Lost Little Wolf

Chapters

Chapter 2 - Orientation
Chapter 3 - Denial
Chapter 4 - Anger
Chapter 5 - Bargaining
Chapter 6 - Depression
Chapter 7 - Acceptance
Chapter 8 - Preparing
Chapter 9 - Developing
Chapter 10 - Advancing
Chapter 12 - Evolving
Chapter 13 - Becoming
Chapter 1 - Trauma
Chapter 11 - Perfecting

Chapter 2 - Orientation

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Chapter 3 - Denial

“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

I think that on some level I knew what I was doing was stupid, irresponsible, and counterproductive.

Being someone with 40-plus years of experience under my metaphorical belt, I made those first few weeks a little slice of parental hell for Chrysalis. I took every unsupervised moment to search and explore. Said unsupervised moments got to be fewer and farther between with each incident, a couple of times she even slept in the same bed. Honestly, that was going a little far, in my opinion. I mean, sure, one of those was when I had wandered into some fresh construction and nearly got trapped when the entrance to that section of the hive closed up behind me. And yes, the other time was when I’d stumbled onto one of the...er, “love harvesting” chambers and seen things that baby-bug eyes weren’t supposed to see. Honestly, I’ve seen worse...hell, the fact that I’ve got a daughter proves I’ve done the stuff they were doing. Of course, I couldn’t say I knew what all that was about and it was no big thing, thank you language barrier.

Once I’d gotten a good solid idea of the layout of the place, I began searching the hive for books. Apparently, there’s not much need for books in the hive, what few I did find were from ponies, or at least, I assume they were pony written, as I couldn’t read the language. It didn’t match the writings I’d seen on the walls and the few changeling artifacts that had writing on them.

Then there was my attempts to use magic. I’m sure “mom” was laughing with me. I’m sure that I was finding it just as hilarious as she was that I was grunting and straining like I was constipated and only little sparks came out of my horn. I’m absolutely sure that her being collapsed on her side, panting in laughter because I made a tiny little firecracker-like pop at the tip of my horn that left my face blackened and sooty was in no way a blow to my ego. She kept snuggling me and cooing in affirming tones while dropping loads of love onto me when I failed to produce anything, so that was nice, at least.

Next up, find a way out of the hive.

Why was I doing this? To get home.

See, I had figured that I had this new lease on life, exploding fuel trucks notwithstanding, and I was now a princess to boot. Sure, I was princess of a nation of spies, but if nothing else, I’d get me some sweet, sweet diplomatic immunity. Ignore the speed limit and park wherever I wanted? Who wouldn’t want that?

OK, I was really trying to get home to my daughter. For two years it was the realization that I had to be there for her that got me out of bed every day. She was my only reason to be awake, to pay my debts, pay my bills, to face my ex-wife...she was the reason I even kept living. Other people may have helped pull me back from the edge of suicide, but it was them reminding me of my daughter that kept me going.

Even now, right after I woke up every day, I would spend the first fifteen minutes or so with my eyes closed, recalling every feature I could of her face, the sound of her voice, the fairy-bell tinkling of her laugh...horse-bug or not, I was never going to let myself forget her.

Then, I would spend another 15 or so minutes focussing on my memories of my wife. The times we laughed, the times I held her when she was crying. Even some of the times we fought until 3:00 AM over really stupid crap. The first time we had sex (six months before the wedding), the first time we made love (the honeymoon), when she wanted to get experimental and when she wanted it simple. How she looked in her business casual clothes, how she looked in her church clothes, how she looked in a swimsuit, how she looked naked. Even with as much heartache she caused in the last two years, I still loved her dearly and never wanted to forget her, either.

So every day, I’d wake up with a new determination to see them again. Where there’s life, there’s hope, right?

Honestly, if I’d just woken up in Heaven’s Waiting Room after the accident and told I’d have to stay there until either my wife or daughter joined me, I wouldn’t have blinked. That conformed with everything I’d been taught since joining the Church with how the afterlife was supposed to work.

Waking up being re-born as a bug-horse-queen hatched from an egg in a kid’s cartoon show? Not so much. Consequently, everything I knew was in question, and with no way to communicate my plight to my new family, it was up to me and me alone to get back to the people I loved.

In the confines of my little room, I was hidden from the hive-mind, some aspect of the room’s construction acting as a faraday cage to the mental hive connection. This was mostly done as a protection for my own mind. Momma Chrysalis saw how agitated I got with the constant droning of the background whisper of the hive and so allowed me more time with my own thoughts than I think she was really comfortable with. I could tell from the many (many) times she took me to see the caretakers that she was growing increasingly concerned about my lack of native changeling abilities. While we were with the caretakers I got a chance to interact with the hatchlings, and I actually found that the most enjoyable, save the time spent with “mom.” Just like human babies, these cute little wriggling grubs were overflowing with loving and happy emotions. Even when one of them injured itself, it wasn’t long before the playful nature of infants overtook them and they were once again joined with the other hatchlings in whatever activity I couldn’t quite figure out. Sometimes I’d join them, allowing myself to be a kid again as we invented games on the spot, introduced rules, tossed those rules out, then changed games within minutes of the first.

Most nights these days Chrysalis would stay in my room, the entire hive-mind reduced just her and I. Apparently she was trying to acclimate me to the idea of thoughts beside my own being in my head, and I was grateful for the gentle and slow tempering process. Such was the case tonight, having fed me a hearty portion of love (I have no idea how I was ingesting it, just that I never seemed to need to actually eat, so I assumed my body was doing it as some sort of autonomic process), she had drifted off to sleep curled up around me. I could tell, because the gentle humming of her thoughts, which only occasionally were “loud” enough for my mind to interpret to something that I mentally recognized as English, were reduced to the telepathic equivalent of a snore.

Tiny little filly-sized legs, bug-like or not, aren’t built for manipulating an alicorn sized body. It took quite a bit of effort to extricate myself from “mom’s” loving embrace, but I managed it quickly enough. It helped that my as yet filly-like body was small enough to squeeze through the spaces I’d manage to wedge open.

As soon as I left the room, I felt the hive wash into my consciousness. I admit, I was getting used to it, and since “mom” was asleep, I thought I’d run a few experiments. I need a way out, I thought. I…’listened’ (for lack of a better word) to the susurration of the hive-mind. It took a moment, but soon I had an...impulse. Almost as though a smell was passing across my ears, if that makes any sense, I had a sudden sense of a direction I should travel, and it was guiding me forward and to the left.

I could work with this.

It took the better part of an hour (by my reckoning) to reach what the hive-mind reassured me was an exit. It looked to be just a blank wall. It was then that I remembered that the Changeling hive in the show had seemingly randomly opening and closing entrances. With a sigh, I sat down to watch a wall and mentally reviewed my plan.

Step one, orient myself. Pretty much any Brony has seen the studio released map of Equestria, and so everyone knew the Badlands were to the south, with Appleoosa to the North-West and Ponyville to the North-East. Basically, assuming the sun rose in the East and set in the West (assuming a lot about an alien planet where the star is controlled by an intelligent being on the planet’s surface, I know...I had to start somewhere, damn it!), get a fix on my orientation and travel North until I hit a train line, then follow that. If I got to Appleoosa, stow away on the train to Ponyville. If I got to Ponyville, head straight for Twilight’s castle and hand myself over. Risk? No thanks, I prefer role playing games to tabletop strategy. Essentially, find a way to communicate to Twilight, who was sure to have something in her library to help her magic up a translation spell, then explain my situation. Being the planet’s living expert on trans-universal portals and travel, surely she could concoct something to get me a gateway home. Heck, even if I was here before Tirek showed his ugly mug, then I’d still be on my way home, just with a longer timeline.

Just as I was stifling a yawn (it was past my bedtime, and I was a growing changeling) the portal in front of me lensed open. I hopped through it and started scrambling to the surface as fast as my little changeling legs could carry me.

When one’s plans are formed in the desperate throes of denial in the mourning process, one tends to go off half-cocked and not thinking things all the way through. After all, why wouldn’t Chrysalis maintain standard diurnal sleep cycles for her hive? It wasn’t like the hive wasn’t built like a termite mound where it towered above the surrounding landscape, making it just as much of a surface city as the rest of Equestria...oh, wait, it was!

Standing in the light of the full moon under a starlit sky, I felt all forms of idiot as I realized that even if the sun travels the same direction as Earth’s, I’d be waiting at least 10 hours, if not a full 12, before I could even see the sun.

Even worse, I looked up and saw the Mare in the Moon staring down to Equestria.

Forget a 10 hour wait, I was at least 6 years too early.

At some point I’d dropped to a sitting position, just staring up at the moon. I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, but before too long, I heard a much larger changeling come up behind me. Chrysalis settled down on her belly, her forelegs crossed at the pastern (or whatever the hell the equivalent of a wrist or ankle is on a changeling), just watching me for a time.

The night air started to cool to the point where winds were starting to pick up. Still gently, but as anyone who’s lived in a desert will tell you, that wouldn’t last. Chrysalis finally spoke, “Mofoblitz, lazap sislaf able reiltas nedril mizule sislaf lazap looking swoquix, foxclore bookbox?” I sighed again, folding my forelegs like her and leaning, our carapaces clacking together as my head hit her shoulder with a thump. I felt her wing touch the top of my head gently, a move similar to a pegasus wrapping their wing over a loved one or…

...or a parent trying to comfort their child.

I was doing a lot of sighing, lately. I had a feeling I would be doing so for quite a while yet. I did so again and said, “All right, mom. Let’s go to bed.”
As I stood, Chrysalis used her magic to lift me onto her back. I was too broken hearted to object, and besides…

...she was mom. I knew how much a parent wants to dote on their infant children.

I turned my head to look at the moon, letting it be the last thing I saw of the surface that night.

Chapter 4 - Anger

Author's Note

This chapter was hard to write. In combination with having to deal with emotions that I've honestly struggled to control all my life and resurfacing stuff from memories that I'm happy burying, then layered on top of that only very recently having to go through all this process for the divorce.

Chapter 4 - Anger

"At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Lord A. Tennyson once penned the poem with the oft quoted line, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

At this particular moment, all I wanted to do was break into the Starswirl the Bearded wing in Canterlot, steal anything related to time and universe-travelling magic, and build a time-space-universe travel machine and bite his smug Brittish face right the fuck off!!!

Completing the anger feedback loop was the continuing problems of not being able to read Equestrian, not being able to speak Changeling, let alone Common Equestrian, being only a few weeks old by this world’s standards, and a general lack of knowledge of the workings of magic in general and time magic in specific. So I was right back to where I started.

The first 20 years of my human life were filled with abuse, loss, upheaval, and minor tragedy. Two divorces, a literally evil stepmother, bureaucratic cock-ups with Child Protective Services that left me feeling that I’d have been better off with my abuser, an epidemic of lies all around to the point where truth was a foreign concept, and nearly losing my mom, dad, and sister during that time span. I had fuel for the fires of rage to last until the Last Days.

The next decade or so was spent in that fire, wanting the pain to stop but not knowing how. Once I got therapy for it my head-space improved drastically, which naturally was the perfect time for life to kick my teeth in through the form of divorce.

In the space of a single year I experienced enough betrayal to make the ghost of Julius Caesar nod in appreciation. Instead of knives, it was sworn testimonies. Instead of death on the Senate floor, it was a divorce decree in the mail.

And through it all, from my earliest memory to my last moment alive as a human, was the nagging, disturbing feeling of being born in the wrong body and wanting desperately to be able to do something about it. Puberty was a special form of Hell. On the one hand it meant I was growing up, and soon I’d be able to make my own decisions rather than have the committee of my parents, step-parent, the courts, and whatever state-appointed-rep-of-the-week wanted to choose for me this week. On the other hand, instead of swelling breasts and thighs and getting to talk about make-up and boys and what other girls were wearing, I watched in somewhat muted horror as hair sprouted in places I didn’t want it to and had to fake interest in “guy” things just to survive high school.

And once my “male” identity had been established by the time I was in college, I met the woman who’d steal my heart and give me a daughter. By this point, I knew I was thoroughly committed, and I was between a rock and a hard place: Embrace my femininity and lose my wife and possibly my daughter, or remain terminally miserable pretending to be someone I really wasn’t to keep the relationship going.

Once the divorce was complete, I started making plans to transition, but there was always that niggling fear that once I started down that path, I’d lose any chance of reconciliation with my ex-wife. Those fears kept the transition in the “planning” stage, and any move out of that stage got delayed again and again.

And now, I was dead. Sure, I was female, but my worst fears were manifest; I’d never see my wife and daughter again.

Can someone say, “Faustian bargain?”

No, not Lauren Faust.

Read a book!

The point being that I had so much ammunition for anger that tantrums were inevitable. Everyone knows what tantrums in toddlers looks like, complete with the flailing of limbs, the screeching howls, and the tears and snot on the faces. The challenge for Chrysalis was that she was expecting a toddler. Not a 40-year old.

40-year olds don’t flail about uncontrollably, though there may be screaming, it will not be wild and banshee-like. More likely there will be gritting of teeth, carried grudges, and physical symptoms as the mind and body desperately try to find an outlet for the bottled anger.

In my human life I carried my anger and tension in my back, and that seemed to continue into this changeling life. After a couple of weeks of gritting my teeth so hard I got cramps in my jaw muscles (NOT fun when you have a carapace), I woke up one day to find my right wing-pair jutting out at an odd angle and a knot in my back the size of a bowling ball (or at least it felt that big)

The trips to the caretakers only increased. I did find out they were absolute master-crafts-lings at massage, even through carapace. Momma Chrysalis was starting to notice when something was pissing me off; she just watched for my wings. When the right one started to lift off my back, it was time for a trip down to the caretakers. While one was working out the tension in my back, Chrysalis would be talking with the another. At first, she would be quietly, though urgently begging for information. I recognized the tone and the emotions that come from a parent who’s concerned for their child, knows something is wrong, but is clueless as to what to do about it. After a couple of weeks of ever increasing trips to the caretakers, both in frequency and duration, the single caretaker and calm tones grew to a small counsel and shouted, harsh words.

That particular scenario came to a head, as it inevitably would. My back was hurting so badly I could barely walk, my right foreleg curled up against my barrel and wing canted out. Chrysalis was stomping in circles around a cluster of caretakers, practically shaking the stalactites in the room loose with her angry shouting as the one working on my back was trembling so badly that she was barely doing anything for me.

I sighed, waved the poor caretaker away so I could move freely, and hopped off the heated stone that served as a clinical bed. I limped over to “mom,” by the time I reached her the whole room had stopped and was watching me. I stopped in front of her, established eye contact and waited. She looked down on me curiously, then tentatively picked me up. I waited until she brought me eye level, then reached out with a hoof…

...and smacked her on the snout.

The caretakers gasped in shock, one fainting dead away. Chrysalis let out a vocalization that I took to be the ‘ling equivalent of “Ow!” The caretakers needn’t have worried, the emotions from “mom” were closer to surprise than anything else, completely shutting off the over-bleed of anger she had just a moment ago.

“Look, mom,” I said, fully aware I may as well have been speaking Pig Latin in Farsi with a Urdu dialect, “It’s not their fault, it’s not yours. They are the only ones able to make my back not feel like a thousand tiny needles are stabbing me, and you’re making it so they can’t do that. Now stop taking it out on them.” With that, I squirmed out of her grasp and fell to the floor, only barely managing the cat-like turn that landed me on my feet.

Another of the caretakers fainted dead away at that.

I limped my way back to the heated stone bed, scrambled my way back up, and waved at the caretaker who’d been working on my back to return to her work.

The caretaker looked nervously between me and the Queen a couple of times before Chrysalis barked out a single laugh. Shaking her head and chuckling, she simply left the infirmary.

-~<^>~-

I knew it was only going to get worse, and it did. My back muscles cramping up on me peaked out at the “walk with a limp” stage, and only ever got that severe every so often. The anger that fueled the cramping, though. was consistently bubbling just under the surface. After all, even the best lived life will result in regrets, and I’d lives far from the best life. I had so many regrets, and being stuck on the other side of the deadline to address those regrets only served to make them all the more raw. My inability to communicate any of them to anyone compounded things.

There’s no feeling quite as dark as feeling alone.

As far as communication went, I was starting to pick up some of the spoken language. Just basic concepts, and if I had been in a better frame of mind, I might have felt rather proud of myself for picking up language nearly 60% faster than the average human child. Each new word and concept I learned in the changeling tongue only drove home how far I had to go, rubbing even more salt in that particular wound.

As with any pressurized system where the pressure only increases, I suppose the eruption was inevitable.

I was limping my way to the caretakers, ahead of Chrysalis by at least a few dozen feet (or should I say “hooves?” Note to self: Find out what the standard for measurement is) and was in the nursery section of the hive when I tripped. I suppose I simply wasn’t watching where I was going, but whatever the reason a simple trip was apparently enough to blow the cap I’d kept on my anger. I whipped around, doing a 180 so fast I’m sure that wherever she was Rainbow Dash was jealous and didn’t know why, only to come face to face with a grub.

I’d tripped on a larval changeling. I knew the look on my face was one of absolute rage, because the poor thing looked terrified.

Back when my wife and I were still together, when our daughter was large enough to be wiggly but small enough she wasn’t quite a toddler, we were getting her ready to go to the only professional photoshoot that was ever done of the three of us together. At different times before and after we’d have our photos done by a pro, but none of them ever would include all of us again. My wife and I were holding our daughter, I was holding her back and legs and my wife was adjusting her dress and supporting her head, when Freya just...juked. All of a sudden, she heaved her hips so hard it was like she leapt out of our hands. It was nobody’s fault, and given that we both had hands on our daughter, we never did figure out why it was even able to happen.

There’s moments in a parent’s life when they are absolutely powerless when something bad happens to their children. I hope that you never have to experience the horrible, meaty smacking sound followed by the dull thud of an infant child bouncing off a coffee table and onto a hardwood floor. In that moment I think both my wife and I were positive we’d just killed our only child. The impact was so great it stunned Freya for a few seconds, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to hear a child crying at the top of their lungs in pain. It meant she was alive. The relief was bitter-sweet, of course. Our daughter just experienced a pretty nasty fall. I still remember the exact look on Freya’s face when we were looking her over, trying to find any hint of lasting injury. I was checking my daughter’s eyes for possible concussion while my wife was on the phone with a nurse friend of hers to find out what we should do next. The look of pure terror, seeing her father not as a protector and shield but as a source of this extreme level of pain she’d never before received will be forever burned into my mind.

That’s what I saw on that larval changeling’s face in that moment.

I ran. I almost wasn’t paying attention to where I was running to, just that I was attempting to get away from contact with anyone. Once again, the hivemind came through, and before long I found myself in the deepest, darkest part of the hive. Even to my changeling eyes it was dark, almost oppressively so. With little heat to create even infrared light, the tunnel I was in was as dark and lonely as any place I’d encountered since being hatched. Even the hivemind was significantly muted this far down, the layers of rock and soil between me and the rest of the hive acting as a natural insulator.

Heaving, but not nearly out of breath, I skidded to a stop and glared around. Only the occasional dig marking marred the walls, indicating this was a discovered tunnel, not dug. Meaning I wasn’t going to be encountering anyone else.

Good.

I pulled in a deep breath, and screamed. This wasn’t the kind of shouting you do when you’re hollering across a room at someone, you don’t do this yelling at a sports game when your favorite team is scoring points, “high-volume debates” have nothing on this.

Women giving birth are in the same class as this scream, as are soldiers about to die. Pure, white hot rage blasted out of my throat in waves of sound. That first scream even scared me a bit, I had almost forgotten that I was in a changeling body, turns out the shifted, buzzing sound that is produced when speaking words is an artifact of a truly frightening set of vocal chords. There were what sounded like no less than three distinct tones coming out of me, each at three different pitches. The lowest almost sounded like my human male voice prior to my death, the highest slammed into the upper ranges of what living creatures could hear, and the middle one was what I’d become accustomed to hearing when I spoke since hatching.

