It is one thing to know someone, somewhere, hates you. That can be dismissed, or even enjoyed, held as a badge of honor. It is another to know the very form of that hate, to taste it, breathe it, for it to surround you and be helpless against it. That takes something from you. It puts worms into your very soul, no matter how tattered it is to begin with.
After a full month in the castle I had more holes in me than usual. And I was hungry. Hate can be supped, but it is bitter, bitter, and does not satisfy.
Of the five principal ponies that I was allowed to talk to (or are allowed to talk to me - it is the same either way), it was Shining Armor whose hate lay heaviest. Ponies are good haters. It is hard to create it, but once it is there, they are just as passionate in that as in everything else. Cadenza’s hate was light, and tempered with the sickly fermentation of pity, and even more unpalatable thereby.
I didn’t dare touch Selene’s emotions. You can warm yourself by a fire, but it is insanity to try and warm yourself by immersing your hoof in the flame itself. Twilight kept me at bay with a spell. I could sense it there, a wall between her and me, though I hardly need that access to read her. She has no idea how to control her face.
Celeste might as well be a lump of stone. I know she has emotions, but they aren’t there for me. Which is, withal, more disturbing than if I could feel her hate.
My children were warm there, in their gilded birdcage, and safe, as a prisoner is safe, but that bower was a hospice and not a hospital. Sparkle worked but had no cure forthcoming for the simple and straightforward fact that we feed on ponies.
Then she arrived in the middle of the evening, entirely unannounced, wild-eyed and wild-maned, with power, her power, leashed but still crackling like summer lightning. “How good is your Celestia?”
“What.”
“You’re going to be Celestia today. Come on.”
“What.”
I am not used to being handled like a foal, but Sparkle’s magic dragged me bodily across the threshold and behind her until I started using my own hooves. “Are you going to explain anything?”
“On the way. We’ll be late! And you need to change!” The look she threw back in my direction was one-third impatience and two-thirds challenge.
Of all ponies, Celeste was the one I had put off-limits, for the very simple fact that she terrified me. I could still feel the light of Sol Invictus inside my veins from our first real conversation. But Sparkle probably could have goaded me into it even if I wasn’t being granted dispensation.
“Fine.” It came out as a growl. Everything came out as a growl when talking to Sparkle. I was given to understand she had that effect on a lot of ponies.
Celeste’s physical proportions are somewhat unusual, but not particularly challenging to duplicate. The subtlety is in the eyes, which are simultaneously warm and loving and cold and hard as a northern winter, and the mouth, which is a delicate instrument that can bestow approval or scorn with barely perceptible movements of the lips. Of course the flash of the mane and tail required constant attention, but I wouldn’t be Queen Chrysalis if I couldn’t do it.
“Good!” Twilight fizzed with approval. “Now come on, or we’ll be late!”
“For?” I could feel events sneaking up on me, ready to pounce. The wolves were in the underbrush, I just couldn’t see their teeth.
“Opera!”
“What.”
I wasn’t sure if the timing was conscious, but following Sparkle we’d turned into the main part of the palace just as I was ready to marshall a more forceful demand for an explanation. Instead I had to don the Dawnbringer mask, warm but distant, and superior to everyone by virtue of fact rather than attitude. Two bubbles of anxiety - guards - peeled off from their posts outside my lair to flank us.
“My dear Twilight,” I said in Celeste’s dulcet tones. “Are you going to explain what’s going on?”
“I’ve been doing it wrong. I was looking at it from the pony perspective, instead of the changeling one.”
“You mean the losing one?” It slipped out. Even in Celeste’s voice, they weren’t her words, and Sparkle frowned at me. Really, I should know better, of all changelings. “So, you have a solution?”
“Part of one. I’m still thinking on it but this couldn’t wait. You haven’t complained but I’ve noticed that you’re weaker. You’re all weaker.” By now I was in stride with Sparkle, and she looked over at me, her voice lowering. “I can’t begin to understand the burden you’re under, and while you may be...prickly, you have kept better faith than I expected. Better than I would have under the same circumstances, really.”
It was just as well I couldn’t taste Sparkle’s emotions. Sympathy was nearly as fermented as pity. But this wasn’t like her, either. She was fairly vibrating with energy, while at the same time only halfway here. “Nice of you to say so, anyway.”
Sparkle shook her head, though not at me. “So Celestia and Luna are spending some time together this evening, while you and I go out. You as Celestia. They know, nopony else does.” She flicked a wing at the pair of guards. Then added, apropos of nothing. “Brace yourself.”
It was advice well-given. And well taken, since I stiffened my legs by sheer reflex from the tone of her voice. The door swung open, and an ocean tried to drown me.
The entire time we had been walking an empty hall, with just Sparkle and the Guards. But the door opened to the outside, and the public. Perhaps a hundred ponies could see me, in Celestia’s form, and upon me crashed a thundering tidal wave of agape. It would have been like trying to drink a river, and I didn’t even try. I just sipped, marveling at the taste.
Changelings know emotions like blacksmiths know steel, like potters know clay. There are thousands of shades and variations on love, from pure and chaste to twisted and rotten, but I had never tried agape before. It wasn’t the most powerful love, but it certainly was unique and rare, and it burned going down. It was not meant to be consumed, but what did I care? It was food to a starving mare, and it was welcome.
