keeping up nicely, sometimes coming a bit too close but never straggling. Since Soar at no point was risking an actual collison, Falcon decided not to make an issue of the tailgating. Soar was flying strongly, not only matching but actually exceeding his altitude, so that he spent most of his time aloft above and behind Falcon, his crossbow out to watch over his wingmate.

Glad we're on the same side, Falcon thought wryly. I sure wouldn't want a foe high on my six like that. He remembered a desperate duel with a flight of Griffon bandits northeast of Baltimare, almost thirty years ago when he'd been but an Ensign. Wow, I sure was excited to be in my first real air combat, so excited I forgot to be scared. The fear had come later, after he was safely back at base, when his knees had buckled and his body started shaking all over, and his compassionate sergeant, Hailstorm, had draped a wing over him and led him to a chair, then gotten him a flask of some fluid whose presence was supposed to be strictly forbidden on an active Guards post. He shook his head wonderingly. Was I ever really that green?

He occpied himself with such thoughts of the past, of his military service and, occasionally, of the softer and sweeter life he had made with Strawberry and their fillies. Then the clouds ahead loomed, the ground ahead greened, and tall trees rose up below. The time for dreaming was gone.

They were over the Everfree.

***

Princess Ceymi's attention was firmly on Falcon Punch as he led her through the maze of clouds. Or led him ... it was always a difficult moment, even for an Infiltrator as experienced as herself, when her own goals and those of the cover so severely diverged.

Normally, in her mind, Ceymi was whoever she was pretending to be. That was the easiest way to avoid letting the mask slip. Ponies were far from stupid, and although they had a useful tendency to trust, to see what they wanted to see, an Infiltrator who made the mistake of imagining them a race of morons would have a short lifespan. Worse, her Hive might be threatened with exposure. Part of Ceymi, the part that stayed outside the masquerade, always remembered that she was in enemy territory, difficult as that might be to believe when she was enjoying home-cooked meals and love freely given as Starry Eyes, visiting home; or other kinds of love and friendship from Starry Eyes' many Pony friends all across Equestria.

A list that had included the Pony whose form she was presently wearing.

That was exciting, she remembered. Listening to Thermal Soar rant about the "buzzies," over a glass down at the saloon, not knowing that he was talking to one. I was young then, it was all so new to me, walking among the prey, tapping their love directly instead of from the pools.

I should have taken him back then, she reflected. But he was so interesting to talk with, once he stopped going on and on about us -- about me, both as Tootsie Pop and as myself glimpsed a moment later. Why did I let him go in the first place? She'd been scolded for that, doubly because his panicked flight had made it obvious that he'd seen her in her true form. Of course she never dared admit to anyling that she'd actually warned him in the first place.

That first intense rush of lust from him must have addled my brain. Direct from the source -- I'd never known that before. There'd even been love in there -- Thermal's nothing if not warm-hearted. For a moment, I saw him as a fellow ling, one who was about to get into trouble with the teachers, and I acted on impulse. Madness!

Then, later, when I met him as Starry -- I was more experienced by then, but lust had never tasted quite as good from anypony else. I wanted to taste his friendship too ... even his love. It was easy for a young explorer to arouse the protective impulses of an older rock hound, to win his friendship -- and then more. All Masquerade, he was never more than prey, she told herself, but the energy was never greater. His love was so intense that I only had to tap a little of it to be filled. If only it could always be so easy. And it made him happy.

She remembered a conversation she'd once had with a Pony -- Goldie Pie, she'd been named -- who called herself a "Friend of Paradise," who had painted for her a picture of an impossible world of love and joy and laughter all the time, a World That Was Lost somewhere in impossible directions of Time, but that could come back, someday, if enough ponies believed in it, and were kind to one another. Goldie Pie had been a middle-aged mare, blonde mane already starting to gray,

"A world where Ponies can be happy all the time?" Ceymi had scoffed -- at that moment she was trying out a new mask -- an Earth Pony she'd invented called Fire Wheel, who was a strolling juggler, traveling from town to town entertaining the crowds. That kind of love had been limited per Pony, but a whole audience could make a lot of it. "Just by being kind to each other?" Typical prey delusion, she'd thought, Soft, weak, turning away from the harsher truths of life. You'd never find Changelings believing any such nonsense.

"Yes," said Goldie, unshaken by Fire Wheel's scorn. "You'd be surprised what's possible with a little kindness. Consider yourself."

"What about myself?" challenged Fire Wheel, who had always been a rather confrontational sort of Pony, lovely but boisterous, well-suited to be a strolling entertainer. "I haven't found that much kindness on the road. I come into town, put on a show, and take their money. Purely selfish on my part, and on theirs -- they want to see my show."

"Ah," pointed out Goldie, "but consider what you are doing. You travel from town to town, and you put on a show. You give your audience joy, improving their lot, and they give you love in return. Each of you is expanded, neither diminished. The sum of your interaction is positive for both of you. It can always be like that." She stared intently into Fire Wheel's eyes, and though Fire Wheel simply stared back, the Ceymi within trembled in terror.

For something great and wise, impossibly ancient and intelligent, seemed to be looking back out her through the eyes of that kindly middle-aged mare. Did it know what she really was? If it did, she felt horribly certain that it would not let her kill Goldie, that it could snuff her out in an instant if she tried anything so rash.

"Some Ponies, maybe," she said. "Not all Ponies. We can't all live like that." Even in the extremity of her fear, Ceymi was too professional to outright reveal that she was no Pony at all, not to a being that might after all be bluffing her.

And then the strange mare said something that she remembered only too well, that still sometimes haunted her dreams, whether in mask or at home in the Hive.

"All Ponies," insisted Goldie. "Even those of the Lost Kinds. Paradise does not discriminate against any who come to It with love and good will in their hearts. "By this token shall ye know Me." And her eyes seemed to glow, though Ceymi could not remember with what color, or even if it was any color at all.

And Ceymi staggered before the purest, most intense love she had tasted, then or now. It was immense and wide-spectrum, every kind of love there was -- though maybe a little thin on the lust. In an instant it filled her to capacity, and the surplus spread across the town, attenuated but almost visible in its effects, for as she cast her eyes about frantically looking for an avenue of escape, she saw the other Ponies around her sigh with happiness, unaware of its origin.

"What ... what did ..." Fire Wheel ... no ... Ceymi ... at that moment they were one and the same babbled.

Then she realized her mortal peril and bolted, ran from that town as if the Twister himself were at her heels, ready to twist her and all Changelings into something even worse than he had done in the old legends, to turn them into true monsters. For in that flash of love she had glimpsed the possibility of a world without predator or prey, a world of mutual cooperation, a sweetly seductive lie that would turn her whole race soft. The real world could not, must not be like that!

Could the lion lay down with the lamb, save to dine?

She had barely reached the outskirts of the town, gotten into the cover of a stand of trees, when she firegated to the top of a nearby hill, then from there Shifted into her true self and buzzed off into the night sky, increasing the distance between herself and that accursed town and the Thing That Should Not Be that had looked at her from Goldie's eyes, and whispered impossible secrets and promises of love freely given and taken by both predator and prey.

In the intervening twelve years, she had never dared to return to Dunnich.

She wondered if Paradise had somehow contaminated her. She certainly had made every excuse to avoid pressing the issue of Thermal Soar, of reminding anyling, especially the Queen, that there was a Pony out there who had seen a Changeling in her true form and lived to tell of it. She had told herself that it did no harm. Nopony believed Thermal, after all. Nopony even listened to him when he ranted about the Buzzies -- save for Starry Eyes, and that was one of her holds over him. Encouraging his alcoholism just that little extra bit had helped -- she'd mostly done that by ordinary social means, every now and then putting in just the barest touch of her Stare. Mind control is most effective when done subtly and delicately, after all.

She knew she'd hurt him, in ways he'd never even grasped. The part of her that was being Starry Eyes sometimes felt guilty about so abusing a beloved friend and more-than-friend, while the greater self that was Ceymi coldly approved the technique. Ceymi, unlike Starry, was not at all sentimental: even the fact that she favored his seed for her eggs did not create the sort of emotional bond that would have existed had Ceymi been Pony.

What of it? He was prey. She should have taken him twenty years ago, would have taken him if not for that momentary flash of weakness on the Hill of the Stones. Thermal had been given two decades, during which he was only tapped very occasionally and well within his regenerative capacity. Two decades running free, two decades during which he enjoyed the visits -- usually at least once a year, and lasting a week or more -- of his dear friend-with-benefits, Starry Eyes. Two decades during which his keen, wonderful mind was free to explore the real world, instead of wasting away in an endless dream encysted within the Hive, where he should have been.

If he'd lasted that long. The Hive could never keep Ponies alive for their full natural span, even if they were very careful about not tapping them too often, and of course they were not always so careful.

Thermal would even get to live a bit longer. She was a Princess of the Hive -- only one Changeling within that Hive had higher authority than her own, and she could probably requisition him as an emergency supply for special missions. She could even join him in the lovedream. He'd think he was free, enjoying the company of Starry Eyes, sharing love with her. She certainly deserved such a luxury, after a mission as dangerous as this one. There was no sane reason for the Queen to refuse her, or even pay attention to matters so trivial.

Why, if she took really good care of him, perhaps he might live longer within the Hive than he would have done so without. Thermal had a rough and dangerous life as a desert rat -- each year she came back, she saw the visible signs of his aging, signs which gave her peculiar pangs whose source within her she did not care to examine. He needed to take better care of himself. She could make him last longer. She could still have those fascinating conversations with him, feel his touch with her mind, bask in his love ...

But, of course, it had been precisely her addiction to Thermal's love which had resulted in her being where she was right now, about to do what she was right now. Her delusion, she now saw, that love between predator and prey could ever be mutual. Thermal was her victim, she the victor over him, it was that simple. Should be that simple. Why can't I just do what I'm supposed to, without always questioning things. She promised herself that she would raise her broods well, never let those she instructed ever find themselves in her current situation.

She had to kill Falcon Punch.

She'd killed three Ponies before, two of them bandits who had foolishly believed that an explorer alone was easy prey, and learned too late that what they were attacking was in fact a natural predator of their own kind. The third had been sadder: a Pony she'd been cultivating as a friend, who had followed her one day and seen what he ought not to have seen. At least that one had been a quick kill -- it would have bothered her if Shine Spoon had known more than a moment of fear and pain, before she took his life with her beam.

But this felt different. Falcon Punch was no friend of hers -- though she had enjoyed her conversation with him: her exploration of his mentality, its capabilities and limitations. He might have become a friend in time; two or three of her masks would have suited him, though she doubted that Strawberry would have been comfortable had she picked Starry Eyes. He clearly liked Thermal Soar, and would have liked him even more had she been under less tension at the time.

However, she had to kill him. Not by choice -- had she been the one ordering this mission, she simply would have taken the corpse and papers along with Thermal, and left but a mystery for the puzzled Ponies of Appleloosa, and a frustrated Falcon Punch arriving to find the Sheriff's office vacant, all the officers at home, and his mission impossible to fulfill. That would have involved little risk, and Falcon would have simply flown right back to his loving wife and foals. Ceymi did not like to kill Ponies, when such death was needless.

Queen Chrysalis had insisted on doing it this way, though. At least she had persuaded the Queen of the importance of getting the papers back to the Hive, instead of carrying them on her to this moment of decision. Should -- by some incredibly bad luck -- she rather than Falcon fall today, Ceymi did not want to let curious Pony eyes pore over a map and directions to the Hive itself.

Why do it this way? "To send a message," Chrysalis had said, which made absolutely no sense, and bothered her even now. The prey should never be sent any message as to the existence of Changelings; Thermal was safely captive; and Falcon Soar but an innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To myself? Does the Queen mean to teach me something? She wondered if her unavoidable sympathy for the Ponies had gone noticed. But I'm the most successful Infiltrator of my generation -- the most successful in the Hive, period, save perhaps for the Queen herself. Why would the Queen care what I feel within my inmost heart? I've never directly spoken of them to anyling Don't my results speak for themselves? Why would she risk me, risk the very secrecy of the Hive, like this?