Were I in a more lucid state of mind, I might have been fascinated by the triple-voice and started experimenting. At that moment, however, it was yet another reminder of my situation, and it merely prompted another scream. I howled for so long I started seeing stars from not taking in enough oxygen.

Panting and sobbing, tears of frustration running down my muzzle, I half-collapsed to the cave floor. I heard a set of hoofsteps approaching, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to care who it was…

...right up to the moment they put their hoof gently on my shoulder. Growling, I spun around and started, well, slapping the offending hoof. It wasn’t dignified, it wasn’t controlled or measured or anything resembling anything other than purely emotional flailing.

Dimly I was aware that the victim of my ineffectual slapping was Chrysalis, and I also recognized in a somewhat detached way that she had a sad, patient expression on her face and that the emotions she was feeding me were entirely about love and comfort.

The part of me that was slapping at her didn’t care about that, and was firmly in control at that moment, “Stop it!” I yowled at her, “Stop trying to be my mom! Stop trying to comfort me, nobody can…” a strangled sob interrupted my rant, “NOBODY can help me! I’m stuck, I’ll never see my wife and daughter ever again! Even when she was being a total bitch to me I at least knew I’d see her, have her in my life in some capacity! Now I won’t, and I don’t know WHY!” I clutched her hoof, my energy running low after the high emotions I’d been letting loose.

“Crystal…” said, Chrysalis. I didn’t notice it at the time.

“...and my daughter...God, I miss my daughter so much. I know what kind of special hell you’re going through because I know what it feels like to have a daughter and not be able to help her!”

“Crystal Amber…” soothed Chrysalis again. Again, I pretty much missed what she was saying.

“And the worst part is I know things! I know things that are so good and valuable and helpful, and it’s all TRAPPED IN MY HEAD because I can’t speak Changeling…”

Before I could continue, ‘mom’ swept me up so I was being held directly in front of her face. She paused only long enough to be sure she had my undivided attention, “Chrystal Amber, you are speaking our language!” Her voice was stern, but she had that tiny upturned corner of the mouth that parents get when they’re endlessly amused by the behavior of their children, even if said child is in the midst of what is clearly a challenging event.

My only response was to blink at her. I simply stared at her while my brain caught up to the rampant emotions that had finally gotten some release. Once it had, I said, “Oh...how…?”

Chrysalis chuckled and settled me into a cradling hold, “I was starting to wonder when you’d allow the hive mind in fully. Once you did, you receive full access to every language we as a race have ever encountered.” she ‘booped’ my nose with a chuckle, “But it doesn’t work with written words, don’t think I didn’t catch you trying to read.”

I could feel the tears drying on my muzzle, I wiped them off as I processed her words, “Wait, so I know Changeling...does that mean you know English?”

She appeared to ponder my words for a moment, then responded in English, “Indeed, though only what you were able to bring into the hive mind.”

Speaking of the hive mind, I noticed that where before it was the jumbled noise like a million radios all blaring a different station at once, now it was like a computer network. Every node was busy and chattering away, but only in specific, highly organized paths that I had full Admin access to.

A few deep shuddering breaths later, and I was starting to feel very fatigued. “So I guess you have some questions…?”

“Quite a few, but they can wait. I think you need a nap after that, you are a growing queen, after all.” She smiled down at me as she moved me to her back. She started trotting back to the hive proper.

“Any chance we could stop by for another massage real quick? My back still hurts.”

She chuckled, “Of course, my princess. I had some business with the caretakers as well.”

I nodded, then asked, “So, you named me Crystal Amber?”

She cast an amused glance over her shoulder, “Mm-hmm,” she replied with a nod.

We trotted in silence for a bit, only interrupted when I said, “I like it.”

Chapter 5 - Bargaining

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

Chapter 6 - Depression

Author's Note

I absolutely promise that this will be the darkest, most depressing chapter of this story.

Chapter 6 - Depression

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

It came on as it must, with the speed and inevitability of a glacier.

I stopped laughing at things. I knew, intellectually, that they were funny and that I found them funny, I just couldn’t muster the humor in my soul.

Getting out of bed seemed pointless, and it eventually got to the point where Chrysalis would use her magic to lift me out of bed and put me on her back before going about her day. When she did so, I was like a cat who simply couldn’t be bothered to fight being picked up for the nth time that day.

Of course, every time she did so it reminded me of the two cats I’d left in my apartment when I died, and I had no way of knowing if they had been taken care of or not, which would be particularly tragic because Freya had bonded with both of them. JoLene’s family were highly unlikely to let her take them in, and since JoLene never earned enough money to rent an apartment, let alone support herself and Freya and a pair of pets they were likely to be sent to shelters.

Ronnie was a shelter rescue twice over, I adopted her when she had been returned to the shelter for unknown reason. She had a crumpled ear, had likely been born that way, and in spite of her perpetually chill attitude nobody wanted her until I came along. I was sincerely worried that she’d be put to sleep because nobody would adopt her for a third time. Murphy was a street rescue, but her chronic health problems meant that she was likely to be put to sleep before even having the chance to be adopted, simply because it would cost too much to get her healthy enough to adopt.

I slowly lost interest in talking about the hive. A part of me was wondering just what the point was. Chrysalis was there and not planning on leaving or dying anytime soon. She was as old as (if not older than) Celestia, so it wasn’t like old age was a factor. I didn’t see the point in learning what was going on around me, especially if I could just send a query to the hive mind and get enough of a response to wing it from there.

Even in dreams it was noticeable. They went from being active and vibrant to being dull, listless extensions of routines. I repeated my daily commutes numerous times. Road trips where mile after unending mile of nothing but ranch, farmland, and desert went by and were replayed over and over. I counted inventory in a warehouse of blank boxes that I never opened and then recounted them. I fixed the same computer again and again and again, and it was always the same damn problem.

“Chrys,” said a concerned Nightmare Moon after interrupting one of these dreams, “I’m getting worried about you.”

The clipboard I’d been holding in my human hands clattered to the floor as Nightmare’s presence caused my changeling body to reassert itself. I sighed and sort of sagged against her, “I know, and I’m grateful, really. Chrysalis is worried, too.”

Almost absently she draped a feathery wing over me, “We can play another game of, what did you call it? Doom? Would that help?”

I did smile at that. One of the nice aspects of being friends with a being that could invade and control your dreams was the ability to access pretty much any memory and play around in it. Considering how much of my later teenage and early twenty-something years I spent playing both the original Doom and it’s sequel, all we had to do is have Nightmare pull up the level maps and monsters from the archives of my subconscious and we could have all-night co-ops and deathmatches the likes of which most gamer geeks could (literally) only dream about.

Nightmare liked it because it was rather like the days of tackling tyrants and slaying monsters before her banishment. Honestly, I think she just liked the guns. Modern Equestria may have cannons, but to the best of my knowledge they hadn’t even had those in antiquity, so she spent quite a bit of time playing with the firearms. And giggling. I kid you not, she would pull the trigger, watch an imp or a zombie take damage, and start giggling. The shotgun really set her off, it had quickly become her favorite weapon when we played. She wasn’t too partial to the double-barrel side by side shotgun, she felt the rate of fire was too slow, so when we decided to shotgun-only games, she got the pump-action and I got the side by side. I will say that breach-loading is MUCH faster and easier when you’ve got magic to assist.

The less said about when she got the chaingun the better, other than if you remember the maniacal laughter from the two-part series opener of MLP, then you have a small inkling of how she behaved when she got her hooves on it.

Amusingly, the energy weapons she was less enamored with. I think it was because they were so similar to what she could already do with her horn, massive destructive effects of the BFG-9000 notwithstanding.

I sighed, “No, but thanks for not calling it, ‘Death by a thousand thunderclaps’ this time.”

She pouted, intentionally trying to be cute, “I only did that the one time…”

I snorted in something that was almost a laugh before slipping back into silence. I looked at the boxes I had been counting and sighed again, leaning my forehead against one of the shelves. “I wish I could tell you to spend your time with some...pony else, somepony who will be better company, but that would not only be incredibly crass and insensitive to you, it would also be the worst thing in the world for me right now.”

For the rest of the dream we simply sat in a poorly lit warehouse, her wing over me and tears not quite reaching my eyes.

-~<^>~-

Recognizing that I had to keep myself moving (a lifetime of clinical depression does wonders for learning coping mechanisms), I took to taking walks around the hive. Many times I did this without the aid of the hivemind unless I got lost or stuck somewhere. I wanted to get an intuitive feel of the hive without having to rely on input from the other changelings unless necessary.

Sometimes a drone would accompany me, I think it was just Chrysalis keeping an eye on me when she was particularly worried, but they generally stayed quiet and let me do my thing.

Sometimes I’d make the journey to what in the hive qualified as a library. I would find a book and start...attempting to read it. It was slow progress, but progress it was as I started discerning what constituted a letter, and then a word in the looping scrawl that was Equestrian writing. Even the press-printed books used that loopy script, even if it was more blocky than the hoof- or horn-written forms.

I had started discerning enough to recognize when a book was targeted at young readers (which I was) and when it was a book that had lots of pictures by nature of the book. An anthology of flora and fauna whose target was an audience of university professionals, for example, was not really good when one was attempting to figure out which squiggly line was the equivalent of the letter A.

They could really use a copy of Pete the Cat. I wasn’t sure if this was indicative of the state of the Equestrian print publishing industry or just what Momma Chrysalis thought important enough to bring back to the hive, but these books weren’t even Golden Book level. The “art” was pathetic, and the lettering seemed to imply some connection to the picture, but when I would grab the occasional literate drone to read it to me, the line of text had no relation to the rest of the page. This would frustrate me enough to grab for a pen to start working on my own book to show these wankers how it was done, only to remember that my magic wasn’t up to it yet and I hadn’t figured out how to even hold a pen with hooves, let alone do anything resembling art or writing a whole book. Often, this would be the most emotion I would feel in a day, and within minutes of stomping out of the library in frustration, I’d be back to dragging my hooves.

At least the massive growth spurt I was experiencing wasn’t requiring a new wardrobe every few days, given that we didn’t wear clothing. When I hatched I was smaller than an adolescent housecat. I didn’t have one to compare sizes to, but based on how I compared to Chrysalis, I’d wager that a toy chijuajua could have taken me in a fight. Now I was more in line with a Maine Coon cat. If my growth was going to top out to be around Chrysalis’ size, I’d probably be around six feet tall once I was a fully grown queen.

Speaking of growth, some of the larvae that I used to play with were approaching their first molting. They were big enough to be a challenge once they got underhoof if they ventured into the other areas of the hive besides the nurseries. I did my best to play with them, but most of the time I was so emotionally numb it was clearly just me going through the motions.

During the few months after my wife left, thanks to what was legally required by the state of Arizona, I was given time with my daughter. This was before the family courts had done an actual investigation into my wife’s claims that I was abusing her and our daughter, so it would still be a few months before an officer of the court declared on the record that the abuse claims were bullshit. Being the father, I had no illusions on where I stood. If the courts had found any cause to entertain the abuse claims during the investigation I’d have lost access to Freya, possibly for over a decade. During these times I was permitted to be with my daughter, I was in so much emotional pain, coupled with the fear that this might be the last time I might see her until she turned 18, I was pretty much in near catastrophic depression the entire time. It was a very good thing these visits were to the Children’s Museum, because if we had been in any other situation where there wasn’t so much to distract her, Freya would probably have picked up on my mood.

So it was with the larvae, they all remembered how I’d been and could tell that I just wasn’t as engaged as I used to be. Bless their little hearts, they tried to cheer me up, but it simply wasn’t enough to overcome the massive, crushing weight on my soul.

Soon enough, the caretakers came to collect the larvae for a naptime, and I was left with my thoughts again.

-~<^>~-

After I first told Chrysalis about my nightly “friend time” with Nightmare Moon, she removed me from my protected room and kept me...jacked in (if you will) to the hivemind at all times. It took quite a bit of persuasion (and two nights where I couldn’t get any sleep thanks to the hivemind keeping me awake) to get her to let me have my room back. The night she let me back into my room she insisted on sleeping in the bed with me, the two of us forming a minimal hive mind as I finally slipped off to dreamland.

Nightmare was there waiting for me. “Where have you been!?” she tackled me to the ground and hugged me close, “As depressed as you’ve been when you didn’t show up I was worried…”

She was interrupted by a clearing throat. Chrysalis stood over us, glaring down at Nightmare Moon. The Mistress of the Night scrambled back to her hooves, suspiciously studying this unexpected development. “You...aren’t part of Chrystal’s dream.”

“And you,” replied ‘mom,’ “Are not welcome in my hivemind. I told you this last time you tried to invade my changeling’s minds.”

“Mom,” I snapped in warning, “It’s OK. If I hadn’t wanted her here I’d have told you when she first showed up.”

Chrysalis glared at me, “Yes, and we’ll be discussing what is and is not appropriate for you to allow into the hivemind when you’re properly rested. Something I’m here to ensure happens, by the by.”

I rolled my eyes, “I was wondering why you were suddenly OK with me sleeping in my own room again.”

“She is not some child for you to coddle!” snapped Nightmare at Chrysalis, “She is an adult with a greater depth and breadth of experience than most of even the most seasoned of Our little ponies even in the height of Discord’s reign!”

“Moony, cool it down! And don’t be hyperbolic.” I snapped, “Mom, she’s a friend, and one who’s been trying to help me.”

They glared at each other, “How,” asked Chrysalis, “Has attempting to gain a foothold into the hivemind been helping you?”

I groaned, “Oh, for the love of…”

I was interrupted by Nightmare this time, “What would We gain from your hive mind? The best way to mix bug spit with mud to make building material?”

Ugh, if this got any more salty I’d be able to cure fish. I transformed into my Princess Columbia persona, “Enough!” Nightmare was once again startled by how much like Celestia I looked and Chrysalis was taken aback by her daughter taking the guise of one of the alicorn princesses, “This is my head! Last I checked, I got to decide the rules in here.”

Apparently, the fighting was feeding my subconscious enough material that a night terror was starting to form and my ‘disguise’ to drop. Of course, with the hivemind connection and Nightmare’s influence, it was a bit broken. The zoo enclosure that tried to wrap around me was missing parts of the walls and ceiling, and of the people on the other side of the glass, the only two who weren’t merely vague shadows were my ex-wife and daughter. They were still as statues, the abortive nature of the dream keeping it locked, like a frozen holodeck.

“...what is this?” asked Chrysalis, glancing around the fragmentary room and focusing on the two figures through the glass.

Nightmare wrapped a wing around me, helping me to deal with the feelings of despair and hopelessness that always accompanied the night terrors. “This is one of her nightmares, a place the darkest parts of her mind created to taunt her.” She used the other wing to point to the figures of JoLene and Freya, “Those are the people she loved most in her previous life, and now they are forever beyond her reach.”

Chrysalis’ searching gaze flickered from me to the figures in the window and back. She walked up to and through the barriers, Nightmare sensing what the Queen was wanting to do lit her horn with her magic and locked the two figures in place while the rest of the night terror dispersed like fog. She carefully studied the dream people, her gaze lingering for some time on their faces. “When you described humans to me, my daughter, I admit I didn’t quite visualize this.” I once again had tears that didn’t quite form enough to leave my eyes, humming quietly in agreement as she examined them. “The smaller one, I assume this is the daughter you’ve spoke of?”

After receiving my confirming nod, she returned to her examinations. I hadn’t thought at the time that it was anything unusual, I was just glad they’d stopped fighting. Nightmare hugged me close again.

“Don’t think your closeness to my daughter has slipped my mind,” said Chrysalis without looking up from her studying, “I would ask your intentions toward her.”

Nightmare snorted in amusement, “She is the first friend I have had in nearly one-thousand years. She knows the pain of banishment and being taunted by that which you desperately want but cannot have. She is a sister-in-suffering. If, when she’s old enough,” this last part was directed at me, Nightmare giving me a bit of a good-natured stink-eye as she said it. I rolled my eyes, “If she chooses then to pursue something more with me, then that is up to her.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I said, “I know as a changeling I’m less than a year old, but I lived until I was forty as a human.”

At this Chrysalis and Nightmare shared an amused glance. Mom returned to her examination as Moon chose to tease me a bit, “Thou wouds’t need another hundred or so years before being considered anything like an equal in age, child.”

I stuck my tongue out at her.

-~<^>~-

A few days later, the depression had caught up to me fully. I was in my room, the lights reduced as much as they could be without snuffing their magic entirely, slumped in the bed in nearly the same position as when I’d awoken. I had stirred enough to use the bathroom, my liquid intake resulting in the attendant biological processes to get rid of the waste and excess. After that, I returned to my bed.

It wasn’t that I was refusing to stir, it was simply that I couldn’t seem to figure out why I should. As much as Nightmare wanted to help, she was only delaying the inevitable. My dreams had gotten more and more gray, to the point where Nightmare Moon’s black coat was the most vivid color in the entire dreamscape, save only her purple cutiemark.

I started humming intermittently, a tune teasing at my memory. For some reason it was stuck in my head but not enough for me to identify it. As I would hum, a piece or two would emerge, connected to emotions and jumbled scenes from memory. After a few bars where I’d have to skip sections I’d get frustrated, give up, and silence would resume, and then the tune would get stuck in my head again, and I’d start humming again, and the cycle would repeat.

At some point, Chrysalis entered the room. She didn’t try to get me out of bed or cajole me into action. She simply climbed up onto the bed next to me and stroked my hair, listening to me trying to assemble a half-remembered song.

During one of these refrains, a lick of the lyrics floated into my consciousness along with the smell of dust and cardboard, and it flooded back into my memory. I had heard it first while I was doing an inventory job I’d landed during the divorce. The courts had just ruled that I would have full parental rights and responsibilities it was pretty much all over except for the negotiation of who’s house Freya would live with and when. The heartbreak of realizing that I was divorced in all but the signatures on the paper had been haunting me for days until the song The Greatest Bastard randomly came up on Pandora. I openly wept at work, having to take a break just to process the grief.

Unnoticed by me, my horn lit up and started playing the plucking of a guitar accompanied by the gentle swelling of a string section. I didn’t realize the instruments were audible, as I was only hearing the sounds of the music from memory.

As I started singing the words, some part of me knew that Chrysalis was hearing everything, but the words were pouring out of me in a flood, and as though they were connected with chains, the hurt and anguish that had been eating my soul was being pulled to the surface.

The song was a ballad of sorrow, the tears of a lover who’s lost their greatest love. It recounted the joys and sorrows of the shared journey they had. The sublime happiness of togetherness and growth. It held the tender notes of apology and understanding that what one person brought to the relationship wasn’t necessarily what the other wanted. It was the pain of realizing mistakes were made and could never be undone, and the understanding that blame was either shared or could not be assigned to anyone. It was an acknowledgement that the love hasn’t ended, but the relationship has. Poured out into the melencholy tune, the minor key, and the octave shifts of the voice was the heartache of knowing of the missed opportunities and unfinished business that could never be completed.

As the final sung notes escaped me, notes of just pure sound without words, tears were flowing down my cheeks freely. In my mind’s eye I saw my wife and daughter as they would be in a perfect world; in perfect health, smiling, and all their cares attended to. I saw them on the beach in San Diego, one with the cliffs of La Jolla reaching out into the surf as the sun set behind them. I saw them at my sister’s wedding in Vail, Freya falling in love with a little stuffed bear in the vacation cabin we were staying in for the event. I saw the Halloween the year before my death when the bitterness of the divorce was finally fading and JoLene and I escorted Freya around the church Trunk or Treat to fill her bag, dressed in a kid’s sized Darth Vader outfit while JoLene was wearing all blue with a novelty palm-sized TARDIS strapped to her head.