“The theatre isn’t far. We can talk more there.” Sparkle interrupted that brief euphoria, but at least I hadn’t staggered and fallen over while pretending to be the ruler of the most powerful civilization in the world. That would have shattered my vaunted image of the Queen of Deception more than my ill-conceived stint as Cadenza.
I bestowed hollow smiles and false nods as I stepped into the chariot with Sparkle, and the pegasi drew us into the air. Sparkle hummed something under her breath, fizzing and popping beside me like one of the awful drinks Candenza preferred. I swear she was taking a perverse pleasure in drawing things out. On the other hoof, more time to feed was welcome. The largesse was already vanishing, sent out along a thousand threads to sustain all my children who couldn’t sustain themselves.
I supposed it was the royal opera house that we pulled up to, a thing of frills and filigree, a very ponylike confection of pastried architecture, and were ushered in through a private rear entrance. The aggressive opulence was muted inside, toned down to mere silk and velvet and gold, but that was more than made up for by the roiling cauldron of emotions I could sense ahead.
Calling a mere hundred or so ponies’ worth of love an ocean had been wrong. It had been a few drops, or a pleasant stream. Two and a half thousand fonts of unadulterated agape was a suffocating inundation. I manipulated Celeste’s face and hoof like a marionette, at a distance, while I scrambled to deal with a torrential flood of riches. If I had done this instead - but no. Agape burned, and while it certainly sustained, trying to wield it as power would have been like trying to eat the sun.
The rainbow-sherbert sea below us rippled and churned as ponies found their seats, a vast euphony in which there were some oddly sour notes.
“Some of those ponies aren’t ponies.” It rankled, to interrupt such an opportunity with something so mundane as business, but there were obligations to be met.
“What?” Sparkle looked startled for a moment, blazing into full incandescent power for a moment as she scanned the crowd, then laughed. The world-shattering presence vanished again, tucked away with the soft pinging and popping of cooling metal. “Oh! You’re spoiling the show for yourself. This opera features gryphons. They’re just disguised actors.”
“You know full well I won’t be paying attention to the show.” I didn’t even bother with Celeste’s voice for that, and Sparkle sobered.
“I suppose not.”
“Well?”
Sparkle kept her gaze on the stage, where an announcer had appeared to quiet the crowd. The agape had calmed from untamed ocean to mere vast and heaving sea, but it was still so much. “I was going at it backward. I was trying to decide how to get ponies acclimated to changelings, and changelings acclimated to ponies. How we would introduce you into pony society, what ambassadors and examples would be necessary. But I was wrong to do that.”
“You were?” Even though I couldn’t read her emotions, I knew Sparkle well enough to tell she had stumbled upon something. And trying to hurry her explanation would only throw her off course, as infuriatingly indirect as she sometimes was.
“Yes. The way to integrate changelings into pony society is to make them vanish entirely.”
That was a nasty jolt, and if I hadn’t already been sitting it might have knocked me off my hooves. But Sparkle was still talking. “Ponies might get used to changelings, but changelings don’t function that way. Your very nature is the deception, and it would run counter to everything you are to have you out and about that way. No, the best thing is to pull you deep under, where changelings have their own faces, and not someone else’s, and where your deception is even greater - to pretend that the changelings don’t even exist.”
“That was...not what I expected to hear.”
“Well, it’s not a pony solution. Or a changeling one, I’d guess.” Sparkle smiled again, but this time there was no humor in it. “And it’s not that simple, of course. Even after you and Luna disentangle them, how long can one of you keep the same identity? How long can you interact with the same pony safely? And they’ll still be yours, not ours. You can’t vanish. We need you to rule them.”
“That is what I do.” If I weren’t disguised at Celeste, I would have bared my teeth. The curtain went up and spotlights shone, but that interested me not at all. What I was being offered was profoundly generous, of course, beyond anything I had expected. But at the same time there was something lacking. “But if they’re just going to be -”
“Oh, there’s no just. Luna and I talked about this.” Sparkle looked apologetic for perhaps four tenths of a second. “And now we’ll include you, of course. But changelings have unique talents that we have to use. Counselors, judges. Diplomats. Spies and counter-spies. You could work with us instead of simply for us.”
“Of course.” Of course Sparkle already had that answer. And I didn’t believe for one instant that she hadn’t already conjured answers to the other questions too, though even I didn’t know them. For the first time in a very, very long time I felt a small spark of hope, crystalline and crunchy. “What do you need from me?”
“Later,” Sparkle said. “After this. You should pay attention. It’s about a gryphon that once ate ponies, trying to live as a pony. It seemed appropriate.”
“...really.” And she was back to infuriating. With Celeste’s face the power of a glare was more cutting than any blade, but she just smiled.
“It’s perspective. A perspective, at least. I couldn’t solve this problem with just one. I needed at least three, and two of those weren’t ponies.” She made a face, a kind of a grimace. “And there are three pony perspectives, you know? Three ways to approach a problem, and all the combinations. I think that’s our strength, more than even our ability to get along. Now imagine what we could do with four perspectives. What problems could we solve?”
Sparkle turned to face me full, voice cutting under a lifting aria in Alce. “I’m not asking you to join us in the sun, because you are more at home in the shadows. But like a chiaroscuro painting, the shadow is just as important as the light.”
