The Last Changeling

by GaPJaxie

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Cadance, Flurry Heart, Changelings, Sad, Drama, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 41155

Years after being turned to stone, a changeling awakes to discover themselves in a new world.

"I won't forgive you," Flurry Heart said, moments before she turned Cheval to stone. She didn't think about what she would do with Cheval after.

Years later, Cheval has come back to life, and Flurry must decide if she meant what she said.

The last story in the Third Wheel series. Thanks for sticking with me everyone. It's been a great ride.

Published 2019-05-10 04:20:02 UTC
Last updated 2019-06-17 01:46:02 UTC

Chapter 1

The last thing Cheval remembered was worrying about her mother.

Cadence lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by palace guards. Flurry Heart had just finished saying something about forgiveness that Cheval had only half-listened to. She was distracted, wondering if she got the poison dosage exactly right.

She only wanted to depose and kidnap her mother, not to hurt her.

Flurry made a sudden movement. Too late, Cheval lifted her head. Green mist filled her vision.

When the mist cleared, she was standing in her family’s living room, in the royal suite of the palace. Her lungs burned, and coughing seized her, but she retained enough awareness of her environment to notice that the palace guards were gone, as was Flurry. The only other creature in the room was standing right in front of her.

It was her adoptive mother, Princess Cadence, a soft smile on her face.

At once, Cheval tried to summon a defensive shield between the two of them. But her horn sparked, and a shooting pain raced through her temples. Still coughing, spluttering, she tried instead to turn into a fearsome dragon. But when she should have changed forms, little blue sparks crackled off her carapace, and pain erupted in her limbs.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Cadence said, so soft she was nearly whispering. “You don’t need to fight. You’re not in any danger.”

With no other options, Cheval backed away from her mother until her tail hairs touched the door to the kitchen. She looked around the room, first in a panic-fueled rush, then in more detail as the coughing subsided.

“I’m sure you’re confused,” Cadence said. “Flurry Heart turned you to stone with an alchemical grenade. We waited before restoring you. You don’t need to worry about the coup, or about me. That’s all over now.”

Cheval still didn’t speak, examining the pony before her in detail. As her eyes wandered over the room, she noticed that every way out was shut: every door closed, every window shuttered. It was like standing inside a cave.

When the silence grew too long, Cadence frowned. “I’ve… forgiven you, for poisoning me,” she said. “You made mistakes. You made a lot of mistakes. But that’s in the past. What matters is that you’re back now, and we can be a family again.”

Finally, Cheval said, “Nice try.” Her voice dripped contempt and a sneer touched her face, showing off her pointed teeth.

Cadence’s frown deepened. “Cheval, sweetie. It’s true. I know this is a lot to—”

“Okay,” Cheval snapped, “Whatever your name is, a few tips. First, Mom doesn’t call me ‘sweetie;’ she calls me ‘dear.’ Second, her coat and mane aren’t actually that shiny. She puts on a lot of makeup to make them look that good in public, but I don’t see any makeup on you, so, maybe next time don’t base your disguise on photographs of the target. Oh, and third, this isn’t my family living room.”

She pointed at an easy chair, sitting next to the couch. “That’s a nice chair. And that’s not supposed to be a nice chair. It’s supposed to be dad’s special chair, which is a stupid, threadbare, worn out bit of cloth and corkboard he brought all the way up from Canterlot because he’s convinced it’s the best chair in the universe and he refuses to throw it out.”

She let out a snort to emphasize her words, then finished: “So how about you tell Amaryllis I’d like to speak with her, and that she can go fuck herself, not necessarily in that order.”

Cadence said nothing for several seconds. She licked her lips and looked at the floor. “I called you ‘sweetie’ sometimes.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“And I switched to a new shampoo a few years ago. Some newfangled stuff with fancy chemicals in it. It works great.”

“Not buying it.” Cheval laughed a thin laugh.

“And we threw out that chair when it finally snapped in half.”

“Good improvisation. Nice technique, really. But if that chair shattered into a thousand pieces, dad would glue every one of them back together.” She slowly shook her head. “I played in that room every day when I was a nymph. I read there when I was a teenager. I had to clean every inch of it when I tried to eat solid food and vomited slime over the carpet. You think I don’t know what it looks like?”

“You were turned to stone,” Cadence said, her eyes still downcast.

“Sure,” Cheval took a moment to think. “I’ll believe that. But Flurry didn’t ice me until after I put her on the throne, and if Amaryllis is bothering with this elaborate ruse, I take it that means Flurry is holding her own. Or, maybe she’s winning?” Cheval’s tone turned mocking. “Is the hive not doing so well?”

“Amaryllis is dead,” Cadence said, her voice thickening. She licked her lips and added, “And we threw out that chair when it finally snapped in half.”

“Heh.” A stiff smile appeared on Cheval’s face. “Fuck you,” she said. Then she added, “You think I can’t tell the difference between my mother’s love and another changeling regurgitating energy back at me? You’re a bad fake.”

“I know this is a shock.” Cadence lifted her head to look at Cheval head on. “I didn’t want to leave you petrified for so long. But there is no Amaryllis. There are no changeling infiltrators anymore. The war is over. And whatever things you did, whatever mistakes you made, you’ve been punished enough. All I want is to help you and—”

Cheval lashed out with a leg, kicking over an end table and sending it flying Cadence’s way. She charged, and as the flying projectile caught Cadence’s attention, Cheval lowered her head.