As my horn’s magic faded and the last, trailing notes of guitar strings faded into the air, I slipped off to sleep, Chrysalis curled around me comfortingly.

-~<^>~-

I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing both physical and emotional trauma that required letting the malady run it’s course, and in all cases it’s simply a matter of letting the body and mind do the necessary healing. If you’ve ever had a burn blister, you know such a thing is about as bad as a blister can get. Horribly traumatized flesh underneath a puss filled sack of your own skin, and that’s only if the burn doesn’t just blast the skin off.

Getting second to third degree burns from flaming vegetable oil is a memorable experience at any age, let alone when you’re eight. Remember kids, never let your cooking oil exceed its smoke point, let alone its flash point!

Once the blister bursts, it needs to be drained completely, and ideally washed and the wound sterilized as best as possible. After that, you can bandage it, especially if you lost the skin in the process, but it’s best to simply let it be and heal on it’s own.

Such was the case with my depression. The worst of it was finally over, and I was doing my best to return to normal activity, but the whole hive had been warned to treat me gently for a while.

A few days after my first unintentional successful use of magic (a fact that I blushed at when Chrysalis explained what she’d witnessed when I woke up later) I was on mom’s back as she went through the hive, attending her various queenly tasks. I was still a bit worn out, but I was aware enough to notice when we deviated from her usual route. “Huh? Mom, where’re we going?”

She turned and smiled at me, “I have a surprise for you, daughter. One I hope you’ll appreciate.”

A few moments later, we entered a compartment I’d never visited before. It had all the hallmarks of a master artist’s studio; paints, frames, tools, a spinning wheel for clay, unworked blocks of stone for sculpting.

A changeling of average build and dust flecked around his shoulders turned to greet us, wiping his hooves with a towel. He stepped away from the sink he apparently just finished washing in and bowed, “Your highness, your timing is perfect. I just finished the polish.”

“Excellent, Clavus. Please, show your princess what you’ve made for her.”

The changeling artist, Clavus (apparently), leapt to his hooves and trotted over to one of the large work benches. It was fairly low to the floor, and whatever was on it was covered by a tarp. Like artists pretty much anywhere, Clavus wanted to turn his presentation into a minor performance. I smiled at him, which he took as his queue to continue, and whipped the tarp off his work.

My breath caught in my chest. I didn’t realize I wasn’t breathing until spots started floating in my vision. Gasping, I turned to Chrysalis. “When I saw them in your dream, I knew what I could do to help. Or rather, what my artists could do. Clavus is the best in the hive at the moment, and I think he did a remarkable likeness, don’t you?”

Mom helped me down so I could approach the two sculptures, each carved from a single block of white and pink veined marble. For the first time since a truck blew up next to me I was looking at my ex-wife and daughter’s faces in the waking world. Not trusting my voice, I stumbled forward and wrapped my forelegs around the busts, fresh tears painting my face and dripping down on the marble. This time the tears didn’t feel harsh, they didn’t have the abrasive, almost poisonous quality of the tears of sorrow like I’d cried the few days prior. These felt like a mountain spring, and I was able to feel something I hadn’t in awhile; genuine hope.

I felt the happiness rolling off my mother and the giddy feeling of success from the artist and heard Chrysalis whisper to Clavus, “I think she likes them.”

Chapter 7 - Acceptance

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

Chapter 8 - Preparing

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

Anne Lamott

Time passed.

There’s really not much to say about the two years between my first molt and my second. I attended classes, improved my skills with the quill and started writing in Equestrian somewhat fluently. I used this as an opportunity to start a correspondence course-style education with one of the Canterlot schools. Sure, my other changeling classmates may not have had access to that kind of thing, but being princess had its privileges.

Along with the correspondence classes, I also subscribed to a few science and magic journals. Artificer Weekly became one of my favorites fairly quickly. Watching the Equestrian scientists in the early stages of what was essentially computer development was quite fascinating and entertaining. The hive already had a quite few subscriptions available to more “pop culture” type magazines and journals. Pony Magazine, for example, was quite obviously Equestria’s version of People, and just as shallow.

There were a surprisingly large number of tabloids that came in every week, often treated with an equal weight as the more serious news publications. When I asked about this, it turned out that Equestria really did have a top-secret anti-monster agency called S.M.I.L.E., and the changelings were in their top-10 threat list. Like the Men in Black, S.M.I.L.E. used the tabloids to keep an eye on the monster population of the country and beyond, and apparently the agency had part-ownership in at least half of them. The hive subscribed to all the tabloids from Canterlot, Manehattan, and Las Pegasus so they could keep up with the same intelligence the S.M.I.L.E. agents had.

To my surprise, we even got a few overseas publications.

The Morning Sun from Neighpon was nice to read, as it included some wonderfully done representations of wood-block printing. I was watching this closely, for if Neighpon's development was going to progress anything like Japan's, this particular publication art form was going to grow into manga in around a decade or so. I was eagerly looking forward to what the Neighponese ponies and kirin would turn out for titles I was already familiar with, knowing that at least two of my favorites, Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon, would be getting published within the next 15-20 years.

The South Griphon Newspaper was incredibly interesting, as unlike Earth's Germany, Griphonia had split into three nations before a major world-wide conflict nearly 60 years prior. The colony on the Equestrian continent, who's capital was Griphonstone, would fall into economic ruin. Without a charismatic and xenophobic leader, as well as the watchful eye of Princess Celestia (and, apparently, no small amount of work by some crafty changeling spies... I love having access to the un-redacted files) Griphonstone never developed the equivalent of the NAZI party, and so remained a cast-off remnant of history. The Sunset Lands (Equus' version of Europe) had two Griphon dominant nations, Prance and Germaneigh. Rather, that's what the Equestrians called the two nations. In their native tongues they were called Gaule and Teuton, with Griphonstone being a colony of Teuton.

The parallel history was just damn fascinating.

The mailroom of the hive was receiving a shipment from Zebrica, which was a fairly large continent, and so we had to pick and choose the publications carefully. By this point Setae and Timpani knew to expect me when a new shipment was coming in, even going so far as sending a runner to get me when I lost track of time in language class. The three of us were sorting the shipment, sifting the publications by language, when I noticed there was an odd number. Normally, we got at least two copies of each individual publication, one in Equestrian and one in the native language of the country of origin. As I was separating the piles, however, I noticed one newspaper, a small, thin thing that was almost just a pamphlet, was out on its own. The typeset looked to be (to my untrained eye) an amalgamation of Arabic and Greek.

"Hey, Setae," I interrupted the drone as he worked, "What's this one? I can't read this language."

Setae looked over my shoulder, "Ah!" he said with a smile, "That's The City from the nation of Eagle's Rock, which ironically enough isn't a nation ruled by eagles." At my cocked eyebrow he explained, "The natives there believe that all wisdom flows from the mighty eagles that make their aeries on the coast. We don't get much news from there, usually just once a year during the annual migration from the capital to the coast and back."

I see," I said, flipping through the thin periodical, "So are they ponies? Or would that be horses in that area of the world?"

Timpani spoke up, not looking up from the crate she was unpacking, "Neither, actually. They're wildebeests."

I processed that for a moment, and then snorted a giggle. This earned me a confused look from Setae and the full attention of Timpani. At their befuddled looks, I held up the small newspaper, "So would you say," I paused briefly to milk the silence, "That this is all the gnus fit to print?"

That earned me a pair of groans and a rolled up newspaper to the head.

_-/^-_

I was still small enough that Chrysalis could carry me on her back as she went about her queenly duties in the hive. This was nice, as between flight practice working my body and all my other classes working my mind, by the end of my classes every day I was wiped out. Of course, she still wanted me learning about the hive, something that I had taken a scholars interest in of late, and thus the carrying was still faster and easier than her having to spend extra time waiting for me to try to keep up.

We were inspecting some of the larger projects that had been taken up by the hive. One such was a complete assembly of a full locomotive within the secure confines of the hive. A larger cavern had been set aside, and piece by meticulous piece had been brought in, often one item at a time.

“OK,” I interrupted, “Help me out here.” Chrysalis’ gaze was curious; I rarely spoke up during these kinds of inspections, so she usually let me have the metaphorical spotlight when I did cut in. The supervisor for the build gave me the impatient half-glare of the unexpectedly interrupted. “Explain to me why we’re building a multi-ton vehicle designed to move long distances in a straight line on a track inside a confined room in a hive full of twists and turns and, most importantly, no track?”

The supervisor huffed and turned back to Chrysalis, “As I was saying…” he began.

Mom’s glare could have cut diamonds, “You did not,” she interrupted, “Answer my daughter.”

Now thoroughly derailed (heh), the supervisor stammered, “Y…yes, my queen! Uhm…” he stalled briefly as he glanced around the cavern, eventually settling on the flywheel of the engine. “Right! So, a few years ago some of our infiltrators started getting word that Princess Celestia gave approval for a new railroad system. Naturally, we need to know about whatever new technology the ponies come up with in order to be able to infiltrate and collect properly. A few months ago, one of our agents managed to copy a complete set of blueprints from Equestrian Railcar Industries, and that allowed us to put together an infiltration network across the industry to secure the parts to construct a locomotive engine.” He was (to use the unintentional pun) building up a full head of steam by this point, his excitement for the project bleeding into his voice. “Just buying an engine and having it shipped to the Badlands would only draw attention, of course, so we’re buying every part individually and having them shipped to various locations in Equestria. Our agents at the final shipping destination then re-direct the parts here, where they’re being assembled,” he waved a forelimb dramatically, “Into a complete model for us to study at leisure.”

He pointed to a cluster of infiltrators, “That group over there is part of the infiltration team. They’re here to assemble study, tear down, break, and fix this locomotive so they can learn everything there is to know about the vehicle. Pony’s special talents may give them a bit of a helping hand when operating these things; we need all the study and learned-skill we can to be able to properly blend in, especially if we need to copy an individual in a pinch.” He turned to Chrysalis with a knowing look, “Nothing like getting caught not knowing what your cover identity should know, am I right?”

As Chrysalis rolled her eyes and resumed her previously interrupted conversation, I hopped down and started poking around. My eyes landed on a rack for clothes. On hangers was a batch of transparent robes. One of the infiltrators slipped one on as I watched, the diaphanous fabric settling over the worker, then apparently meld with her carapace.

After waiting for a lull in the conversation, I interrupted again, “Hey, another question for you.” This time I could taste the irritation from the supervisor. Ignoring it, I pressed on, “What’s with the robes?”

“Ah, those are special safety suits we’ve had to make.”

This one took Chrysalis by surprise, “What? Why? Is there some element to the trains that’s dangerous to changelings?”

The supervisor shook his head, “Nothing more than any other environment, save for the unusual combination of having to work in high-heat environments in close quarters with ponies. As I’m sure you’re aware, your highness, higher temperatures are distracting to a changeling, as is being in close contact with a pony. Throw the two together…”

Momma Chrysalis nodded sagely, “…it increases the likelihood of an accidentally dropped disguise. I was under the impression that trains were long and only needed to be staffed by a small crew?”

He sighed resignedly, “That’s their design, yes. However, these first functional models are being built to be hauled by a team, rather like a particularly large carriage. My understanding is that some higher-up pitched it as a fuel saving measure. Why have extra coal cars for long hauls if you’re already going to have a team of ponies aboard that can be strapped in for a pull?”

Chrysalis rolled her eyes again, “Of course, this ignores the hyper-specialization that ponies have, requiring that a team of haulers be employed in addition to the staff on the train itself.”The three of us chuckled. I may disapprove of anti-pony bias, but anti-bureaucrat bias was fair game.

“Basically,” the supervisor changeling continued, “The suits are made to hold a changeling’s disguise for short periods, maybe a few seconds, as well as provide some shielding from the heat of the engines.” We watched as the infiltrator disguised herself as an earth pony and started moving about, apparently testing range of motion.

“How much use are we expecting to get out of the robes?” asked Chrysalis. “An Earth pony can haul a significant amount…more so than my changelings. Are they expecting to need to haul these locomotives over the long term?”

“Good heavens, no!” sputtered the supervisor, “We’d pull the infiltrator before we’d subject them to the workloads an average Earth pony can handle. No,” he shook his head, “We only see the need for a short period while the major arteries are built between the metropolis’. Once those are built and fuel depots put in place at the small towns along the major routes even the Earth ponies will be pulled off of hauling duty. It will only be the transcontinental trips that will need dedicated hauling teams after that, and even then I’d expect that the rate of technological advancement will probably make pony-drawn trains obsolete within a quarter century.”

He sighed, “Of course, the nobility and the merchants and the manufacturing interests are chomping at the bit to get engines and cars and get cargo and ponies transported across the country, far more than the system really has the capacity for.” He waved at a wall that had maps and schedules tacked to it. No fewer than three changelings were flittering about (literally, the wall was at least three stories tall and completely covered) drawing lines, updating charts, crossing out entries. “This set of maps and schedules is just for the current system between Canterlot, Manehattan, and Baltimare.”

I looked up at it, “Oog…that looks like a scheduling nightmare!”

“You don’t know the half of it, kid,” retorted the supervisor, “Some days there’s so many trains moving down the tracks that they’re stacked up like caterpillars all trying to get the last leaf on a branch.”

I grinned, looking from Chrysalis to the supervisor and back. She returned the look with one of suspicion. “What are you up to, my daughter?” came the thought floating through the hive mind.

Instead of answering directly, I turned to the supervisor, “OK, to recap: You have this locomotive in here as a practice and instructional platform for a group of infiltrators who’s primary job is the instruction of other infiltrator agents out in the field, the majority of whom are working in the burgeoning railroad industry to deliver these high-speed conveyances in groups, often requiring they be hauled by a team of ponies or particularly strong changelings. Since there’s only one or two major tracks laid between cities, the transportation efforts often result in convoys or caravans for expediency. Further, for safety and security reasons, the changelings who perform the final tasks alongside their unsuspecting pony co-workers must wear specially made, changeling friendly outer cloaks that provide heat protection and a boost to our natural disguise ability. Does that about summarize it?”

By the time I was done, the supervisor’s expression had faded into something akin to shock that a two-year old would even bother paying that much attention, let alone use the vocabulary I was dropping casually. His brain finally prompted him to nod.

Grinning impishly, I said, “So your train trains trainers to train trains in a train in trains?”

Chrysalis’ hoof slapped against her forehead as the supervisor’s mouth bobbed open and closed like a goldfish, a look of complete incomprehension on his face.

_-/^-_

My first exposure to the works of Anne McAffrey was through the Harper Hall trilogy, which her fans will know was a supplemental spinoff of the Dragonrider series. It was also the first time I read a story that was fun and engaging that had dragons as a major feature as the good guys. Consequently, whenever the subject of “dragons” came up, I tended to think of wooden sailing vessels and folk-style music with haunting lyrics.

Nightmare Moon watched me as I tied off a sail, catching the wind just right to propel us across open water. Honestly, I have no idea why I was so hung up on the ocean in my dreams. I was born in Colorado and frankly didn’t much care for the idea of large, nigh-bottomless bodies of water hiding living creatures large enough to swallow me whole when I lived in San Diego. Maybe it was my psyche doing a posthumous rejection of having to live in a desert the few years before my death and the couple of years after my hatching. Whatever the reason, I was the temporary “captain” of a small boat, large enough for two people to travel across the ocean between Pern’s northern and southern continents.

I settled in next to Nightmare, who was wearing Harper Blue and apparently stepping into the role of Menoly. The two bronze firelizards settling down on her shoulders was a the best clue, given she still had the bodily proportions and coloration of her pseudo-“Equestria Girls” look. I was apparently in Sebell’s role, though still a woman in this dream, a golden queen firelizard settling on my shoulder as I took my seat. I fidgeted a little, remembering what part of the books this particular scene came from and wondering how to broach the subject.

Ah, well. Nothing for it but to do, “You should know…” I started hesitantly, “…this particular scene in the book it comes from ends in, ah…sex.”

Nightmare started, her surprised motion startling Rocky and Diver into a brief flight before they returned to their perches. She glanced around, connecting that we were the only two on the boat to the obvious conclusion. She was clearly just as uncomfortable as I expected her to be, “But…thou’rt female…and we’re sorry, but we don’t find that form attractive in the least!”

I rolled my eyes, “Gender and physical sex requirements aside, I understand.” I reached up and stroked Kimi’s crest, “If you want to avoid the…physical end game of this scene, just make it so that this firelizard doesn’t go into heat. They’re psychically linked to their owners, so when they start doing like they do on the Discovery Channel, so do their owners.”

Blushing slightly, Nightmare waved her hand in a Jedi-like move, “…done.” she intoned sternly, “Though we were under the impression that the reptile most commonly visualized for sexual dream imagery was a snake.”

I stared at her for a moment, the corner of her mouth flittering ever so slightly upward, “…did you just try to make a joke?”

She blushed and giggled. My own mouth quirked upward, “So you were jesting? You were trying to play the jester?” A hint of confusion crossed her face, but her smile remained as she nodded. “So you were playing the fool?” my own grin starting to reach comic proportions.

It was clear I was baffling her with my sudden line of inquiry, she leaned away slightly, scowling at me only half-serious, “What art thou saying?”

Leaning in conspiratorially, I smirked, “So you’re a…FOOL MOON?”

As her face met her palm, I cackled. “I’m a dad!” I crowed, “That automatically grants me access to the multiverse’s Infinite Dad Joke Repository for all time and eternity! Y’all will never beat me at the bad jokes!” Her only response was the bronze firelizards jumping off and chasing me around the small boat, the little golden queen chasing after them and scolding them for ruining her perch.

_-/^-_

For about a week, Chrysalis was absent from the hive. Distance apparently lessened the hive mind connection, as repeated queries to the hive mind didn’t yield any impression of direction, condition, or any other clue as to her location. I found out that she had left some time during the night, leaving instructions to ensure I attended my regular classes and not be distracted by the usual things that would claim too much of my attention.

After some inquiries, I discovered that she did this on a semi-regular basis. Prior to my hatching, she would head out at the same time every year and apparently disappear for a week or three, leaving the hive to run itself in her absence. On returning she would never say where she went or why she left, leaving even her most trusted advisors and assistants clueless at her periodic absences.

The weeks’ worth of rather boring breakfasts (apparently, the wait staff were well versed in the best ways to deliver ordered food to a table and not much else) I was pleasantly surprised to see Momma Chrysalis sitting across the table from me again.

“So,” I began after taking a loud and obviously obnoxious sip of my juice, “Where’d you disappear to this last week?”

The look on her face spoke volumes, but she was so closed off it might as well have been in a foreign language. After a pause so long it started getting uncomfortable, she sighed, "I...I'm on the cusp of a discovery. One that could provide for our changelings for the rest of time and make us a world power that challenges even the mighty Equestria."

My eyebrows knit together, "...mom, that sounds very 'I'm a terrorist leader' of you."

She snorted in frustration, "I am not so foolish as to attempt some sort of genocidal attack on the ponies like you've suggested I will do from this show you have told me about, nor do I believe I have some form of Faust-given mandate to kill the ponies like those fools in the world from your previous life."

The uncomfortable feeling in my gut must have reflected on my face. I had been trying to gently dance around the expected attack on Canterlot in about twenty years, but apparently, I hadn't been as subtle as I thought. Or she was just that good at picking up on subtle clues, she is Queen of the Changelings, after all. The look on her face reflected the disappointment in her voice as she continued, "My dear Chrystal, I am a Queen, and have been for over a thousand years. I may not be as powerful as Celestia, but I have nearly as much experience in ruling a nation as she does. Were I to do something so foolish as to attempt an invasion of another nation's capital, that would be an overt act of war. And against Equestria...?" She snorted and shook her head in a very equine gesture of frustration, "I would be dooming my kingdom and my changelings for a very short-sighted reason."

