Being forced against the wall bodily by unicorn magic had unfortunately not been the most painful thing Child had endured on this day. Even less fortunate would be what was to come.
The two royals guards laughed to one another as they picked him up again and sent the changeling stumbling towards another stone and steel doorway. This seemed to be the last in a long line they had passed through to get to the Canterlot Castle Dungeons and by now Child assumed they had to be at least halfway down the mountain that the palace protruded from. In a way he almost took comfort in the feeling that pony kind set up their dungeons the same way his brothers and sisters set up their entire colonies.
Child made the mistake of smiling and the guard on his left, an earth pony stallion, bucked him while he was still in the grip of the female unicorn on his right. It resulted in the ring of magic around his neck closelining him due to the momentum and at the angle his ankle struck the steel frame it was no wonder the guards shuddered and Child screamed when they all heard the cracking of breaking bone.
A few dribbles of green oozed from the cracked carapace above Childs back hoof but he gave no other satisfaction to the guards by keeping silent. The guards for their part shared guilty looks at his ankle and at his broken wings (that likely being the only reason he was captured) and in a moment Child found himself being floated gently on his side instead of hoisted by his neck. He whispered a ‘thank you’ to the female unicorn and closed his eyes.
He could be thankful until his last breath that these ponies were not apparently a cruel race. It was until that moment that he had actually believed he was on his way to a torture chamber of some kind. Child would have been better off keeping that mindset. Though when the time came it would not be said it was any fault of the guards, as they had brought this lone captured changeling down to the dungeons to be held until the crisis above was at its end. After all, they had to make sure the wedding party and guests were okay, not to mention having two of their princesses attacked.
They had only been given the order by a hasty lieutenant in the process of trying to find Shining Armor or any of his other commanding officers in the guard to find out what was going on. It was, however, very fortunate for Child that when the combined might of Shining Armor and Mi Amore Cadenza banished the rest of his brothers and sisters from Canterlot above, the guards had brought him deep enough that the blast never reached him. It was a disgusting turn of irony that the moment the hive mind was utterly shredded was the same moment they gently set Child down in an isolation cell and slid the rusting locks closed.
This as well had been a horrid turn for the Changeling as they guards had simply meant to put him in a regular holding cell. Knowing full well that with his injuries and the limiter on his horn that he was no more than a weak foal at the moment and would not need anything more. It turned out that most of the cell doors had been removed to be refastened into similar isolation rooms to the one Child found himself in now. A single slat just over horn level for him shone a small amount of light from the torches outside and reflected immediately off the only other surface he could see in the cell. He gave thanks that the guards had not closed the cover for it.
It was half of a hinge, decrepit and rusted with no pin. It gave the impression that this cell had been a rush job, that or when the crafters were working on this it may have been when the word of an attack above reached them. Regardless Child decided it was of no consequence.
A feeling of cold fear drenched Child as he felt the spell above fire and the noise, the conversation, the emotions, the security that Child had felt all of his life… silenced.
It was the moments following that Child heard it for the first time. It was masked first by the receding steps of the guards and the light sound of their chatter but that only lasted until they closed the door behind them that had broken his ankle. The door closing set the quiet into stark contrast, especially so for Child who had not been without the sound of a hive in his entire life. Since the moment he had been born and remembered the collective memory of Chrysallis looking down upon him and declaring “My child.” He had never been without the comfort of his species collective thoughts.
And now there was nothing.
Nothing but the drumming.
Child shook his head and limped around his cell. Simple curiosity had him rubbing a hoof against the walls which, once whatever was crusting them was rubbed off, happened to be marble smooth and without imperfection. There was nothing in the cell and he thanked his queen that the cell did not seem to be cold or overly humid but instead the temperature seemed to at least be the only thing of comfort.
A small victory for Child but he would take what he could get. As he limped the offbeat sound of his hooves comforted him and he was glad there was at least some sort of noise. He found himself smiling again as he thought of a few pony movies he had watched while in disguise and wished that this was a stereotypical dank and dark cell that had dripping water and the scurrying of rats. It was an odd thought he admitted to himself, but anything is better than the silence. Or whatever that sound was he had heard.