With a burst of magic off her horn, Cadence deflected the table away. Moments later, Cheval wrapped a leg around Cadence’s neck and pressed her horn against her throat.

Cheval’s horn came to a point like a sword. It’s tip drew blood from beneath a thin pink coat. Cadence gasped, and froze stiff on the spot.

“You’re not my mother,” Cheval snarled. The doors to the hallway burst open, and crystal ponies in strange uniforms charged in. “Back off!” Cheval snapped. “Back off or I will kill this one.”

“It’s okay,” Cadence gasped. “It’s okay, back away.” The guards did not seem inclined to obey her, forming a circle around the two of them. “Cheval, the… the windows are unlocked. They’re unlocked. You can jump out one and fly away.”

After a moment’s hesitation, her eyes flicking back and forth, Cheval agreed. “Fine. Shuffle that way. Slowly.” It was an awkward movement. Cheval had to keep her head down, with her forehead pointed at Cadence’s throat. The guards moved around them as they moved, one tiny step at a time.

Then they came to the window. “Go ahead,” Cadence said. “It’s fine.”

“Open it,” Cheval ordered. The window glowed and the shutters lifted. Then the glass pane behind them swung outwards. A sudden blast of chill arctic air made it clear the window opened to the outside, and the sounds of city life could be faintly heard in the distance.

Cheval shivered. Then she pushed Cadence away, spread her wings, and leapt out the window. She didn’t get thirty feet.

The Crystal Empire wasn’t supposed to have skyscrapers.

She squinted into the setting sun. A strange skyline was before her, visible only in silhouette. There were buildings that dwarfed the palace, carved from massive shards of imperial crystal. Trains on elevated rails ran down every street. A cloud city held station over the ground below, home to the pegasi who flew thick as flies.

When the sun stung her eyes too much, she looked away. Eventually, a pink glow surrounded her, and Cadence’s magic pulled her back in through the window. Cadence was still there, along with all the guards.

“You’re hurt,” Cheval said. Her movements were sluggish and jerky, but she managed to turn her eyes to the trail of blood running down Cadence’s neck. “I hurt you.”

Cadence shooed the guards away. “It’s okay,” she cooed. “No harm done.”

“No. No. I…” Cheval reached out a hoof to Cadence, putting it over the wound as though to staunch the blood. It was wholly unnecessary—she’d drawn only a few drops. “I hurt you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know. I know.” Cadence said. “It’s okay.”

A faint shiver in Cheval’s torso built to a trembling in her limbs, until her hoof couldn’t hold steady on Cadence’s neck. Blood smeared. “No no. I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I know. Cheval, I’m your mother.” Cadence reached out to hold her with both hooves. “I know you. I know what happened. I know who you are, I know what you are, and I love you. I’ve forgiven you for everything that happened. I want us to be a family again. I want you to be happy again. It’ll be okay.”

Cheval worked her jaw open and shut without making a sound. She flicked her tongue over her pointed teeth.

“How long?” she asked.

Cadence drew in a breath. “Fifty-two years.”

Chapter 2

Not all of the guards were crystal ponies. Some were earth ponies, or pegasi. One was a unicorn, whose cutie mark was a zip-tie and a sword. His natural magic gave him the power to shape plastic into more effective restraints.

So he made a plastic cap that went over the tip of Cheval’s horn, rendering it useless as weapon. He also made caps that went over her teeth, lest she use the points to tear out somepony’s throat. It was as though she was wearing braces, and they made her lisp.

Cadence explained that she wasn’t being punished. She committed crimes, yes. Terrible crimes—mind control, sexual assault, multiple murders or attempted murders, torture, and treason against her monarch. But fifty-two years of confinement was enough.

She didn’t need to pay for her crimes. She needed to get better. Cadence was there to help her recover from the stresses and urges and dark thoughts that made her do all those things. The plastic caps and the inhibitor on her horn and the pills that prevented her from shapeshifting weren’t because she was a prisoner, they were for her own good.

They protected her from herself.

She was free to do whatever she wanted. She could leave the palace, see the world, do whatever made her happy. She only needed an escort. And once she could control herself, and was safe around ponies again, she’d be free to go.

When Cadence was done explaining, an long silence came between the two of them. Finally, Cadence asked: “Do you understand?”

Cheval stared at her hooves for a long time. Then she asked, “But why is dad’s chair gone?”

It was morning when Cheval was turned to stone. It was evening when Cadence restored her. A small matter, easily overlooked among half a century of distractions.

But Cheval didn’t feel like sleeping, even as the hour grew late. Shrine fillies hung up firefly lanterns, and offered flowers to those who had come to grieve. By midnight, she and Cadence were the only two ponies left in the graveyard.

Shining’s headstone was unfit for royalty. It was a plain, square marker in the dirt. “SHINING ARMOR,” it read, “SAVIOR OF CANTERLOT, TWICE-SAVIOR OF THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE, AND A GOOD PONY.”

Only the offerings marked it as different from any other grave. Ponies piled flowers around it, or lit candles, or left notes or poems in the dirt.

Amaryllis was there too.

