Our Last Chance

by Noble Thought

Rating: teen
Tags: Queen Chrysalis, Changelings, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Adventure
Length: 6272

Hatred, in the form of an ancient enemy, rises in the north, driving the changelings from their home. Chrysalis sees only one option: follow in her ancestor's tracks and force the ponies to destroy Sombra.

Long ago, the Crystal Empire, led by Sombra, and the changelings clashed. The Empire won, throwing the changelings into disarray, destroying their home and taking their Heart, the source of their love. Now the changelings learn that the Legacy of Hatred is more than a myth, and that Sombra is returning. He remembers a confidence shared, a betrayal done, and a vengeance wrought against him.

The changeling that betrayed him is long gone, but her descendant remains.

Chrysalis rules a fractured people, and she sees only one chance to save them.

Edited by Minds Eye
Preread by ZOMG, Auramane, Meridian Prime

Published 2015-03-21 22:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2015-03-21 22:00:02 UTC

Chapter 1

“Two. Days. Where are you? You should have been here two days ago! Scout the land and scour the cave-holds. Report. That does not take two days!” Chrysalis rounded the fire again, pacing, knowing she was showing her anxiety, and not caring.

You’d better care. Her mother’s memory, a stern taskmaster, a harsher teacher. Show that worry, and they will wonder, and dig, and ferret out the reasons. Secrets make us strong. Keep them close.

“How many can I keep? So much of us came from fighting him. Now that he is returning…” No! You don’t know that. Patience. Maybe you are imagining things. “Eyes in the wind, ears in the rocks. Hate everywhere.” It sounded mad, coming from her mouth, and she jerked a quick look at the yurt’s heavy tent flap, the weighted fabric barely rustling in the howling wind.

Once more, she turned from the flap and circled the fire again, passing the padded bedroll and the saddlebag with the stylized emblem of her lowly maid persona stitched in rough imperfection on the flap. The winged feather duster had become so familiar over the last weeks that it felt odd to not see it on her flank.

It had been the perfect disguise. None of the ponies had paid a second glance to a maid wandering from room to room, dusting everything. And the things she had learned… “Time sensitive things. And an opportunity soon to pass us by.” Not to mention plots set in motion that will fall apart if I am not there to catch the pieces as they come together.

The first indication that there was another soul out in the middle of the icy plains was the scratching on the yurt’s door. Before thought could coalesce into coherence, she was no longer Chrysalis, but Feather Flight the pegasus maid.

“I seek only a place to change my cloak, and then I will leave,” came a rough voice from outside.

Relief flooded her, followed by annoyance, and she snapped out the response even as the disguise burned away, along with a tiny measure of the love that had made it real. “A cloak is no good against the wind.” She thrust her head out of the door to find four figures shrouded in blowing snow.

“Thank you for coming.” It was an effort to push the snap out of her voice, and she held open the flap to let four changelings, along with a rush of snow and wind, inside. “I trust your scouts have confirmed what mine have?” she asked of the first.

“Aye.” Cragan shook his pack and glistening black pelt free of fast-melting snow and guided a trembling female, looking small next to his bulk, close to the fire. “It was disturbing, how weak they were when they returned. It was as though something drained their magic and their life essence, but they recovered once away from it. But Tally, here…”

“Move aside, brute.” Quirk, following far enough behind the more massive male to have almost been avoiding him, snapped her tail at Cragan. Then she stepped aside to let another follow, a changeling with a bulging saddlepack strapped around narrow caste bands marking him as a lore-keeper too young to hold much sway. “I trust that you have a reason for dragging me away from my studies? Quillen and I were on the verge of—”

“You and Quillen can count the ripples in a still pool some other time,” Chrysalis snapped. “There is no time!”

Quirk glared and snapped her tail again, but reined in the snarl Chrysalis could see straining the corners of her mouth. “I will listen, but I could do without your superiority complex.” She sat, pressing herself obscenely into Quillen’s side. It was obvious to Chrysalis that the mare could barely contain herself. “Or your false urgency.”