It had only been for a scant few moments but Child had heard terrifying drums in his ears and could only expect that a ceremony was being led to come execute him. After all, it seemed his brothers and sisters had shared a swift demise. Never before in his life had the link to the hive been broken and he had never bothered asking about it as it was a part of every changeling. As Intrinsic as their need to feed and never in question. Before he had realized what he was doing, while thinking about his culture he had begun tracing the outer edges of his cell and reminiscing.
Strange as it was he had actually not stopped limping, even when his ankle began to throb and somewhere in the back of his mind a truly primal terror welled up and surged adrenaline through his veins. There was something wrong about himself and he could feel it.
It didn’t take more than six hours of walking in circles for his ankle to begin bleeding again from cracks that had opened with the swelling. He almost wished that a few of the pony myths were true, such as changeling blood glowing in the dark even without light, bio-luminescent and whatnot. At least then there would be something. Something aside from the sound right under his hearing.
Childs leg twitched and cold terror settled on him as he heard the drumming. It was coming from his swollen ankle and now he could feel the sound threatening to burst his ear drums. The terrible cadence of war drums, of an infernal never ending tempo of beats. He knew it would be his death somehow. That whatever that sound was, it was coming for him.
As soon as the panic really began to settle in and his eyes began to grown wide, the dark rushing in the edges started to subside. It took several minutes and the soreness building in his foreleg for Child to realize that it had stopped because he had begun using his foreleg to gently scrub the coarse layer away from the smooth wall closest to him. The noise was one of the most soothing things he had heard since the loss of his hivemind and now conscious of his actions he smiled once more, hobbled slightly closer into a comfortable position and continued to scratch at the wall.
This as well proved a somewhat bad idea as it made the sensitive frog of his hoof ache after only a few minutes of the scraping. Child switched immediately to using the edge of his hoof after hearing the drum beat four times. This, he knew, would begin to wear as well and he would have to be careful not to chip his hoof or he may end up with more than one injured limb to worry about.
With the soothing sound of scratching and crumbling to fill his ears Child was free to look around the cell and was almost immediately drawn to the hinge he had seen upon entering the cell. Now that his eyes were adjusted to the darkness he could see a small amount of light coming under the door and make out the outline of the bottom hinge of the old door as well. It must have really been a rush job all things said.
The drum beat four times before Child moved his hoof to a spot he had not rubbed yet. Lost in thought he had not taken the time to notice that the spot where he had started was now bald marble as smooth as anything in the palace above.
Child had switched to using his horn four hours ago. He had not rubbed off all of the crunchy material from where his hoof could reach but he also did not want to use it too fast. This made him feel clever almost like he was rationing food supplies. Probably because his actual food supplies were non-existent. He had gorged himself on the guard pair as they were bringing him down to this cell, as it turned out they had a behind – the –scenes thing going on and it was sweet as one could possibly imagine to taste of that deep well of passion.
And now he was drooling. Starving or not it had been ten hours since he had sensed anything he might feed off of and most muscles in his body were now overworked and screaming in protest from his constant attempts to make some kind of background noise.
The monotony of his actions were only broken once when he almost nodded off into a blissful slumber. He was woken up a beat later by the drumming again and found himself almost hypnotically staring wide-eyed at the lower hinge of the door before he began rubbing with his horn and hoof to stave off the sounds.
Presently he was trying to eat the dust he had crumbled off of the walls in hopes it was some kind of pony rock candy or some crystal crap he might find fulfillment with. All he found was that it was fine as sand and soft as cotton. To his dismay Child also found that when he stepped on it and attempted to grind it against the ground it barely made any sound. Worry wormed into him as he quickly slid his body against the wall where he had started. Moved from one part to another in his shuffling movements showed that he had practically smoothed one of his walls. There was still room for him to get his horn dug in and maybe if he got up on his good back hoof he could reach a little more. If only he had his wings. If he hadn’t been foolish enough to get bucked by some guard straight into a statue holding a javelin his wings wouldn’t have torn and he would have possible hours left.
