Once, long, long before any pegasus bore and lightened the name, a despicable human sorceress made the name Somnambula one to be feared. During her youth, she had been a vain and self-important enchantress, though not one of much darkness yet – she favoured illusions, an entertainer filled with imagination and a desire for the adulation of others. For a time, she had it, basking in the adoration of the crowds who attended her circuses of delight. One could fulfil so many fondly held but impossible wishes with none of the fogginess of a dream, under the auspices of Somnambula. However, a bane that comes for all in time came for her too – a bane quite keenly felt by all those in the public eye, and particularly the vain. Her features began to lose their finery, creases and faded hair sneaking into her visage no matter how many creams she tried. She who had been beautiful, and in love with her own beauty, took this as a mortal insult, and she vowed to do something, anything, to restore her youth.
At first, she hid the wear and tear with her illusions, but those were things she could only hold for so long at a time, and she always knew what really lay beneath. To her, it seemed worse and worse every time she caught a glance at her reflection, consuming and twisting her thoughts. With the growing decay of her loveliness, she realised that the glow of her life too was fading with it – something that leant new desperation to her search for an answer. While simple smoke and mirrors had been her bread and butter, now she turned to darker tomes, delving where she had not dared before. Insidious, the idea of what she could do with these grimmer spells wove into her mind, capturing her imagination. Where before she had feared this magic, she’d now never leave it behind, for it offered that most precious of cruel tricks – hope, at the expense of others.
As she ravenously devoured the secrets in the tomes her family had once wrested and hid from that of a witch named Hydia, she learned that she could drain the life force of others to bolster her own. Drain their years and beauty from them, to revitalise herself in new and shining glory. Time and again, she practised on small creatures, to be sure she had it right. Mice withered in a moment, and their benefit soon after, but it was proof that it could be done. The longer a creature survived the spell, the longer and more effective the effect on her – and the longer she had to ensure it would last beyond their demise. She knew how to ensure her stolen youth would remain, but the problem was that she didn’t have the skill to make it stick if she tried before her victims were near death.
Naturally, the best effects would be seen from youth belonging to creatures that lived longest, whose lives were the brightest – beings, in fact. Those that could speak. Once, she would have baulked at such a thing. To kill people was a big step, one that could land anyone in hot water, and if one gained a reputation like that, who would come to the shows? However, this Somnambula was not as she had once been, too consumed by her desire to be young and beautiful forever. She devoted her time to scheming up ways to stupefy her victims, to render them unable to resist her illusions – after all, an illusion alone was of little use against a strong enough will, and it would only take one to see a scheme undone. Scouring the land for any information she could come by on anything that could subvert someone’s will, she came upon an account of a type of magical canary whose song could enchant any adult – a defence against large predators, many supposed.
With a captured canary caged at her side, Somnambula brimmed with confidence, sure that she could finally absorb enough youth to lock it within her, that she could spend her days young, and keep her cup filled every so often to remain so. Her targets of choice were the ponies of Paradise Estate – even those fully grown lived their lives as full of youthful vigour and blithe happiness as though they were but innocent foals. For a while, it seemed that she had all that she desired at her fingertips, youth and even a power she had never known coursing through her veins. At last, she could even make her illusions come to life – a dream she’d left by the wayside in the search for regained youth. Her elation made her careless, however, and she was thwarted – in large part due to the love those too young to be affected had for their elders, the kindness of her unwilling accomplice, and the strength granted by love to one pony who adored one of those pouring power into the crystal she’d used as the focus of her grand working.
The crystal and her youth shattered in the same moment, she fled, aged once more and bereft of unicorn might. All that she’d worked for had been taken from her – but she was too tenacious to admit defeat just yet. Her heart grown grimmer yet in the bitterness of her dreams snatched from her like a kite in high winds, she began work on a new plan. If she alone could not sap the life from even the most innocent of beings she could find, then she would no longer be alone. Delving even deeper into the grimoires she owned – and then deeper still into some she’d pilfered from the land of Tambelon – Somnambula believed she had an answer. She would create servants for herself, creatures that could harvest the life force of others and deliver it to her. Creatures of change, of both illusion and truly shifting shape – and crucially, creatures which could feed upon that troublesome love that had so stymied her in the past. With love drained as well, surely there could be no resistance?
First, what she needed was a place of magical significance, somewhere filled with power and life. That wasn’t all that hard to find, in a land as magical as those she roamed – a thick forest whose name she didn’t know, if it even had one, fulfilled that need. It was old and alive, like an entity unto itself, full of magic and a presence like that of some spirit filling each nook. The air practically reeked of life, with the notes of decay and death all undergrowth carried with it – a balance. Within the wild wood, she came upon a swamp – like a natural cauldron for the potion she intended to brew – with a tree somewhere in the middle of it. The perfect host vessel – particularly as it hosted flitting little cousins to the ponies she so despised. A colony of breezies, miniature relatives of the flutter ponies. At night, while they slumbered, she captured them each in their own little blobs of enchanted honey, crystallising them. In suspended animation, of a sort, the breezies lived yet, but in no state to do anything about their state of imprisonment. While she stowed them away, she poured enchantment after enchantment into them, weaving illusioncraft into their very being.