Fury boiled up in response, quickly doused. She’s baiting you. “Very well. I shall be... civil. So long as you promise the same.”

Quirk sniffed, turning aside from Chrysalis to press her fangs to Quillen’s cheek in an all too public display of affection.

Chrysalis forced herself to look away before fury at the lore-keeper’s obvious goading made her too angry to think. Instead, she watched Cragan guiding the the trembling female.

She, her bones creaking audibly from the cold, sat down, then collapsed, one hoof almost laying in the fire. She seemed unable to pull it back, and Chrysalis’ own hoof ached sympathetically.

She watched with a mask of impassivity while questions burned through her mind. But which she could ask, and how, felt a distant concern as one of her changelings, one of her people apparently lay dying.

To see it in the flesh, and not in a dusty record… It was an effort not to shudder.

Cragan draped a wing over the smaller female, then pulled a blanket from his pack to settle over the caste-banding marking her as a scout. “Rest, Tally.”

“Tally is…” Too quickly, fool, do not betray your own fear! She stamped down her urgency and made herself be calm. All but the surging thump of her heartbeat obeyed, but she felt her face still and her ears steady. It would not do to show them fear, though it continued to boil ravenously in her gut. She was Queen, and a queen was cunning and bold—not afraid.

“The leader of my scouts,” Cragan said gruffly. He tsked, noticing at last the hoof too close to the fire, and drew it back. She did not miss the concerned furrow of his brow as he resettled her leg. So different from Quirk. “She made sure that they all came back.”

The unusually somber note in Cragan's voice, usually rough and clamoring for obedience, rang strangely in Chrysalis’ ears. She knew him as a gruff leader, and his warrior banding was so wide it seemed as much a part of him as his imperturbability.

“Come back from what?” She heard herself ask. Almost, she saw him again towering over her, a young Queen only hours past the trials, to swear his oaths. That she could look him in the eye without craning her neck felt irrelevant. Or so it seemed. So long ago, that was. A decade, at least. More? She shook that from her head, schooling her face back to impassivity. A quick look at Quirk almost made her snarl. The lore-keepers’ leader was smirking at her. That arrogant—

“She distracted a snow dragon long enough for them to escape and find me.” He shook his head. “A snow dragon, Chrysalis. I would have thought her report in error, did I not see its tracks for myself.”

“And she’s here because…” Worry gnawed at her, borne by the faint echo she was all but certain she could feel seeping from the mare’s gaunt form, but she kept it from her face. She was queen, and her steadfastness was the hive’s. But her people were already so few in number, to lose another because she had been— It was necessary! All of it. “Cragan, you can’t risk your people like this.” Can’t risk us like this.

“Risk?” Cragan spat the word. “Risk would have been knowing what was waiting and doing it anyway. Risk would have been…” His fangs clicked shut when Tally bumped her head against him. It seemed at the bare limit of what she could do. “What was that out there?”

“An old enemy, a terror long since banished to the ice by our neighbors to the south. Sombra, Cragan. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I asked for scouts. I couldn’t let my own fears and suspicions cloud the discovery.”

“The Legacy?” He jerked back, but his brow furrowed, and his fangs showed briefly. “Better that we had known!”

“Psh. The Legacy of Hate is an old tale. There is no evidence!” Quirk sat up straighter, ignoring Quillen’s attempts to draw her down into a muzzle-lock.

At least she has that little bit of decency left.

“Not…” Tally lifted her head again. “Not tale.” She collapsed.

“She needs love.” Cragan looked to Quillen and Quirk, who looked away, and then to Chrysalis. “My queen, if you would be so generous?”

“What of your own reserves?”

“Near drained getting her here. I’m sorry. She insisted, and she knows the most of this threat. Please.”