“You want to cry,” she told Cheval. “But you can’t. Because your eyes don’t have tear-ducts.”

Cheval looked to her left, where Cadence sat silently. Cheval didn’t want to talk, but Cadence had said she’d stay as long as Cheval wanted to be with her father. Then she looked to her right, where Amaryllis sat, her gossamer wings folded against her rainbow-hued shell.

“Changelings,” Amaryllis said, “don’t cry to express grief. We buzz our wings against our shells to produce a sound like rain. Hujan, in vespid. But you were raised by ponies. You learned by watching the ponies around you that your eyes need to be wet when you’re sad. And so if you don’t cry, you think that you must not be sad. You can’t cry, so you think your grief is cheap.”

Cheval looked at Cadence again. Then to Amaryllis she said, “I hate you. I hope ghosts are real, because if there’s an afterlife it means you can burn in hell for eternity. Death is kinder than you deserve. I want you to suffer.”

Cadence didn’t react. A moment later, her ear twitched.

Amaryllis let out a small breath, something that was almost a laugh. Then she said, “Your grief isn’t cheap. Shapeshifting is part of how you express your emotions. If you have to turn into a pony to cry, it doesn’t make you a bad daughter.”

“Does poisoning him make me a bad daughter?” Cheval’s muzzle twisted into a snarl, and her tone turned bitter. “The last thing I ever said to him was, ‘Hey, I made coffee.’ And he believed it. He trusted me so much that even with a black shell and my legs full of holes, it didn’t even occur to him I might do him harm. And I betrayed him.”

“You put him to sleep. You didn’t kill him. He died years later.”

“You say that like it matters. Mom and Flurry didn’t even wake me up for his funeral.” She looked at her hooves. “Why should they have?”

Amaryllis said nothing. A chill breeze blew through the graveyard, rustling the flowers and the offerings. Somepony’s note blew away.

“I thought you cared about him,” Cheval said. “Somehow, even though you’re made of arrogance and hatred, I actually believed your affection for him was real.”

“It was.”

“And you couldn’t do anything about this?” she snapped. Cadence still showed no signs of having heard. “You couldn’t turn him into an alicorn or put his soul in a little jar or… or something? You’ve got thousands of drones who practice dark magic, and not one of them had a way to cheat death?” Her voice cracked. “He was a hero.”

“We were at war. I couldn’t exactly walk up to him with a book of rituals.”

“And whose fault was that?”

Amaryllis’s wings buzzed against her shell. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You were supposed to surrender without a fight. Then all the politics in the north would be over and we’d be one happy kingdom. I wanted us to stay together.”

“Right.” Cheval laughed. “You didn’t want to hurt him. You just wanted to take his kingdom, enslave his people, get between him and his wife, then chain him up in your hive as part of your harem. But you’d never hurt him. You cared about him too much for that.”

She couldn’t stop smiling. “I really am your daughter aren’t I?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

Cadence lifted her head, and Cheval’s alarm was so great she nearly lept out of her shell. But Cadence didn’t look at Amaryllis, and her smiled showed a quiet sadness instead of alarm. “He asked after you, you know. Often. He wanted to unfreeze you right away, but Flurry wouldn’t allow it. So instead he kept checking on you. He put shield spells around you that lasted through the whole war. He was so scared something would happen to you when you couldn’t defend yourself.”

“He loved me,” Cheval said. “How did he die?”

“He was poisoned. One of his aides was a spy for the international party.”

“Was it quick?” Cheval shifted in place. “I mean, painless?”

Cadence nodded. “Yes. He fell asleep and never woke up.”

“She’s lying,” Amaryllis said. “The poison destroyed all function in his kidneys. He wasted away for weeks under the care of incompetent doctors who thought he had lupus. They didn’t understand why their medicines and spells weren’t working.”

“Ah.” Cheval cleared her throat. “Were you and Flurry there for him? In the end?”

“No.” Cadence lowered her head. “She was ruling in the North. I was in the south, trying to rally the remains of the Stormguard to Equestria’s cause. It all happened too fast.”

“So he died alone.”

A shiver ran through Cadence. She squeezed her eyes shut, and for a moment, her voice cracked. “He knew we loved him”

“He didn’t die alone,” Amaryllis buzzed her wings again. “Others were with him. Comforting him when he got scared. But she’s not lying about that. She doesn’t know. They never told her. The officers thought it would injure the dignity of the army, if ponies knew he was afraid of death.”

“Why was he even with the army?” Cheval snapped, her tone shifting into outright anger. She didn’t know who she was talking too, and didn’t care which of them heard. The plastic caps on her teeth gave her a noticeable lisp. “He was deposed. He was needed, to help with Twilight and to protect Equestria with his shield spells. And he was getting old! There were younger officers.”

“It was what he wanted,” Cadence said. “I’m sorry.”

Cadence tried to hug her, but Cheval pushed her away. And so they stood beside each other in silence.

“I didn’t understand that either,” Amaryllis said. “I don’t understand why anypony thought of him as a soldier. That was never what made him special. He didn’t save Canterlot by stabbing Chrysalis to death, and he didn’t save the Crystal Empire with shield magic or the command of an army.”