She could not figure it out, and now was neither the time nor the place. Falcon Punch must die, and his damning cargo vanish along with him. She must obey her orders.

They flew on into a rift between two tall clouds. Golden sunlight streamed almost horizontally through the formation, creating shadowed valleys. The clouds were tall, and down through the rift Ceymi could see dark reaches lower down, litten by lightning-flashes. They flew into a headwind. It was hard going, and all Falcon's attention would be focused on the way ahead.

She would never have a better chance.

Ceymi gripped her crossbow firmly in her hooves, propping the rest against her chest, ensuring that the recoil would not tear the weapon from her grasp. She was a decent shot with a crossbow -- it wasn't her favorite weapon, but it was Thermal's, and part of the plan would be to discredit him by proving him, with this murder, to be hopelessly Lone-Mad. Briefly, she felt a flash of remorse at the final insult she was to wreak upon his memory amongst other Ponies, but she firmly pushed it down. There was no time for weakness now.

She fixed her gaze on Falcon, a predator preparing to pounce on her prey. Best to kill him with the first shot, she thought, and in these winds long range shooting is a bad idea. I'll close to point-blank range, then loose my bolt.

She dived to the attack.

Chapter 4: Betrayal in the Sky

Author's Note

This chapter is the biggest reason this story has a "gore" warning. It's not gratuitous, but it is sadly all too realistic in terms of the physical effects. So don't read it if you don't like a description of a fairly unpleasant event happening to one of the main characters.

Chapter 4: Betrayal in the Sky

The storm was flashing below, lightning stuttering his paramagnetic flight field and the thunder shivering through Falcon Punch's bones, but the ex-Guardspony felt the interference of another's flight field coming at his own fast, from high on his six.

He did not stop to question who or why, the stimulus simply touched old responses conditioned in to him by the Guard's obsessive drill. He automatically rolled to his left, because most attackers would strike to the right, and the first crossbow bolt sung through the air where his back had been, passing so close to him that he could distinctly feel it passing through the field emitted by his wings as they pushed him hard to the left.

I'm under attack! he realized in utter horrified surprise, but though his conscious mind was almost paralyzed by emotional shock, his training continued to condition his responses, and he jinked right in midair, pulling his head up and tail down so he was standing vertical, turning to see his attacker. He saw Professor Soar streak by, crossbow in hand, the other Pegasus turning toward him and braking, bringing his crossbow up almost in line with Falcon's own torso.

The enemy must be behind me! he thought and he inverted his wings, pitching backward into an inverted dive, but as he snap-turned he could see nothing behind him and he wondered what Soar was aiming at, only to hear the snap of Soar's crossbow firing quite close to him, and watch in utter shock as the bolt passed between his hind legs, whickering through the long hairs of his tail and almost cutting skin. Severed hairs fell behind him in the dive, and he yelled "Watch out! You're shooting wild!" as he frantically scanned the sky, trying to locate the real attacker.

He looped and climbed back up, unable to see any foe no matter where he looked -- all he could see was Professor Soar, frantically working the bolt of his bigger crossbow, loading and winding what must have been the last bolt from his magazine, while Falcon himself darted his own crossbow around uselessly, trying and failing to find any target for his smaller quick-shooter.

And then he came up, at an angle that would let himself and Soar scan the whole sky between him, with only a small blind spot represented by each other's bodies and wings, and he started to say "Back to back!" -- the position in which they would have maximum visibility and safety against the unseen foe, and all he said was "Back --" before he realized that Soar's eyes were fixed on himself, Soar's crossbow coming up to aim center-of-mass on Falcon's own body.

And as that realization shocked his brain to realization of what was really going on -- though he still didn't know why -- in that last second of possible future in this lifetime -- he began to bring his own bow up -- to shoot the Professor who had unaccounatably changed from sky-friend to deadly foe -- in that last second Falcon's age betrayed him, for at forty-nine he was simply not as fast as he had been three decades ago when he and his wing-mate had beaten twice as many Griffons on their own over the seas off Baltimare.

He was still fast, yes but Soar was just that crucial bit faster. Just as he stroked the trigger and the action of his crossbow began to work, something punched him hard over the top of his barrel, knocking him back in the sky. He saw his bolt slash through Soar's left foreleg, and Soar's own bow went wild with the recoil and tore from the other Pegasus' right hoof, going sailing off into the cloudscape, but it didn't matter now, nothing would matter any more for Falcon Punch. The aging ex-Guardspony looked down to see the familiar bulk of the package, but above it what at first looked like a metal attachment sticking out from his harness.

Why, I never noticed that rod before, Falcon Punch started to think, and then he breathed out and the bright red fluid sprayed forth to mist the air before him, and he knew he had his death-wound. Oh, damn, he thought. I wasn't ... enough ... and then he tried to breathe in for his next wingstroke and he began convulsively choking, starting to drown in midair on his own blood, and he lost his upward momentum, hung for a moment, wings shuddering still for the last time ...

... and Professor Soar reached forward with his right hoof, left foreleg hanging uselessly at his side, braced himself against with his hind hooves and tried to yank loose the package. It was hopelessly stuck, and the Professor glared at him with a strange combination of anger and ... sorrow?

Then Falcon must have started to hallucinate, for there was a flash of green fire, and where the Professor had been was an impossibility, something the size and general shape of a small Alicorn, but it was black and green and in its chitinous form bore a hideous resemblance to a gigantic insect, despite the fact that it had only four hole-pitted legs and two membranous wings, quite unlike any bug he had ever seen. It had a pale greenish yellow mane, and greenish yellow slitted eyes, and about it was something that said to him female, though it looked like no mare he had ever seen in or out of nightmares.

The creature's horn flared, and the straps on his harness parted. The package came free in the mare-thing's right hoof, and for a moment it held him by its hind-hooves, while he flailed around weakly, no longer having the strength to even try to breathe, and everything began to become dim around him. Anoxia ... he thought dully, another useless word from the life that was now ending.

The mare-thing spoke.

"Sorry," she said in a strange buzzing voice. "Nothing personal. Orders ..."

And then she let go.

In his dimming sight she was the last thing he saw, falling away far above ... no, he must have been falling away far below.

He could feel the air rushing around him, whipping his limp wings and shaking his strengthless limbs as he began the long last plummet. He had time for one last thought, a last despairing silent mind-cry wrung out of the depths of his soul as he realized the worst part of this.

Strawberry ... he thought, his last mental image his wife's own dear face.

Falcon Punch could no longer feel the air. He could no longer feel the need to breathe. He could no longer feel anything. He no longer was ...

***

And in a house just northwest of Ponyville, Strawberry Lyn Berry, who had been in the middle of serving an early supper, coughed convulsively and fainted, right before her disbelieving daughters, the bowl of warm honeyed oatmeal she had been holding spattering across the kitchen floor.

"Mommy's fallen," commented three-year-old Raspberry Lyn calmly, then, seeing no sign of motion, turned to her elder sister and cried "Mommy's fallen! Help!" Tears sprung from her frightened purplish eyes.

Blackcherry "Cheerilee" Lee, aged nine, stood frozen in utter shock for a moment, nothing in her nine years of life having prepared her for such an event as her mother simply falling down on the kitchen floor. Mercifully, she was not yet knowledgeable enough to even grasp the possibilities of heart attack or stroke that would have occurred to an older filly. All she knew was that there was trouble, Mommy was in no condition to do anything to help them because she had fallen asleep in the middle of supper, and her baby sister was scared and needed her.

This was a key moment in Cheerilee's life, a moment when her sense of purpose crystalized. It was not the moment when she got her cutie mark -- that would happen years later, when her destiny had set more firmly, but it was the moment when something that had been as yet merely potential in her became actual, when she learned what her general role would be in any crisis.

Daddy wasn't here. Mommy was sleeping. And her baby sister was crying.

Somepony had to take charge, and she was the only pony awake, present, and not hopelessly terrified.

So she took charge.

"Mommy just fell down," Cheerilee explained, in a childish treble version of the voice which would by two decades later be familiar to every schoolchild in town. "You need to be good and calm while I get her up again, okay?"

Raspberry nodded silently, her right hoof stuck firmly in her own mouth, her lips sucking. tears rolling down her cheeks, but her sobs stilled.

Cheerilee stepped over to her mother, bent down, looked into her face. "Mommy?" she asked. "I think you should get up. Raspberry's scared. She needs you to tell her it's all right."

There was no response.

She'd heard somewhere what to do about this. She'd never done it, but she'd heard somepony say they had, and that was as good as any guide in such a strange situation.

Cheerilee trotted over to the sink, climbed up to the top of the countertop to get a good grip on the handle, and worked the pump, filling a cup of water. Then she hopped down, took the cup and dashed the contents, directly into her mother's face.

Strawberry sat up spluttering. "Wha --" she said, then saw Cheerilee standing there, cup still in her hoof. "Why --?"

"Mommy, you fell down and wouldn't answer, so I woke you with the water." her eldest daughter explained.

"Yeah," chimed in Raspberry, pulling her hoof out of her mouth, "An' you look funny all wet!"

"What happened, mommy?" Cheerilee asked. "What was wrong?"

"I ..." Strawberry kneaded her forehead, with both hooves, "I don't really know, dear." She blinked repeatedly. "I was in a storm, and then I was choking, and then I was falling. And that was it." Tears started from her eyes, began rolling down her cheeks. "It was all over. All over ..."

"Why are you crying?" asked Cheerilee.

"I don't know ..." she said, and the silent tears continued. "I don't know!"

Raspberry looked in horror and tears began to well up in her eyes as well.

"I think you should get up, Mommy," said Cheerilee, pushing herself under her mother's rump and nudging hard.

Strawberry, responding automatically to a stimulus that had been known to her ancestors twenty thousand years ago, when the difference between succeeding and failing to get up when predators menaced the herd could also mean the difference between survival and death, got up. Normally, it would have been the mare performing this service for her child rather than the other way round, but instincts in sapient mammals are surprisingly flexible.

There was a flash of light visible through the windows. They waited for many seconds, then came a low distant rumble.

There was a thunderstorm over the Everfree.

"I hope Daddy's not out in that," commented Cheerilee. Both fillies were Earth Ponies like their mother, but they knew that their father didn't like to fly through storms.

And once again, Strawberry began crying, quite without knowing the reason why.

***

Ceymi held the mummy of the unknown and obviously unfortunate nymph and clutched it to her chest with her one remaining good forelimb, cursing the ill-luck that had let Falcon sense and dodge two of her attacks, and react fast enough to realize what she was doing and get off that one accurate bolt before her own last bolt found his heart, or close enough that the fast-acting drug on the bolt must have been stopping his heart and lungs even as she spoke those last outrageously-weak and sentimental words to her prey. The wound had healed, of course, when she Shifted. But even transformation magic, even the wondrously-flexible transformation magic of what the Queen called the Master Race, is not without cost.

Her left foreleg was still terribly weak -- she would need to eat a meal of protein, drink fluids and consume love in order to restore both flesh and energy. She didn't dare try to hold the mummy in it, or she might drop it -- if it landed near Falcon's corpse that would rather totally obviate the entire point of the mission. She'd lost her crossbow, so her spare bolts were about as useful as an ovipositor on a drone. She had a knife -- which she couldn't wield very effectively with her magic almost exhausted and one foreleg out of commission. Otherwise, she could risk over-channeling herself in the midst of the worst wilderness on the whole damned continent, a place so hostile that it made the Badlands seem almost friendly by comparison.

At least in the Badlands the monsters weren't packed nearly so dense.