“She does not know the most, I fear, but she has the most recent account, and she has served you and I well.” Chrysalis shook her head and bent to touch horns with Tally. The pain that flowed back through the contact startled her. The same pain that had been passed down in story after story, of hatred eating at the heart of a changeling and destroying them. Feeling it first-hoof… “I will do what I can. I won’t lie, Cragan, she may still die—I’ve never felt it this close before.”

He turned his head away, and nodded. “She is a good and loyal scout.” It was as close to seeing him in tears as she ever had. He used more than his reserve, getting her here alive.

“Thank you, my queen.” Tally’s eyes, darkening at the edge of death’s door, shone up at her with a glimmer of adoration. She made herself ignore it, ignore the death closing around the younger female’s last spark of life, and wove the construct of an ancient spell in her mind.

Emerald light tinged with white and pink built around her horn, gathering at the tip. A lance of it struck Tally’s horn and spread in a flash down her body.

A scream echoed in the tent, rebounding off the walls of reality, tearing at the golden light of the fire. A shadow so dark the light flinched away from it arched up, out of Tally, and the scream ratcheted higher, then fled the light and evaporated into the cold air.

Silence clung to the yurt. The fire guttered briefly as a fitful wind howled down through the smoke-hole.

Quirk flinched.

“Rest now, brave Tally.” Chrysalis lowered her head again, calling up a far simpler spell, and let love flow back into Tally’s horn as a gentle ebbing tide of green light.

When the light of the spell faded, she sat straighter, firming her back against the sudden weakness infecting her spine. Fear. To have faced the bane of her kind, even the smallest part, and have the histories confirmed right before her eyes… to have battled the ancient foe… Fear was inevitable.

She pushed it away. “I brought you here, as close to the border with Equestria as possible, as far from the hatred as possible, to tell you that the monster, Sombra, is returning. The hate that almost killed Tally was a weapon used by our old foes. It’s more than simple hatred. It’s hatred turned into a weapon the same way we use love to fuel our magic.”

“You could have sent a letter!” Quirk snapped her tail again, ears set back. “We were so close—”

“Attempting to overcome the curse, as you put it, is pointless and insults our strength. Have we not lived thousands of years since Discord changed us? Have we not prospered? I do not pretend to understand your desire to not be a changeling. We. Are. Strong.”

“Strong?” Quirk’s smirk came back thinner, and tight lipped, but no less arrogant. “You think being subservient to a lesser emotion for our magic is—”

“Is what makes us strong! Hardship, Quirk. Cunning. Guile. Survival. This is what we are. Not—” Chrysalis snapped off the last few words and forced herself back to calm, if not impassivity. Her nerves still jangled with the close brush of the antithesis, and she could not trust to an oath to keep the lore-keepers in check if she said something.

It was hard, though. Quirk’s eyes flashed green fire, and an echoing pulse flickered down her horn. “Love and hate, Chrysalis. Do you really think that hate is so powerful that it can burn out love? You?” She laughed, fangs flashing as she pressed herself even more into Quillen’s side.

Chrysalis wanted to wipe that supercilious smile from the other’s muzzle. “This is not simple hatred, foolish mare! This is—”

“It hungers...” Tally coughed, dipping her ears and wings in deference to Chrysalis “I’m sorry, my queen. I felt it, when it came for me. It hated me, and it—” Chrysalis could see it in her blue eyes, still filmed with the lingering weakness of death’s doorway. Terror. Unrelenting terror.

A chill crept through her blood. “Rest, Tally. Give your body time to recover.”

“She doesn’t understand!” Tally struggled to get to her feet, stumbled, and lay down, glaring at Quirk. “It wanted to eat me. Not just my body. Me!”

The accounts are all right. It does more than kill. It destroys the soul. The chill grew to match the wind outside, and it took an effort to quash the howling terror growing in her own heart. It’s only a reaction. Stop. But the feeling of the hatred as she pushed it out of Tally came back up in her memory—hot, ragged, tense.