Staring down at the gravestone, Amaryllis said: “He saved Canterlot because he loved Cadence so deeply their bond overcame Chrysalis’s dark magic. The first time he saved the Crystal Empire, it was because he trusted the ponies around them, and helped them do what he couldn’t. And when he saved the Crystal Empire from me, it was because he could empathize with a creature who didn’t deserve it.”

She flicked a hoof at the writing. “The headstone is right. ‘And a good pony.’ That’s what made him special. He was a genuinely good pony. All the way down.”

“He never…” Cheval had to struggle for the words. She was still lisping. “He never did tell me what he said to you that day. To get you into bed. He never told anypony, other than mom. And she kept his secret.”

After a long pause, Amaryllis replied: “He asked me what I was so afraid of.”

She needed a moment to find her words. The chill midnight air was descending on the graveyard, and as it gradually got colder, the colors on her shell stood out all the brighter. “To have come so far, and done so much. To have killed so many of my own drones. And to have gambled with my life. He asked what I was running away from.

“I said reform. I didn’t want to be a reformed changeling. But he didn't buy it. I dealt wholesale in atrocities and dark magic, but I expected him to believe this blasphemy was one step too far for me? No. I lied to him because I was too weak to face the truth, and he refused to believe me.

“He said I saw the world as predator and prey. That all there is is the powerful and their victims, and if I didn’t want to be powerful, a victim was what I’d become. Ponies were weak. They were prey. And anything that made me like them made me more like prey.

“He told me I was afraid of a world where Equestria forgave me for what I’d done. That I didn’t want to be your friend or your ally, and so I poisoned everything around me. I wanted you to hate me, because hate was an emotion I understood.”

For a moment, Amaryllis paused. Then she finished: “And he said he’d give me everything I wanted, all the treasure, all the power, the Crystal Heart, if I just gave friendship a chance. If I couldn’t do that, I was crippled. And he had too much dignity to surrender to a creature that couldn’t stand under her own weight.”

“Heh.” Cheval looked up at the sky. “And then he fucked you.”

“No. Then we made love. And I gave peace a chance.”

“You lied to him. Took advantage of him.” Cheval sneered. “Betrayed him and everything he stood for. You are a monster and he was a fool.”

“He wasn’t a fool.”

“He believed he could change your heart. But all he did was change how you look. He turned what should have been a quick battle into decades of suffering.” She spat the words. “Changelings are monsters and we always will be. And I don’t know if you’re a ghost or a hallucination, but I’m tired of you. Leave.”

Amaryllis vanished into the thin air.

“I’m done,” Cheval said to Cadence. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 4

Cheval’s room was just like she remembered it.

Of course, some things looked a bit more worn than they had fifty-two years ago. Her books were yellowing and in places water-damaged. Her window had scratches. And the thank-you note she’d forgotten to write to Twilight before she left for school was, all things reasonably considered, now severely overdue. It had mostly fallen apart in any case.

Her bed sheets though, were fresh and smelled like mountain air. Evidently those had been replaced shortly before she’d awoken. The sharp edges of the holes in her legs tore scratches in them as she lay down.

“I wanted you to see that we didn’t touch anything,” Cadence said. “We can replace all this with new stuff tomorrow. But I wanted you to see we never forgot you. It was always your room. And you were always family.”

“Why isn’t Flurry here?”

“She…” it took Cadence a moment to find her words, “thought it would be better if you got more used to the modern world before the two of you met.”

“Because I’d be shocked by how exactly the same she looks?”

Again, Cadence struggled for an answer. Her hooves shifted on the ground. Finally, she said. “It’s complicated.”

Cheval didn’t reply, and so Cadence stepped up to the side of her bed. “But your Auntie Twilight hasn’t changed a bit since you saw her last. And she’ll be arriving tomorrow morning to keep you company. I’m sure you have some complicated feelings on me right now, so I thought it would help you recover if you had somepony else to talk to.”

When the silence went on long enough, Cadence leaned down to kiss her daughter’s cheek. “Good night,” she said.

Cheval tried to refuse Cadence’s love. She thought to starve herself in her bed. But her gut twisted, and a powerful hunger overtook her. It was as if a pit had opened inside her, and she devoured all that was offered.

Somehow, Cadence noticed. She stayed a few minutes more, her horn softly aglow, thinking sweet thoughts until Cheval felt better.

Then she left.

Twenty-four hooves clattered on hard crystal.

“Cadence!” Twilight called, her enthusiastic words only partially muffled by the door. There was a brief silence, and Cheval imagined them exchanging a hug. “It’s so good to see you again.”

“You brought friends,” Cadence said. Her tone, not unwelcoming but with a hint of doubt, made it clear she’d been expecting Twilight to be alone. Then the introductions started. Twilight’s new friends—who were indeed new, having only been the bearers of the Elements of Harmony for two months—took turns sounding off. One was Comet Flash and one was Jade Star. A colt’s voice introduced itself as Astral Heat. A griffon, also male, said that his name was Sky Guard. The last Cheval did not hear, though she did hear Cadence asking them to speak up.

So Cheval got out of bed, and pushed out into the main room. Cadence and Twilight were there, along with two mares, a stallion, a griffon, and one very quiet yak.

“Hey!” Twilight’s eyes lit up when she saw Cheval. Without the slightest hint of fear, or even sign that she recognized Cheval’s warped state as concerning, she rushed across the gap between them and seized her in a tight hug. “How’s my favorite niece in the whole world doing?”