That thought caused his eyes to widen in the dark again. What would he do when there was nothing left for him to scrub? He could only limp for so long or he might infect his wound and so far it had been half a day with no one coming to check on him. Being the dungeons only occupant and what seemed to be a victory on the ponies side meant he wouldn’t likely see another living soul for a time yet. He had to make all of this last. One more time he tried grinding the sand under his hooves and found that it stung viciously at his irritated flesh. With slow movements Child brought his hooves into the light under the door and found them to be worryingly thin. Worse yet, he had indeed chipped the both of his front hooves.
The drum got to three beats before he realized he was already scraping at the wall beside the doors right again.
Child sat in the center of the cell and buzzed his broken wings. The membranes had torn from his efforts, or already were torn, the pain made no difference to him. What mattered was the sound his wings made. Sound mattered and he wouldn’t give it up. He had resorted to this when he had finished the other part of the wall beside the door (effectively clearing two of his walls) and buzzed his wings in agitation. Now, even as the initial bleeding mist of his wings being rendered forever useless dried on his back he enjoyed the whirring sound they made with no membranes.
Child nearly screamed when it turned out to be too quiet a noise to drown out the drumming. It had made three beats and he was up scraping his horn on the third wall and desperately grinding his hooves into the smooth debris for any sound it would muster. As his hoof caught on piece of the debris with a hold to the wall and pierced the frog of his hoof he yelled out and cursed for several seconds before he began to laugh, his injured leg forgotten and bleeding.
The next 8 hours of in and out sleep where accompanied by singing, whispering, shouting, talking, humming, yodeling, anything Child could do with his rediscovered voice to make noise.
With a very short amount of rest under his belt and moving into what he thought was day four or five Childs hope fell as he did a quick survey of his remaining resources. As far as hunger went he was still good. Those guards really fed him right. That almost gave him some satisfaction until he remembered that in his frenzy of singing and attempts at comraderie with his echo the night before he had scraped most of his third wall in a kind of accompanying instrument idea he had in the heat of the moment. To his ever growing worry he found about half of the middle scraped away, he was just lucky that in his fervor he had been jumping and scraping parts of the wall he couldn’t have reached otherwise. That, also, had an unfortunate end to it as well as now his hoof that had been injured had torn the frog in his earnest and he now had two injured limbs, exactly what he had been trying to avoid.
The drums got to two before he was frantically scraping at the remains of wall three and again scraping all four hooves into the smooth particles below them.
The rest of that day he had taken turns using his voice and scraping to keep the cell filled with sound. In a moment of desperation he had tried to lay down as relaxed as possible and use the drumming as a sound in itself but by now the sound just filled him with some kind of terror. He couldn’t hope to explain why but if he tried he figured that it was the singular beat of it. The constant single sound when his whole life had been filled with a myriad of laughter, thoughts, emotions and was now a barren waste with that single sound a steady reminder of the absence of all he had known.
And it drove him mad.
Three days later and Child had rubbed the flesh of his wings against the edge of the door until they were nubs and played with the blood as it squelched under his hooves until it had congealed and dried. He flaked it off after that for what distraction it provided and finished scraping the last of his fourth wall horn reach area. He had injured both of his remaining good hooves on the pursuit of sound from the floor which he found that if he scraped with any less than all four of his hooves the sound was not enough to drown the drumming. The drumming had only made it to one beat the time he had found that out.
His throat had bled and he had vomited in the corner from drinking it down so much. After all, even when it bled it added a nice touch to his voice, made it gravelly and added more to the distraction away from the drums.
But now his voice was gone, his throat ragged and dry.
His hooves all chipped, cracked, bled and dried.
His wings…well he no longer had wings.