She ducked back to her breakfast, apparently not wanting to continue eye contact. I watched her for a while, memories of two skyscrapers collapsing to rubble and taking thousands of lives with them, and the cartoonish but very powerful explosion of the massive magical throne in the center of this hive blasting off the top of a mountain, and pondering that between the two, I wasn't sure which would actually be more potentially devastating.

Author's Note

I know, it's short. But damnit, I wanted it done with!

Chapter 9 - Developing

“In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

The sound of Chrysalis’ hooves clacking on the stone floor of the lobby to our quarters was the only sound, save the slightly panicked breathing of the changeling next to me. Beetle hadn’t wanted to be part of our little plan in the first place, and I did feel a little bad for putting him in this position. Only a little though, the guy needed to grow a carapace or he’d wind up being nothing more than a refuse worker when he got older.

Having completed a pass in front of the line of younglings, of which I was at the head, she slowly and deliberately circled around to walk behind us. We all kept our eyes forward as she paced up the line.

Not that there’s anything wrong with refuse workers, but there’s the small hoof-ful of them that do nothing but refuse work, and even Chrysalis (who was their mother) didn’t want to hang around them, mostly from the smell, but also because after years of doing nothing but the changeling equivalent of garbage hauling, septic-tank maintenance, and carting off the dead for proper disposal, the refuse worker’s social abilities tended to fold inward until they were barely able to communicate even over the hivemind.

As Chrysalis circled around me and started another pace around in front of us, she let out an aggravated sigh, “Would it be too much to hope,” she began, “That Chrystal was not the mastermind behind this latest headache?”

The smaller changelings in the line shuffled their hooves, a couple lowered their gaze in shame. “Uhm…mom…” I began.

She pinned me with a look, “I am not asking you, I’m asking your…cohorts.”

It was my turn to shuffle my hooves and drop my gaze.

It was, of course, Aphid that spoke up first. While sometimes she reminded me very much of my sister from my human life, she had a mommy-pleaser streak a mile wide and I had no doubt that momma-Chrysalis knew it. “Momma, Chrystal said that since we were able to use disguises properly we could visit the pony town at the edge of the badlands.”

Chrysalis let out the "I'm not angry, just disappointed" sigh that is universal to all parents and glanced over at the pile of saddlebags we had been wearing when the soldier-changelings that patrolled the exterior of the hive caught us trying to sneak out. Canteens, scroll checklists, and some travel foodstuffs poked out of the openings of the bags of the younger nymphs in our group. OK, that was being charitable, every bag but mine was a packing nightmare. One of them, Barkbiter's if I recalled right, was practically bursting, being packed with nothing but comic books of all things. By the time I'd found out how poorly he'd packed we were already on our way out of the hive and I didn't want to risk the extra trip back plus the time it would have taken to get him properly kitted out.

For all the good that did us. "Well," began Chrysalis, "You certainly were prepared…mostly.” We collectively held our breaths as she turned to us with a determined gaze. “For the rest of the day the lot of you are to help in the kitchens, clean-up duty only,” she addressed this last to me directly, she knew how much I liked to cook, “You are still expected to complete your homework and have it ready to turn in the day after tomorrow.” The majority response was a mild but resigned groan. Those of us who were paying close attention (which meant me, Aphid, Barkbiter, and Moth) were now hanging on her words. Chrysalis noticed we caught the scheduling implication in her declaration and her stern visage was betrayed by a tiny smile. “Tomorrow, you will be here before sunrise, you will be properly packed, and you will be ready to visit the ponies.” This was met with cheers and a stampede for the door.

Chrysalis pulled me aside before I could leave, “Daughter…”

Uh-oh! I thought. “Yes, momma?” I did my best to turn on the ‘cute,’ a trick my daughter had tried numerous times.

She sighed, “I know you were an adult in your previous life, and I appreciate your independence and strength of will and the leadership you’re already showing for the younglings…” I was sensing a ‘but’ coming, “But…” I knew it! “…you can’t just go haring off on trips like this without telling me about them. At the least you could have arranged some guards.”

I bit my lip. I had numerous things I could have said about her statement, but she was a mom and it would have been unfair of me to argue her maternal instincts. Thinking back on it, if Freya had tried what I had just done with a group of her friends from school or church, I’d have been tempted to tan her hide, and at the very least she’d have lost TV and video game privileges for a month. “Yes, momma. Sorry, I…got used to making my own decisions before…you know.”

She hugged me close for a moment, then said, “Go on, you have work to do in the kitchens.”

I put a hoof to my head dramatically, “Oh, woe is me! Banished to the deepest dungeons of the dark castle, pressed into servitude! Me, a princess, serving as a lowly scullery maid!”

Chrysalis snorted a laugh and whipped my backside with her tail, “Get moving, drama queen!”

With a yelp and a giggle, I galloped off to catch up with the rest of my classmates.

_-/^-_

We once again stood at attention in a line as Chrysalis paced in front of us examining us closely, though this time she held a small smile on the face of the pony disguise she was wearing for the day. Her choice of a soft forest green fur with a silvery mane was a slightly exotic touch that nonetheless would blend in nicely with pretty much any pony population, and the unicorn horn would allow her to use magic without raising suspicion. She had chosen a cutiemark of an ink-heavy quill in front of a stamp.

My own disguise was that of a teenaged unicorn filly with a white coat and blonde mane. I chose a cutiemark that I’d created for an old OC that never saw the light of day; it was a pair of metallic stylized Pegasus wings spread for flight. Amusingly, my design for the OC, that being a unicorn obsessed with flight that she made a pair of wings using metal and magic, was somewhat vindicated when the prosthetic wing the writers and artists of the MLP staff made for Rainbow Dash in the alternate universe where Equestria was at war with Sombra was nearly a dead-on match for the wing design I’d imagined. And granted, while I wasn’t technically a teenager, my native form was nearly twice the size of my classmates, and changing sizes in disguise took a lot more energy.

Chrysalis paused in her inspection, “Hmmm,” she vocalized, “There’s too many cutiemarks for a group of foals this size. Aphid, Moth, you’ll be markless.”

Moth just shrugged and with a small burst of green flame was now sans the wrench pseudo-mark he’d been wearing, but Aphid whined a little, “But mo~o~o~m, I worked hard to come up with this mark!” It was, indeed, a very nice mark. Too nice. It was a complete scene of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, complete with shimmering wings and a forest backdrop framed by expertly designed branches.

Chrysalis was refraining from rolling her eyes, “I can tell, now listen to your mother.” Grumbling, Aphid complied, nixing the overly artistic mark. “I expect a report turned in to your teachers on effective original cutiemark design within a week, understood?” With another grumble, the younger changeling gave her acknowledgement with as minimal a head nod as I’d ever seen her do.

_-/^-_

It took a hike of three hours to get through the Badlands desert, and another hour to find a good way of entering the town un-noticed. While the younger ‘lings may have complained a bit (under their breath, and not where Chrysalis could hear), I understood that a lone mare with a teenager and small pack of foals trotting out of the desert would have raised a few questions. Soon enough, however, we were strolling through town, looking for all the world like a teacher simply taking her class around a small town to show them grade-school civics.

Chrysalis, or “Short Form” (as her disguise was named) would point to a building and identify it as a courthouse, or a town hall, or a library (she had to magically restrain me at that one…but books!) and explain how it fit in pony society. The questions were typical of foals their age (or the age they appeared) and my own questions were more appropriate of a teenager. As we actually were ignorant of the things we were asking, and referring to “ponies” in the third-person perspective the way we were would make sense in a class setting, we blended perfectly. We even got a few smiles from the adult ponies that passed by, and the town mayor, a stallion the pony mares may have found attractive, in a “distinguished (read - going slightly gray around the muzzle) gentleman” sort of way, even stopped by to greet us and explain what his day was like. (And flirt with Chrysalis, he was shameless! At least she and I got a giggle out of it.) Ah, small towns, gotta love ‘em! Plus, the town being a whistle-stop on the new train line meant that the appearance of a whole class of unknown fillies and colts on a field-trip went completely unquestioned.

The whole town was practically lifted from a postcard from the generation just before my parents. They had a barber’s salon, a small schoolhouse that served the towns entire minor population, and even a corner store with an old-style pharmacy lifted right out of 1950’s Americana.

I suppose the nearly Disney-esque quality of the whole experience was what left me somewhat emotionally vulnerable to what happened next. It wasn’t a big thing, it wasn’t a terrible thing, but it was one of those reminders that even years after the fact, the gaping wound of loss can still feel fresh.

We had just finished having malted ice cream shakes at the pharmacy and were on our way to the nearby firehouse when I heard a little filly with a shockingly familiar voice, “Mommy, can I play on the swings?”

My reaction wasn’t logical in the slightest. The filly’s voice I heard was just a notch different, maybe in the timber, maybe the cadence, maybe the pronunciation of the words, but just different enough to not be my daughter… but it was close enough. My ears turned on a swivel, I turned my head to where the voice was coming from, “Freya!?” I gasped.

Once upon a time, about six months after the divorce, I had been working on a pony OC for myself. Naturally, when my daughter saw it she hopped up in my lap and insisted I make one for her. Giggling, I refreshed the pony creator and started building it with her. We picked a coat color, a mane and tail color, a mane style, an accessory or two, and even an umbrella cutiemark was selected from the small library built into the creator.

The little filly I saw with her mom could have leapt right off my screen. The only real difference was the filly was a unicorn, where Freya had wanted the full alicorn look.

Back in early 2011 when my wife and I were just getting into MLP, she had designed her own OC. It was an earth pony mare with a loose, curly dark brown mane and light brown coat and a pair of dice for a cutiemark.

The mare I saw with the filly was shockingly similar to that OC, though the mane style was more of an up-do and the cutiemark turned out to be a pair of red bricks and not dice. The mother said something to the filly, I couldn’t hear over the pounding of my heart what it was. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been moving for a couple of minutes until Chrysalis wrapped an arm over my withers. She looked at the tears streaming down my cheeks, looked to where I was watching, and then her face lit up with a melancholy understanding.

We stood there for a while, I’m not sure how long. She just held me close as I cried myself out. Even after the mare and filly had moved on. The other changelings, only slightly aware of the situation, formed a curious and somewhat protective ring around us.

I knew exactly what was happening, of course. I had spent the last two (nearly three now, actually) years in the hive. There was precisely one mother in the hive, and the voices of the changelings all had a slightly buzzing and dual or triple layered quality to them, which meant that there was no chance my brain would be tricked into thinking it was around other humans, and thus leaving open the possibility, however slight or remote, that my ex-wife and daughter would be nearby.

Here in a pony town, however, was nothing but “normal” voices and “normal” nuclear family sets. Even my own appearance wasn’t what I’d been living with, so the part of my brain that had adapted and even somewhat healed from my death had “fallen asleep” enough to allow a filly’s voice to catch me off-guard.

The similarities in the appearances, however, was just karma being a dick.

As the sun started to slowly sink to the west, I finally got a handle on my emotions enough to stop the water-works. “Thank…thanks, momma.” I said through the last lingering sobs, “I’m glad you caught us yesterday. I’m glad you were here.”

She nodded in reply, “Would you like to go back to the hive?” she asked quietly.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I nodded.

As the school was letting out and a train was depositing commuters who were returning home for the evening, we were able to slip out much easier than it was to get into the town. As soon as it got dark enough to hide the black of our carapaces, we all dropped our disguise and flew home.

_-/^-_

While Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t as good as it’s predecessors or even the other sci-fi shows it was contemporary with, it had a few features I really liked, including a pool hall in Paris, France used as a setting for the holodeck. It was in this setting that Nightmare Moon helped me recreate that she finally asked me what was bothering me.

I sighed as I used my human body to line up a shot, “I saw a mare and filly that reminded me of my family on Earth.” The clack of the cue ball against one of the striped balls punctuated my explanation. I missed the pocket.

Moon nodded in understanding. As a fellow creature of loss, she had no need for me to elaborate. She lined up her own shot, her rather nice humanoid body draping over the table in ways that would have made a male anatomy stand at attention. “You’re not even doing that consciously, are you?” I asked.

She made her shot, pushing off the table just in time to allow the path of two solid-color balls to be unimpeded. One bounced off a bumper, the other sank into a pocket. She turned from the table as she walked around to reposition, “Doing what?”

I rolled my eyes, “Never mind.”

_-/^-_

Breakfast the next morning was interrupted by a scout, for once not one from Equestria. “My queen,” he said from a deep bow, “Many apologies for interrupting, but this is fairly urgent.”

“Rise, Spiracle” replied Chrysalis, “It had better be important for you to abandon your mission and return here from the Undiscovered West personally, rather than simply send a message.”

Spiracle, a clearly travel-hardened changeling, stood at attention, “They’re in the West. We found signs of a recent encampment. We were able to identify a slave ring that had been left behind.”

Where Chrysalis had been in a mode of “professional detachment” before, she dropped that entirely. “Manically Interested with a hint of Murder” would be a better description. “You mean…?” she trailed off.

“Yes ma’am,” interjected Spiracle, “It’s been 500 years, but we found the caribou.”

Author's Note

Dun-dun-DAAAAAAAH!

Chapter 10 - Advancing

“Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn't magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning.”
― Carrie Jones, Captivate

"Have we managed to get any messengers past the embargo in the Frozen North?" Chrysalis grilled the half-circle of assembled changelings in front of our throne.

"We have not, my Queen," answered one of the generals, "Given how closely the yaks check for any flaws in disguises and what they do once they find said flaws...we didn't want to report fatally smashed scouts." A few shudders made their way through the crowd at this pronouncement.

Chrysalis sighed heavily, "Very well; the City-state of Thicket?"

A changeling still bedecked in the ceremonial fineries of the deer stepped forward, "King Aspen sends his renewed commitment to our people's shared cause and has instituted a program to renew the Grand Purpose and True Way in his populous." He jingled a bit as he talked, his bells on his headscarves thankfully very small and well-tuned so as to be pleasant, not jangling.

I sighed, "Mom..." I attempted quietly.

"The hippogryphs?"

Another scout stepped forward, "When we arrived at their aerie, the place had been abandoned. We've set up a monitoring station, but no activity has been spotted since."

"Mom..." I attempted again, a bit more forcefully.

Chrysalis ignored me, "Any word from Lord Torch? He may be a blowhard, but he’s reasonable under the bluster. I know there's no love lost between him and the caribou."

The same general who answered the question about the Frozen North replied. "We did receive a response to our message. He will report any incursions into his own lands, but will deal with any caribou invaders. He requests a similar arrangement from us, reiterated that changelings are not to attempt to take any dragon territory, and refused outright to commit any forces outside the Dragon Lands borders."

Chrysalis nodded in reply, "About what I expected, to be candid. Any word yet from our scouting party to the Tenochtitlan Basin?"

A changeling that I recognized as one of my teachers stepped forward, "Due to the collapse of the regional alliance three centuries ago, we no longer have a central authority to approach. As a result, we've opted to simply create a merchant network to keep our ear to the ground for information and spread our own; there's been some trade with nomads that match the caribou description, but nothing definitive."

"Mom!" I interjected before anyone else could interrupt.

Chrysalis took a deep breath, "Yes, Chrystal Amber?" she replied.

Uh-oh, full name usage, better be careful... "Why haven't I heard anything about contacting Equestria?"

"We are not," she spoke in a clipped manner, "Going to approach Equestria in this or any matter."

"Well, why not?!" I replied without thinking, "They're literally the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation on the planet!"

"Chrystal..." Muttered Crystalis.

"I mean, the only nation or people that has a better intelligence network is us, and that's because we're ALL spies and intelligencers! And Equestria has their pick of intelligencer savants, it's not like they're slouches, the spy versus spy games that go on between S.M.I.L.E. and us are better than the C.I.A. and K.G.B. during the height of the cold war."

At the time, I was too wound up in presenting my case, so I didn't notice when Chrysalis growled just low enough that I could only barely hear it. "Daughter..."

"Even discounting their intelligence networks, they just plain have numbers! They outnumber us by at least 100 to 1. They're more likely to have had some sort of contact with the Caribou through sheer surface area."

The rest of the room was deathly quiet, and I didn't notice the other changelings backing away from the throne and watching the interchange in something resembling fear. "My daughter, you need to drop this..."

"Mom, you need to stop being stubborn about this. Just send an emissary to meet with Princess Celestia..."

Anything further I could have said was cut off as Chrysalis lunged at me snarling, "CELESTIA SEALED ME IN A VOLCANO!"

I'm not sure I could have prepared for it even if I was expecting it. As it was, I found myself instinctively huddling into as small a ball as possible feeling light tremors shake my body. Shoving the panic aside, I swallowed the lump of fear down before quietly replying, "Yes. That would, indeed, offend."

I'd been noticing a minor problem the last few months where my very human mode of thinking seemed to drown out the mental chatter of the hive mind, and only when some emotional spike happened to momentarily "reset" my consciousness would I become aware of what the rest of the changelings relied on instinctively, which explained why the rest of the hive noticed the boiling pot of anger that Chrysalis had become.

Chrysalis snorted and declared, "We're done for now. Generals and Captains, prepare your reports and be ready to present them when I call you individually; It's clear we're not going to be getting any sort of alliance to combat the caribou, so we'll have to plan accordingly. I'll be in my quarters." Without waiting for a reply to anyone, she took wing and stormed out of the throne room.

As one, the rest of the hive turned to me, a question etched on each of the changeling's faces. I cleared my throat, "OK, Mac, so what’s the next case on the docket?”

There was a susurration amongst a group of changelings to my right, and to my great surprise one of them was pushed forward from among the small pack. I blinked, “…and who are you?”

“Macao, your highness. My clutch-mates call me Mac for short.”

I’m sure had a photographer been there that day, they could have taken a picture and won several artistic awards for, ‘Completely Poleaxed Changeling Queen.’ “Oh…kay… I was just joking…” I muttered under my breath as I turned toward a pair of guards standing near one of the throne room entrances, “I don’t suppose one of you is named ‘Bull’…”

A truly massive ‘ling smiled hugely, “That would be me, your highness! Well, actually, my name is Zadiprion Townsendi, but everyone calls me Bull.” A perplexed look fell over his expressive face like a curtain, “…I’m not sure why…”

Next to him, a much smaller female changeling guard huffed and growled out in a gravelly voice, “Oh, great, now I’ve got to reset his brain, or he’ll be stuck like that all night.” She hovered up next to his head and thumped him behind his right ear.

A big, goofy smile returned to his face, “Gee, thanks Flour!”

A young female changeling stepped forward out of the crowd, “Your highness, are…are we really going to do this, have you take over court in your mother’s absence?”

I leaned down, “And what’s your name, counselor?”

“Er, Harlequin, your highness.”

“Oh, please,” a cocky voice interrupted, “Like we’re going to take orders from this hatchling?”

I raised my eyebrow, “Uh-huh…and you are?”

A soldier changeling with the markings of a logistics worker, probably a low-level executive, who was casually lounging against the foot of the throne replied snidely, “Well you can call me Uncle Dandelion Wasp, your Precociousness.”

“Uh-huh,” I repeated, then addressed the room without looking away from Dandelion, “Bull, a little help?”

The massive changeling was suddenly standing right behind the arrogant changeling and unleashed a subsonic sound that might have been a growl, but it shook the entire chamber. The smarmy changeling didn’t even blink, “But then, all my good friends call me Dan, your highness.”

I chuckled, “Well, I may not be a supreme court justice, but I am a Queen, so let’s make this happen. Take two, this time for real…what’s next on the docket, Mac?”

-~/^~-

“…so in short,” I summarized, “Aphid here is accusing Pupa of imitating a pony who’s imitating a changeling because Pupa has been hinting that she wants the latest Spear Senator album that Aphid purchased on his last love collection mission.”