Tally held the glare, her body trembling with the effort, until her eyes rolled up and she slumped against Cragan. He pressed his ear to her neck, listening, and Chrysalis turned her eyes away as he kissed her neck. Not with fang, but with lips. Love passed between them, a faint thrum, barely felt.

The only sound in the tent for a long moment after was the fire and the wind. Even Quirk looked shocked, her ears flat back in her mane.

“Tally is sleeping,” Cragan said finally, lifting his ear from her neck, his own eyes weary. “But she is alive, and her heart is no longer laboring for each beat.”

How much more love can you expend before you must hunt? How much more before you cannot? Anger thudded briefly in Chrysalis’ heart. He should not be taking such risks. But she did not wish to press him. Tally was more than just a scout leader to him. It may not have been true love between them, but it was as best as they could manage.

Jealousy flared, caught, and held as she jerked her head away from the sight.

Cragan lay a hoof over her back and shot a glare at Quirk. “Listen to what Chrysalis has to say. Surely even you bookish cowards can see the value in what she knows.”

“Knowledge that they’ve held back, for what reason? All knowledge is valuable, even if it is just some love-forsaken fairy tail. If they’ve held it back, then what possible value could it have?”

“We’ve held it back because the power of knowing what this hate can do, of the spells required to even have a chance of fighting its effects, is dangerous.” Chrysalis bared her fangs in a snarl. “You run around like quillfeathers pecking at fungus without care for whether it is whitecap or dream-adder.” She cut off, hissing, as Quirk laughed.

“Are you a child now, Chrysalis? Hurling insults?”

“You have no idea how dangerous some of these spells are. You are the child, Quirk, to think that power should be given to all without the barest consideration!” She waved a hoof at Tally. “To cleanse her of this hatred could have just as easily stripped her mind bare. It could have set it free to infect another.”

Quirk snarled back, standing up. “Knowledge is only dangerous to those who deem it worth keeping secret! There is a reason why you are the last of your line. Arrogant, self-centered ego-maniacs!” Quirk lifted herself up higher, not quite rising from her place beside Quillen, and jerked her chin at Cragan. “Is it not time to consider a new ruling line? Chrysalis is the last of the magi caste. Another, stronger—”

“Fool! You forsake your oath?” Chrysalis snapped her fangs, horn glowing briefly to remind the would-be usurper of the powers of the magi.

“My oath was never to follow Chrysalis! It was to follow the Queen!”

“I am Queen!”

“Enough!” Cragan roared, imposing himself between his queen and the lore-keeper leader. “You two bicker like foals, and it’s making me sick.” He turned the harsh glare at Chrysalis, jaw working as his eyes flicked to Tally’s still form laying beside the fire. Finally, he let his head fall with a sigh. “What you’ve done for Tally… I thank you, but you need to start acting like a queen and not a child. You are our leader. By cunning and guile, you are my queen. It is you who must face this... this hatred.”

He shoved a hoof at her. “Lead, or you’ll find the caves empty of support.” He turned to Quirk. “I apologize for my harsh words earlier. It was uncalled for, but we do owe her at least a modicum of respect. Now, please stop bickering and let us learn why we are here.”

It took a long minute, with the wind howling around the smoke hole, howling a reminder of fear hiding under her skin, for her to push down the fear. To her surprise, the anger fled as the fear did.

“Yes. You should enjoy this, Quirk. You’re going to learn something new.”

“Chrysalis…” Cragan shot her a look as he settled back next to Tally.

“Foal,” Quirk grumbled, low enough that Chrysalis could pretend she hadn’t heard it.

“Sombra,” Chrysalis started, to a snort from Quirk and Quillen both. She forced herself to ignore them, though she felt a jab from a fang on her lower lip. Careless. “Sombra,” she began again, “was the king of the Crystal Empire.”

“Blah blah,” Quirk said, rolling her eyes. “Yes, Chrysalis, you can stop with the history lesson. You will recall that we—”

“Shut your mouth, lore-keeper,” Cragan growled. “Still, Chrysalis, we know this. What does Sombra have to do with the Legacy of Hate? He was cast down by the sisters an age ago.”