Her love was like caramel and candy-floss. It always had been. And so it seemed that alicorns really didn’t change.

“I’ve been better,” she said.

“I can tell.” Twilight made a show of looking her over, and kept her tone forcefully light. “Because, wow, you don’t look great. I mean, last time I saw you, you were like this cute little orange beetle. Now with the blue eyes and the dark shell you’ve got this ice queen theme going.”

“I am a queen. And there’s a lot of ice in the north. So I suppose that fits.”

“Um… right.” Twilight hesitated. “I was making a joke. To lighten the mood. I didn’t want you to—”

“I know what you were trying to do. It’s okay. You’re being a good aunt.” Cheval hesitated half a moment. “You sent me a book, before I left for Griffonstone. I meant to thank you for it, but I forgot and never got the chance.”

“Oh.” Twilight scoffed. “Come on. That doesn’t matter now.”

“You were a good aunt, Twilight. You were always kind to me.” Cheval looked at the floor. “Thank you.”

“Oh, come on.” Twilight's smile turned strained, but she tugged Cheval along with her magic anyway, pulling her towards her friends. “Don’t be so serious. Sure, life has dealt you a bit of a rough hand right now. But, the future is great! Trust me, you’re going to love it. And we brought the new new new new new new new new new new new new Element of Laughter up to cheer you up. That’s the griffon.”

Reassurance delivered, she turned back to the group for one more introduction. “Everycreature, this is Cheval, my niece.”

Twilight’s new friends stared back at her. A few of them grimaced. The yak hid behind the griffon.

“Well?” Twilight glowered. “Say hello.”

“Oh, uh… hi.” One of the mare stepped forward—a little black pegasus whose cutie mark was two chopsticks sticking out of a bowl of rice. “I’m Jade Star. I met Twilight two months ago. But we’re best friends now, which I guess makes me your friend. So um. Hi.”

She stuck out her hoof. Cheval didn’t reciprocate the gesture. Behind Jade Star, one of the other mares asked: “Why is she wearing a muzzle?”

Cheval snorted. Then she reached up with a hoof, tapping her plastic braces. “Because I tore a pony’s throat out with my teeth.”

Jade Star backed away so quickly it was like she’d teleported. One moment she was extending her hoof to Cheval, the next she was in the rear of the formation, hiding behind the yak who was hiding behind the griffon.

“She did not!” Cadence burst out, her reaction half a second delayed. The sharpness in her tone made Twilight’s friends jump. “She did not. She…” What else could she say? “She’s never bitten anypony.”

“Very reassuring,” somepony said. One of the mares.

“Okay, you know what?” Twilight cut in, her tone quick and matter-of-fact. “We’re changing the topic. Cheval, we’re here to introduce you to the future. Take you around town, show you the sights, meet some ponies. Help you get accustomed. There’s all sorts of cool new technology, and new kinds of ponies and other fun things to see. One of Rarity’s grandchildren is a tailor here, and he offered to make you some clothes. Something fashionable, that’ll help crystal ponies relate to you.”

“Okay,” Cheval glanced over the group. “There’s something I’d like to see first.”

“Sure, anything.” Twilight smiled. “Is it the monorail? I know you can see that from your window. Monorails are a lot like trains used to be, but, smaller. Also vaguely cooler.”

“I’d like to see a war museum.”

“Oh…” Cadence cut in. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. There’s a lot that might come as a shock, and you’re still so stressed from what happened.”

“I want to see it.”

“Cheval, dear,” Cadence’s tone turned firm. “It’s not a good idea.”

“I was told,” Cheval looked at Twilight, “that I wasn’t a prisoner. That I was free to travel as I pleased.” For a moment, her voice betrayed emotion, strain audible under her words. “I thought fifty-two years was long enough.”

“You’re not a prisoner. You’re not.” Twilight reached out to rest a hoof over Cheval’s. “We’ll go to a war museum. And all of us will be there to talk you through it.”

“Twilight…” Cadence frowned. “There’s a lot of things she doesn’t know. This will hurt her.”

“So did putting a muzzle on her,” Twilight’s tone turned snappish. “Didn’t stop you from doing that.”

Cadence froze. Her eyes went wide, and when she spoke, her tone was hurt. “That wasn’t my decision.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but this isn’t either.” With a lash of her tail, Twilight turned away from Cadence. “Come on,” she said to Cheval and her friends. “Let’s go.”

As the seven of them passed out of the royal suite and into the palace hall, Cheval watched the door behind them. Once it was shut, and she was sure they were out of earshot, she turned back to Twilight and asked: “Why did you let them leave me there?”

“I didn’t.” Twilight drew in a breath and let it out through her nose. “I wanted you released. Flurry said no. So I shot her with lasers. Pew.” She licked her lips before adding. “Flurry kicked my butt.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, she threw me through a wall. A solid wall. Broke three ribs, all four legs and one wing. I got better, because, you know. Immortal alicorn, but.” Twilight shrugged. “Your sister doesn't mess around.”

“I remember her when she acted like a fluffy ditz. I guess she grew up.” Cheval looked at the ground. “Did Mom fight her too?”

Eventually, one of Twilight’s friends whistled. “Aaaawwkward.”