He had pulled out every hair of his tail and broken them on his fangs for the twanging noise they made to help him get what little sleep he could.
Again when he had woken, every time from the drumming he could see the lower hinge of the door and he wondered.
The thought had come to him the day before when he had almost finished his final wall and had begun scraping off his wings. Child didn’t remember much of that but he did remember that having something in his stomach made him feel a lot better, especially when he was crunching the cartilage as loud as possible.
Could he make noise with that?
The drumming began and before he tried to sleep again Child had snapped off the very tip of his horn under the door and had begun using it like chalk. He was beyond writing a message but instead had seen it as another way to stave off the coming of the drums. Indeed the scraping of his horn on the frame of the door provided sound until it was only small enough for him to scrape against the door with the bottom of his only semi usable hoof. The tip of his scraped horn of course pierced the already paper thin flesh of his final hoof and between the blood dripping down his forehead and the fact that his originally injured back leg was all but completely numb and disfigured, he could not have cared.
His leg had been his final idea before now. That had been three hours ago and he had spent the first two of them picking off pieces of his injured carapace and crunching them in his teeth before attempting to spit them at the door for sound. Without spittle he was a bit out of luck so Child had bit the insides of his mouth to bleeding and used the warm blood as saliva to power his sputum.
The last hour he had ground his fangs against the flat of the door until they had both snapped and it was in that moment that Child found his latest noise. He had only done it once for fear it had been the drumming, it had been his forehead smacking against the door.
That last hour had been Child sitting in front of the bottom hinge of the old door and staring at it.
Had anyone been there to watch him they would have noticed that slowly he had begun to lean back further and further and in a quick precise motion Child threw his body weight behind his neck and bashed his skull into the hinge. His horn fractured from the breaks already present and he could see splinters of it in the new blood he wiped away from his head. The sound had filled the entire cell but sent Child into a panic. When he had started the drumming had become more frantic for the first time since he was put in this place. He would be damned if the drumming was going to take him now after all the clever things he had pulled off to keep it away.
He would be damned.
And so it continued. Child wound back faster and slammed forward again, and again. His horn, the only thing that had truly stopped his skull from making full impact with the flat or sharp edge of the hinge was down to a bloody stub and if rational thought had been possible for Child it assuredly was not now.
Child knew it had come down to these final moments. The drumming would not be the death of him, he wouldn't let anything get him. None of those damn ponies, none of his brethren or sisters that had left him to this, the worst fate of a changeling in history. He hoped that whenever they found him tales of this atrocity committed by pony kind would be spread across the world and retribution by his fellow clans would be swift.
Those thoughts of vengeance beyond him and betrayal were some of his last before he well and truly began to bludgeon his face and head against the hinge.
Telling time no longer came, it was only the vertigo of the rush towards whatever this was for Child. He could feel something coming even as he began to grow increasingly cold. Time seemed to be slowing and he knew it was only a matter of time before he would be free, free again to hear his brothers, to share with his sisters and to listen to the mighty command of his queen.
And as Child limply fell to the side, his head with a gaping wound and his face beyond recognition, he closed his eyes and heard the most blessed thing he would ever in his existence.
He heard the drumming beat of his heart in his ears fade and quiet eternally.
Above in Canterlot proper two guards argued with the higher command about whether or not they should be allowed to check on a changeling they had apprehended. Commanding officer, a mare who had replaced their original lieutenant after he had regrettably died fighting off a changeling disguised as his wife, denied their request and continued her paperwork. The guards left the office with plans of bringing bread and water to the captive as well as someone else to vouch for them as the lieutenant shuffled her papers and laughed.
As if those two rookies could ever catch a Child, let alone a changeling.
Author's Note
This was my first attempt at a Dark fiction and I am extremely proud of it. The idea came to me while drinking some coffee at Starbucks and I wrote it immediately. It was the fastest a fiction has ever come to me and I have been able to finish it. took about 2 1/2 hours or so.
Thank you so much for the read.
