Princess Cadance: Changeling Hunter

Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, which would later be shortened to Cadance, was born on the 6th day of the 8th month of 972 L.B. (L.B. = Luna’s Banishment) to parents Flower Blossom, a pegasus, and Glowing Sun, a unicorn prince and distant brother to Princess Celestia. The sky was sunny and cloudless, a good omen to the family. It was a particularly good omen that the child was not only blessed with her mother’s wings, but her father’s horn as well. She was a monumentally rare breed of pony known as an alicorn, a winged pegasus in laypony’s terms.

When the royal princess learned of her birth, she headed right away to the new parents to congratulate them on her niece being brought into the world. Princess Celestia herself was certain that this pony would go on to do great things. She didn’t know, however, what these “great” things would eventually amount to.

Glowing Sun was a brown pony with a black mane and a cutie mark of a spear. Flower Blossom was a creamy white with an ice blue mane and a cutie mark of a flower. Cadance’s father was the head of the Royal Guard while her mother cared for her at home which was in the countryside about a mile from Canterlot. Flower Blossom was very hesitant about sending her daughter to a school where she felt she wouldn’t receive the same treatment as everypony else, so she homeschooled her daughter. It was fortunate that Flower Blossom was one of the most intelligent ponies during her school years and had even considered being a teacher, but she fell madly in love with Glowing Sun and became a stay-at-home wife.

Cadance was an extremely bright filly growing up. She began speaking at the age of 1, when most ponies began speaking at the age of 2. By age 2, she began reading and writing. By the time she was 5 years of age, she already had the penmanship and vocabulary of a fully grown mare. Many people contributed this massive growth of knowledge to Flower Blossom’s peerless tutoring, but Princess Celestia herself was convinced there was just something special about her.

If there was one thing that Flower Blossom enjoyed most about tutoring her daughter, it was the flying lessons. Being a pegasus pony herself, she saw herself as the perfect teacher for her daughter. On Cadance’s 4th birthday, Flower Blossom took her daughter out for flying lessons. The first couple of days were quite troubling for Flower Blossom, as Cadance seemed more focused on watching her mother’s wings than she was with listening to her words of advice.

Cadance, however, knew exactly what she was doing. She watched with great intuition how her mother’s wings would move in wave-like patterns which made her fly in different directions and speeds. On the 4th day, Cadance tried replicating the movements herself with minimal success. She was barely a foot airborne, but she quickly lost herself and crashed into the ground. This is when Cadance began listening to her mother’s words and taking her advice on how to properly control herself.

The next day, Cadance took Flower Blossom’s words to heart and began to control her flying. Within a couple of hours, she was able to easily fly alongside her mom. In a few days time, she was just as skilled a flyer as her mom. Cadance claims that her mother was never prouder of her than on that day.

One of the other things Cadance liked to do with her mother was a little song that they did together, accompanied by a dance:

Sunshine, sunshine,
Ladybugs awake.
Clap your hooves,
And do a little shake.

This little moment of each day was enough to bring Cadance out of even the deepest of average childhood throes: falling down when she messed up in her flying lessons, missing her dad who was almost always away with the Royal Guard, feeling lonely without many friends. Despite her protectiveness for her daughter, Flower Blossom loved her as any mother would.

One day, Glowing Sun came home for a small relieve of his duty. Cadance was ecstatic to see her dad whenever he came home, however rarely he did. Flower Blossom did not share the same sentiments. Being as long gone as he was, she always felt pent up with emotions brought about by his prolonged absences. This sometimes caused fighting between the two lovers. Cadance remembers crying every time one of her parents would raise her voice at the other.

Despite the occasional arguments, they still were good around each other and their daughter. In fact, Glowing Sun used the time he had with his daughter to his full potential, using that time to teach her magic. With Cadance’s intuition and intelligence, she was able to pick magic up to the level of a middle-school mare by the time her father had to return to duty.

After discovering the use of her magic, Cadance asked her mother if she could go to the library and find more books about magic. Flower Blossom, despite being quite apprehensive about bringing her alicorn daughter into public, felt that it was time for her to be accepted into society. To Flower Blossom’s relief, Cadance was not only accepted, but she was highly respected inside the city of Canterlot. The librarian of the Canterlot Royal Library even allowed Cadance to check magic books out that weren’t available to the public.