The Crystal Throne

“Flurry, we—that is, Cadence and Celestia and Luna and me. That is to say, the other alicorns. We are, um, collectively. I mean, all together. We’re concerned about some of your actions. Recently.”

After a moment, Twilight cleared her throat. “We’re worried a bit.”

Flurry sat on the throne of the Crystal Empire—her throne. She wore her full battle armor, and rested her glaive by her side. And she made quite the sight. The throne sparkled, her armor was a work of art, her weapon had a shaft of ivory and its blade was magically formed as a single diamond. She was young and beautiful and always would be, but where Twilight was young and soft, Flurry’s limbs showed muscle.

There were two lines of crystal pony guards, flanking her throne on either side.

Flurry allowed the silence to hang. She considered Twilight and Cadence, and sat as a ruler sat, with her forehooves on her throne and her back straight. It was only when she was done thinking that she allowed the conversation to proceed: “Are you?”

“Flurry, dear…” Cadence took half a step forward. “We know you’re in a difficult situation. The Crystal Empire still isn’t safe and action needs to be taken. But some of these sedition laws you’ve been enacting… you can’t. You just can’t.”

“Or you’ll scold me and send me to bed early?” Flurry let out a derisive snort. Her horn glowed, and she pulled her glaive over to her, idly inspecting the shaft. “I think we’re a bit past that, Mother.”

“It’s un-Equestrian,” Twilight interjected. “Alicorns have a divine right to rule because we embody good things: love and friendship, the warmth of the sun and the beauty of the night sky. We’re avatars of harmony. We can’t hurt the ponies we rule.”

“I’ve hurt the ponies I rule; my wings haven’t fallen off.” When Flurry lifted her eyes from her glaive, her expression was hard. “And I will hurt them again, if it is necessary to keep the Empire safe.”

“This isn’t necessary! Amaryllis is retreating and—”

“She is retreating to preserve her army to fight another day. Which it will.” Flurry raised her voice, and assumed a commanding tone. “You have liberated empty tundra and logging camps, while Yakyakistan, the Diamond Republic, and Vanhoover remain under Amaryllis’s control. You have suffered heavy casualties, and are now far enough from Equestria that supply is becoming a serious problem. The griffons are preparing for a major offensive against the badlands. And I will not—”

“—we will protect the Crystal—” Twilight tried to cut in.

But Flurry shouted over her, her face twisting back into a snarl. “And I will not lose my throne the way she did!”

With a flick of her muzzle, Flurry indicated Cadence. “Weak and helpless, unable to protect my ponies, waiting for Equestria to save me. You left us to die, Twilight. We screamed for help and you didn’t come. So this time I’m not wasting my breath. The Crystal Empire must be able to defend itself and wage war in the North in its own right. I will not weaken our defensive posture in return for promises of Equestrian protection.”

“And how does killing ponies who question your rule enhance your ‘defensive posture’?” Twilight demanded.

“Don’t be a fool. Nearly a fifth of the Crystal Empire thinks that Amaryllis would be a better ruler than me. Our ranks are riddled with spies. We talk about changeling infiltrators, but for every shapeshifter, there are three traitors who willingly support Amaryllis’s cause. Left free to act, their influence will spread, and we will lose the Empire not through any military action but when I am overthrown. Sedition is a crime, and if I want to enact exceptionally severe punishments for that crime, the circumstances warrant it.”

Silence hung over the courtroom. Cadence looked at her hooves.

“You can enact laws to that effect if you wish,” Twilight said, her tone cool. “But when you accuse ponies of breaking those laws, they get a trial. They get to defend themselves. And if they are found guilty, they get a punishment that is appropriate to the severity of their offense. You don’t have the right to have them abducted in the night and murdered.”

“Why not?”

Cadence’s head snapped up. Her mouth hung open in shock. Twilight pulled back, and grimaced like she’d eaten something sour. “So you don’t deny it?”

“No.” Flurry folded back her ears, and stared down Twilight and her mother. “Why should I? When a naive young stallion defects from the army, it is my right to have him summarily executed for treason. But when a scheming mare with a love for changelings in her heart encourages him to defect, she is somehow entitled to a trial and fair treatment? Better that the schemer dies and the young pony lives.”

“So you’re bringing back the secret police. Just like in King Sombra’s day. What’s next?” Twilight snapped. “Banning public gatherings? They might be plotting against you. Arresting ponies with foreign friends? They might be communists. In fact, why have courts at all? Declare martial law, and you can personally dispense justice with your glaive and a storm drain for the blood.”

“Flurry, dear, please,” Cadence said. Her voice was weak, and it wavered up and down. “I know I was a terrible ruler. I made so many mistakes, and I’m sorry. But you were my sweet little foal. Don’t do this. You were a princess. Please don’t grow up to be a warlord.”

“Mother, I am a warlord.” Flurry sighed, and lowered her voice back to something like normal. “At this point, the Crystal Empire doesn’t do much except wage war. Food is grown for the army, crystals shaped for weapons, schools exist to train young ponies to calculate artillery tables and march in formation.”

“And when does it end?” Twilight snarled.

“When my enemies are dead.”

“And if Amaryllis surrenders?”

Flurry’s snort perfectly captured her contempt. “Then that would make it much easier to kill her.”