“He is the Legacy of Hate. The Empire’s greatest weapon against us. The history tells you that we were near victory, and had nearly reclaimed our homeland and the Heart. Our heart. What the history of my line holds is a far different story.

“We were always on the run. Skirmish after skirmish, we were driven away from our home and the crystallized essence of our hearts.” That had been the cruelest thing. Not that Discord took away our ability to feel our own love. That he left it for others to steal. “That was his goal. Sombra’s. He was not a crystal pony, but had seen our Heart and was jealous of it. He turned the ears of our once kin against us, making us out as monstrous parasites. We became the enemy. We became a threat.”

“How?” For once, Quirk sounded cautiously interested. “How could he turn them against us? The histories we have kept state it was Discord’s doing, that our own appearance was what drove the crystal ponies against us. What did Sombra corrupt them with, if it wasn’t Discord’s claw?”

“Hatred,” Chrysalis said, letting satisfaction curl her lips briefly. “He corrupted our once kin against us, enslaved them to hate us as virulently as any. Oh, that would have been a bad enough fate for us. But worse, his hatred, his essence was as poison to our soul. Without love of our own to counter his hate, it consumed us, body and soul. Worse, it spread like the plague.” At that, Quillen and Quirk leaned away from the trembling mare, fangs bared. Chrysalis snapped hers at them, annoyed. “She is far too weak to spread it, now.”

Cragan brushed a hoof over Tally’s forelock. “But… she did not hate me, Chrysalis. She was only so weak that—” His muzzle wrinkled into a half-snarl. “She burned her love to keep it away.”

“It is the only counter. Love to counter hatred. Had she been drained when it came upon her, it would have feasted on her life’s energy in an attempt to slay us all. The snow dragon was a boon, old friend. It focused her need to survive, and gave her the strength to keep the hatred from consuming her long enough for you to reach me. She had enough time to realize, and counter it as best she could.”

He frowned at that, but held his silence.

“The spells I know are not enough. Saving one here, one there while our very survival is threatened. The caves would run with blood as brother turned on sister and sister on brother. He will not assume that we will perish without our Heart again.” She smirked, shaking her head as she looked to Quirk. “Some few could escape, maybe. Enough to rebuild? Would you choose the youngest and strongest? Would you instead choose the eldest and wisest? Which gives us the best chance of survival?”

Quirk and Quillen looked at each other, but only curiosity passed between them. There was no spark of affection as there was between Tally and Cragan. It was a problem to them, a thing to be probed and dissected—each part examined until every last detail came free.

Affection is the wrong word for what Tally and Cragan share, Chrysalis thought as she watched a different exchange play out between the still sleeping scout and the watchful warrior. It is loyalty. Debt and honor has ever been favored in the warrior caste. Odd that it should be so in the scout caste as well.

“If he is back…” Cragan didn’t have to look down at Tally for Chrysalis to know his mind was there.

“He is not. If he were, his war would have already resumed, and we would be fleeing again, if not worse than dead.” Her eyes tracked from his to Tally’s almost still form. “Worse than dead, Cragan.”

“Why would he even assume we are still around? Would he not assume we had died after he took the Heart?” Quirk’s eyes were hard as they bored into Chrysalis.

And there was the reason the histories were secret. Chrysalis sighed inwardly, but kept up her mask of strength. She is sharp, for whatever other faults of hubris she has. She was already breaking a thousand years of tradition to reveal as much as she had. What’s one more family secret? I am already too deep to back out without showing weakness.

Still, admitting it rankled. “It was the first Queen, my ancestor, who infiltrated and orchestrated the first skirmishes between the Empire and Equestria. It was her greatest joy, she wrote, to be there at the final battle and watch his hatred burn futilely as he saw whom it was that had wrought his downfall.” Pages upon pages of gloating. Madness.