For a moment she hung there indecisively, then duty won over safety and sanity. Ceymi had been ordered to confirm the kill, and so she would. Tipping forward, she buzzed her wings and power-dove after Falcon Punch, her black chitinous body cleaving the clouds, her flightfield automatically polarizing to let her through rather than support her upon the thickening masses of cloud.

Vapor whipped past her form as she dove, and visibility dropped to ridiculously short distances within the cloud-masses. From a distance there had seemed to be a decent ceiling between the base of the thunderstacks and the forest far below, but of course she had only viewed these particular clouds from above.

This was a crazy risk to run -- if the ceiling had dropped to the tops of the trees, she would not have nearly enough time to pull out of her dive. Even with her flightfield snapping to maximum, she would face broken bones, and lie there crippled in the midst of the Everfree, facing a choice of capture by Equestrian search party or death by brute beasts.

Still -- she was pretty sure she hadn't yet gone down a mile. Ceymi knew how fast she could fly in a power dive, and she knew how far it was to the ground -- both very roughly -- so she could even more roughly estimate her altitude. She briefly wished that there were some way of seeing through the clouds of directly sensing her altitude save with an inner ear already confused by the pressure drop within the storm. I might as well wish to fly to the Moon on a magic ship, she told herself scornfully.

At one point in the clouds there was a flash and every single one of her muscles extended simultaneously. She tumbled out of control, slowing back toward terminal velocity as she lost active propulsion, but never actually lost consciousness, and a few moments later, Ceymi snapped back into an active flight posture, wings again vibrating, emitting paramagnetism. Only a tiny fraction of the static electricty had discharged directly into her -- if any large amount had, she would have become a charred and twisted curiosity, perhaps for Equestrian scientists to puzzle over if she were sufficiently unlucky.

How far had she fallen now? She needed to slow down ... she must be well below a thousand feet now ... Ceymi reduced thrust, then began to curve her course up from the vertical, emitting paramagnetism downward, reducing the velocity of her descent. She had to do this carefully -- trying to pull out too fast could damage her wings. They weren't as robust as those of an actual pegasus, and weak as her magic was right now, she did not want to try Shifting back to a pegasus form in mid-descent.

Ceymi came out of the clouds around five hundred feet off the ground and still in a fairly steep dive. She saw mixed woodland beneath her, the canopy happily low, giving her well over four hundred feet of clearance between the clouds and the trees. She frantically pulled up, flaring paramagnetism downward, trying to build up an active cushion beneath her. The buildup of her field attracted lightning which fortunately discharged directly into the field instead of into her body, but less fortunately collapsed the field beneath her.

Once again she tumbled, this time for a much shorter time, but in a situation where she was rapidly running out of sky beneath her, her ears ringing from the thunderbolt. Third time will be the charm, she thought gloomily, and was rewarded by a second strike following the ion path of the first one. Fortunately, she had already managed to get out of the path on aerodynamics alone, and she looked down to see the forest clawing up to meet her.

She had no choice if she did not want to smear herself into a crater somewhere within a few miles of Falcon Punch's own self-dug tomb: with her flight-field down she would suffer serious injury in any crash. She buzzed her wings, re-igniting her flight field, and through some combination of extreme good luck, managed to burn off much of her vertical velocity and pull up into perfect horizontal flight. The next few moments were exciting ones, as she jinked right and left to avoid smacking directly into tree boles, all the while air-braking to come to an absolutely perfect landing, remembering at the last moment to pull up her injured left foreleg so that she did not land on it with the momentum of her landing added to her normal weight and injure herself further.

Ceymi stood three-legged for a moment, gingerly putting down her left foreleg and discovering that she could, in fact, put a little weight on it, though it still felt tender. Rain lashed her, lightning flashed again and again, and were it not for her excellent low-light vision she couldn't really have seen much. The adrenaline from the last few minutes drained out of her system, and she shuddered, suddenly realizing that she was wet, exjaisted. hurt, and had nearly gotten killed several times over.

This was a bad plan, she realized Even granted that I had to let the courier have the package, instead of giving him a fake or just taking the mummy back to the Hive after we secured Thermal Soar, I could have killed Falcon Punch back in the Palomino, then carried the corpse over the Everfree and dropped him there. Instead, I had to ambush him over the Everfree, then dive after him to make sure he was dead.

I'm pretty sure I killed him, she continued the thought. My bolt took him somewhere in the upper barrel, went somewhere respiratory from all the blood, and there was enough tranquilizer on the tip to put him to sleep somewhere in midair, meaning that he made the hard landing I just barely avoided. Assuming, that is, that he didn't just drown in his own blood on the way down. I find it incredibly unlikely that he's alive after all that, or that he'd last much longer if by some miracle he did somehow live through getting shot, then falling over a mile.

I would never have done this if it had not been at the Queen's direct orders, and if she had not merely specified letting Falcon have the mummy and then killing him with Thermal's crossbow over the Everfree, but also insisted that I confirm the kill by checking the crash site. This was stupid. Granted, the Queen couldn't have possibly known she would be ordering me to fly into a thunderstorm but that is exactly why one normally gives Infitrators some discretion in the details of fulfilling their missions Why is she being so absurdly specific about this all?

She looked around herself. She did not, of course, expect to land right beside Falcon's corpse. That would have required absurd good fortune, given the combined effects of changing winds, the fact that she had leveled off and landed rather than plummeted to her own death. But she did think it likely that he was somewhere within five, maybe ten miles.

Such a search would have been hopeless, given the conditions, were it not for one thing that Ceymi happened to know. Namely, the paramagnetic resonance frequency patterns of standard Guards ID tags, which all Guards wore around their necks for just such location purposes -- such as being trapped in the middle of a trackless forest awaiting rescue. Its secondary purpose was to locate their dead bodies should they be beyond the point where rescue would do them any good, and that was what Ceymi was now doing.

This was more difficult in a thunderstorm, As is pretty much everything, Ceymi thought with some peevishness, but it was not impossible. She waited for a lull in the storm, resting for the meantime on the against a fallen tree, huddling beneath the trunk (she did not want to chance sitting under a standing tree in such a storm), her back to the bole and an eye out for any predator stupid enough to go hunting in a thunderstorm. Stupid like a Changeling Princess, she realized, since that's pretty much what I am in the middle of doing.

After a moderate amount of time -- no more than half an hour or so, not nearly enough time for the Guards at Canterlot to get worried by their non-arrival -- the frequency of the flashes lessened and the time between flashes and booms lengthened. The worst of the storm was moving on beyond this point,

Somewhat rested -- though far from recuperated -- Ceymi judged that she had more than enough energy to cast one simple little locator spell, fly to the crash site, and fly back to the Hive. For that matter, after she found the site, she could take a Pegasus form -- she had at least one or two such identities in which she had little invested. Tootsie Pop herself hadn't been seen much in the last twenty years, and had no current contacts in Equestria. Pegasi were far better for long-distance flying, and had the advantage that nopony seeing one would report a "buzzy" sighting.

But she needed to have a horn to cast the spell, and she did not desire to slog through the Everfree on foot in the rain without having a quick way to escape any aggressive animals. Or plants, even. Life was more than a bit strange in the deep Everfree.

So after making sure the storm really had mostly passed on, Ceymi hopped back up into the air and cast her spell.

North by north west. The bearing to the locator was an awareness in the back of her mind, something sensed rather than seen. She cruised slowly about a hundred feet above the treetops, which she judged should be enough distance between her and any likely hungry maws. She was a bit tired, but remained alert -- it would be oh-so-stupid to die now, after she'd successfully. completed what should logically have been the truly dangerous parts of her mission, despite the idiotic plan she'd been forced to follow.

Nothing ate her. She found the crash site, and what was left of Falcon Punch.

She set down there, after first peering carefully into the vegetation for creatures wanting to take advantage of the lunch delivery from above. She regarded him a bit sadly. Aerodynamically, he should have hit head-first, but he'd clipped a tree on the way down -- she could see the broken branches -- and struck tail-first instead.

His head, shoulders and forelegs were protruding from the ground, more or less right side up, and he almost looked as if he could have been alive, merely buried in the ground. The rain had even washed the blood from his mouth. But he had her crossbow bolt in his chest, he was not breathing, and his head lolled at an angle that looked as if he'd taken a broken neck from his arboreal impact. She touched his face gently -- he was as cold as the rain. Falcon Punch had flown his last flight.

I wish I hadn't had to kill you, she thought again. You fought pretty well. You almost got me. Glad that it's you lying there instead of me ...but it's too bad that either of us had to die this day. She could not say that she was grief-stricken over the death of an enemy, but it was all so pointless. He had a lot of love for his family. Some of it could have gone to the Hive.

And that was that. She hefted the mummy ...

... and something --- a rustle in the leaves, a sudden stillness, maybe the motion in the air -- warned her at the last moment, and she flung herself to one side as the manticore's paw smacked the wet soil where she had been standing. She dodged again a moment later as it followed up on the attack.

As the beast gathered itself to strike again and again and again, like one of those little cats the Ponies kept playing with a mouse, Ceymi simultaneously sprayed a wide-angle beam from her horn into its face -- not enough to really hurt it,. but enough to make the monster recoil, hissing. In one swift motion that she would have sworn a minute ago she lacked the energy to perform, she scooped up the mummy in her right foreleg, reared, and leaped for the sky, wings buzzing. Something swiped the air as she launched herself, but the scorpion tail was way too slow and inaccurate with the creature half-blinded.

Ceymi gained altitude, listening to the angry roars of the beast diminishing as it fell away beneath her.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me, she thought to herself. Does this little bit of forest hate me personally? It was probably interested in the corpse, but once it saw me it thought live game would be more fun. Rosedust's freaking rear-hole, I so very much hate manticores. They always hate me. They'll be the death of me someday, if something else in this insane forest doesn't get me first!

She buzzed away southward, the mummy whose existence had caused all this suffering firmly in her grasp.

Home, she thought, home and the Hive and some long-earned rest, where nothing's trying to kill me.

After she was about three hundred feet up, she Shifted to Tootise Pop, letting herself fly on her broader and stronger wings. It was still raining, but the lightning storm had passed away to the north, and as she flew the visibility began to improve.

I should be safe now, she thought. The Hive is boring, my fellow Changelings are mostly imbeciles, but if it is one thing the Hive most definitely is, that is safe. Besides, maybe it'll be a bit more interesting now, with old Thermal in a cyst. I can give him a lovedream, take my time about it, get not only some of that incredibly tasty love of his but talk a bit, maybe about geology. or philosophy -- he was always so interesting to talk with, I looked forward to his mind almost as much as I did to his love. Maybe more so.. He can't learn any more now, not in the field, but we can talk -- as long as I don't bring him all the way out of it, it should be easy.

I can be Starry Eyes. He'll remember Tootsie Pop's a Changeling now, but I never blew Starry Eyes as a cover -- he really likes her, she'll be an excellent Mask. She smiled to herself. It'll be almost as good as before. Maybe more so, because I won't be among the prey -- nothing too bad could ever happen to me in the Hive. He'll last a good long time -- I'll make sure that he does. I'll have my own private little love-stash.

The idea warmed her, despite the cold rain. And so Princess Ceymi winged away back homeward, thinking happy thoughts.

Chapter 5: Betrayal in the Hive

Princess Ceymi soared on Tootsie Pop's wings over the Palomino. She was grateful for the wider wingspan and ability to glide on broad-spread flightfield: Had she been limited to the more active means of flight of her natural form, she would have been forced to consume much more energy. As herself, she would have had no choice but to stop somewhere, hunt for food, get some sleep. As Tootsie Pop, she could make it back to the Hive within a single night and morning's long journey. This convenience was a clear demonstration of what her Queen had always told her: Changelings were the Master Race, able to make use of the advantages of any of the lesser breeds.