Then Cadence said: “And what about your sister?”

Twilight, midway through another angry retort, fell silent. She turned to look at Cadence, and Flurry did as well. The Alicorn of Love was trembling where she stood, and quite obviously trying not to cry. “What about Cheval?”

“She’s a threat to the Empire. She stays where she is.”

“How?” Cadence demand. “How is she a threat? She’s a teenage mare.”

“That is an exceptionally stupid question,” Flurry snarled. “She’s a changeling queen, and she’s pregnant. She can start another hive.”

“And her first batch of drones will come of age in, what, fourteen years?” Cadence struggled to speak, her eyes red and bloodshot. “Is that strategically relevant? Were you planning for this to go on for that long?”

“It’s not over until it’s over,” Flurry said.

“And that doesn’t happen until all your enemies are dead,” Twilight summarized, her words laced with disgust. “Is Cheval one of your enemies? Are her unborn children? Are you plotting to have your nieces and nephews killed because they might one day be a threat to your rule?”

“I will do whatever is necessary to protect the Crystal Empire,” Flurry snapped. She descended from her throne, picking up her glaive as she did. “That’s my destiny. That’s why I was born. And that’s why Cheval put me on the throne in the first place.”

“Then she made a mistake,” Twilight said. Her horn glowed. “This is wrong, and I can’t allow it to continue.”

Flurry didn’t wait. As her horn formed a shield in front of her, she pointed to her guards. “Shoot her, now!”

A bright purple beam fired from Twilight’s horn.

“Bitch!” Flurry kicked Twilight’s unconscious body. She lay in the rubble, surrounded by guards, her body burnt by laser blasts. Flurry’s battle armor was blackened and dented, and her glaive had a notch on the shaft. Long scorch marks covered the walls of the throne room, meandering along it’s walls and ceiling like great serpents.

“Think you can come and tell me how to run my kingdom!” She kicked Twilight again. “Like you know what war is?” She kicked again, and one of Twilight’s ribs broke.

“I have watched ponies die. I have seen what torture does to a creature. I saw what happened when my own sister tortured one of her inlaws until she tried to kill herself. And I know that it will!” She kicked Twilight again. “Not!” Again. “Stop!”

She lifted a hoof, and brought it down on Twilight’s exposed leg. It snapped, and bone protruded from the skin. “Until they are all gone. You understand? It’s not over until it’s over!”

Tears were streaming down Flurry’s face. She wiped at them with an ash-stained hoof, and then violently shook her head. “Make sure she doesn’t die,” she snapped at a guard, before storming off.

Cadence hadn’t fought. She’d thrown up shields to protect Twilight, but she hadn’t attacked herself. As Flurry marched out of the throne room, she shot one last curse at her mother: “What? Nothing to say?”

Cadence was crying as well, but she kept her composure better. She reached up and gently wiped her tears away. She straightened her back, and stood like an Equestrian princess should.

Then she said, “Both of my daughters are monsters.”

Chapter 6

Ponies stared at Cheval as she walked down the street. One could hardly blame them. Even those who didn’t know what a changeling looked like could see she was not a pony. She was a strange, monstrous thing, with a cap on her horn, a muzzle on her jaw, and an armed escort to prevent her from escaping.

One pony pulled out a camera and took a picture. When Cheval didn’t leap across the gap between them and disembowel him, others became emboldened. Lens bulbs flashed and shutters clicked as they made their way down the sidewalk.

“Hey!” shouted Twilight’s griffon friend. Sky Guard was his name. “Photographs with the princess are fifty bits.”

Collectively, crowd paused. One pony snapped a picture, and in a flash, Sky Guard was at his side. “Fifty bits,” he commanded, resting his talons on the pony’s shoulder, “or your camera.”

The pony pulled the film from his camera, and the pictures stopped. When Sky Guard returned to the group, Cheval offered him a chuckle. “So you’re the Element of Laughter?” She tilted her head. “It fits you.”

After a moment, she added a softer, “Thank you.”

The war museum was quite a large structure, taking up the entire city block on which it was built. Despite a long line and a staring crowd, Twilight held them up a full minute at the checkin counter asking about the suggested donation. A banner over her head proclaimed there was a special exhibition this month on “Patriotic Music of the Great War in the North.”

Twilight donated a bit for each of them. Ten paces from the front, she felt bad and ran back to add another ten. “Pay what you want,” she explained, was a tax on ponies with anxiety.

The first two floors of the museum were dramatic, Cheval supposed. They had flying machines that hung from the ceiling on cables, defused bombs, model submarines, and wax soldiers with full kit. She read about decisive battles in towns that she once visited to wave at crowds, and saw pictures of famous generals who she distantly recalled as staff officers.

But she didn’t learn much from it. She thought she understood “blitzkreig,” only to have Twilight explain that it didn’t actually involve lightning, or even any pegasai. It had something to do with armored vehicles, and the others’ explanations only confused her more.

When they reached the second floor, she learned more from an exhibit on yak soldiers. They were all dressed in black, their shoulder patches adorned with the symbol of Amaryllis’s Hive. Twilight’s stallion friend cracked a joke.

“How many yak does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he asked. “Two! One to change the bulb, and one to willingly collaborate with the darkness.”