Despite the respect that Cadance received in her time at Canterlot, this was exactly the reason that Flower Blossom kept Cadance from the public. Since Canterlot was the capital of Equestria and was easily its most luxurious city, the populace consisted mainly of snobs and stuffy upper-class socialites who haven’t learned of the value of true labor like Glowing Sun and Flower Blossom had. Cadance’s mother wanted her daughter to grow up to learn such values, along with self-respect and eventual dependency on herself.

With many of the spells that Cadance learned from the books she checked out at the library, she was able to fell trees for lumber and firewood, she learned how to control fire to assist mother with cooking, and she also used her magic to help with their own little garden which they used for sustenance. It was clear that Flower Blossom was teaching her daughter right.

Glowing Sun came home again one day when Cadance was 6. This led to another argument between him and Flower Blossom. Cadance couldn’t take it anymore. She hated seeing her parents arguing. She came downstairs and casted a new spell that she had learned in her books. A red heart split in half down the middle flew towards the arguing ponies. The heart joined as one between them, causing a spray of smaller hearts to emit from the larger one onto Glowing Sun and Flower Blossom.

The two ponies stopped arguing and began talking calmly to each other. They then began to reason that they shouldn’t fight like this in front of their daughter. After they promised not to have another argument like that again, Cadance ran down the stairs and hugged her parents. It was this act of love and kindness that allowed Cadance’s cutie mark, a blue heart with gold lace to finally appear. It was one of the happiest days of Cadance’s life. Soon later, her happy days would be coming to an abrupt halt.

Since the day she got her cutie mark, Glowing Sun began spending more time at home, honing Cadance’s magic. One day, Flower Blossom came back home from the market. However, she seemed “off” to Cadance. She didn’t greet her in the same way that she normally would. In fact, she gave Cadance nothing more than a rough pat on the head with her hoof. She seemed more interested in Glowing Sun.

In fact, she greeted him with a passionate kiss, something unseen by Cadance from her mother before. His father was also surprised by this kiss, but kept it going. Cadance was unsure of what was happening with her mother to make her act this strangely. The disturbing of Cadance went further, as every night, she would hear passionate moans coming from her parent’s bedroom below her. The difference scared her and her terror almost brought the filly to tears.

Beginning almost immediately with the “change,” Glowing Sun spent more and more time at home, all to the point where he stopped becoming the head of the Royal Guard altogether. “Flower Blossom” also began sending her to public school, which Cadance went on to remember as some of the most horrible experiences of her childhood. Being as bright of a student as she was, she found the classes very easy for her, which many of the students, including the upper class, found very irksome. The colts and fillies taunted and teased the young Cadance relentlessly. Cadance would come home in tears every day, but her “mother” paid no mind to her, and her father seemed to be getting more and more distant from her daughter every day.

Despite recommendations from her teachers that she should move to a grade more suitable for her, “Flower Blossom” insisted that her “daughter stopped whining and just deal with it.” Cadance was soon convinced that this mare that had come into her life was not her mother. She needed answers.

Cadance went to the police after school one day to ask them to go on a search party to find her real mother. Despite saying that Flower Blossom was obviously around, she told the police about her radically different behavior and her sudden attention towards her dad. The police told her that what she might be dealing with was with a creature called a changeling. She left, but not before the police would promise to investigate further.

Cadance spent the next 2 hours at the Royal Library researching changelings. She found only one book that provided any answers, and its contents were shoddy at best. The only serviceable information about the creatures was that they fed off of the love of ponies in the forms of the pony that they love, and that distinguishing a changeling from the actual pony could only be done by another pony that was close to them. She left the library disappointed.

Upon returning home, she was greeted by her “mother.” Cadance could remember the conversation fully.

“So Cadance,” she said in a domineering way, “where were you today?”

“I was… at the library.”

“Really? Did you have fun? I certainly don’t remember giving you permission to go to the library, but I guess since you had fun, that’s all that matters. Wanna know how my day went? A couple of policemen came to my house and asked me some interesting questions.”

“Like what?”

“Oh nothing. Just that I was accused of being a CHANGELING!”

She took a cup from the cupboard and threw it at Cadance’s head on the last word. Cadance tried running to her room, but “Flower Blossom” was too quick for her. She grabbed Cadance and pinned her to the bed. She struck her hard with her hoof and quelled the subsequent crying with her other hoof.