Most of the way south she had followed the river. There was a danger of encountering other Ponies this way, of course, but then there was nothing particularly suspicious about Tootsie Pop. The famous Code of the Skies held that fliers did not bother one another without specific reason, and once she had cleared the Everfree, there was nothing logically connecting her with the corpse she was leaving far behind in that clearing. However much of it would be left when the manticore was finished.

Briefly, Ceymi wondered if the manticore would eat the whole corpse, including the tracker. That would be mostly to her benefit; as it would totally muddy the evidence. In addition, this led her to the amusing thought of the Guards hunting that manticore through hill and dale, finally killing it and cutting open its stomach. That would serve it right. The alternative possibility -- that the Guards wouldn't get it until it passed Falcon Punch, depressed her slightly. He fought too well to deserve to be manticore droppings.

Ah well. We don't get what we think we deserve. He probably thought he deserved to come home to his wife instead of dying over the Everfree. And I --?

Her life was actually going pretty well now -- she'd be able to report complete success at a dangerous mission to the Queen, she'd only suffered minor injury in the process, which some sustenance and sleep would heal in a night or two, and she'd even get to keep Thermal as her personal love store for the next decade, if she buzzed her part right. She felt she'd gotten at least as much as she deserved.

Won't last forever, though, she reminded herself. Into each ling's life a little rain must fall, and into the life of an Infiltrator more than most. The day would come when she'd be fighting for her life again, perhaps somewhere even more unpleasant as the Everfree. But for tonight, all she had to do was get home, make her report, and rest. Oh, sweet sleep ...

She yearned to already be back home.

***

Strawberry had long since recovered from her fright of several hours past, gotten the fillies more food, and cleaned up the kitchen floor. She had just finished putting Blackcherry and Raspberry to bed, the lights were out. It would be a normal night.

Except that she didn't feel normal. The initial terror was gone, but she felt inexplicably nervous.

What's the matter with me? she asked herself as she lay on the living room couch, repeatedly rubbing her fore-hooves together until she felt the sensitive suckered surface on the bottoms becoming painfully raw. She considered knitting, but of course now her dexterity would be shot until a good night's sleep healed them.

She felt weak, endangered, as if something she had counted upon to strengthen and shield her for years was missing, and the world had become perilous. It was an odd sensation -- Strawberry had been raised by loving parents, sheltered by them until she was old enough to seek new loves -- and had almost instantly met and married Falcon. She had always enjoyed the protection of others -- being alone, even for a short while, bothered her on a very deep level.

I'm a big silly getting like this just because Falcon's gone for a night, she scolded herself. When I talk to him about how I felt tonight, when I see him tomorrow morning he'll tell the same thing himself.

The thought of seeing Falcon tomorrow morning greatly comforted her.

I'd better get some sleep, she decided. I'll want to be fresh for Falcon tomorrow.

She got up, padded over to the kitchen, took out a cup. Her hooves were easily up to the task of this minor manipulation. She opened a cabinet, looked at the array of bottles contained therein.

I don't want to drink too much, she decided. I'll get a hangover, and my breath will be all nasty for Falcon when we kiss.

So she selected some wine -- the wine was strawberry, just like her name, and bottled by her own family -- and poured herself just a single cup. She recorked the bottle and put it away, to make sure she wasn't tempted to take any more. Then she took the cup into the living room, slowly sipped her wine, felt her calm returning.

There. All better.

She returned the cup to the kitchen, washed it -- everything's going to be neat and tidy for Falcon when he comes home -- and went off to bed.

She slipped off to sleep, and dozed untroubled by nightmares.

***

The night was long fled into the west -- it was well past sunrise, when Princess Ceymi finally landed at the entrance of the main upper tunnel into Hive Chrysalis. She folded Tootsie Pop's weary wings, shifted back to her true form, and made a vocal recognition buzz to the two Warriors who stood in alcoves beside the gate, who buzzed back to welcome her home to the Hive.

After the first couple hundred yards of Outer Hive labyrinth, defense against any outsiders who had managed to make it this far, Ceymi reached the Middle Hive, stepping back into her familiar world of close tunnels filled with the comforting warmth and scent of Changelings and their bio-technology, the strips of luminescent fungi on the tunnel walls, the bustle and rustle of Changelings and their chitin, the buzz of Changeling minds and voices. Here there was no Enemy, no danger, here was only Hive Chrysalis, here only the Changelings, all of them at least her half-siblings, their kin-based altruistic love surrounding her in its literally kind embrace, for it derived solely from genetic similarity..

It was no intense love, such as the Ponies knew at their most fortunate. There was friendship, but not friendship against all others, for the first love and loyalty of any sane Changeling was to Queen and to Hive. There was a dim kind of lust, and occasional mating, but there were no romantic meetings, shy courtships, special somelings or anything like marriages: for all but the smartest of Changelings, sexuality within the Hive was starkly reproductive, rather than sentimental. The love was vague and tasteless to her empathy, which was proper since Changelings could not feed off the love of one another. And the minds behind that love were, to Ceymi's brilliant brain, but dim and flighty ones, useless for any serious conversations, such as Starry Eyes had enjoyed, with Thermal Soar and a few other Ponies.

Still, they were her own kind, her own Hive, and their love was undemanding and unshakeable -- all it asked from her was that she subordinate her individuality to the greater whole that was the Hive Mind. When she was in the Hive, Ceymi usually just turned off most of her own thoughts and ran on conditioning, drifting along in the collective dream that was the vague consciousness of Hive Chrysalis. It was relaxing and restful, and right now she needed relaxation and rest more than almost anything else.

There was but one responsibility, one chore left to perform before she could surrender herself to sweet somnolence. And this would surely be a happy task, for she had accomplished her assignment. Once again, she had proven herself the greatest Infiltrator the Hive boasted. She had moved amongst the prey undetected, taken control of one of their Warrior-posts unsuspected, made captive her primary target, then slain the secondary target -- a veteran Equestrian Warrior -- taken the physical prize, confirmed the kill, and made a clean getaway. She had once again won, returned victorious.

She made her way deeper into the mesa whose outside seemed so sinister to those not of the Hive, yet so welcoming to the Children of Chrysalis. Another gate, another pair of guards, another challenge and recognition. Now she was within the Inner Hive, the sanctum of Queen Chrysalis and her most trusted servants. Here, no outsider would ever enter, unless never to return. The prey stored here as love-stock were for the personal use of Queen Chrysalis, and hers alone, kept apart from the common larder or the subsidiary larders maintained by the lesser Royalty such as Ceymi herself. And of course, only at great need would the Queen lower herself to drink from the mere love-pools employed by the common Changelings. It was the Queen's right to tap directly from the source, a right as unquestioned within the Hive as her right to rule, as long as she remained dominant and un-Challenged.

A final set of gates, a final challenge and recognition. And Princess Ceymi, the greatest Infiltrator of her generation, strode within the crowded throne-chamber of Queen Chrysalis, self-proclaimed strongest Changeling Queen of her species and her historical age. The roughly ellipsoid cave, carved from the rock by a forgotten race, remolded to Changeling purposes, and lined with the hardened secretions of many skilled Ling artisans, arranged in patterns of bioluminescence and scent that were as beautiful to the Changelings as they would have been nauseating and terrible to Ponies, was crowded with Changelings. There were Changelings crowding the floor, the walls, even parts of the ceiling, clinging to deliberate irregularities in the coating ideally-suited to be grasped by the irregularities and holes in Changeling hooves.

Unlike the Ponies, Changelings did not need luxury, they did not need personal space, they did not even need to be oriented vertically to function. This throne chamber was proof and testament to Changeling superiority, and the constant low buzz that filled even more fully than the chitinous Changeling forms was supremely comforting to a weary Infiltrator returned from the lands of their prey and enemies.

There was no formal announcement of her presence, as there might have been at a court of Ponies or Griffons or similar inferior beings. There was no need -- she simply buzzed her identity as she entered, in voice and mind, and the Hive Mind of which the Changelings in this chamber were part relayed her identity to its Focus who sat at the room's other end. The Hive accepted her. The Queen accepted her. Without being explicitly told, Ceymi knew that it was right, proper and necessary that she advance to close audience with the Queen, and she did so.

The crowd before her parted automatically as she advanced, also knowing what to do without being told directly. Those few enemies or prey who actually knew of the Changelings might imagine that they were mindless slaves of the Hive, but it was not slavery. Rather it was glorious Unity, with and within the Hive, and in this moment -- among the last moments of her life, though she did not know it yet, in which she would really and genuinely feel this sentiment -- Princess Ceymi was happy in her unconditonal acceptance and place within the greater order.

Queen Chrysalis sat before her, great and glorious in her sublime majesty. The Stare -- stronger by far than Ceymi's own -- slept behind her gorgeous green eyes, proof to the mind of the Princess of her psychic dominance. Special pheromones wafted from her body, including most especially the flower-like growth that crowned her cranium, proof to Ceymi's vomeronasal receptors both of that same dominance and their close kinship.

There was only one eusocial collective in Equestria greater than a Changeling Hive, one Focus stronger than a Changeling Queen, and though it was a far more loving One, Princess Ceymi had already fled in terror from its principal Friend, and would never have the chance to become a part of it again in this lifetime. Chrysalis was the Queen she would live and die for, as the possibilities of her life approached their narrowing-point.

Princess Ceymi dipped her head to her Queen. There was no need for any elaborate ceremony of submission, no Far-Northern proskynensis, nor even a low bow as an Equestrian subject would have rendered to his Ruling Princess. Ceymi's submission came from mind and pores alike, and it was a submission so complete that it would have alarmed and even horrified the Sun Princess of Canterlot, had one of her own rendered it unto her.

"Welcome back to the Hive," would have been the Equestrian translation of the concepts which Queen Chrysalis conveyed to her royal vassal. "I see that you have succeeded." Had Ceymi failed, her psycyhic and pheromonal emissions would have tasted very different to the Queen, and her reception might have been far less pleasant.

"Yes, my Queen," replied Princess Ceymi. "I was completely successful. I secured the Pony who was my primary target, Thermal Soar, without revealing any useful information to any other Ponies. We took the forms of Equestrian Warriors and relieved the Pony War-Leader commanding the post in Appleloosa. Coxus took charge of Thermal Soar, and I took that Pony's form and accompanied the Pony War-Courier, Falcon Punch, sent to convey Thermal Soar back toward Canterlot. I ambushed and slew Falcon Punch over the Everfree, took his package, landed to confirm the kill, and, disengaging myself from the hostile life of that forest, flew without further incident back to the Hive. I am available for further orders, though I must report physical and thaumic exhuastion from this mission, and would be much more useful to my Queen and my Hive after a period of rest."

"Very good," said Queen Chrysalis. "You have shown yourself once again to be a courageous and competent servant of the Hive. This eliminates all but one of any possible sources of doubt I had about your fitness as my vassal."

What!? Only Ceymi's extreme skill at subterfuge prevented her from showing the shock she felt. She had known that Queen Chrysalis was testing her, but she had not realized that she had been under active suspicion. Why ---? she briefly wondered, but the answer immediately leaped into her brain.

She knows! Ceymi thought. Dread swept through her. She knows that I deliberately delayed reporting that I had found Thermal Soar, had been watching him -- meeting with him -- for almost two decades. She feared that I betrayed the Hive! But wait - if she feared that -- why whould she wait so long to strike? She said nothing aloud, though. Chrysalis was the only ling Ceymi had ever known to be easily of her own or greater intelligence.

"Do not fear, Ceymi," said Chrysalis, with what strangely seemed a combination of malice and genuine affection. "You have not returned to the Hive after your arduous mission to face your execution. I also know why you spared him, to what mental illness you have succumbed, and it one easily remedied, a remedy that shall be combined with a very easy test. The threat of Love-Addiction, and of Split-Mind, are part and parcel of Infilitration."

The Queen made a motion behind her, where servants waited at the back apeture, which ledi to her own private suite behind the throne chamber.