The accuser, Aphid, was very clearly the runt of his clutch. Small, obviously weak, and missing a few neural connections even in the hive-mind, I had come to the conclusion he shouldn’t be talking and leave the actual accusation to Dandelion Wasp, who was fulfilling the roll of prosecutor with aplomb and enthusiasm.

Poor Pupa, on the other hand, was the changeling version of the Statuesque Blond. Long, sculpted legs, gorgeous proportions, and very clearly took care of her carapace. She was also smart enough to allow Harlequin do the talking for her. It was just as well, because Dandelion was making some very obvious passes at the changeling version of Fleur de Li. The greater the distance between the two, the better.

Dandelion stepped forward, “That’s right, ma’am.” I had finally gotten them to stop calling me ‘your highness’ every time they addressed me, “It seems that Short and Clueless here is under the impression that a unicorn is capable of perfectly imitating a changeling that has never been out of the hive for the sole purpose of absconding with an album which is widely available in record stores throughout Equestria.”

“Harley,” I turned to the changeling filling the roll of defense counselor who was eyeing Pupa with poorly disguised envy, “Does the accused have anything to say in her defense?”

“Ma’am, it seems that Aphid has a history of accusing Pupa of stealing a wide variety of things, from breakfast items to random belongings. This is just another in a long string of such claims and like the others this one remains unfounded.”

“So not guilty?”

“Yes, your highness, not guilty.”

“Very well, case is dismissed, and I’m going to ask a question that’s been bothering me; Aphid, do you even own a record player?”

The somewhat dimwitted changeling seemed to ponder this for a moment, “Uh…”

Flour Beetle turned to Bull, “Look at that, someone who’s even slower than you.”

The very large changeling turned to his partner, “Uh…”

Flour sighed, “Never mind, it’s a dead heat.”

Macao had managed to dig up a pony-style gavel in the two hours I’d been playing judge, one I happily clacked against the throne’s ‘arm’ (the thing was huge, I’m not sure it actually qualified for traditional chair terminology), “All right, that’s a wrap for now, court is in recess until we can all get something to eat.”

I nearly leapt out of my exoskeleton when I heard Chrysalis speak up behind me, “I see you’ve managed to abscond with my court, daughter.”

I whipped around, the gavel clattering to the floor. The changelings around us pretended to be about their business, but it was obvious that they were lingering far longer than they needed. Hesitantly, I looked up to see Chrysalis’s lips curled up ever so slightly and an amused twinkle was in her eye. “Sooo…sorry about interrupting court, mom.” I offered.

After only a moment’s hesitation, she pulled me in for a hug, “I apologize, as well. I should not have snapped at you like that. My dealings with Celestia…it’s a sore subject for me.”

I pushed back gently to look up at her, “Yeah, you’re going to have to explain the history to me. That wasn’t exactly explored in the show.”

“Given that the caribou are in no way appropriate for children, I can easily understand that part of our history might be glossed over.” She said with a touch of dark humor in her voice.

“Wait, what?!” I gasped, “What do the caribou have to do with your history with Celestia?”

She began walking me in the direction of our quarters, “My dear Chrystal, they have everything to do with it…”

-=%@’

Over 1,000 years ago…

“You see, my daughter, we changelings never used to have any direct dealings with the ponies. We mostly stuck to the shadows of pony society to collect love and feed the hive.”

“That was until Timbucktu.”

Timbucktu was a pegasus cloud city that sat over the peaks of three mountains, rather similar to the Windy City strides two peaks in modern Equestria. I had begun receiving reports that the general culture had begun growing more and more militant, that females of all races were beginning to be treated as second-class citizens, or even worse, being stripped of their citizenship entirely. Rather than forming herds, as had been the tradition amongst ponies up to then, where the females chose their stallions carefully based on which would best serve the herd going forward, the stallions were forming harems; the individual stallion choosing the mares of the harem based on which was most ‘pleasing’ to the stallion. When some of my changelings began being selected because their disguise forms were naturally more visually appealing than their pony mares, I began to get first hand reports from inside the harems; Unicorn mares having their horns lopped off, pegasus mares having their primaries clipped. In the most extreme cases, even the earth pony mares weren’t spared; their flexor tendons were cut and allowed to heal wrong, or even removed entirely.

I attempted forming some sort of coalition at the time, but nothing could be formed in time to accomplish. The hippogryphs were too far removed, the Equestrian states were too busy trying to cobble together a government that wouldn’t fall back into three squabbling tribes again, and besides which their recently crowned Princesses were off in the Frozen North fighting King Sombra. I would only later make the connection between Sombra and the caribou…perhaps if I had been able to warn the Princesses, the Crystal Empire might have been saved. But then, I wouldn’t encounter my first caribou until around the same time as the fall of the Empire.

With no chance of international support arriving in any sort of timely manner, I gathered as many changelings as I could and moved on Timbucktu.

The reports were understated. Mares were unable to walk down the street unaccompanied by a male ‘lest they be accused of being whores and raped in the street. Foals being taught that mares being subservient to stallions was the natural order of things.

And within minutes of my forces landing in the midst of Timbucktu that the true nature of the threat was revealed.

I was marching at the head of a column of my soldiers down a road, its name lost to time, when I encountered my first caribou shaman. I was using my magic to rip off the veils being forced on mares (and showing to the world the abuse heaped on them by this twisted patriarchy that had sprung up in less than a generation) when I was interrupted by a shouted insult.

“You, [female-perversion-monster]…”

‘@&=-

“Whoah, whoah, whoah…’female perversion monster?’” I interrupted.

Chrysalis smirked down at me, “It’s a slang-word from a fifteen-hundred-year-old dialect of a loan word from a dead language. The actual word is ‘tshufižatsalláfkibu’ and its most exact translation would be ‘female whore shadow,’ but that doesn’t precisely convey the intent behind the word.”

I glowered at my goblet, filled with pomegranate juice, and forced myself to swallow some down around the bad taste that always seemed to come up whenever I read a fic involving the caribou. “Basically, they called you the worst form of whore they could.”

She nodded while taking a bite of her own meal, “I am curious, though; how is it a story meant for young children includes the caribou?”

I put down my goblet and sighed, “It didn’t. You can thank some…knuckle-draggers for that little contribution to pony-lore.”

It was Chrysalis’ turn to be confused by language. “’Knuckle-draggers’? I understand the individual words, but the phrase…how does someone dragging their knuckles equate to the negative emotion you’re attaching to it?”

“Ah,” I chuckled, allowing one of our usual anthropological discussions to lighten the mood, even if just a little, “Around midway through the 1800’s, the ‘Theory of Evolution’ was introduced to the public at large. While it remained controversial even to the day of my death, the notion was that humans had descended from apes was enough to create whole brand-new ways to discriminate against our fellow man. If you wanted to imply that someone was less well bred, less ‘evolved,’ one accused them of being ape-like in some fashion. Since most apes were quadrupedal instead of bipedal, if you were a ‘knuckle-dragger,’ you were basically being accused of being sub-human. Over the nearly two centuries since the phrase entered popular use, it moved from the purely racist connotations into something that you used against someone who had allowed some more base aspect to rule their intellect. Treating women as sub-human, for example, is considered an extremely primitive, proto-human mode of thought, so the use of the term in this context is to accuse them of being sub-human themselves, thereby dehumanizing them sufficiently to allow a sane person to not spiral into depression based on the realization that you might actually be related to the damned fools.”

She nodded again in understanding, “So how did the caribou enter into it?”

I picked up a sandwich and took a small bite before replying, “You remember how I told you about how the show’s creator accidentally made a show that would appeal to adults as well as kids, just because she didn’t follow the ‘girl’s entertainment’ formula?” At her nod, I continued, “Well, as more and more adults were exposed to the show and the fandom, by simple law of numbers that meant that we’d wind up with a statistically predictable percentage of deviants that liked some aspect of the show, but who missed the fuckin’ point.”

“Ah,” interjected Chrysalis, “I believe I can fill in the blanks. Some fraction of a percentage of people ‘created’ the concept of the caribou, and this concept managed to take root in the larger collective canon of the show and its lore.”

“Precisely,” I nodded in relief. I really wasn’t relishing rehashing the initial stories of ‘Fall of Equestria’ to Chrysalis, even if she’d lived through something like it. “Fortunately, anyone who published a ‘pure’ caribou story about the subjugation of females was pushed out of the fandom like a body rejecting an infection. It only took a few months for anyone posting any such story had to do it anonymously. Only a couple of months after that came the first ‘reaction’ fics, the ones where Celestia would tear apart the caribou single-handedly, or some long-forgotten tech would be woken up by a pony and the caribou would suddenly find their asses handed to them, that sort of thing.”

Chrysalis gave me a warm smile at that, “You’ll have to tell me some of those in more detail, sometime. They sound like stories after my own heart.”

We shared a knowing, predatory grin at that.

-=%@’

“You, whore! What do you think you’re doing? Cease your disturbance of the peace and return to your master’s place!” the buck spat out at me.

Wary, I glanced over to my soldiers, all of whom were watching me and awaiting orders. I turned back to the caribou, “I have no master, for I am Queen of All Changelings. I shall never bow to another.”

“Foolish female!” growled the buck, “If you have no master, you shall become my slaves! Beginning with one so foolish as to call herself a queen!” With that, his antlers lit up, rather similar to the way a unicorn’s horn would, and a staff he held on a mount on his back also lit with sympathetic magic. As it did, I began feeling something pecking at my consciousness. It was as though a voice were attempting to wedge itself into my mind and insert thoughts which weren’t my own.

Next to the hive-mind, of course, it was like listening to a single being with a megaphone attempting to drown out the cheering of a stadium full of changelings cheering at the top of their lungs.

It was mind control magic, pure and simple; and this ungulate had just attempted it on the Queen of All Changelings.

Thanks to my soldiers being so finely attuned to my will, he barely had time to gasp in shock as his life was snuffed out by twenty changeling soldiers all using their magic against him at once.

“General!” I snapped to the nearest high-ranking soldier, “Get some scouting units airborne! Find out how many of these antlered creatures there are. If they’re using mind control, that would explain how an entire civilization was changed in just a few years like this.”

My only wish about that campaign was that I had been able to bring more changelings. Thanks to the sheer overwhelming numbers of stallions and caribou bucks, we had to be very selective with our strikes. Our scouting parties were able to determine that the caribou had infested the very fabric of Timbucktu like termites. And like termites building up mounds where they lived, the caribou built compounds, fortresses really, inside the city walls. They used pegasii guards. Our initial attacks on them proved them to be heavily mind-controlled, requiring us to forcefully drain them almost entirely of emotion before they stopped mindlessly defending their invaders.

The first of the caribou compounds to fall to us revealed the dark secret that kept the ponies enthralled; each one was built around a mana engine, a massive organic crystal lattice that broadcast their messages of male dominance and female subservience throughout the city. We lost an entire squad of changeling to the explosion that resulted from tearing apart the matrix of that first engine.

The more I saw of what the caribou wrought, the angrier I became. Who allowed this to happen? Who let the mares of the ponies be so systematically destroyed while this network of mind control magic was laid so thoroughly throughout the city? I fixed my gaze on the palace, and the seat of power of King Orion.

I led a strike team, all of us disguised as stallions or bucks, while I ordered the bulk of my forces to drop any disguises, those in harems included, and openly fight to draw out the bulk of the pony and caribou fighting forces. I identified a high ranking pegasus captain and we brought him down. I had to use our own brand of mind magic to put him to sleep and took his form. I returned to the battle, this time within the enemy’s own forces, and began issuing orders that would leave the ponies and caribou vulnerable while I issued commands through the hive mind to the changelings that would press those advantages.

Within half an hour, the battle was turning into a rout. I called for retreat even as King Orion was demanding that we remain in the field of battle.

My changelings made a fantastic show, giving every impression of nipping at the heels of the retreating defending forces as we piled into the palace and barricaded the doors. Within moments, the arrogant king was ‘debriefing’ me, “What was the meaning of the calls for retreat? And what happened, commander? We went from having overwhelming numbers and clear tactical advantage to nearly losing the city? I demand an explanation!”

“I’m afraid it was necessary…” I replied as I engaged the last lock in the barricaded doors.

“Necessary for what?!” barked the King.

“For this!” I dropped my disguise.

Predictably, the coward sent first his soldiers, then his harem after me. The fool had no way of knowing that every mind-controlled servant he sent after me he only made me stronger. I siphoned off the tainted love, forcibly tearing out all the caribou-influenced emotions from the ponies, leaving them blank slates where none of the evil magic would be able to find a foothold.

Eventually, it was just the King. He picked up a spear and shouted at me, “I’ll take you down myself, vile female bug!”

I didn’t realize at the time that his attitude towards females was his own and not influenced by the caribou. I wouldn’t understand the caribou always sought out at least one sympathetic male that already allied with their world-view until much later, so I didn’t realize that what I had thought was a mercy would actually be what would sow the seeds of distrust between Celestia and I.

“You are a disgrace of a leader!” I snapped at him as he charged me, “You cannot elevate one part of your people by tearing down another!” I seized him in my magic and kicked the spear away with a hoof. “Hopefully when I’m through with you, you will remember the love for your people someone in your position should have.” With that, I drained him of his emotions.

As I picked up his crown from where it had fallen off his head and opened the doors, I allowed him to fly off. I wanted any of the city defenders to witness their defeated king fleeing so as to break the morale of the fighting forces.

One of my captains at the time approached me, intending to deliver a message from one of my generals in the field. “Your Highness…what of the caribou that were inside?”

At that moment I felt a bit of the fool. I hadn’t even realized that none of the invaders had joined in the retreat into the palace. “…there were none. I have a feeling that we may have been played on that count.” I growled, my body attempting to expel the tainted emotions through the magic channels in my eyes, wings, hooves, and horn, “These…caribou are a scourge. No survivors, make every attempt to identify any leaders so we can display their severed heads as a warning. Disable the ponies and any of the other races in the city if at all possible. They’re victims. Destroy all the caribou compounds. What was your message?”

The captain smirked darkly, “What we should do with the prisoners, my queen?” I returned his smile and he left to relay my orders.

From there, we laid siege to the remainder of the city until every single caribou control crystal was destroyed. We changelings were regarded with distrust and suspicion even as we liberated an entire city. We received no cooperation from the natives, but then, we didn’t ask for it.

In the end, we didn’t actually achieve many caribou kills. They were entirely too clever at using their brainwashed pony slaves as shields, throwing entire companies of pegasii at us as they committed a retreat. By the time we had cleared the city, we had managed less than 40 caribou deaths.

When we had finished the grim task of purging an entire city’s populous of the magically tainted emotions, we still faced the logistical problem of being a comparatively tiny force that would have to defend a massive metropolis. It was a relief when I received word that a regiment of pegasii from Equestria were approaching in advance of an army of ponies, including unicorns and earth ponies, headed by Celestia herself. She and her sister had apparently finished their campaign in the Frozen North (and subsequently lost the Crystal Empire, though I was unaware of that at the time) and King Orion had relayed his tale of an invading force of bug-like ponies. Naturally, I was ignorant of the lies the king had planted in Princess Celestia’s mind, I just wanted my changelings to be able to leave the blighted city and return home, so we fell back as a wave recedes from a beach as the tide goes out. The “rescuers” never even saw a single changeling, only had reports of a mysterious race of insect-like creatures that drained emotions and destroyed buildings.

‘@&=-

“While we saved the populous, the city was lost. Within two generations, the ponies had abandoned the Triple Peaks of Timbucktu, and shortly thereafter the pegasus magic holding the clouds together failed, scattering the city to the winds.” Chrysalis finished her tale with a sip of wine.

I nudged the last few bites of sandwich around on my plate, contemplating what I’d learned, “I’m guessing that there’s more to the history between you and Celestia than that.”

She nodded, “I think I’ll save more of that tale for another day. I believe our changelings are awaiting their young queen’s continued efforts in court.”

I rolled my eyes, “Of course, I take initiative once and I’m given even more to do!” I playfully blew a raspberry at her.

She hopped out of her seat and chuckled at my antics, “Just think, one of these days you might even be considered responsible.”

I theatrically shuddered, “Perish the thought!”

Author's Note

No appearance from Nightmare Moon in this chapter, but don't worry, she'll be coming back again very soon.

Also, this is the first time I'm showing a P.O.V. that isn't Chrystal Amber's, I hope it worked out well and wasn't too jarring.

Chapter 12 - Evolving

“We've all lost something along the way.”
― Po Bronson, "Why Do I Love These People?": Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family

As awesome as it would have been to play tourist and check out Ponyville, there simply wasn't time to do so. We deboarded at nearly three in the morning and switched tracks to head to Las Pegasus; the train to Canterlot left at 4:30 AM for the early morning commuters that had jobs in the capital city. While I enjoyed the farming community atmosphere, the small town of Wanderlust (the tiny frontier town closest to the hive on the badlands) was even smaller and cozier, and as farming communities go Ponyville was a boomtown in comparison and could be considered "massive" by virtue that it actually had a dedicated government building, as opposed to sharing space with the general store.

After about fifteen minutes on the train, the rest of the changeling entourage started evacuating the cars, a coordinated dance between the infiltrators removing the baggage we'd brought for the trip. When it was just Chrysalis and me, she quietly got up and knocked her head to the side slightly, indicating I was to follow. Calmly and casually, as though we were simply getting up to stretch our legs, we stepped out of the car and onto the gangway. With a glance behind her to ensure nopony was watching, Chrysalis quickly shed her disguise and leaped up to the roof of the car with a bit of wing assist. I hadn't been briefed on how we were going to deboard, but I wasn't really surprised. This kind of thing was done all the time in training during school and learning hours at the hive, so with a mental shrug, I replicated her move. (though granted, I wasn't nearly as graceful and practiced as she was at it)

With the royal entourage fully gathered, save one changeling, we quietly packed the numerous saddlebags, everyling having at least one bag, including me and Chrysalis. Once we had done so, a subtle ping echoed through our tiny little hivemind announcing our disembarking point was approaching. Looking ahead on the course of the track, I could see a tree with a single branch with leaves that were a distinctly different color from the rest. The tickling sensation that had been pestering me all night suddenly happened, and the final changeling in our group finally connected into the hivemind. Ah, I thought to myself, Must be a scout sent ahead to find the drop point.

We leaped off the train at the indicated spot, a narrow corridor perfect for such a departure but completely invisible to a train passing by at 40-ish miles per hour that was the average land speed of an Equestrian locomotive. Once everyone was on the ground and accounted for, we followed a well-disguised path deeper into the forest.

All in all, it was a pretty standard operation for a race which had 'I'm a spy!' Embedded in its DNA...but I think I can be forgiven for humming the 'Mission Impossible' theme song, the sidelong looks from my hive-mates notwithstanding.

Thicket was Rivendell, there's really no better way to describe the reindeer city. Massive trees buried deep within the Everfree, hidden from the view of other races who didn't know the explicit path through the forest. I lived in a hive where the tunnels changed on a minute to minute basis, and even that wasn't as mind-bendingly confusing as the labyrinthian heath that surrounded Thicket. I didn't see any guards to the city, but then the "city walls" were the forest itself, so they could have an army hidden in there and you'd never know.

The buildings themselves were built around and into the trees. It was clear the reindeer had some magical means of moving and adjusting the growing plant matter of the towering giants, as there were no tool marks (or even tools visible) anywhere to be seen. Even the filigree which might have been called carved had any other race made them were simply growth patterns in the wood. Imagine entire city blocks "built" the way Golden Oaks Library (R.I.P. ...but then it hadn't been destroyed in this timeline yet, had it?) was in Ponyville, and you'd have a solid idea of what I was looking at.

The reindeer themselves roamed their city at a sedate pace that reminded me of the way Buddhist monks carried themselves, especially the ones who'd mastered the basics of Zen. Even the fawns maintained a noble gait, though they did tend to stumble and trip, as all children do.