“You may have uncovered my disguise,” she said, “but you can’t just disappear now. If you leave the picture, I will have signed my own arrest warrant. But unless you really want to disappear, just like your mother did, you will be a good little girl, you got that?” Cadance was too terrified to do anything. “YOU GOT THAT?” Cadance nodded as hard as she could. “Good. From now on, this door remains open. You lost your privacy privileges.” “Flower Blossom” left the poor Cadance to weep into her pillow. She knew that something had to be done for her nightmare to be over.

One day, “Flower Blossom” went to the market for groceries, allowing Cadance to check on her father. What she saw shocked her to the core. Her father looked strange. He sat in the corner of his bedroom, swooning as if he was about to collapse from exhaustion. His normally blue eyes where replaced by a lime green. His eyes also looked tired and bloodshot. Cadance tried calling out to her dad to snap him out of it. The only response he could muster were the words “honey” and “Blossom.”

It was clear that she had wormed her way into his mind. Cadance tried more and more to reach out to him, but all her efforts were in vain. She tried one last thing. She tried casting the love spell on him like she did with him and her real mother. Upon casting the spell, she waited for a response. To Cadance’s horror, his eyes were still the same lime green and he said the same two words.

“Honey? Blossom?”

Cadance knew that she would never get her father back. She couldn’t afford to see her father in this state, so she led him to the bed and let him lay down. She then grabbed her mother’s pillow and held it over his head.

“I love you, daddy,” she sobbed before pressing the pillow over Glowing Sun’s muzzle. As the stallion struggled for air, Cadance tearfully held her father down further with her magic as she smothered him. At long last, her father stopped moving.

Glowing Sun died on the 9th day of the 3rd month, 979 L.B.

“Flower Blossom” came home later that night. Upon placing her saddlebags on the table she made her way for the bedroom. She was horrified to see her lover’s dead body on the bed. She tried to resuscitate him, until Cadance came into the room. She had cloth wrapped around her hooves to prevent her noises from betraying her.

“Hello, ‘mother’,” she greeted.

Using the same spell that she used for felling trees for lumber and firewood, she cut off one of “Flower Blossom’s” wings, resulting in a splatter of green blood. As “Flower Blossom” writhed and screamed in pain, Cadance saw the amputated wing turn feathery to insect-like as it flailed upon the ground. “Flower Blossom” also changed shape.

She turned into a very skinny black equine figure with long legs with holes that were visible in the bottom parts of the calf to her hoof. Her other wing turned insect-like as well. The mane and tail that were once icy blue were now long and resembled seaweed, being a royal blue instead. Her eyes were large and green, and her mouth was nothing but a row of fangs. Cadance then noticed that she had a jagged horn on top of her head, which she deduced was for magic.

Cadance used a stronger version of her chopping spell, which cut the changeling’s horn like a carrot, minus the sickening crunch as the bone cracked away from her body. The stump where her horn was began spurting more green blood, mixed with chips of bone that still hung from the horn. The changeling screamed louder than before as it flailed in pain.

Cadance used its moment of weakness by tearing off bits of cloth from the sheets and gagged the changeling with them, using another strip of sheets to close her mouth. Lastly, she took some rope from her father’s closet and tied a noose around the changeling’s neck before tying her to the bed with the other end of the rope.

Cadance could hear the changeling’s muffled cries from the cloth, so Cadance took a lantern that she found and hurled it at her enemy. The glass shattered, with shards cutting the creature’s skin, and the oil from the lantern seeping into her wounds.

“Goodbye 'mother',” Cadance whispered.

She casted a spark spell at the changeling, who flailed wildly knowing what was about to happen. The spark touched the oil, setting the changeling and the room ablaze. Cadance watched with a smile as the changeling’s flesh began to bubble, peel, burn, and wither to ash as it screamed into the night in blistering, agonizing pain. Cadance was forced to leave the house when the fire began to engulf the room.

Cadance threw her cloth shoes into the fire from the shattered window of her parent’s room. She then ran full gallop to Canterlot to report the “accident” that occurred.

By the time the police arrived, the house was well beyond saving, and they saw it fit to let it burn until there was nothing left.

Cadance smiled at the thought of the shriveled ashen corpse of the changeling inside the house. The satisfaction that arose from this act was one she would always remember. She knew that that wasn’t the only changeling to exist in this world. She knew that others existed, and as long as they lived to steal the love of others at the misery of the victim’s loved ones, she would never be fully happy. Cadance made a promise to herself on that very night: that she would go on to rid Equestria of all changelings as long as she lived.