"Were you a less capable Infiltrator," she continued, "I would simply dispose of you, as proven too weak and fallible a reed for further reliance. But you are the greatest Infiltrator in this Hive, save for myself. You are a resource which I cannot simply toss onto the heap for composting. All you need to do to pass your test is not react, until I am finished with my meal."

The servants led forward a Pony whom Ceymi recognized only too well.

The member of a lesser Changeling caste would have gasped in dismay. Even a lesser Infiltrator might have displayed some sign of emotion at this point.

But she was Princess Ceymi, greatest of her generation. She stood stony-faced, unmoving, clamping down by main force of will on pheromonal emissions, on psychic leakage, just another Changeling in the court as the servants led to stand before Queen Chrysalis that Pony, a Pony she had known well for twenty years. One of the very few beings she had ever honestly called her friend.

Thermal Soar.

He seemed unhurt, though a little tired. He had no expression either, of course, save for a sort of dull smile, for he had been well and truly subjected to The Stare. He was probably in some happy dream world right now -- she briefly wondered exactly what he perceived this place as being. Perhaps he thought he was in the Day Court at Canterlot, being honored by the Sun Princess for his selfless service to his own Hive.

The intentions of Queen Chrysalis were painfully obvious from her previous statement.

There was a whole spectrum of intensity across which a Changeling could feed. At the lowest level, she would drain only a tiny percentage of the victim's love, so little that given strong positive affect the prey could easily regenerate the energy in a single night's sleep, indeed might not even be aware of any exhaustion. This was how Ceymi herself usually fed, had fed many times upon Thermal Soar, upon others -- a few of whom she regarded with affection -- though of course she could feel no true love herself. Such feeding would be prolonged, and invisible save to the most precise magical detection.

At increased levels of intensity the drain would be more severe, and increasingly less subtle. The victim would be instantly exhausted, often immediately fainting, while the paramagnetic leakage from the energy flow might be so great that the very air would ionize between predator and prey, so that it looked as if the very life was being drawn from the stock. Which was not all that far from the truth, but was not usually the case -- though if this level of feeding was often repeated, the creature's soul would be eroded -- after weeks of such excessive feeding, little would be left but a mindless animal. Ceymi had done this as well, reluctantly and at need, and she always tried to stop well short of inflicting permanent damage.

The highest level of intensity was possible only to the strongest Changelings -- royalty, such as Chrysalis and Ceymi -- and Ceymi herself had only ever done this once, as a training exercise upon stock that was close to death in any case. The results had sickened her, and she had resolved never to do it again. Such a rapid drain was never really necessary, given competent mission planning, and as an attack it was cumbersome and slow, compared to simple horn-blasting or weapons usage. It was simple sadism, a mockery of everything superior and noble in Changeling nature, and she would have no part of it.

Queen Chrysalis turned and smiled upon Thermal Soar, carefully directing her gaze at no other entity within the chamber. Knowing what was about to happen, her two servants stepped rapidly aside, leaving the old Pony geologist staggering there, smiling foolishly at the Changeling Queen, at what he no doubt saw as some high Pony noble, perhaps even Celestia herself.

Ceymi knew what was about to happen as well. No, she thought but did not speak, did not even emit from her mind, Please, no. This is a waste ... we could drain him for years ...

Chrysalis opened her eyes wide. Her slumbering Stare awoke, and in an instant submerged Thermal's feeble mind as if it were a wood chip caught in the path of a tsunami.

No ... thought Ceymi to herself. Not feeble. It was a fine mind ... one of the best ... She already thought of her friend in the past tense. He was still alive, of course .. .but not for much longer.

"Love me," hissed Chrysalis, and Thermal's face immediately distorted into an intense, pained look of utter adoration. His wings shot out rigidly. There was a rhythmic spattering noise against the chamber floor.

Ceymi saw that Thermal had instantly unsheathed and was emptying the entire contents of his testicles in a series of uncontrollable ejaculations. Oh, Thermal, you would have been so embarrassed to have done that in public, were you really where you probably think you are. But of course Thermal's mind was in a place beyond any normal social considerations. She remembered other times she had seen -- and felt -- his stallionhood fulfill its biological purpose, times when they had lain together in love, or what he thought was love, times when she had at least known physical pleasure, closeness, companionship from a dear friend, times beautiful and sweet in her memory, and utterly unlike this dark parody of love.

Must you rob him of his dignity like this? Ceymi had tapped his love in those remembered times too, but it had been gentle and harmless feeding, though amazingly sustaining, and she had surely given back as much as she had taken, though in different coin. Afterward they had lain and cuddled and caressed one another, lying not in victory or defeat, but in mutual affection, long conversation, minds and souls meeting as gladly and intimately as their bodies had met just before. She had slept safely in his embrace, the embrace not of her enemy but of her dearest friend, a friendship that had transcended species and social roles, something that was almost beyond mere friendship ...

And then Ceymi knew, and in that knowing something snapped within. But she remained rigid, unmoving, unrevealing. It was far too late for Thermal Soar. All she could accomplish by protest would be her own destruction. The perfect Infiltrator, she showed nothing on the outside of what she was feeling within.

Queen Chrysalis turned briefly to smile at Ceymi, and then the Queen locked her gaze once again on her helpless prey. She opened her jaws wide.

Ceymi's own empathy could feel the Queen establish a deadly emotional resonance. She wanted to turn away, but that would be revealing. So she watched as it happened.

Brilliant green energy erupted from every orifice in the head of Thermal Soar. The paramagnetic leakage was so intense that it brought flesh to the boiling point, and the old stallion screamed hideously as his throat and nasal passages were seared by live steam, his eyes exploded, his brain boiled as the love surged out from him to be absorbed by the thirsty Changeling Queen. He must have been dead after the first moments, but green and pink-tinged steam contiinued to erupt from him, spreading to empty him of all wastes from his nethers as well, and he continued to scream -- and make less polite noises -- from the sheer internal gas pressure.

Ceymi had expected this. She had done it once, and sworn never to do it again, even though the one to whom she had done it had meant nothing to her, had almost no mind left after over a decade of over-tapping.

Now Ceymi was seeing it done to one she -- only liked, she desperately told herself, only liked -- and she could not taste the love Chrysalis was consuming, only see the energy wasted as light and heat, energy accumulated within his dear soul and now cast out like garbage. Her mind froze with horror and disgust. Within her, the broken parts could not mesh, her Self and her Masks were splitting apart, reeling toward insanity.

And still Chrysalis continued.

Thermal Soar was surely dead now, please, Rosedust, let him be dead, thought Ceymi, but Chrysalis continued to drain the husk, pulling out energy which she could no longer metabolize, for it was no longer love, but merely undifferentiated life force. His corpse remained horribly upon its hooves, jerking with random neural sparks, horribly eyeless head shuddering in a gruesome parody of speech as the water vapor hissed out of his tongueless mouth. The hair dropped from his mane and coat, the hide stretched tightly over the bones as flesh flash-dessicated. A hideous smell of boiled meat filled the chamber.

Chrysalis laughed, clear and loud, as the lightning played about her. Then, she stopped. She let go with her horn, and Thermal's corpse dropped to the chamber floor.

She looked to a pair of servants. "That is a bit dried out now, but there is still protein within. Render it for the broth -- I do not waste what is of value to the Hive."

They dragged the corpse away.

Slowly, Queen Chrysalis turned to face Princess Ceymi. Surplus love radiated from the Queen, she glowed in spectra beyond the visual with the power that now filled her beyond repletion.

"I trust you understand that this was in part for your own benefit?" Chrysalis asked.

The Changeling whom the Queen addressed felt numb. She felt nothing.

She was nothing. She was no one.

No, said that part of her Self which was an elite Infiltrator, you cannot afford to be unresponsive. You are something. You have to be something,

Choose your Mask.

She considered her options, chose a Mask. It was a very appropriate Mask.

She didn't even have to Shift to don it.

Ceymi, she thought to herself. I will be Princess Ceymi.

She regarded the still-smoking spot on the floor with indifference.

"Thank you, my Queen," Ceymi said. "I understand. I was becoming Love-Locked to that prey. I risked Split-Mind. It was good of you to shock me out of it in such a manner. I feel much better now. Though still very tired."

"Do you feel better now?" the Queen asked, and suddenly her Stare lashed out again, pinning the Princess in its psychic glare. The Changeling so subjected felt the Queen's eyes boring into her very soul.

The subject bore up stoically under that Stare. She did not try to resist, for she was being Ceymi, and Ceymi was utterly loyal and would never resist examination by her rightful Queen. The scan swept through her mind -- and found only Ceymi, who loved only her Hive and was utterly-obedient to her Queen, merely a bright mind and set of skills at their disposal.

Chrysalis could at that moment have laid upon the subject any command she wanted, and that subject would have followed it, even to the destruction of Ceymi.

But there was no need for any geas. Ceymi was utterly devoted to Hive and Queen. There was nothing in her attitude to adjust. Further Staring into her might only damage a valuable tool.

Satisfied, Queen Chrysalis veiled her Stare.

"You have done well," she said to Princess Ceymi. "You have passed all tests. You must be tired now, after your strenuous mission. You may do as you wish, feed as you wish, rest as you wish. We shall call upon you again when you are once more needed. You may go."

Ceymi went, departing the Inner Hive for the Middle.

As the subject walked down the twisting, green-litten tunnels of the Hive, she felt its warmth and life all around her, the familiar rustle of chitin as Workers busied about their ceaseless labors, the hiss of effort as Warriors sparred, the buzzing voices speaking by both sound and psychic emanation. It was a single great living being, and Ceymi should have been comforted by it, warmed by her own great diffuse love for the Hive.

So Ceymi did, and was.

A ling must truly be damaged not to naturally feel love for her Hive, the subject thought. Hopefully, this damage shall heal. The thought created all the emotional affect in her that she would normally have felt had she noticed dirt on her chitin and thought that should be groomed.

The subject felt hunger, thirst, love-need. So she went to the appropriate chambers and satisfied these needs. She ate broth, drank tea, drained from the communal pool -- she was far too tired to craft a love-dream for stock, and the thought of a brutal draining resulted in her first emotional affect since Thermal's death -- revulsion. She ate and drank and drained with utter indiffrence as to the quality.

That's a bit wrong, the Infiltrator realized. Ceymi is fastidious, she has a weakness for comfort which she acquired in the field, she strives to be physically comfortable even within the Hive.

She was already full, so she couldn't ingest anything more. But she did feel dirty.

So Ceymi bathed.

Afterward, the subject felt somewhat better, cleaner not only of carapace but also of mind and soul. The buzz of the Hive all around her was faintly annoying, an irritating distraction. Ceymi prefers to think apart from others, the Infiltrator thought. It's one of her signature habits. After a misision such as this she would want to mull over what she has learned, prepare her notes, her reports, consider how her Masks might be affected by what has happened. She never does this when physically inside the Hive.

So the subject walked out of the Middle Hive into the Outer Hive, and from there to one of the exit tunnels. Challenge and recognition passed between Ceymi and guards. She walked between the two Warriors to launch herself into the air from the apeture at its end. Her wings whined as she flitted over the Hill of the Stones, across the valley to a ridge about a mile away -- still well within the zone patrolled by the Hive.

Here, the vast gestalt that was the Hive Mind -- huge, united, and profoundly, deeply, sadly stupid -- was far in the background, something she could hear only by straining all her senses. Here, at last, it was quiet enough to really think.

The subject knew that she was far from sane right now. She did not know her own identity. So many sub-personalities, so many Masks, all whirling around in her head, and which one of them was her true Self?

Queen Chrysalis had spoken of Love-Lock, and that was certainly true. She had been addicted to Thermal Soar. She was still addicted to Thermal Soar.

It was just too bad, because now she was going to have to quit cold turkey. That was, she supposed, a good thing in its way. In that sense Chrysalis had been speaking complete honesty.