With the failure of her first grand scheme, Somnambula had learned better than to put all her eggs in one basket – instead of securing all the trapped breezies back into their former nest, she selected only a portion of her haul to bind into the tree, keeping the rest back for other sites of power. Uncovering the roots, she carved runes of dark power into them, chanting and pouring vile fluids over them, before reburying them and setting to work on the immense potion she intended to make of the swamp. Gathering ingredients from wherever she could, she sank them into the murky waters one by one, chanting as the campfires she’d set around the edge flared higher than should have been possible, searing inwards across the surface and heating it to a bubble – but never once scorching the tree. It was a gloriously disgusting stench that greeted her when the fires died, but the potion was not yet complete. For it to properly feed her creations to be, it needed a very special ingredient – one she’d tried to harness before and failed, one that could make the illusions she’d sown the seeds of in her creations come to life. Unicorns.
The ponies she had so plagued before were hardly the only examples of their kind in the world, and much as she’d have liked to have a chance to settle the score with those, it struck her as tempting fate. Instead, she preyed on the unwary, those setting out on their own. To lure them in, bereft of a canary to put them in trances, the evil enchantress had put in the effort to learn other methods of subduing those she preyed upon. With the combination of her illusions and a form of spellcasting expressed through dance, her eyes became beacons of will-sapping transfixion – but only for so long as she could keep dancing in spite of her age.
She could have tried keeping those unicorns alive to leech of their lives, but by now she considered that too meagre an existence, and the risk of loved ones searching out and finding her victims too great a risk. Every single one, she bewitched to lurch straight into her evil brew to melt unheeding until too late, their bones soon enough all that remained of them. While they stewed, she wove a small plait of their hairs in with some of her own, tying it around one of the breezies in the tree’s hollow. That plait, she tied spiderwebs to, binding the other breezies to the focal individual by this means, so as to link all to one hub answerable to her. Then, she tucked in a picture she had drawn of what she desired them all to become, her intentions scribed on the back in the same runic script she’d carved into the tree’s roots.
Not content with a single, foilable attempt, she repeated the feat in other places of power – where she couldn’t find a suitable swamp, she’d corrupt a lake or a river, just so long as it could get the job done. In each spot, she found herself a host tree, and in each tree she stowed some of the captured breezies, a plait of victims’ hair with her own tied around a single individual, and spiderweb links to all the others. In each, she sealed a sheet bearing the likeness and specifics of her desired minions, the anticipation within her growing with every new incubating gall.
After eleven months of waiting, Somnambula was rewarded by the rupturing of wood. All but one tree ruptured, spewing forth the very first hives of the beings she named changelings. Their fledgeling hiveminds connecting to a circlet she had created during her wait, even those she had made into Kings and Queens of their kind believed her to be their Empress. Thus it was that her new minions infiltrated the lands of others wearing innocuous forms, stealing love and life force whenever they could ambush groups of thinking beings. Neither they nor Somnambula desired outright war, not at first – concealment was the cornerstone of her teachings in this time, that she’d not be thwarted again as she had been before, the apprehension of all she'd worked for being torn away once again spreading from her and taking root in them.
With the changelings pouring life into her, she was able to roam with a travelling circus all her own, a wonder of illusion and beauty. Claiming to be her own grandchild rather than herself, she basked in glory and youth once more. However, with time and success, she grew both greedy and ambitious, not realising that she was slipping into the trap of complacency. Bolder grew the raids she ordered her hives to undertake, drunk on her power. The servant Royals could see her folly, but they dared not disobey their Empress any more than their subjects dared act against them. In vain they attempted to convince her that to act as brazenly as she desired would court open war – that they were designed for stealth, not overt kidnapping en masse. She refused to listen, punishing those who suggested that her approach could be flawed, and the changelings could only watch her draw up plans of attack in frustrated fear – until one night, their Empress’ overindulgence in a more literal drunkenness revealed to them the falseness of her dominance over their minds.
Her circlet had slipped to the ground from her brow as she lay slumped and snoring – and with it her presence in the hiveminds. Before, even asleep, her mind’s resonance was felt by all – but not now. Confused and shaken by this unexplained shift, they trampled both circlet and wielder, crushing the instrument of their subservience as they grasped that at last they could be free to feed and act as they chose. Somnambula awoke during their frenzy, wrathful and striking out at them with her magic – but she was still inebriated, and the Royals had turned the powers she’d given them against her, feeding from her as she had bade them feed her. Feeling herself slipping away, she attempted one final gambit. With a burst of all the magic remaining to her, she attempted to possess one of her creations, to rewrite them into herself – but without her circlet, the tools turned foes assailing her were locked against her attack. Terrified and desperate, she dove down the last, faint connection she had left – that which led to the hive whose incubation had stalled.
The thread was thin, so very thin, and her essence under attack from all sides, only a sliver of her being made it through. The very core of who she had become, bereft of memory but steeped in the emotions and desires she’d held at her last moments, settled into the slumbering Queen, gradually subsumed into a new identity. That of a being less vain, but no less thirsty for conquest – the soon to be notorious Queen Chrysalis, who lay incubating while the other hives slipped into anonymity, only to wake at Starswirl's ill-advised signposting.
Author's Note
While this isn't a true prequel to my other work, I wanted to lay out how I thought the changelings in my version of events first arose, drawing on both a villain from Generation One and the origin of Chrysalis' hive seen in the comics.