"...they're freakin' elves!" I expectorated after several minutes of staring somewhat slack-jawed at the city.

The year after the 9/11 attacks that brought down the World Trade Center in New York, my wife and I were given some complimentary passes to Comic-Con in San Diego. This was before the event turned into "Hollywood South" and you had to reserve your ticket months in advance, so it wasn't the massive, city-wide event it would eventually turn into. It still took up three-quarters of the San Diego Convention Center, so it still couldn't be called "small." Nevertheless, to a woman who'd been raised in a household where the parents actively drilled into the kid's heads that science fiction and fantasy were "kid's stuff" and "wastes of time" and "boring," JoLene was completely unprepared for the experience. When she walked onto the vendor floor, she made it about three steps in and just stopped, eyes bugging out and jaw slack. My own expression upon viewing Thicket had to have been nearly identical.

"How the hell did you guys come up with a way to make pony elves?!" I gasped at the universe. I usually try not to get too meta and address the fourth wall, but the feeling of shock that was exactly like what my ex-wife felt a couple decades ago was enough of a cage-rattler that I had very little filter.

Chrysalis was watching my reaction with confused amusement. She tilted her head to the side, as though trying to read a book only to realize after you've opened the cover and discovered it was in another language. "Elves...ah! Fantasy creatures, mostly similar to humans, save for long life, pointed ears, and a deeper connection to magic; also, frequently written as being tied to nature and living in trees." She chuckled, "Yes, I can see the resemblance!"

This snapped me out of my shock, "You know, I forget that the hivemind has access to American English as I knew it." It was my turn to chuckle, "And you didn't understand the comparison to Romulans and Vulcans?"

She snorted, "We were in a dream, that's a separate simulated environment from the hivemind. For me to access both at once would require some preparation that I hadn't done."

I nodded in comprehension as we resumed our approach to the city of Thicket.

King Aspen was basically Elrond with a sense of humor. "It would seem," he was saying in his stentorian voice with a wry grin, "That you have decided to, ah, catch up? When last we spoke, you wouldn't even consider having a child to be an heir." His gaze was flickering between momma Chrysalis and me.

Chrysalis rolled her eyes, "I've told you before, I have no need to play your silly, 'who has more children' game. I have the entire hive as my children, after all."

If his wife wasn't sitting there next to him with a similar playful grin on her face, I'd swear the old deer was flirting with my mom.

I wasn't sure what to think of that.

Aspen was continuing to speak with mom, "As good as it has been to see you, I am aware of the unfortunate circumstances that have conspired to cajole you from your hive. Our ancient brothers are once again on the move."

Smiles faded from everyone's faces as Chrysalis replied, "They're also getting better at moving in stealth. My scouts lost the trail as quickly as they found it."

I sighed, settling in on my haunches and listening with only half an ear; this was going to be a long meeting.

I was more or less stumbling my way to our assigned quarters (a very nice suite in what was essentially a luxury treehouse), the hour wasn't actually that late, but the early departure from the train combined with the stealth ops and the hike to the city were compounded by the several hours long talks with the royal family; I was knackered. I was by this point larger than the average changeling, but still had a way to go to be as tall as mom, so while I made decent time down the hall, it wasn't nearly fast enough for my fatigued brain thanks to legs that were still at least a couple feet away from being as long as I was accustomed to in my old human form.

Thus it was I was simply tuning the sound of giggling out.

"Hey, Princess," came the voice of a young buck faun from a path that branched off from the one I was taking, "We found a pet for you!"

Blinking owlishly, I turned to face what I just knew were going to be a group of children looking to prank... and got a face-full of stick-bug. Sure, it wasn't actually on my face, but it was less than an inch away.

Adrenaline shot through my system, "" I shouted in English and leaped nearly perfectly vertically, my instincts causing me to grasp onto a low-hanging branch.

After enough deep breaths to restore something that wasn't a fight-or-flight reaction in my nervous system, I managed to look down to see a trio of fauns, a buck and two does, laughing their fuzzy butts off, a poor confused little stick-bug scrambling away as fast as it's little legs and wings would take it.

"Yeah, yeah," I groused at them, "Laugh it up, fuzzballs!"

This only made them laugh harder.

"Whoever heard of a bug that was afraid of other bugs?" Repeated Prince Bramble...for the twelfth time.

I rolled my eyes, "I keep telling you, changelings are..."

The other deer children (we had picked up a couple more) walking with us chanted in unison, "Equinoid isopods."

A somewhat small and lean doe slugged Bramble in the shoulder, "Geeze, just drop it already!"

"Ow! Sandalwood, stop it!" Groused the prince. The doe's fairly small and unimposing form hid a pack of muscle that had nearly bruised my own carapace during some roughhousing earlier. Bramble's complaints, while a bit whiny, were justified.

I rolled my eyes in exaggeration, "OK, but if any of you tell me you found a map to Candy Mountain, I'm gone."

The poleaxed confusion that greeted me to this rather oblique reference made the stick bug incident worth it. I was tired enough that the giggles turned into a ground-pounding belly laugh.

Sleep eventually did happen, and I was tired enough that I didn't object to the fauns wanting to do a cuddle-pile. While not the norm for deer as a species, it was apparently a thing that friends did. Nobody in the group was of age for puberty to wreak havoc yet, so one mixed-race cuddle-puddle was a go.

Naturally, waking up to Chrysalis and Queen Heartwood giggling and cooing over the adorableness wasn't embarrassing at all. Guess which part of that sentence was a complete lie.

Mom briefed me over breakfast on the meetings from the day prior, she knew I wasn't up to the meeting sessions, and it was her who told me to go get some rest, so the rehashing of even the stuff I'd been there for wasn't objectionable. "Aspen naturally put out feelers for us to Thicket's allies," Including Equestria, I mentally added with a satisfied nod. If Chrysalis knew what I was thinking (which I'm sure she did), she refused to acknowledge it, "But without any solid treaties in place, it's impossible to organize any sort of dedicated search. Since we," she indicated herself and me to specify 'changelings,' "Have only loose mercantile ties with the other nations, and even those are under disguise, it, unfortunately, falls to Thicket's allies alone. The deer are understandably reluctant to disclose the nature of their...relationship with the caribou, so it's somewhat difficult to explain the threat, especially since they have remained rather stealthy for the last half millennium."

"What's a maluminum?" Asked Rosewood, a faun who'd managed to attach herself to my unexpected juvenile deer escort by virtue of being Sandalwood's younger sister.

"Millennium," I corrected as I went to take a sip of the chocolatey brew that had become one of my breakfast favorites, "And it means '1,000 years.'"

"You mean how when the ponies are just trying to say, 'a really long time ago'?" Replied Bramble.

Chrysalis and I both nearly snorted our drinks up through our nose. "Not quite, though it does technically apply in this case. 500 years is a long time no matter how you measure it."

Chrysalis shrugged, "It's only about a third of my life...though I've seen quite a few generations of changelings pass in that time."

I thought back to my life on Earth and realized that would compare to about 17 years of my human existence and shuddered to think of what I would have gone through emotionally if I had been forced to watch Freya and several generations of her children be born, grow old, and die while I aged, in comparison, not at all. I shivered as the feeling of the grave rippled over me, all in all, a disturbingly familiar feeling when you've dodged death's visit like I had.

My melancholia, mirrored slightly by Chrysalis, was lost to the fauns. "You have everything we'll need for food packed, right Sandalwood?" Bramble was saying, taking after his father as the group's de-facto leader.

Sandalwood rolled her eyes, "It's only going to be a day-trip, not like we need more than snacks." Sandalwood was, by accident or device, proving that girls matured faster than boys. She seemed to recognize that the "epic adventure" the group was anticipating was merely going to be a simple hike, one which the fauns were well prepared for by virtue of their living environment.

Bramble was having none of it, "Never-the-less, we should be prepared for every eventuality! We'll be out until after dinner time, so I expect lunches, at the very least, to be secured from the storehouse."

"What seems to be this 'epic quest' you lot are embarking on?" Asked Momma Chrysalis.

At that question, the excited babble was replaced by tense silence. The fauns looked at each other, then me, then Chrysalis, and then seemed to be inspecting the rest of the room for a moment. Finally, Sandalwood rolled her eyes again (She seemed to do that a lot...ah, the joys of being a 'tween. All the angst of being a teenager, all the precociousness of being a kid.) and said, "She's a changeling, guys, it's not like she's gonna tell the other adults."

I grinned at Chrysalis sidelong, "Congratulations, mom, you're an honorary faun."

She chuckled, and with a flash of green flame now appeared to be a near twin of Sandalwood, but with a darker pelt and a slightly more equine shaped skull. And, of course, Chrysalis' omnipresent cunning grin.

As though her appearance made her one-and-a-half-millennia-long life vanish with her carapace, the fauns seemed to accept that she was, indeed, a youngster just like them and the previously cheerful atmosphere returned. They all started speaking at once.

"There's an old pony castle in the forest!" Blurted Bramble

"Nobody's 'sposed tah go there 'cause of ghosts or somethin'" interrupted Rosewood.

"The grownups say we're not supposed to go because the structure isn't safe." Snipped Sandalwood in the 'I'm the older sister so I'm right' voice.

Chrysalis and I shared a look as she sent over the hivemind, Celestia's old castle?

Most likely, I thought back to her.

"What are you gonna bring, Chrystal?" Asked Rosewood innocently.

"Wait, what?" I blinked in confusion, refocusing on the conversations.

Chrysalis chuckled quietly, You really need to get better at splitting your conversational attention, my dear.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes as Bramble repeated with more clarity, "We're all bringing something to help with our quest, what are you able to contribute?"

I was now confused in a slightly different way, "Wait, I'm going with you? When was this decided?"

Momma Chryssy smiled that infuriating smile mothers get when they want you to do something, "It sounds like a great experience for you, actually. I know you'll be bored silly at the meetings with the king and queen and their officers. Besides, young Bramble here," she nodded across the table at the prince, "Will one day take his father's place, just like you'll take mine someday. This will be good for you two future rulers."

While Bramble practically preened as his spine stiffened and a beaming smile crossed his face at the prospect, I knew my face had a haunted expression. I knew what that responsibility meant, I knew Chrysalis knew I knew. She knew at that moment I was wishing I could glare daggers at her in polite company. Still, she had that cheese-eating grin.

I didn't even have to use the hive-mind to relay the thought, I'll get you for this!

Similarly, she didn't need the hive-mind to reply with a mere upward curl of one side of her mouth, as if to say, You'll try, my dear.

Damnit.

The challenges of the Everfree, while intimidating to a pony and dangerous even to your average human, were pretty mundane for our little troupe. The reindeer had grown up here, after all, and I was being trained as a master spy by the best this world had.

The fauns, for the most part, didn't see it that way. For them, it was an epic quest that even the prematurely cynical Sandalwood was taking super-serious. A brief altercation with bramblevines was treated as though it were the Fellowship fleeing the Mines of Moria. A cragodile encounter held the gravity of Smaug attacking Laketown.

I chose not to mention the signs that we were in a chimera's territory, nor the indicators that we were being monitored and said chimera had been dealt with in some non-violent fashion. (No blood on the ground, for example) It was damn expertly done if I do say so, and any creature other than a changeling might not have noticed the signs.

Inside of a couple of hours, we were at the Castle of the Two Sisters. Bramble and company, being rangifers and a close cousin to the capra genus, made fairly easy work of the ravine between the rest of the forest and the castle. I just flew across the gap.

Once inside, we began exploring. Thankfully, they listened when I insisted we stick together. I didn't want to do a live reenactment of "Castle Sweet Castle" with a small herd of immature deer.

It wasn't until we got to the throne room that contained the dais with the inactive Elements of Harmony (sans Magic, of course) on it that anything noteworthy occurred.

I was again firmly insisting that Bramble not touch the god-damn rocks on pedestals when Sandalwood's concerned voice rang out, "Where's Rosewood?!"

“Shit!” The evidence of adults monitoring the expedition notwithstanding, I was well aware of what a solitary child could get into, including all forms of trouble, “OK, that’s it. Bramble, I’m taking charge of this party.”

“But…” began the princeling.

“No, this just graduated from ‘fun little romp in the woods’ to a real situation. Everyone call out a buddy. Bramble, you’re with me.” I admit I was using my now forty-odd years worth of experience as an adult to take charge, but I wasn’t going to take chances. Cowed, Bramble sidled over to my side.

The search took about half an hour, and in the midst of it, I received a ‘ping’ (for lack of a better word) from Chrysalis. She had heard that we were having trouble and was on her way to assist. Once she arrived, once again disguised as a faun, it took just a few minutes to find the trail. “You’d gotten close,” she reassured me as we scrambled down the stairs on the side of the cliff next to the castle, “I think in just a few more years you’d have found the trail before I even pinged you. You’re doing well.”

Bramble was still behind me, just barely keeping up as Chrysalis and me, “I don’t understand, there’s nothing here…”

“Emotional residue,” I interrupted. “Since we can eat emotions, we can smell them like predators smell meat or herbivores smell their favorite plant.”

I felt his emotion shift into something resembling juvenile comprehension, I have a feeling he nodded, but I was focussing too much on finding his subject to look back.

As it was getting later in the day, we were able to see the dim glow from the cave well before we rounded the lip of the entrance and the entire party skidded to a shocked halt.

“Dear God…” I said in English.

“Great Mother Faust…” echoed Chrysalis in a whisper.

The fauns that were with us were similarly shocked, though just into silence. Before us stood the Tree of Harmony. It’s impossible to convey what it was like to see it in words alone, though if you can imagine encountering a tree made of crystal standing a good four stories tall in a massive cavern, glowing weakly as it's branches were festooned with angry looking vines, thorns somehow digging into the silicate structure. At its base sat Rosewood, struggling to pull a massive length of vine away with his teeth.

Stepping carefully, I rushed over to the little deer as quickly as I could and pulled him away from the vine. “No!” he gasped out, “It’s hurting! Can’t you hear it?!”

I gripped him in my magic and hauled him toward the entrance and the rest of the group, “You have no way of fighting those things. Even alicorn magic can’t begin to touch those things.”

Chrysalis spoke to me without looking away from the Tree, “It would appear our wayward faun is a sensitive.” She turned to face me only when I had come even with her. “This is that tree you said the pony superweapon came from?” At my nod, she continued, “And the vines?”

“A creation of Discord,” I answered. “As sickly as the tree looks now, it’ll be fifteen years or so before the vines overpower it enough to become a threat, and even then they’ll go after Celestia and Luna first before attacking anything else.”

She pondered the potential threat in front of her, “...that idiot. Didn’t you tell me that this tree was connected to the land itself?”

I nodded again, “I don’t know if that was the intent or an unintended consequence, but from the moment that tree sprouted the fate of Equestria became locked in with the fate of the Tree.”

She sighed, “Discord was always a shortsighted fool.”

I blinked in surprise, “You knew him?”

She shook her head and turned to the entrance, “No, but I watched from the shadows as he played with the ponies. He always made so many decisions that made no sense at any point.”

I joined her, the rest of our group following our lead. “Yes, well, it’s Discord, if he made sense he wouldn’t be a being of chaos.”

As she nodded in resigned comprehension, Rosewood gasped out, “My pack!” we looked over to the group to see Bramble and Sandalwood restraining their youngest friend. We glanced back at the roots of the tree to see a little saddlebag sitting amidst the vines. As we watched, a thorn hooked the back-loop of the bag and started dragging it over a root.

“I’ll get it,” I turned back into the cave, “Rosewood, stay put.” Whether he was simply reassured that someone older than him was moving to retrieve it or he was actually following my orders, he stilled as I moved carefully back through the vines.

“Careful, my daughter…” came my mother’s warning voice.

Nodding in response, I reached out for the saddlebags with my magic, only to have it be fouled by the plunder-vines. It was like they exuded an anti-magic field. Sighing gently so as not to be heard by the others, I gingerly stepped over the vines to rest my hoof on the root and reached out to pick up the pack. As I did so, my hoof slipped and my barrel hit the trunk of the tree…

...you are not of this harmony…

...your music is a minor key…

...you are the minor key…

...the abyss awaits your turning…

...your brother awaits your returning…

...you shall create the new harmony…

I wish I could say it was my own willpower that broke...whatever the Tree had done to me, but it was more like I was pushed away. I found myself stumbling back, tripping over plunder-vines, the saddlebags hooked over a hoof making my flailing for balance even more difficult.

I finally collapsed at Chrysalis’ hooves, “Daughter!” she gasped out, “What happened, what did it do to you?”

Weakly shaking the saddlebags off my hoof, I scrambled to my feet, “It was...some sort of message? I think?” I rubbed my temple with my fetlock as I sat down again, still quite rattled by the experience. “I don’t think it expected me…something about a brother and music…”

She glared briefly at the tree and shifted back to her native form. Magicking me up onto her back, which was getting harder for her to do because I was getting too big to easily be carried like that, she moved back to the entrance. “Alright, let’s move.” she ordered the rest of our party, “Your parents are waiting for you back at the city. I think I’ll have a word with Aspen about restricting any further forays to the castle. I suspect it’s getting far too dangerous even for us.”

Whatever happened between me and the tree must have been more taxing than I at first thought, because we weren’t even out of the ravine before I nodded off, lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of being carried on Chrysalis’ back.

Chapter 13 - Becoming

“…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.

Some people might find that strange.

But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.”

― Ranata Suzuki

Once upon a time I read a fanfic wherein Twilight Sparkle was a steampunk mad scientist who falls in love with the Mare in the Moon. The set-pieces described were so breathtaking and imagination inspiring that it did make some sense that I should find myself having tea with Nightmare Moon in the middle of Twilight Sparkle’s lab/library. Nightmare was wearing a tophat and a dress that looked like it was responsible for the deaths of many a taffeta and lace creature (had such a thing existed). As for myself, I was wearing a dress that was more utilitarian, to go with my overall motif of being a mare of tinkering and engineering. The clockwork mechanisms on my forehooves that worked in place of fingers only solidified the image.

“The Tree is infested? That is...not good.” Moon fretted.

I nodded, using a claw-like appendage to drop a sugar cube into her teacup. “One thing they never did explain in the show was why Celestia allowed the Tree to go unmonitored for a thousand years. For you, it makes sense, what with being...ah...otherwise occupied,” I nodded at her as she lifted the cup with her magic.

“‘tis yet another thing about my sister’s reign that will have to be addressed once I return to the throne.”

By unspoken agreement, we didn’t pursue that particular line of conversation. We had come to brawls by her or I pushing the issue of her eventual return and what would happen after. Consequently, we didn’t discuss the show very much, either. She absolutely refused to accept that any version of events that depicted her losing to her sister to be prophetic.

“On the plus side, it looks like young Rosewood is going to be trained as a cleric. His parents are thrilled, of course.” I took a sip of tea, allowing the fictional aroma to waft into my dream senses. After a moment or two I noticed that Nightmare hadn’t responded. Glancing over, I noticed that she seemed to be staring off into space.

“Moon?”

It seemed she realized she was zoning out and shook her head. “‘tis nothing,” she said unconvincingly, “Merely a particularly challenging day.”

I’m sure it may be possible to describe the incredulity with which I glared at her, but it may require dream logic to assess the sheer quantities of doubt I metaphorically assailed her with using my gaze and expression.

“Yes!” she barked back, “Yes, I know, I don’t actually have ‘long days,’ just this one, long, unending night where I may look up and see my sister’s sun and the whole of Equestria and beyond so far out of reach yet tantalizingly in view, reminding me of my prison!” To my surprise tears started to form in her eyes, “My every hour not spent in this microcosm of a dream realm spent…alone, so alone…”

The steampunk setting dissolved when I wasn’t looking and I reached out a hand to clasp her wrist, “Moon…?”