The Queen had also said that Ceymi had been Split-Minded, and that was untrue. Or it had been untrue when the Queen had made that statement.

The subject was definitely Split-Minded, now. The subject no longer knew her true name or nature. Not anymore.

Was the subject "Ceymi?" That was the Mask she had worn to successfully exfiltrate. But why was she "exfiltrating" from her own Hive? One did not do such a thing. One's Hive was one's mother even more than was the Royal who had laid one's egg. One's Hive was where one was completely and utterly safe. Even if one's Hive killed one, all that this meant was that the Hive resources temporarily incarnated in oneself would be returned to the Hive. Such a fate was nothing to fear. There was no fear within the Hive, there was only love. The only love proper to a Changeling.

So why did the subject feel no love right now? Not for Hive, not for self, not for ... anyling or anypony. It was as if the capacity for love had been cauterized right out of her soul, boiled away as surely as had been poor Ther -- No. She could not think of that. She must not think of that. She would go truly mad if she thought of that.

The subject paused. Or is it that this one must think of that? But not as Ceymi. As one who could feel the emotions directly, express them, discharge them more properly and completely, before they destroy this one's mind?

This may be noisy, the Infiltrator thought, recollecting the emotions of Ponies. Ceymi must fly farther from the Hive.

She took to the air again, flew five miles to a low hill that the Changelings rarely frequented, for it was out of the direct line of sight of the Hive and so far away that including it within the perimeter would have required a ridiculous commitment of resources. She settled into a sheltered dry gulch between rocks.

Very well, the Infiltrator thought. Now to don another Mask.

Green fire played across the subject's form. Chitin vanished, flashed away to become light gray fur. Wings and horn vanished. Blue eyes peered out at the gulch beneath a short blue mane, eyes that loved to see new places, that had seen many stranger sights before. Strong Earth Pony hooves gripped the ground with versatile micro-suckers and paramagnetic ground-fields.

Starry Eyes stood there.

Very good, thought the Infiltrator. Mental state isn't impaired enough to interfere with Shifting. Now, how would she react to what just happened, given that she is now out of danger?

Her eyes widened in stark horror, ears pinned fully back, head flung back and mouth opened to emit a loud, ragged cry, that might have been "No!" but bore only a vague resemblance to the coherent speech of anything sapient. Tears started, ran down her face. Still wailing in helpless denial, Starry Eyes sank to her knees, to her barrel, buried her head under her forehooves and broke down into helpess sobbing, unable to speak a single world. Thermal, was her only clear thought, Thermal ...

She remained like that a while, the sobs slowly dying down, shivering as calm slowly returned, a huge hollowness still within her heart, one which she feared would never be full again, a hollowness which had nothing to do with love-hunger, and everything to do with the final loss of a particular love. Still more slowly, sanity began to return, bits and pieces of a greater Self re-integrating, taking command of the sub-personalities it had invented to serve the purposes of her Masks.

She closed her eyes for a long while. There was no use in sorrow. Thermal Soar was gone forever, and whatever joy he still gave to her he could only give in memory. He had deserved a kinder death, by far a kinder death than that mockery of desire the Queen had inflicted upon him -- she was briefly shocked by the flare of fierce hatred within her, directed at the Queen she normally worshiped -- but what had happened had happened. It had to be faced, accepted as reality, surmounted and pushed to the side for the needs of survival.

Secrecy is survival, she reminded herself, even if one must sometimes keep secrets from the Queen, from the Hive. Strangely the blasphemy did not bother her as much as it would once have done. She supposed that she had just lost the last shreds of her innocence, which had nothing to do with the things most Ponies imagined were innocence, but everything to do with the lack of familiarity with betrayal. I never dreamed that I would want to betray my own Hive, my own Queen, that I would have no choice but to do so in order to survive.

Even at this moment, it did not occur to her that her Queen and Hive might have betrayed her as well. She was brilliant, emotionally more capable and flexible than all but a tiny fraction of her kind; almost a mental throwback to the adaptability of what that kind had once been, before it had been irrevocably Twisted. There was in her the capability to become much greater than she imagined, but she would never receive the stimulus. Such is the harshness of Evolution, whether entirely natural or manipulated by long-gone humanoid Eldren biomancers and petrified mad Chaos gods.

The notion that her Hive or her Queen owed her anything in return for her loyalty was literally beyond her comprehension. And always would be beyond that comprehension. She rejected any tendency in herself to grow in that direction as firmly as she had rejected the offer of Paradise. She was one of the noblest and smartest Changelings that had ever lived, but her upbringing had been entirely Changeling, and there were some things she simply dared not even try to think. That was her tragedy, and one she would never grasp.

Ceymi, still wearing the Mask of Starry Eyes, opened those blue Pony eyes and looked out again, a badly-shaken but once again essentially sane Changeling.

Well, that was strange, she thought. "Grief." Real grief. I never felt that before.

Ceymi felt sorrow that Thermal Soar was gone. She felt regret that she would never enjoy his love and friendship again; the physical pleasure of lovemaking with him, the still-more-important intellectual pleasure of exchanging ideas with his fine mind. She felt disgust that he had died in such an unnecessarily vile and wasteful fashion. He had been a brave and determined Pony, an explorer, philosopher, and scientist. He had deserved better.

But it was a mostly abstract sensation. It was not the all-consuming loss that Starry Eyes would have felt, were she in truth still alive, rather than almost two decades dead in the Everfree. That death was not Ceymi's fault, a fact for which she felt rather glad, because she thought she would have liked Starry Eyes well had she known her in life. But she was not Starry Eyes, and she would not react as Starry Eyes, save to convince Ponies that she was her Mask.

She would live, and remain Ceymi for ever. She would never let herself get so absorbed in a Mask again that she risked Love-Locking, let alone Split-Minding. She would learn from her errors, and pass on her knowledge to her students, especially to her offspring (that minor treason was unavoidable, she had spent too much time among Ponies), to ensure that they never felt the pain she had suffered.

Queen Chrysalis may have indeed done her a favor, though Ceymi did not think it had to be done in such a cruel and wasteful fashion. She was sane now, and would be sane from now on.

Feeling much better, she Shifted back to her true form, lifted from the Gulch and headed back to her Hive.

***

Within that Hive, another Changeling was engaging in a far darker form of insanity.

Queen Chrysalis felt good. She had both put Princess Ceymi in her place, and pulled her off a dangerous path, a path which might have led to Deviation far more profound than her own. She knew full well that Ceymi had been not merely locking onto Thermal Soar, but actually falling in love with him. That love had started as part of the Mask, but would have inevitably spread to Ceymi's Self, even if Thermal had been kept in the Hive as love-stock.

Back in the Old Worlds, she had seen Changelings take those on whom they had become Love-Locked and flee the Hive. They were almost always recaptured and killed, but Ceymi's skill and intellect were such that she might have even succeeded in remaining at large. Perhaps she would in the end have betrayed Queen and Hive alike, fled to the protection of the Realm and its accursed Night-Watch. That would have ruined all her plans, including her most ambitious ones.

It was a good thing that she had nipped this tendency in the bud.

Now she had business to perform, a use for the energy she had ripped from Thermal Soar. Her path took her from her own study-chamber to a dark and twisting tunnel, barely illuminated by glow-fungus, deep within the heart of the mesa. It led to several tunnels, and to a single door.

She stepped through that door, into a chamber that was but dimly litten, visible even to the Queen's nyctalopic eyes as an irregular ovoid outline. The only light came from the fungus in the corridor outside. Even that, though, was too much radiance for that which she must accomplish.

She put an opaque cloth over the apeture, spat a quick-drying glue to seal it tightly around the edges. Now the room was both almost air-tight and utterly lightless, even to the Queen's sensitive vision.

Stepping to the center of the room and facing away from the door, she reared up on her hind legs. She spread her forelgs wide, buzzed her wings in an unusual and vaguely disquieting fashion. She commenced chanting in a langauge which had been old at the dawn of the Changelings, old at the time of the Cataclysm, old when the Eldren had crafted the Five Kinds from the Proto-Ponies; old even when the Great G'marr had taken wild horses and shaped their minds until one day an equid had looked out upon the world with sudden sapience. It had already been old, in fact, when the Earth had formed from cosmic dust, though Queen Chrysalis knew nothing of astrophysical timescales, and hence could not appreciate the true extremity of its ancientness. Her legs hurt as she remained in this uncomfortable posture, and she could feel the excess energy she had torn from her victims draining from her, until she was no stronger than her normal wont.

Presently, a cold wind began to blow through the near-hermetically sealed room, proceeding from somewhere and to somewhere beyond any normal mortal ken. An apparently violet light began to flash intermittently from all around her, from within her as well, though the Changeling Queen noticed that -- no more than on previous occasions -- could she see any portion of her own anatomy by this spectral effulgence. It was as if she was a disembodied spirit, adrift and helpless between the dimensions.

Had she not been who and what she was, Chrysalis would have been utterly terrified. As it was, she did find the effect more than a bit disquieting.

After some more time, she was no longer alone in the chamber.

"O, mighty Ahtu," she said bowing low. "Haunter of the Dark, it is I, Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings, who was once known as Kifuko, and who does obesience to thee, and tremble before thy power and glory." She raised her head slightly. "I do worship and greet thee, Mighty Messenger from Beyond, Crawling Chaos, and do entreat thee to grant favorable audience to thy humble servant."

A great three-lobed eye, burning with impossible unlight, opened and regarded her coldly, as if she were but a worm spread out for dissection by something vast and Cosmic. It was a gaze less friendly by far than she had given to her hapless victim in her throne chamber, before she wrenched his soul free from its mortal housing, to empower herself for this ritual. Chrysalis, at least, could appreciate the taste of love, though she might never feel such an emotion. She doubted if the entity before which she prostrated herself had even a nutrtional attraction to the emotion.

Suddnly, she was shaken by a vast and utterly-cold laughter, that like the violet radiance seemed to sound not only from the direction of that great Eye, but also from all around her, even within her. And Queen Chrysalis, dark and loathsome though she was, shuddered before the dreadful mockery of Ahtu, who was known in some lands as Nyarlathotep.

WORSHIP ME? The concepts seared themselves painfully into her very brain, by some painful means which were as to Changeling telepathy as a hard-driven punch was to a gentle caress. Queen Chrysalis sobbed in anguish. Then, reducing somewhat in intensity, as if the speaker sensed It was destroying her mind, Oh no, little Flutter-Pony, I doubt most greatly that thou worshipeth any entity, besides thine own insatiable self -- thou who aspireth to be Hunger.

Through her pain and terror, Chrysalis almost felt like laughing at this, but she knew better than to anger the god.

Fear not, little creature, Ahtu continued. I shall not destroy thee -- now. Did I not have my pawn Twist thine whole subspecies to produce one such as thyself, though he imagined he did so for his own entertainment? One who knowest not love, nor loyalty, to any being, not even to one's own Hive? Thou art consummate evil, Kifuko, and thou shalt become great amongst the Shadows -- who shall rule this Universe, even as my idiotic cousins amongst the Cosmics bubble and blaspheme and dither, unable to act in their own decadence. And thou shalt be mine own vassal, whose power shall be in my ranks to ensure that I am even greater in the new Universal order.

Art thou comforted? It asked her.

"Yes," said Chrysalis. "I shall live forever, to serve thee, mighty Ahtu."

To serve THYSELF, Ahtu said again, but in doing so thou shalt also serve me right well. Do not think of betraying me in turn to the Shadow Cosmics, It explained. They are far less benign than mine own self, and would use you as you used the sacrifice you made to Call me.

And Chrysalis contemplated the concept of a thing more malign than Ahtu, and she in truth trembled.