“Oh, sweet love…” Quirk closed her eyes and covered her muzzle with a foreleg. “Arrogance must be a family trait. How else could you and she be so alike? So, he knows, then, does he? He knows we survived his purge.”

“It was hardly her fault!” Chrysalis had to force the ‘her’ from sounding too much like ‘my,’ but she heard it anyway as she shifted her head, taking Tally from her peripheral vision. “Those milksop ponies did not do a proper job of ridding the world of his evil! Christyd gave him to them on a silver platter, and they placed the platter, whole, in the icebox and called their job done! Even our Heart was lost to us.”

“And so, we flee, then.” Quirk made to stand. “We run across the ocean to the frozen lands. Some of the texts that survived the Fall mention great caverns there. It would not be so—”

“Run?” Chrysalis laughed. “You do not know the half of it, little lore-keeper. Sombra is no more a being of flesh and blood. Did you not feel the unease in crossing the snowy plains? His essence has bled into the very ground and infects every rock and stone from here to the Ice Teeth.” She turned her attention to Cragan. “Did you not think it odd that a snow dragon came calling? In this season? That it attacked us? It will not be long before the whole of this land fills with his taint. Where, then, will we run to?”

She laughed again, unable to keep the fear from turning it brittle. “No. Running is not an option. Our only strength now lies in skills honed in a thousand years of surviving on the fringes of pony society. Stealth, cunning, guile.” She bared her fangs in a tight snarl. “We finish what Christyd started. We use the power of the ponies to crush Sombra.”

Quirk’s eyes widened until Chrysalis could almost smell the sick fear pouring off the other mare. “What? Are you mad?”

“Mad?” Chrysalis bared her fangs wider. “Mad? No, not mad. Even as I sent the messages to you, asking you to send out scouts and scour the lands for signs of the return, I have been planning, and plots are already in motion. I have only just returned from Equestria, and the time could not be more right to take control of the head.

“In a week, you must bring all of our kin from the caves.” She paused, waiting for the inevitable opening of mouths, and snapped it off before Quirk and Cragan could raise protest. “All of them! Do you think the caves will be safe in a month? I am not even certain we have a month. But timing is our key.”

“What plan could you possibly have?”

“I mean to give Celestia a heartfelt reason to want to destroy Sombra this time, but I need time. We need time, and time we do not have.” She drew out a pair of scrolls, sealed and capped with wax. “Do not open these until you are in the lands of the ponies. The ground listens here, and the wind has eyes.”

Even Quirk turned her eyes to the ground, though she hid it with a stretching arch of her neck. “Not enough, Chrysalis. I will follow, but only if you give me enough. Oath or no, I’ll not walk into death.”

Cragan was nodding, though he kept his eyes on the flap leading outside. “You would have me commit our inferior numbers against the greatest power in this part of the world. If any plan is to have a chance, I must know more before crossing into their lands.”

Four sets of wary ears twitched at every gust of wind as Chrysalis fought to keep her eyes from locking on Quirk. It is not her fault. But how much can I reveal? She watched as the scrolls disappeared into packs, and sighed wearily.

“Perhaps I can tell some.” How much? “We are refugees, fleeing a natural disaster in the north, and seeking refuge in Canterlot.”

Quirk snorted, shaking her head. “You can’t believe the ponies will just let us march all the way to Canterlot, can you? Not en-masse. But,” she said, looking as though she had eaten something foul, “the ponies will gobble up the story. I imagine we will all get our fill of love on the way.”

“No, they will not, but we do not have time for much subtlety.”

“How long do we have?” Quirk shared a glance with Quillen, who pulled free a sheaf of parchment and quill. “For each cave-hold, how long before the last can leave safely?”

Biting down her temper proved harder than she would have thought, but Chrysalis did. “No longer than three weeks. No. Longer. Those that leave so late may not be strong enough, even to disguise themselves, and if I am wrong…”

The sour wrinkle on Quirk’s muzzle grew. “Assume you are not.”