She looked up to meet my eyes, then flicked her own back down to the hand holding her wrist, “I’m sorry, my…friend…I must go.”

Abruptly the setting disappeared like smoke that quickly enveloped Nightmare Moon, her usually confident or angry eyes rimmed with bloodshot red and tears trickling down her face. The moment all of her form was obscured from my vision, her wrist disappeared from my hand and I was grasping through the smoke, “MOON!”

My eyes snapped open, my lips already in the shape to repeat what I had just spoken during the dream. Almost instantly, I snapped them closed, wondering if what I was experiencing was a mana headache or if someone had just hit me in the back of the head with a hammer. All told, it matched what I’d heard hangovers felt like during my human life, right down to feeling like I wanted to unleash the contents of my stomach on the unsuspecting bed without moving my head…which would be really disgusting to do as a changeling, as we had several glands that could spew out numerous chemicals, from toxins to glue.

I had been woken up briefly once Chrysalis got the little retinue back to Thicket, gave a very short briefing along with the rest of the troup, and given a sleeping potion to help me get through the night. I suspect that the “potion” was more like a few herbs in what felt like a gallon of water and the hydration was more medicinal than the herbs. I had apparently slept through the rest of the day and through the night if the early morning sunlight streaming through the branches above the gap in the tree that made up a window was any indication.

A quick ping of the hivemind confirmed her presence before I said, “Mom?”

“Yes?” came the quiet reply.

“Can changelings survive getting their heads cut off? ‘cause right now my…everything hurts above the neck.”

Her response was simply to chuckle and gently stroke down my back, avoiding the spot where my neck met my torso as that seemed to feel just as on fire as the rest of me.

Several hours later, during which time I was not able to get back to sleep, we made our way to the breakfast table, at which there was a potion mercifully provided by our reindeer hosts for combatting headaches caused by visions. Apparently, cases like Rosewood’s suddenly blossoming into having awareness of more spiritual manifestations and my own encounter with what, for all intents and purposes, was a higher power were not terrifically uncommon in Thicket. At least, they were common enough to mean a specially brewed potion just for treating the after-effects of the experience were readily available.

Not long after we were getting ready to leave. While we hadn’t come for a long trip by any means, it also wasn’t slated to be as short as it wound up being.

“Are you sure we can’t convince you to remain, Chrysalis?” enjoined King Aspen, “We’ve barely gotten you settled in.”

Chrysalis shook her head, clearly reluctant to leave, “As much as I do enjoy the times we’re able to meet in peace like this, I…the confirmation of my daughter’s…’visions,’ for lack of a better term, seen with my own two eyes…it changes things. I need to prepare my hive.”

“Oh, sure, now you believe me.” I rolled my eyes and smiled wryly at Aspen and his wife, “Fresh from the shell with thirty-plus years experience in my head from an alien world and it takes an overgrown silicon bush that needs a professional gardener to convince her.”

Chrysalis rolled her eyes in exasperated response. “By your own admission, daughter, your very presence shows that we are in a differing timeline from that which you saw in your…’teevee shows.’”

Aspen chuckled in confused amusement, “Well, I know from my subjects that having an oracle for a child can bring about it’s own unique challenges. We shall pass along the formula for the post-vision potion should you need it in the future.”

Soon after, we had made it back to the train tracks and intercepted a rail car, the transition this time being more complicated by having to arrive from above and match speed with the moving vehicle. From there, we took an afternoon connection at Ponyville (too little time to play tourist again, darnit), and headed south to the Badlands.

“So,” I started once the seats around us were fully occupied by our changeling escorts, providing plenty of privacy, or as much as could be had on an early sleeper car on a train, “‘Changes,’ huh?”

This pulled Mamma Chrysalis out of some obvious introspection, “Hmm? Oh, yes. Merely reviewing the memories of this show you brought to the hivemind upon your awakening…though I’m getting a rather…confusing jumble…” Now confused myself, I tilted my head a bit with an inquiring grunt. She continued, “There’s many narratives, including… more alicorns? Something called ‘anthro’ and duplicates… and what is ‘clop’?”

I am still not sure how my carapace didn’t spontaneously combust from the embarrassment I experienced in that moment. This wasn’t just your mom finding your porn stash, this is your mom having a full download of your complete Internet history right to her brain…and the brains of every single one of your relatives.

“OKAY!” I said way too loudly, “We’re gonna talk about fandoms, fan created works, and why it’s important to clear your browser history!”

“So with all the…many…different versions of the stories from the show that branched from the timeline into fan…fiction?” she quirked her head to the side.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But if it’s prophetic storytelling…” she trailed off.

I clearly had done nothing to clarify things for her. “Okay,” I was saying that alot today, “The thing is, the creators of the show didn’t know they were being prophetic for you. Hmm…how to explain this…” I tapped my hoof against my chin in thought, “So you know how if you pick up a book, say a Fetlock Holmes story, before you read it the first time, all you know about it is the title, maybe a picture if the publisher put one on the cover, and the author’s name?” At her nod, I continued, “So you read it the first time, and it’s new and exciting and you don’t know what’s on the next page. Let’s say you finish the book and want to read it again. If you do so, does your reading of it change anything about that story?”

She knew from long experience with our many, many talks together that I was leading up to a point, but she clearly had no idea what that point might be, “...no? Of course it wouldn’t, the book is finished.”

“Ah-ah,” I chastised gently, “This is multiverse theory, which is only a hair more confusing than string theory; there’s no ‘of course’ or ‘obviously’ when it comes to multiverse theory.” She rolled her eyes at me but otherwise remained quiet.

“To continue, let’s say you were adapting this book into a stage play. You’d have to go back and re-write it, but you want to remain faithful to the book, so you do your best to match the dialogue and the blocking, but it just won’t work because a book is not a stage production. You gotta adapt some things. The major points are there, plot beats, act structure, climax, denoument, etcetera, but some of the dialogue winds up just a little bit different. That’s OK, ‘cause it’s telling the story overall correctly, right?” At her nod, I continued, “So let’s say you read the story, then you get a brain injury that makes you forget you read it due to…let’s say a teleportation accident. You wind up in another part of the world entirely that’s never heard of Fetlock Holmes, and near as you can figure, there’s no way home for you, so you settle in to live your life. After a while, you get this idea for a mystery story featuring a detective with a doctor assistant who goes about assisting the guard in solving crimes. You write out the plot as you think it up, but you don’t realize you’re remembering it, ‘cause you don’t remember the original time you read it and there’s no way to get a copy of the book, so as far as you or anyone else around you knows, you’re the author of the book, right?”

I could tell her mind was beginning to grasp where I was taking this, but not completely, “Are you suggesting that the humans of your world are…transposed Equestrians, similar to yourself?”

I chuckled, “No, nononono…no, thank heavens. Don’t need another ‘Five Score’ incident in the multiverse…although that does raise the question…” I shook my head to clear it, “Getting off track! The point is, the original story doesn’t change based on the re-writing of it, nor is the new ‘author’ magically manifesting the original story. Even if some means of travel is uncovered and the fans of the ‘new’ version find the old version, that doesn’t change the story, nor does it mean that one somehow manifested the other.”

I waved my hoof, “This is where the analogy breaks down, so I’ll just try to explain it as literally as possible.” I thought for a moment to formulate my words, “So the universe is infinite, right?” she nodded and I continued, “Well, by extrapolation, then, the multiverse is also infinite. It stretches to the absolute limits of imagination and beyond, each distinct reality from the four basic multiverse types has such unbounded variety that any conceivable thing you could imagine exists out there somewhere. It’s literally a calculation of ‘infinity to the fourth power times infinity to the infinite power,’ you think it, it exists. Just thinking of it doesn’t create it, but it does create a connection, even if it is just a metaphysical one.”

Chrysalis put a hoof to her head and started rubbing, “...and you think running a hive is complicated? How do you even think of this stuff?”

“Eh,” I shrugged, “I was diagnosed with ADHD…er, Attention Defficite Hyperactivity Disorder, when I was a kid. I didn’t buy it at first ‘cause it was too close to my step-mom’s abusive accusations at me when she lied and told me what…guh, nope, not going to go over that. That’s a dead life and I’m…over it…”

I’m not sure if it was the near sob I choked down or the fact that I couldn’t seem to blink fast enough to stop the tears from forming, but Momma Chrysalis’ attention became laser focused on me, “My child, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing…” I waved a hoof, “Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing…I’m dead, I’m sure she’s dead by now, it’s a dead issue. Back to multiverse theory…”

“No,” she interrupted as she got up from her couch seat and squeezed herself onto mine, “I don’t think it’s nothing. Your wife and daughter aren’t ‘nothing’ and I helped you, still help you with that, so this is something, too.” I heaved a shuddering sigh but didn’t say anything, by now looking at the floor. “Daughter, please, speak to me.” She quietly settled in and just waited, knowing by now I needed to gather my thoughts when she asked me probing questions about my human life.

“...she lied.” I finally said after a couple of minutes of silence, “I…one time…” I gulped down a sob, “One time…I mean, she always hated me. I didn’t figure out why until I got older and away from her, but turned out she just hated…men. And here I was growing up to become one, even if I knew there was something wrong with that, I didn’t even know until I was an adult that people…humans could change their gender, I just knew I wanted to be a girl so bad…but my step-mom…she hated men, and hated men who wanted to be women more.”

The confusion from Chrysalis was so palpable I could taste it, “But…why?”

“Figures,” I barked out a tearful laugh, “That a race of beings that can change their entire body at whim wouldn’t understand that…but I don’t wanna explain TERFs right now. My stepmom hated me. She always found ways to hurt me without touching me, and maybe even that. I can’t remember some parts of being a teenager,” I took a deep breath and continued, more able to tell this part, I’ve had to explain it so many times in my previous life that it was almost comfortable to talk about. “My sister, she told me once that she watched as my stepmom beat me. I don’t remember. I don’t remember so many times where I should because I can remember school, I can remember walking home and dreading getting there…but I don’t remember what happened after getting home.”

“One day, she…my stepmom…told me that if I couldn’t bring home a completed homework sheet every day, I wouldn’t get dinner.” I didn’t bother explaining the homework sheet. If Momma Chrysalis was really interested, I could explain another time, “Well, because I had ADHD and this was before it was properly understood or even diagnosed in most cases and the medications for it were sometimes worse than the condition, I pretty much never had a completed homework sheet. So I’d just come home, put the homework sheet on the dinner table, then go to my room to read or just lay in bed until I fell asleep.” I started shaking and I couldn’t figure out why, “I was…so hungry. I would wake up sometimes at night and sneak up to the kitchen and try to grab a slice of bread or a handful of chips, hoping I didn’t wake anyone up.” I could feel tears dripping down my muzzle by this point. I don’t think I’d told this story to more than three people while I was human. The telling of it wasn’t as familiar as the memory gap story, “I would eat as much cereal in the morning as I thought I could get away with and pretend nothing was wrong at school. I thought,” by this point my voice was shaking as well, “‘Today I’ll remember. I’m so hungry there’s no way I could possibly forget to get my homework sheet signed,’ then I’d start imagining some story in class or start reading a book I liked or something just to distract myself from being bored and hungry and I’d wander to my next class and forget and…”

“...and then I’d be walking home and I’d be hungry and remember the homework sheet in my backpack and I knew I wouldn’t be getting dinner and…” I couldn’t stop the words by this point and Chrysalis was holding me close, stroking my mane and cooing gently to me, “I sometimes would sneak into a grocery store on the way and steal some candy or bread ‘cause I didn’t have any money and I couldn’t eat proper food…my aunt,” I sobbed at this point finally able to take a breath, “Years later my aunt was watching me eat and said that prisoners of war would sometimes eat and eat and take whatever food they could even years later ‘cause while they were prisoners they never knew when their next meal would be, and I think she meant it as a joke but I went to therapy and found out it was because of PTSD…and she lied about it!” Chrysalis seemed confused for a moment before I continued, “My stepmom lied to my face! Months later after I’d gotten used to just not eating dinner she asked me why I never ate with everyone else and I told her, ‘cause I kept forgetting my homework sheet and she asked me what I was talking about and I said, ‘you said that I couldn’t have…’” I couldn’t speak for a few minutes by this point, unable to control my crying enough to form words.

By the time my sobbing settled enough to be able to speak, I had to clear my throat and blow my nose to make a coherent sentence, “I said, ‘You told me I couldn’t have dinner if I didn’t have a completed homework sheet.’” My face twisted up in fury, “And she LIED!!!” I growled out, “She said she never said that!” I was now shaking in anger, tears still streaming down my face still. “I spent…months…maybe a full year literally starving myself because I was afraid of a punishment from her that would be worse than starving. And I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

Chrysalis might not have known why that innocent sounding question would have triggered even more crying, but she did have access to my memory via the hivemind and knew me pretty well by this point, so maybe she had an idea... I curled up a bit, my muzzle between my fetlocks as yet more sobbing escaped before I was able to compose myself enough to speak again, “Because they always believed her!” Even as I said the words, I realized that I was hurting far more from the entire debacle than I had thought. “It didn’t matter what I said, if she told the school or CPS or the cops anything different than what I said, they always…” I stomped on the seat angrily, “...believed…” another stomp, “...her!” This prompted another crying jag, but this time I forced the words out through the anger and pain, “I had nobody to tell, because nobody believed me!”

The only accompaniment to my sobbing was the clacking of the train over the tracks. The nearby disguised changelings giving us space even as they functioned as guards. I heard the door to the car slide open and the conductor took in a breath, probably to request tickets. He seemed to catch the mood of the space and remained quiet. I heard the gentle murmuring of the pony as he checked the tickets of the other “passengers,” all changelings who’d been slipped their tickets by the ‘ling who was assigned to this particular train. By the time he got to our bunk I had managed to control my breathing, but I was still curled up with my head buried in my arms and Chrysalis had pulled me close to snuggle against her. Oddly, I found I missed the smooth coolness of her carapace as she cuddled me close to her pony disguise.

“Madam…oh, thank you,” said the conductor as Chrysalis showed him our tickets in her magic. As he stamped them, he asked in a concerned voice, “Is…everything alright?”

I actually heard a smile in her voice as she replied, “Oh, yes, thank you for your concern. My daughter is just…processing something that happened years ago. She’s normally very cheerful and would probably ask you dozens of questions about trains if she were feeling better.”

The old stallion chuckled as the rustle of his jacket broadcast the action of putting the ticket stamper away, “I’ve got two fillies and about six grandfoals, believe me, I’ve been there.” He clearly didn’t realize he was speaking to someone several hundred times more senior to him, “Don’t worry, young filly, just keep showing her love even if you don’t ‘get it’ and she’ll love you back, even when she catches the dreaded ‘teenage-itis.’”

Momma Chrysalis giggled and even I let the corner of my mouth creep up a degree or three. “I’ll keep that in mind, and thank you again.”

The stallion passed through the rest of the car, and after a bit I was able to un-curl and wipe the remains of the tears from my eyes. Chrysalis nuzzled me gently, “I…didn’t realize your stepmother hurt you so badly.”

I sighed, still shuddering my breath from my crying jag, “Yeah. I learned from her how to lie. How to break promises and not get called out. How to cheat and steal.” I was just short of whining like a canine with another sob that I managed to contain. “I wouldn’t figure out that was at all strange until my mid-20s. I just thought all kids had to deal with something like it growing up. People got confused when I asked how to tell what’s true and not.”

Chrysalis’ mouth quirked into a smile, “It’s one of the great ironies of our species that we, the masters of deception, must value truth more than anything, or we lose ourselves in the lies we must tell others just to live.”

We spent most of the rest of the trip back to the badlands in comfortable silence.

My old night terrors returned that night. Cooking meat that made me frightened for reasons I couldn’t explain, an eldritch abomination in the next door neighbor’s house, the ‘office’ that I was never supposed to even open the door to, and the nagging feeling that everything except that prison in my dreamscape was the entirety of my existence and I’d never, ever know anything different dominated my sleep. Even the one where I was across from my stepmother in the living room with the feeling of my life being choked from me even though she wasn’t touching me made an appearance. They were all so normal for me, and some part of my sleeping mind must have realized how…sad that was, because in addition to the frenzied terror that always accompanied these hell-dreams, there was just a sense of…sadness, like I was aware of how horrible it was that I was used to being locked in this sort of nightmare.

Nightmare Moon didn’t return to stop them, and when I woke up I worried for her.

Author's Note

Just a quick reminder that Chrystal Amber is me from late 2017, isekai'd into an AU of MLP. The described events of abuse actually happened and I will actively delete any comments that question my experience or minimize the effects of child abuse and neglect.

I'm not 100% happy with the dialogue/exposition section. I wasn't able to squeeze quite as much explanation of multiverse theory in as I was hoping, but the added plot point of the incident from my past was just so perfect for this point in the story I couldn't not write it this way.

Chapter 1 - Trauma

Author's Note

I’m one of the oldest Bronies in the fandom, certainly the oldest I know of personally. (I’m 40, which means the number of people in the fandom that are my age are older are in the single-digit percentages, if not lower) I’ve been an active participant in a number of fandoms (Trekkies, Herc/Xena, Ranma ½ and anime in general, etc.), and one thing that I’m finding amusing is the acceptance, even appreciation of the “self-insert” fanfics in the Brony community. In any other fandom, SI fics are considered to be bottom-of-the-barrel crap. The stuff you write when you’re cutting your teeth on this whole “writing” thing, and swiftly abandoned once your creative writing skills grow to the point where you’re not producing drek. Amongst Bronies, however, they’re not only accepted as a regular meta-genre, they grow their own fanbases that are as rabid as any I’ve ever seen.
While this is not my first SI Horsefic attempt, I am coming at this with quite a bit more experience, both in writing and in life in general, and I’ve got a decent amount of reading of other community accepted writings under my belt, so I know what works and what absolutely doesn’t.
Welcome to my little AU, and I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1 - Trauma

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

My mind has always been somewhat analytical, even (or especially) in high-stress situations. I believe this comes from a life full of upheaval, learning at an early age that breaking down in a panic in the moment will not help, even hinder, so what else is an adrenaline or stress boosted mind to do but calmly analyze whatever situation one is in?

One such crisis came about when a fuel truck exploded as I was driving past it on my evening commute. For reasons that will become clear, I never did find out what the cause was. Whether it was a terrorist attack (unlikely), over-pressurizing of the contents of the tank trailer thanks to the Arizona heat (possible), or simply poor maintenance causing several problems at once resulting in the tank blowing up during transport (most likely), I would never really know for sure.

Once the world swam into focus, I felt numb from my waist down. Having some unpleasant experience with my body going into shock thinking it was catastrophically losing blood when I was trying to donate plasma a year ago, I was able to keep my wits about me when I looked down and saw a section of my van’s steering column shoved through my torso.

About a decade and a half ago, I had the opportunity to learn a few life lessons from a Viet Nam war veteran. One of the things he taught me was the “three breaths” rule. He had seen enough death during the war that he was able to watch the faces of people who knew they were about to die, and they always had about three breaths between the realization that they were about to meet their end and when that end actually came.

Almost like I was able to see the countdown in my mind’s eye, I knew I had seconds to wrap up my life.

...Three…

I reached into my shirt pocket grateful my phone hadn’t flown out in the explosion and that I hadn’t opted to put it in the windshield mount like I normally would. I unlocked it, opened the phone app, and tapped my ex-wife’s face on the speed dial screen.

...Two…

Miracle of miracles, she answered. “What have I told you about calling me at work?”

“JoLene,” I struggled to speak, “Shut up, I’m dying...accident on the freeway…”

There was a dead silence for a moment, “...what?” I could hear the distress in her voice. I always knew she still loved me, regardless of how much she denied it, if only because her anger was a sure sign of the passion that hid under the lies her family fed her for years about me, leading to her divorcing me a couple of years ago. Well, at least I’d die knowing she really cared about me in the end.