Now know this, Ahtu told her. Thou hast already created another being, a Daughter whose power shall become great, whether for the weak Cosmics of this world, or in the service of the Shadow. No, it is not that weak and sentimental fool thou so recently did discipline. She is corroded by love, and thus useless for our purposes.

She is now beyond thy reach, It continued, but when the time comes thou shalt have opportunities ample to reclaim her. Do so. For if she serves our foe, she may make conquering this wretched world much more difficult. Not only in her own right, but in whom may be drawn to serve her. Dost thou understand?

"I ... I think so. Dost thou mean the child of ..."

Yes, said Ahtu, taking the name from her surface thoughts. Then thou understandeth thy role. Marshal thy Swarm, overthrow Equestria, and regain control of thy straying child. It shall take thee many years, perhaps a score or more by my estimate, but it is possible if thou dost not err.

"Yes, great Ahtu. I hear and obey!"

Very well, said Ahtu. I shall grant thee a gift. An adviser, who shall aid thee in thy efforts. There was a subtle shift in the room, which now had three occupants.

Do not Call me again save at great need, Ahtu warned her. Or I shall be wroth with thee. Fare well in thy quest.

Thank you, Mighty One, said Queen Chrysalis. Thank you.

The Eye vanished. The unlight faded. The cold wind ceased.

"Are you there, adviser?" Chrysalis questioned.

"Yes, my Queen," buzzed a Changeling voice. It was that of a Prince, the rare naturally-male version of a Princess, and it held in its accents a subtle tone of mockery.

Chrysalis could smell the scent of Hive Chrysalis on this new one.

She stepped over to the door, spat solvent upon the glue, opened the curtain. Faint fungus-light, which seemed to blind her compared to the absolute darkness of before, flooded her eyes.

She entered the corridor, turned to watch the door.

A Changeling Prince walked out from the ritual chamber, stood before Queen Chrysalis and inclined its head in the barest possible bow which would avoided outright insult. The Prince was dead-black in all frequencies, including the ultraviolet. Even his eyes and teeth were black, to the Queen's perceptions. He was taller than Chrysalis, but he bore no crown of dominance.

"What is your name, adviser?" asked Chrysalis.

"You may call me -- Polypheromone." came the cultured voice.

"That is an unusual name," said the Queen.

"It is -- descriptive," replied Polypheromone. "For you shall find that I can pass in any Hive, as a member of that own Hive, and hence am among my other talents an Infiltrator beyond compare. Better, by far, than your worthless spawn Ceymi."

And Queen Chrysalis shuddered, for she had never named Ceymi, neither to Polypheromone nor to Ahtu Itself. But when one accepts strange aid from beyond Space and Time, one cannot quibble over its exact nature and capabilities. One must not look a gift ling in the mouth, and still less a gift demon.

So Chrysalis, who had long ago betrayed the home of her birth and raising, and already in her heart betrayed her Hive and Kind, and now was willingly betraying her whole planet and even Universe, ascended the twisting tunnel with her new Adviser.

***

The morning was well advanced when the knock came on Strawberry's door.

Both fillies were being watched by a neighbor, she had the house to herself, and she was practically bouncing with delight as she stepped to the door. She was wearing a light blue summer frock, and a little makeup, and she had done her hair, for she wanted very much to give her husband Falcon a good welcome home.

She flung the door wide open, crying "Darling!"

But the word died on her lips as she saw that Falcon Punch was not there. Instead there stood two tall Pegasus stallions of the Day Guards, one a Senior Lieutenant and the other a Staff Sergent, both resplendent in full armor, the glamors on their helmets making them look snowy-white and blue-maned, the very picture of Equestrian military might and glory. This picture of patriotic virtue was ruined by only one thing.

Both of them looked very depressed.

"Oh!" she said in confusion "I'm sorry, good soldiers -- I was expecting my husband."

"Yes," said the Lieutenant. He looked away for a moment, then seemed to gather his resolution and looked her directly in the eye. "I'm Flash Eye, Lieutenant in the 2nd Regiment, and this is Sergeant Low Finder. May we come in, Mrs. Punch? Raspberry Punch?"

"Certainly," she said stepping inside. "And that's my name." The two seemed nice enough, though still unhappy about something. "Would you like some coffee? Tea? Fruit juice?" she asked htem.

The two Guardsponies followed her within, shut the door.

"Um, Ma'am?" Lieutenant Flash Eye said. "You'll probably want to sit down first."

"Oh, all right," Strawberry said, a certain unpleasant feeling starting to creep over her. Falcon told me once about something like this, something the Guards always do personally, as a courtesy to the ... no ... She sat down more heavily than she had intended, making an undignified thumping sound on the couch. The two Guardsponies did not seem to mind her faux pas.

She felt very cold.

"Ma'am," Lieutenant Flash Eye said, his lip starting to quiver. He stumbled verbally, unable to continue the sentence he had started.

He's young, she realized, noticing it through the glamor. And he's a full lieutenant. He must be skilled, have attracted favorable notice. My Falcon never could do that -- he never played Service politics very well ... I wonder if he's ever had to do this before. She dared not admit to herself the true nature of 'this.'

The Sergeant unobtrusively nudged him. It was a respectful touch, but it broke the Lieutenant out of his funk, got him talking again.

"Mrs. Punch," the Lieutenant said. "I deeply regret to inform you that, while acting as a civilian contractor for the Royal Guards of Equestria, and thus acting under the aegis of the Service, Reserve Lieutenant Falcon Punch was killed in the line of duty last afternoon ..."

There were more words, but she couldn't hear them, as the bottom fell out of her world and the gravity on which she had always so stably depended upon acted very strangely.

They had stopped speaking now and were trying to hold her, because she was thrashing about, she wasn't sure why, it must have been the gravity changing direction again and again, and somepony was screaming, just screaming endlessly while the room span around her, and it was all a nightmare, it had to be a nightmare, and then she realized with a strange detachment. Oh, I'm screaming, I need help but the Guards are here, so it should be all right, but they can't help me because I'd want them to save Falcon but Falcon's DEAD, nopony can save him now ...

Unconsciousness mercifully claimed her.

Chapter 6: The Bereaved

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 1: A Special Assignment

"Do you have to be gone a whole day and night, dear?"

Falcon Lee Punch, former Lieutenant of the Day Guard, sighed as he regarded his beautiful young wife, Strawberry. She was pouting at him, and he had to admit to himself that she certainly knew how to pout very prettily. Her curvaceous form was as attractive to him as it had been when he'd met her ten years ago, even if it was perhaps more curvaceous beneath after she'd borne him two foals. Rose-pink eyes blinked at him from her sweet strawberry-pink face, framed by the purple mane he loved to touch. She was difficult to refuse when she got like that.

He'd been 39, an overaged Lieutenant in the Guards, disciplined and one of the best unarmed-combat fighters in the whole establishment, a master of the Feather Blade and other techniques, but unlikely ever to be promoted any further due to a distinct lack of interest in leadership. He was smart -- but lazy. So he hadn't really been giving up much of a future that night at the Summer Social when he'd looked across that dance floor and into Strawberry's lovely eyes for the first time in his life.

He'd still looked handsome in his uniform, and he had a quick way with words. He'd spoken to her, found out that she was from a farm family which owned berry orchards northwest of Ponyville, the town in which his section was stationed. Most of what he remembered of the night was dancing with her, drowning in those rose-pink eyes, talking with her outside, heart tumbling in a turmoil of emotions he'd never felt for anypony, despite a quarter-century of experience with the fairer sex.

He'd had a repuation as a bit of a mare's stallion, but he'd treated her very respectfully during the ensuing month of courtship. In fact, he'd had to cool things off once or twice: Strawberry was innocent, but very eager once she'd dipped her hoof in the waters of love. They had eloped, at her suggestion, right after that month -- he'd taken accumulated leave; they'd had a quick wedding on the outskirts of Canterlot, and then taken the train for a week-long honeymoon at Neighagra Falls, during which they'd more than made up for that month of painful restraint, to their extreme mutual delight and one pleasant consequence.

The pleasant consequence of that week of passion, nine-year-old Blackcherry, was sitting on the couch, playing at dolls with her little sister, three-year-old Raspberry. Falcon smiled to himself as he regarded his young daughters. It was so sweet to see how Blackcherry was always kind to her younger sister, always willing to play with her despite the fact that Raspberry was barely more than a toddler. His family meant more to him than any possible military career, in fact he'd resigned within a year of his marriage to be there for Strawberry and their first foal.

But he did miss the military life at times. In the Guards, there was always the prospect of action and adventure, even if most of the time nothing much happened beyond routine patrols. One never knew when a pony would get in trouble, bandits strike, monsters attack. His old combat skills were getting rusty, even though he conscientiously peformed his exercises every morning, and he yearned to discover if he still had the right stuff in the pinch.

Besides, there was a nice fat bonus riding on this assignment. And he'd already agreed to it. Ponies were counting on him. He couldn't bail on them now. Especially not his old buddy Orange Streak. Orange was not only his old friend, he was a Captain now, he had influence. If he handled this well, this might be the route to future military contracts. More money for his family.

"Well yes," he said "that's how long it's going to take me to fly to Appleloosa, get some rest, pick up the package, fly to Canterlot, deliver it and come back home. Remember, I can't do full speed all the way and turn around immediately. I'm a pegasus, not an airship."

Strawberry frowned.

Falcon hated to see a frown on that pretty little face. He reached out with one hoof, stroked her hair and cheek gently, then ducked his head down to nuzzle her right under her jaw, where he knew from long experience she was especially sensitive.

Strawberry giggled. "You rogue!" Then, as he continued nuzzling downward along her jugular, "Not in front of the fillies!" She was blushing bright crimson. "Anyway," she whispered, "you can have plenty of that when you come home tomorrow evening." Her eyes shone with love as she looked at her husband.

"I'll take that as a promise," Falcon said, grinning. "Hey, little berries!" he called to his daughters. "I'll see you two tomorrow!"

"Oh no, daddy, do you have to go now?" asked Blackcherry, cantering over to him and rubbing against his chest. "I drew a picture, I wanted you to see it ... it's in my room ..." Her green eyes, so much like his own, gazed worshipfully up at her father. Her coat was pinkish-purple, like her mother's mane, and her own mane was two-tone pink, like her mother's coat but darker.

"No time for that now," Falcon said, rubbing Blackcherry head playfully with a hoof, then kissing her on its top, smooching her hard until she twisted away, giggling. "The bold courier is off on a vital mission! You be a good little Cheerilee and take care of your sister until I get back home!"

Blackcherry laughed. She loved her father's pet name for her.

Something bumped him repeatedly around the forearm. He looked down to see Raspberry's purplish-pink face gazing up at him under its pinkish-purple mane. Her dark red-purple eyes fixed his own.

"I wanna hug! I wanna hug!" the little filly insisted.

Falcon obliged, sweeping up Raspberry in one foreleg, squeezing her, kissing her on the forehead and then tossing her up onto his back to launch into a quick orbit of the living room, his youngest daughter laughing in glee as she rode her Papa.

"Take me flying outside!" she said.

"No time for that now, either," replied Falcon, landing and putting Raspberry back down.

"Awww. ..."

"Be a sweet little Berryshine and mind your momma and big sister while I'm gone," said Falcon, using his special name for Raspberry. You'll scarcely miss me!" He kissed his youngest daughter on the top of her head and then turned to his wife

Strawberry stepped over to him.

"See you later, darling," he said, and reared up, wrapping his forelegs around her and kissing her firmly on the mouth. Her lips parted, and the kiss briefly became passionate.

"Ewww," said Raspberry. "That's yucky."

"I don't think that's appropriate," added Blackcherry, with an air of great solemnity.

Falcon and Strawberry parted and regarded their offspring.

"Be off, rogue," she said playfully, poking Falcon in the chest with one hoof.

Falcon grinned, opened the door. "Gotta fly," he said, waving a hoof.

"See you," whispered Strawberry.