And so it went, the fire guttering, and Quirk dragging answers from her that she wished did not make so much sense to give. Yet with each one, Quirk’s eyes flashed, and her instructions to Quillen came sharper, sometimes even deigning to take up the pen herself to scratch and rewrite. Eventually, even Cragan joined in, weighing the strength of his soldiers against the ponies.

The presence of the eyes and ears watching and listening grew stronger as the night wore on and the fire burned low.

Through it all, the wind howled with laughter, vicious and hateful. Mocking.

I am not Christyd. I will not gloat. I am not mad!

The memory, the madness, passed on as she lay where she had that night.

Chrysalis looked up into the wind. Four figures approached her, two female and two male, striding out of the swirling snow towards the remains of the campsite. The yurt was long gone, the fire gone colder than the ground.

“It was our last chance!” she shouted at them. “Our last! Can’t you feel him? Sombra? He is coming!” Coming, and she could not stop him. He would eradicate her people—do worse than murder to them. To her. “The plan should have worked!”

“Yes.” Quirk stepped closer, features drawn and haggard. “It should have. Your first plan wouldn’t. Thousands of refugees? Fleeing from an unnamed disaster in the north? But what I added… it should have.” She shivered, but did not look cold, even with her pelt burned to the undercoat in places. She was not watching Chrysalis. Her eyes were on the boulders that had not been there the first time.

Jagged edges marked the rock where it had been shattered, sharpened by the presence that had drawn them up from the cold ground and broken them into spikes and razor’s edges.

“Yet it didn’t.” Certainty flared, then died, but she used the ember to stoke her anger. “Did you wish to be Queen so much? It was you! You betrayed us! It was you who sent the warning to Celestia.”

Quirk shook her head, exhaustion plain in the set of her ears. “Not I. It was my plan, as much as yours. And because… as foolish as you are, you are my queen. Still, I don’t have to agree with you. I don’t have to like you. But you listened, and I am no quillfeather to ignore an oath when both sides are upheld.”

Trust her? Don’t? Is she the traitor? Fear muddled her thoughts, exhaustion shook her body, and both doused her anger. She slumped as the momentary fire left her weaker than before. “I am sorry.” For failing. “For accusing you.”

Quirk nodded, but did not say more. That, alone, spoke volumes about her state of being.

Quillen, standing silent at the lore-keeper’s side, only huddled closer, clutching a sprained foreleg to his chest.

How many received worse? How many died in the landing? In the flight?

Tally stumbled forward out of the blizzard, followed by Cragan, his face impassive even through the mask of dried blood covering the side of his face.

“Cragan? Tally? You—” Are alive. “You are here.”

“It was my fight, my queen. Do you think I would sabotage that? I owe my fighters more than to let them die in a hopeless struggle. I did not send the message.” He bowed his head. “Even with the shield up, you managed what I thought impossible. You are my queen still.”

Tally, beside him, bowed her head low. No, not bowed. She was so exhausted she couldn’t keep her head up, but she kept standing even though her forelegs trembled from the strain like a newborn foal.

Betrayal…

“Now that we have lost,” Chrysalis started to say. “No! We are not lost. Not until the last of us is gone.” There is still a betrayer in your midst. It was a suggestion, a command. “But I will know who set themselves against us. To have done so, they must have known even our contingency plan.”

Blank faces stared back at her.

“My queen,” Cragan said hesitantly, “you told none of us of any contingency plan.”

Quirk tilted her head. “What contingency? We covered what I thought was needed.”

Did we? Chrysalis shook her head. Everything had gone into the scrolls that she could trust, and more had been dragged from her besides. All logistics and numbers, timing and schedules like the ponies and their love-forsaken trains.

“Should we have been discovered to be more than refugees, invasion was next. A swift strike, before word could reach the capital, but the shield came up the day after I arrived.” Nods came from the four listening, and she stood, shaking her head slowly and frowning into the wind. She needed to move, get her blood moving. “You both burned your orders?”