...One…

“Tell Freya…” my vision was fading, I couldn’t see the sunlight anymore, “...love her…” I realized I couldn’t feel my fingers around the phone anymore, I was almost gone, “...love...you…”

I only knew I’d dropped the phone when I heard her crying out my name through the tiny speaker that was probably an inch from my ear, but in a moment, I couldn’t hear that either.

It was the sudden cessation of pain that told me I was dead. I was actually a bit thankful that I didn’t seem to be hanging around the mortal world, I never did like having to clean up catastrophic messes, and I’d learned the hard way during the divorce that lingering around old relationships was just a good way of torturing yourself. I was actually somewhat eager to head into the light, though I was starting to wonder why I wasn’t experiencing the “life flashing before my eyes” thing near-death survivors reported. Two things and two things only seemed to sear themselves into my soul as I passed, the faces of my ex-wife and daughter.

-~<^>~-

Free yourself, my daughter…

Sensation started to return. Fully rational thought hadn’t, I was operating more instinctually than anything else. I started twitching. Flashes, green flashes, flickered around me. My back felt compressed, I had no room to move.

Awake, my princess…

As the thoughts stirred my mind to consciousness, I started thrashing about, my limbs slamming into hard walls, my lungs filled with fluid. The realization that I was not breathing air hit me, so too did the spike of adrenaline that kick-started my mind. Holding my breath, I stilled to assess my situation.

...Daughter!? the foreign thought invaded my mind, distracting me for a moment. It was accompanied by emotions, fear, near panic, and an outpouring of raw, parental love like I’d only ever experienced when my daughter was born. The alien nature of the emotions caused me to jerk my head back reflexively, bumping into one of the walls and top of whatever vessel I was in.

As soon as I reacted, the fear abated to a less...toxic level and the panic disappeared entirely, replaced with relief and excitement. Come, daughter! You must free yourself! It’s time to come out!

I was starting to experience oxygen deprivation, so I was inclined to agree. I shifted, rather like one would move about in a hot tub or swimming pool, and braced my back against one wall, and getting my feet out in front of me. Of course, since all I could see was a very dim green light, only barely visible through the walls of my confinement, I was guiding my movements by muscle memory and feel alone. The symptoms of oxygen deprivation were hammering my awareness, lending urgency to my actions, so when I thrust out, hammering the opposite wall with my legs, I made immediate progress. A crack of light could be seen, and the muffled sound of liquid flowing out of a vessel reached my ears. Encouraged by my progress, plus the outpouring of excitement and love from...wherever it was coming into my mind, I repeated my action. Then again. After the third such strike, the wall of the container I was in fell away, and I was swept out onto a warm floor by the escaping fluid.

Gasping and coughing, I heaved in deep breaths, my mind suddenly inundated with a cacophony of what seemed like whispering voices, but my ears were only reporting the sound of a single other voice, muffled by the fluid still draining out of my aural canals and a few other orifices and crevacis in my body I didn’t want to think about at the moment. The sensation of warm feather-light touches brushed my skin, and in what light there was I could only make out blurry shapes. Whatever the warm feathery sensation was, it was joined with the feeling of being lifted and dried simultaneously. Whatever they were using for their towels was damn fine material. Still hearing the sound of a voice, but unable to make out any words in English, I felt the sensation of being bundled up in a blanket, encouraging cooing becoming a pleasant background noise as the adrenaline rush turned into an adrenaline crash.

The voice returned to my mind, relief, joy, and parental love pouring into me, Sleep, little princess. Having had one hell of a day...or however I was going to measure time now that I was dead, I opted to do as the voice suggested.

Chapter 11 - Perfecting

Chapter 11 – Perfecting
“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”
―Andrew Solomon,The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

As the days without word of the Caribou stretched into weeks, then months, the alert level of the hive went down. Chrysalis became less volatile and things started to return to normal. After nearly two years, Chrysalis decided that a diplomatic visit was in order to Thicket, a city state buried deep in the heart of the Everfree Forest.

This was my first major trip out of the hive, and the first where I wouldn't be returning to my comfortable, quiet room in the royal quarters. Our travel itinerary had us stop by the whistle-stop town of Wanderlust (where Chrysalis had taken me and the other young changelings years prior on a day trip) to catch the train heading north through the Macintosh Hills, switch trains at Ponyville, and then hop off the moving train at a location known only to changelings and (as I would come to find out) Reindeer.

Sleep the first night was a little hard to come by. I'd gone from being in nearly complete bedtime isolation, both mental and physical, to being surrounded by ponies (and changelings in disguise) and mom riding right next to me. In addition to the sounds and motion of the train, there was the sounds, smells (eugh!), and emotions of the ponies, plus the limited hivemind that would grow and shrink as we passed by and through communities large enough to host enough changelings for love collection operations.

It was finally just plain exhaustion that caused me to drop off into dreams, and when I finally did Nightmare Moon greeted me amidst the dark tunnels of the hive.

"My dear friend, how art thou?" she smiled as she gave me a neck-hug that equinoids used when they wanted to show casual affection.

I refrained from pointing out that her "Nightmare" visage was slipping. That had begun a little over a year and a half ago, and I made the mistake of calling her "Luna" and pointing it out. That had set her off on a tantrum and numerous attempts to frighten me by modifying my dreams. For someone who suffered night terrors, attempts from a friend to frighten me were akin to attending a Halloween "haunted house" put on by a well-meaning but severely inexperienced youth pastor from a community church; mostly jump-scares and attempts to frighten me into what the "scare-er" thought was the correct path. Much like the brain made of jello, the attempts were more pathetic than anything truly frightening.

"Bleh, I've decided I hate travel as a changeling. Too much clatter and chatter and...noise to really enjoy the road trip." As though the words acted as a summoning spell, the dream abruptly changed and we were once again in my van, this time re-creating my road trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Spokane, Washington.

"Oh, goody! You haven't shown me this part of your human experience before, where are we?" The child-like smile on Moon's face gave me a chuckle.

I surveilled the countryside as I drove, Dream-Logic allowing me to do so without opposable thumbs or even really thinking about it. "I'd say we're in southern Utah somewhere. I expect we'll find a gas station coming up here soon, it's probably the only one in a hundred-mile stretch, which is what makes this particular bit of freeway stick out in my memory."

Sure enough, a fuel-station and rest stop that had been new sometime in the 1960's came into view. The dream railroaded the van into pulling over for a fuel top-off, and both Nightmare and I broke out into laughter when a thoroughly confused Chrysalis stepped out of the convenience store.

--=--

Nightmare Moon opted for the back seat, partaking in my memories of road trip snacks (chips, crackers, trail mix, beverages both caffeinated and non, and a moon pie that she wouldn't stop giggling at the thought of) while Momma Chrysalis took the passenger seat.

“So because we’re on a road trip, we must engage in this silly fantasy?” queried Chrysalis.

“Mom, c’mon, it’s not any sillier than the full-bed seats that we’re laying in in the waking world.” I replied, pulling out my old iPod and cuing up my favorite road tripping music.

“Besides,” Moon interrupted from the back seat, “This is the only way I get to experience new things until the ‘thousandth year of my sister’s reign.”

Animosity over Celestia was one of the ways the two had bonded after their initial meetings, and while I would roll my eyes whenever they started in, I had heard enough similar bitch sessions from my aunts when I was a kid to let it bother me or attempt to correct their perceptions.

"Actually, mom, I remember a while back you said something about Sombra having something to do with the Caribou, which is the primary reason we're on this trip," I deftly inserted into the conversation, "Care to elaborate on that?"

Nightmare Moon paused in guzzling a Mountain Dew, "Wait, what? What does that horrible, mewling coward of a stallion have to do with the reindeer?!"

"Not reindeer," replied Chrysalis, "Caribou. There is a distinct difference."

"Kinda like the difference between Vulcans and Romulans?" I offered. At their blank stares, I blushed and said, "Never mind, forgot who I was talking to."

"After we had pulled out of Timbucktu..." Began Chrysalis.

Nightmare leaned forward to put her head between mine and mom's, "That was you? Well, yes, I suppose in retrospect that does make sense," Moon pondered, "But why did you attack Timbucktu in the first place?"

I rolled my eyes, "I'll explain later, Moony."

"After we had pulled out of Timbucktu, I dedicated as many resources as we could spare and still keep the hive functioning to the search for the Caribou. Having only known of them from our encounter in the pegasii city, we had only the physical descriptions to go on."

"Both overt and discreet inquiries to the surrounding nations gave us enough clues to venture into the Frozen North. This, coupled with a sudden cessation of all reports from the changelings that were stationed in the Crystal Empire were enough to warrant an investigation."

"We had no railroads at the time, of course, so it was an over-land journey, and one that was laden with confusion as I led our investigatory teams north; many of the ponies we spoke to gave us vague warnings of the Empire being lost, but as they were mostly operating off of rumor and hearsay, the image painted for us was unclear, more of what one might expect of a devastated nation-state that had been abandoned to the elements."

"When we arrived at the spot the Empire was supposed to be, we found...nothing."

Moon gave out a pained sigh, "Yes, I recall what was left."

Chrysalis turned in her seat to her fellow immortal, "I frequently forget that you were there. I'm afraid your sister has rather overshadowed you in history by this point. Even the Crystal Empire has been largely forgotten."

The surge of hatred banished the clouds of loss in Nightmare Moon's eyes as she focused on Chrysalis, "Do not concern yourself with forgetting my actions, or the consequences of them. Even my little ponies gave the credit nearly entirely to my sister upon our return from the North. It was our combined efforts that defeated Sombra, though how he engineered the entire Empire to simply...disappear like it did...I can guess, I simply cannot say for certain."

"I have...suspicions." interjected Chrysalis, "Perhaps you can tell us what happened and we can piece together the events into a tangible whole."
Moon nodded firmly and began her own tale.

[^]<^>|^|

My sister and I had been hearing tales of a unicorn supremacist taking over the Crystal Empire, and given the nature of the magic inherent in the Crystal Ponies, it began to affect other places in Equestria as well. As young as the nation was at the time, a mere 500 years old and still recovering from Discord's tyranny, we couldn't afford to let anything that would fracture our nation remain stagnant for long. We departed for the Frozen North after only the sparest of planning.

We initially had considered bringing an army, but with the schism between the unicorns and the rest of Equestria meant that we'd have to leave our most formidable combat magic behind, and taking a contingent of earth ponies and pegasii would have weakened the position of both tribes at home, leaving them vulnerable to the nascent unicorn supremacy movement. We made the choice to go alone, relying on our overwhelmingly powerful alicorn nature to take the place of an army.

To our horror, the crystal ponies had been thoroughly brainwashed. We were attacked outright, and it quickly became apparent that we were targeted merely because we were female. Once we realized that, it wasn't much of a revelation to discover that all the attacking soldiers were males under the full body plating and helmets of Sombra's military. The helms contained some sort of crystal lattice, shaped from the very black crystals that the evil king coveted. Once we determined that, discovering Somra's location was quite easy; we used a magical resonance cascade and traced the source of the magical signal to the Crystal Palace.

As we flew inward toward the city center, the magic thrumming through the black crystals began hammering our psyche. We had to retreat some ways in order to perform mind-purging magic on each other. My sister suggested we find a way to dismantle the magical lattice that infested the city at least somewhat so as to eliminate its effects on us long enough to complete our mission.

We determined that while the black crystals were conducting and amplifying the magic, the source of the signal was inside compounds scattered throughout the city.

[^]<^>|^|

"I suspect," said Chrysalis, "That those were the original Caribou forts."

Nightmare Moon and I had cajoled Momma Chrysalis into drinking a Red Bull, something she was only sipping at. I saw it as an opportunity to experiment; what would the dream-induced effects of a dream-created energy drink be on a dreamer? Moony saw it as a practical joke; whether Chrysalis got wired in the dream or the pseudo-caffeine tricked her system into waking up, it'd be a net win for Nightmare Moon. I think Chrysalis had a hunch we were up to shenanigans, ergo the sipping instead of the quaffing we were encouraging her to do.

"What would the Caribou have wanted with Sombra, anyway?" Inquired Nightmare Moon. "The Crystal Empire is fairly far afield from the reindeer's usual stomping grounds from what I understand. Isn't their city in the midst of the Everfree Forest?"

"Again, the reindeer are a different people from the caribou." Chrysalis reiterated, "In both cases, they're actually ideally suited to the Frozen North. Once upon a time they were a nomadic people who roamed the northern stretches of the world. It was actually the Crystal Empire's original Imperial actions that drove them southward." She took another sip and looked off into the distance of the Idaho farmlands contemplatively, "The Caribou may have been attempting to reclaim their traditional lands, they're rather fundamentalist like that."

"In any case, the Caribou don't begin their invasions outright. They are patient, they observe, they send in scouts masquerading as merchants or travelers or explorers, they find a male in the city they seek to take over who is sympathetic to their way of life, ideally one who feels that females should be subject to males, and it's an added bonus if the mark is a petty tyrant who feels they should be the ruler of not just the city, but has larger goals on creating an empire of their own."

"Once they've found their ally, they use them as a front; they purchase land for their first compound, then seed it with a control crystal. They build the compound around it, hiring from the locals to staff and guard it to avoid arousing suspicion. Once the crystal is of sufficient size, they bring in their priests, who start casting the necessary spells to begin their mind control on the area around the compound. They will then build other compounds in a hexagonal pattern until they've covered the whole city, or as near to the whole city as is physically possible. Once the final compound is complete, they merely need wait until all the males are brainwashed and all the females are subjugated. A handful of caribou can take over an entire city the size of Manehattan if given the time to do so, and nobody will be the wiser for it until it's too late."

There was silence in the van as Chrysalis took another sip. Nightmare Moon and I were simply gawking at her, suddenly speechless at this calm recitation of the Caribou battle plan, as well as slightly stunned at the evil, subtle ruthlessness of it. She turned to face us, "I've encountered them numerous times in the past thousand years. I've had ample opportunity to study their methods."

Moon cleared her throat and resumed her story.

[^]<^>|^|

We did not find any rein...Caribou. We simply found and dismantled the crystals inside the structures, and we quickly determined that an appropriately tuned magical pulse into the control crystals at the right moment of their collapse would cause a cascade failure in the nearby black crystals.Celestia preferred to leave the magical challenges to me, so it became my task to tear apart the crystals while she took down the waves of soldiers that Sombra sent after us as mercifully as she could. It took hours, but we finally made our way into the heart of the city and the Crystal Palace itself.

We were unable to locate the Crystal Heart, and this was probably what caused the loss of the Empire. Sombra proved too much of a challenge, having mastered the ability to harness the black crystals to discorporate himself. It was also his weakness, as we later found out.

As we climbed the steps to the Crystal Heart platform, Sombra materialized before us and issued a challenge. Once again, Celestia engaged in combat as I dealt with the crystals arrayed around us. In the place of the Crystal Heart was a large black crystal, similar in growth and design to the Caribou control crystals, but very clearly made by Sombra himself.

[^]<^>|^|

"This crystal," interrupted Chrysalis, "How do you know it was Sombra's design?"

"Mostly physical differences,lattice structure, geometry, size and composition, that sort of thing." Replied Nightmare Moon.

Mom was contemplative for a few moments, then spoke up, "This does explain a few things, actually. Specifically,what we found at the site of the Imperial Seat, or rather, where it should have been."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

Chrysalis grabbed a quick breath, as though steeling herself, "We found the bodies of over four-hundred caribou. The bodies were located about where the Crystal Palace was supposed to be. We believe that Sombra had buried them in a sub-basement."

There was once again stunned silence in the van, this time accompanied by the patter of rain against the windows.

[^]<^>|^|

Celestia was having some rather severe difficulty in fighting Sombra. "Prithee, what is the delay, sister?!" I snapped out at her as I scanned the crystal lattice for weakness.

A dome of light sprung up around me as I worked on the crystal, just before the vile smoke that was Sombra's incorporeal form slammed into it; the sound like a war drum echoed in the tiny chamber, vibrating the crystal as much as my ears.

Celestia landed next to me, easily passing through her own shield, "Tis his infernal gaseous form, Lulu. 'Fighting smoke' is an understatement!" So saying, she overloaded the shield with magic, causing it to explode outward, momentarily ejecting the dark mist a considerable distance. "Thou knowest we would be rid of at least half the challenge were't that crystal not powering the fiend."

I rolled my eyes at her, "Verily, if only there was somepony available who Starswirl considered gifted in magic present in this battle, mayhap we might be able to defeat King Sombra's vile traps!"

Celestia fired a beam of solar energy at a portion of Sombra's cloud that was beginning to re-form, frustrating his efforts to attack us again. "Sarcasm suits thee not, sister."

My scans finally yielded results at that moment, revealing not just the frequency but also the cipher to the magical spell that was controlling the populous. "It suits Us well enough, sister!" I shouted triumphantly as I triggered the harmonics to overload the black crystal.

The black control crystal shattered, and like a stone splashing in the center of a pond, the black resonance crystals shattered in a wave outward from us. As the caribou control crystals exploded mightily, taking their compounds with them, we heard Sombra's voice carried through his smokey form, "Noooooo!"

"Huzzah, sister!" shouted Celestia, "Thou hast defeated the dark king!"

Then, to our horror, the very city around us began to discorporate into nothing.

[^]<^>|^|

"We...that is I believe that when the resonance crystals shattered, the spell that controlled Sombra's corporeal form blasted outward, causing the city to simply...vanish into the mist, along with any crystal pony unlucky enough to be caught in it. They were biologically attuned to the magic of the Empire, after all; what affects the Empire, affects the crystal ponies and vice versa." Moon hung her head, clearly reliving the sting of having victory snatched away from her in a tragic deus ex machina that she couldn't have foreseen.

We sat in silence, the solitude of the open road slowly retreating to a small city as the vehicle once again directed itself to a truck stop where I had gone for food and to sleep for the night on the original trip that inspired the dream in my human life.

Chrysalis spoke as she examined the bright neon lights of the city signage, "Sombra must have studied the caribou's magic and hijacked it for his own purposes, then killed them as soon as he no longer had use for them."

"It probably wasn't even hard," I chimed in, "I'm betting the caribou hadn't even bothered to modify their spell once they got the basic functionality down. He probably just had to tinker with a control crystal until one of its basic routines crashed, then that would have given him the entry into the rest of the system. Given he was an expert at crystal magic, by the time he was done I'd bet he knew the system better than the original caribou that made the crystals in the first place."

Now it was the two immortal's turn to look at me slack-jawed. "What? I was an engineer and hacker in my human life. Magic isn't a whole lot different from coding and system engineering."

Chrysalis shook her head, "Well, be that as it may, our expedition to the Frozen North wasn't the only one. Right after we found the dead caribou, we were confronted with live reindeer."

As soon as Mom dropped that particular conversational bomb, a train whistle blew, and the city outside the van started to vanish. "Aw, man!" I exclaimed, "I'm starting to wake up!"

Nightmare lunged forward in a hug, "I'll see you tomorrow night, thanks for the memory of the snacks!"

-~/^~-

I awoke with a tiny snort, "Sure thi...damnit!" I was back in the waking world, once again disguised as a teenaged unicorn with metal wing cutie mark.

Next to me, Chrysalis (disguised as a pink unicorn with a startling resemblance to Princess Cadence but with a treble clef cutie mark) woke up,"Language, my daughter."

I stuck my tongue out at her. "Don't think you're off the hook about the next part of the story." I groused.

She merely giggled as she magicked our luggage out from under our seat, the disguised scouts and soldiers that were our entourage surreptitiously mirroring her actions as the train pulled into Ponyville Station.

Author's Note

As usual, if you spot any grammar, punctuation, etc. errors, please mention them in the comments and I'll fix them ASAP.