Falcon launched himself into the late morning sky.

***

"They're all around us," hissed the old Pegasus to the big burly Earth Pony, his yellow eyes darting back and forth madly. "They could be anywhere. Anypony. I've seen them!"

Appletree sighed and rolled his own eyes.

"Sure, old-timer," he said soothingly. Being the Sheriff was a good job, but it meant that he had to deal with all sorts from time to time. Thermal Soar was one of them, a crazy prospector who had started as a geologist but gotten his brain fried by staying out in the deep desert a bit too long. He was always bringing back wild stories of strange objects, lost cities and monstrous races, and sometimes even had an ambiguous artifact or unusual fossil to sell for the supplies for his next journey.

Appletree himself had been in one of the first families to settle Appleloosa, as part of the expansion of Equestria southward into territories which had previously belonged to wild Buffalos and jackrabbits. He had seen the land blossom under the care of his relatives: wells sunk, irrigation ditches dug, wheatfields and orchards growing where there had previously been only scrub country.

But a new land was a wild land, and aside from occasional hostility from the wool-heads, there were unscrupulous Ponies who thought that fleecing the settlers was the best way to make their fortunes on the frontier. Appletree could plant and buck trees as well as his kin, but his true talent lay in his toughness. He was not an exceptionally-violent Pony, but he had all the famed stubborness of his folk, and something in his gaze made all but the most desperate outlaws back down without any need for fighting. And if it came to fighting, whether with hoof or bow, those outlaws soon found that Appletree was as tough as old wood.

For twelve years now, Appletree had kept the peace in this county, and he liked his profession.

Thermal Soar wasn't a bad sort, though, simply a bit touched in the head. When Thermal was in town and sober, he was generally good company. When he got drunk, he sometimes had to cool off for a night in the jail, but he never made much trouble even then, and after he started to sober up a pony could have a nice conversation with him. Appletree had learned all sorts of interesting things about rocks and land formations from the old ex-scientist, chatting with him in his office over some coffee and apple juice.

But now something had Thermal more than usually worked-up. He had found some sort of mummy out in the deep desert toward the Badlands, something which he'd brought back wrapped in a tarp, something which he refused to let anypony see, claiming that "they" might have spies anywhere. He'd paid to have a special message ported to the Unversity of Canterlot, and darned if a message hadn't come back, bearing the famous Eerie Eye of the Night Watch!

Someponies were certainly taking this more seriously than Appletree dreamed possible.

Thermal grabbed one of Appletree's big hooves with his own more delicate appendage, stared up into the big lawpony's eyes.

"Out in the deep desert," Thermal whispered, "toward the Macintoshes, where the land's all dry and twisted and worn -- uplift and erosion and something else like a great explosion from the southeast, but following the pattern of no volcanic or meteoric event science can explain -- there's a hill, crowned by a ring of stones older than anything I've ever seen before. Older than the first Hearth's Warming. Older than the Cataclysm. Older, mebbe, than all Ponykind.

"I was there, once. Saw a filly down there -- most beautiful mare you ever did see, a pretty pink Pegasus standing on the hill and beckoning up at me. I came down to see what was the matter, and she said she'd strained a wing, could use some company while she waited for it to heal up a bit. We fell to talking and, well, that was twenty years ago and the sap ran a bit more lively in me then than it does now. And we did what came naturally." He smiled, and for a moment Appletree could see the younger stallion he had once been. Then his face darkened. Afterward she told me to go. And I asked why, and she said "They'll take you."

"I wouldn't listen, and she just ran away behind a stone, and there was a flash of green fire. And when I looked behind that stone, a horrible monster hissed at me, and I screamed and flew away like all the devils o'Tartarus were nipping at my hooves. And that was the last I saw of Tootsie Pop, and the first I ever saw o'the Buzzies." He hissed the name. "First time I found out they was real."

Appletree chuckled to himself. "Buzzies, huh? Next thing you'll be telling me you pal around with the Sass Squash."

"They are real," Thermal insisted, "and this time I have proof."

"What kind of proof?" asked Appletree, willing to listen to more of the tale.

"I've been out in the desert that direction more'n once," Thermal said. "Never dared go too close to the hill again, but sometimes I've watched from a distance, and I've seen the Buzzies out there, a-flitterin' around the hill and goin' in an' out o' a nearby mesa. Whole thing's riddled with caves -- must be their hive or summat like that. I have notes -- maps -- they're all safe in this here packet," Thermal clapped a hoof at a large oilcloth packet on his side. "Night Watch wants to see `em. When I told them what I had, they wanted to see it right quick!"

"The maps?" asked Appletree.

"That," replied Thermal, "and the mummy. Do you know what that mummy is?"

"What is it?"

Thermal leaned close, looked both ways as if afraid of eavesdroppers. Then he hissed the answer.

"It's a Buzzy."

"They're that small?" Appletree asked. That tarp had only looked big enough to contain a foal, or at most a young colt or filly.

"Naw," said Thermal. "Adults are as big as you or -- well, at least as big as me," he reconsidered as he examined the brawny Sheriff. Few Ponies were as big as Appletree. "I'm guessin' it was one o' their young 'uns, went out into the desert for some reason long ago, got lost or injured, couldn't make it out, died out there. Got buried by sand, mebbe centuries ago, so the varmints didn't get at it. Uncovered by some desert wind -- you'd be surprised at the things you can find out there in the deep desert, buried long ago and revealed to a sharp eye like mine.

"I swooped down and there it was. Shaped like a pony, but all covered in black chitin, like some enormous bug. Stubs o'two wings -- those woulda been membranous in life, least they were on the Buzzy I saw twenty year ago. Big eyes -- empty now o'course, but once they would have been multi-faceted and shimmering and strange beautiful. Holes in the cannons and pasterns -- coulda been weathering but I think they're normal for Buzzies. Don't know what they're for -- weight reduction mebbe? They fly -- mebbe they're like our hollow bones ..."

"Can I see?" asked Appletree, with some interest.

Thermal shook his head.

"Better you don't." The old scientist explained. "They keep their secrets. I cain't be the first to have seen them. But a sighting's just hearsay -- I know you don't believe me. But physical evidence? They'll kill to get that back, I reckon. Kill ... or worse. I don't think I'm gonna live very long, less'n I get out o'here fast. Or be free very long, if there's any truth to some 'o the legends.

"I'm old," he continued. "My life's near over. Nopony'd miss me if'n I was gone. But you -- you ain't old yet. You have a wife and family. I don't want to make it so they have to get you, too. You're my friend."

Appletree felt strangely moved. The old Pegasus was nutty as a squirrel, that was obvious. But he thought the danger was real, and he wanted to keep Appletree safe.

Not that Appletree was too worried about monsters from a campfire tale. But it was the thought that counted.

"All right, old friend," the big Sheriff said, clapping the scientist on the shoulder. "Ah'll hold off lookin' at your mummy. And when you come back to Appleloosa again, we can share some coffee and cakes." He smiled.

Thermal smiled back at him. "Don't think I'll be comin' back," he said, "but not 'cause I won't miss your company."

They were interrupted by two deputies, Greenapple and Longnose, coming into the office.

"Howdy," Appletree said to his two deputies. "Greenapple, take charge of my friend Thermal here and keep him safe until the courier from Canterlot comes, okay? He and a find he made are traveling back to the capital, Night Watch request."

"Got it, Sheriff." replied Greenapple. He was a tall and wiry green stallion with a long brown mane. There was something a bit wrong with his voice today -- sounded as if he'd had a slight cold.

Which reminded Appletree of something.

"Longnose," he asked, "didn't your wife say you were out sick? Flu or something?"

"Oh," said Longnose. His voice sounded a bit rasping, too. The long-nosed yellow stallion scratched his head, mussing his orange mane.

"Longnose was feeling a bit better," said Greenapple. "Wanted to come in to help out."

"Okay," said Appletree. "More hooves the better. But be a mite careful where you sneeze." He grinned at the long-nosed deputy, who smiled back at him uncertainly. "Well, I'm going to mosey along home now. Got a nice lunch a-waitin' for me." He nodded at Thermal. "Have a good flight. Hope I see you another day."

Thermal Soar nodded back at him. "Farewell," he said, in an almost sepulchral tone.

Appletree looked back at him one last time. The two deputies were standing to either side of the old prospector, guarding him with what looked like an odd zeal. Appletree had a strange sensation, as if he were leaving his old friend not to await a courier, but instead execution, or some fate far less describable. For a few moments he wavered -- considered remaining -- but then he remembered his sweet wife Pear Blossom, and how delicious were both her lunches and her other charms. And his fears were ridiculous -- brought on, no doubt, by Thermal's wild tale. Thermal would be perfectly safe in the sheriff's office, at the heart of the Realm's authority in Apple County.

He stepped out of the door, and into the bright Appleloosan sunshine.

For the rest of his life, he was to wonder what would have happened, had he instead insisted on remaining.

***

Thermal sat at a desk and nervously watched the clock tick.

Where was the courier? The message from the Night Watch had told him that one would come by noon, which was only half an hour away. He would not feel safe until he was in the capable hands of the Watch. Sweat beaded on his brow.

"You look thirsty," said Greenapple, handing him a cup of coffee. "Drink -- you'll feel better." The deputy stepped away to take care of something behind him, while Longnose sat at a desk and watched him.

Thermal gulped the coffee down gratefully. He felt immediately better, as promised, from the warm caffeine-laden brew -- though the taste was a bit off -- Greenapple clearly wasn't as good at brewing it as was Appletree. The benefits of long experience, he thought wryly. Soon he'd be in Canterlot -- they had much better coffee there, by his recollection.

"Thanks," he said. He was relaxing now. As he sat there, the room was almost swimming with his calm, the lines of the objects around him wavering. His eyelids felt very heavy.

Green light blazed behind him.

He was so relaxed that this fact did not disturb him, even while a part of his brain was frantically trying to remind him just where it had seen exactly that color green before, on a hill crowned by menhirs older than known history. He should have been terrified, but there was nothing in him but a sleepy calm.

The coffee ... he thought in his last moment of full rationality. ... drugged.

He turned, slowly in his chair, to see a tall, elegant bright-orange coated, light green-maned Pegasus mare standing behind him. She had chocolate-brown eyes, which regarded him with a strange sorrow.

"Tootsie ...?" he breathed in disbelief.

She nodded, her eyes still sad.

He tried to get up to greet her, but his legs gave way and he started to fall.

Tootsie caught him, held him up. She was surprisngly strong. She held him close, whispered:

"I wanted to let you go. I did, back then. Why didn't you just stay away from our Hive?" Her voice was sweet, almost loving.

In the background he heard the sound of the bolt being thrown on the front door. Green light shone from that direction as well.

"My Princess, the building is safe," came a buzzing voice.

Thermal ignored it. He already knew what had him -- his mind was still awake, though his body seemed to be falling asleep. He was fairly sure his life was about to end, but he wanted to get one thing clear.

"You were ... a Buzzy ... always ... Tootsie?" he asked.

Tootsie nodded. "Changeling," she whispered, correcting him. "Princess Ceymi." In that voice was both sweetness and an ancient, ruthless lethality. "I wanted you to know, before the end. You were brave ... you deserved it." Then, regretfully. "You should have stayed away."

And Thermal knew for certain he would never reach Canterlot.

Author's Note

Ceymi comes from Phoenix_Dragon's excellent Without A Hive.

Would she really have let Thermal go, back around 1461? Or revealed her true name to him when still in enemy territory, around 1481? Perhaps not, especially not as she is by the 1490's. But then Ceymi was younger then, and hunters can gain strange sympathies with their quarries. And it's not as if Thermal was ever going to get to speak with any other Pony, ever again.

And in Without A Hive, I always felt she had more liking for Ponykind than she was prepared to admit to Nictis.

Comments on this, and all other aspects of the story, are always welcome.