Nods came back once more.

“Had they detected me, the city would have ousted me, or attempted to. It was not I.” Nor had Shining Armor been suspicious of his fiance’s ‘nervous jitters’ that carried her throughout the city. Her thoughts trailed along her path, inspecting escape routes, hiding places, choke-points. And her thoughts skittered to a stop as she remembered the final piece, a letter rather than a scroll, sealed and stamped for Celestia’s Eyes Only, and placed at the bottom of…

The day you put into place your final contingency, should all else fail. Days before the wedding, she had placed it at the bottom of the inbox for one of Celestia’s lowest officials. She had picked him because she had personally seen him to be a layabout during her infiltration as a lowly maid. What a day for him to do his job on time. It had to be that stupid wedding. Timing. The timing was off, and he was in a rush to complete his work. That has to be it! Another week earlier, and I could have found some other way! “A plan that relies on chance is no plan,” she whispered, reciting an adage passed from her mother.

But she had needed to tell the ponies something. Conscious of the eyes on her, she kept her pacing short, pondering. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her arrogance. It was prudence. If the invasion failed, then the ponies needed to be ready to stand while she retreated.

A quick glance at Quirk showed the lore-keeper’s attention was all on Quillen and his leg. She could feel a tiny flow of power as Quirk expended some of her love to ease his pain. Why did they have to be so understanding? All except for Twilight Sparkle. She was too ready to apologize and ruin everything. The elements had to be broken! It had to be done.

Christyd’s laugh echoed down through the ages, tinged with madness—and contempt. Betrayed? Sombra said the same.

Christyd had lovingly written down every last emotion, savoring his impotent hate even as he screamed out the name of his betrayer. She wallowed in it in page after page. Brought down by blindness. Arrogance. He had us on the run. Would even one of the magi risk being so close to the poisoned well? Of course not.

Shuddering, Chrysalis stopped her pacing and looked up to see Cragan close by, watching her. She arched a brow at him, watched him swallow, but stood tall all the same.

“What of the outer lands? Did any mark your passing as any but ponies fleeing from a disaster?”

“No alarm was raised in the outlying lands of the kingdom, else we would have been in place long before. That was clever, ‘Count the ripples in a still pool.’ We moved slowly, as you commanded, and piecemeal as Quirk suggested, and as befit exhausted refugees fleeing danger. What ripples we made did not disturb the pool.” A wry smile tugged Cragan’s ears down. “Not far from what we were. Or are, for that matter.”

Betrayal! The thought came like a spike of ice in her mind, filling her with fear and hatred. Green fire filled her mind, burning away the thought even as it faded on a howling gust of wind.

A moment later, she wasn’t certain if it was her thought or carried on the wind, but she still held the spell in her mind that would cleanse away the poisonous hatred. Sombra’s presence was growing stronger by the instant, oozing from the ground and carried in the wind, tugging at the last scraps of love she had managed to keep a hold of.

Chrysalis stared into the wind, letting the cold sear into the fine pelt covering her cheeks. “Chance.” No betrayal. No betrayer. “You made your ripples, I made mine, and I counted those. They went unmarked by all but one. Yours, I could not see until the right and proper time. You both did well.

“All chance. Perhaps there was another threat from another source. Perhaps Celestia herself determined the cause of our flight. Perhaps she saw the signs in the North even before we.” She sighed, pushing herself up out of the snow to turn away from the bitter wind. It was not me.

Bitter, mad laughter boiled in her mind, but she pushed it down.

“Come. We must leave this place, find who we may, and hope the ponies are able to stand up to Sombra.”

Quirk laughed, low and bitter. “We’re running. As I said we should from the start.”

“Yes. We are running.” She turned to the East, where the sun would be rising in a few more hours. The wind howled, raged, and tore at her. Sombra remembers. So do I. “We are going home.”

Hateful laughter boiled in the wind.