Then Twilight’s yak friend cried, and seeing her cry reminded Twilight of Yona, so then Twilight had to cry. One of her mare friends poked her stallion friend and called him a jerk, and they all had to go learn a friendship lesson about racism. Cheval had seen Twilight learn that lesson already, so she didn’t interrupt. She wandered off, along with the two crystal-pony guards escorting her, and while teenagers argued, she climbed the stairs to the third floor.

There was a tour group forming outside one of the exhibit halls. “CHANGELINGS,” the sign above the hall read, “THE PARASITE RACE.”

So Cheval stood in the back of the tour group. A few ponies noticed her, but Cheval’s handlers said it was fine.

“Okay!” The tour guide was a slight little mare, with a blue coat and a blonde made so voluminous it looked bigger than her head. She wasn’t quite out of puberty yet, an adult but only just, the blue museum shirt that was her uniform slightly ajar on her frame. Nopony doubted her energy—it made her voice crack. “Who’s ready to learn about… um.”

Cheval stood head and shoulders above the other ponies, and so it was hardly possible for the tour guide not to see her. As the guide trailed off, the rest of the tour group turned to stare as well. “Um. Hi.” The tour guide said. “Who are you?”

Cheval stood with her head high and her back straight as she’d been trained her youth, and she said: “I’m Her Royal Highness, the Princess Cheval, daughter by right of Princess Cadence and Prince Consort Shining Armor, daughter by blood of Queen Amaryllis and Prince Consort Shining Armor, peer to alicorns and fifth in line for the throne of Equestria.”

When she was certain the tour guide had understood her, she added: “Who are you?”

“Um…” The mare cleared her throat. “I’m Misty.”

“Please continue with the tour, Misty.”

Misty had to collect some permission forms from the ponies who had foals with them, since the content in the exhibit was at times mature and disturbing. It was awkward. Nopony said a word and she fumbled with the paper.

“Okay everypony,” she said at the end, clapping her hooves just in case anypony failed to notice the concentrated enthusiasm dripping from her every word. “Welcome to the changelings…” She paused a moment to glance at Cheval. “Welcome to the changelings tour. If you’ve ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or had nightmares that your spouse isn’t really your spouse, this is the truth behind the myth. You’re going to learn about the race that murdered, lied, and whored their way the top, and who nearly enslaved all of ponykind. We all know about Princess Flurry Heart’s legendary deeds, but now you get to see the monsters she was fighting.”

The tour group, collectively, looked back at Cheval. But Cheval said nothing, and after a few seconds, Misty let out an awkward cough. “Okay!” she said again. “I’m going to walk backwards. Walking and talking. Let’s go.”

She backed into the exhibit, and everypony followed.

There were wax statues of changelings, posed mid-hiss. Collections of weapons. Samples of resin and model eggs. An exhibit entitled, “WHOREHOUSES: A CHANGELING’S HUNTING GROUNDS” discussed what perversions a shapeshifter could use to pry open the heart of an unvirtuous pony.

There was a statue depicting Flurry Heart and Queen Amaryllis locked in single combat, moments before Flurry plunged her glaive into Amaryllis’s heart. It was across the way from a diagram explaining changeling social structure.

“What made changelings unique among monsters,” Misty explained, “was their ability to use the magic of friendship and the power of love. All other races who touch the powers of Harmony this way are intrinsically good, with ponykind being the most notable example. But changelings had the ability to feel friendship, to feel love, to feel kindness, without letting it influence their inner desires. This was called, ‘becoming the mask,’ the process by which a changeling temporarily felt love or affection for the target.”

“Is that how they fooled Equestria?” a little colt asked. He must have been eight.

“Yes! Very good.” Misty beamed. “Are you learning about the magic of friendship in school right now?”

The colt nodded, and Misty went on: “Well you’re exactly correct. The princesses of Equestria were used to their powers of love and friendship telling them how every creature really felt. They couldn’t understand that they were being tricked! Even Princess Twilight was once famously conned by a changeling named Thorax, who used his power over the magic of friendship to convince her he really was her friend. That’s why Equestria got deceived again and again, and might even have been conquered if things went on.”

With a practiced smile, Misty turned to the group: “Only Princess Flurry Heart had the wisdom to see what was really going on. Today we take our safety for granted, but if you take the time to study history, you’ll really start to appreciate how her decisive action saved all of ponykind.”

“Why do you use the past tense?” Cheval asked.

Silence fell over the group. Everypony turned back to stare at her. The color drained out of Misty’s face.

“Um…” she stammered. “They’re… extinct. Changelings are extinct. Other than you, I suppose.”

“How?” Cheval asked. “How did that happen?”

“They were… um. You’re… changelings.” She stammered. “Eusocial. Were a eusocial species. The queen is the only one who can lay eggs. When Princess Flurry Heart heroically slew Amaryllis during the final assault on the hive, the changeling race was doomed.”

“What about Thorax?”

“Oh, um… the southern changeling hive was destroyed earlier in the war. That one is actually less important to—”

“What about the drones?” Cheval pushed, raising her voice so as to be clearly heard. “The ones outside the hive.”

“Changeling spies were—”

“I am not talking about spies!” The words emerged as a hiss from between her pointed teeth, and a number of ponies lept back from her. “A changeling drone lives seventy years. Amaryllis laid at least one batch of eggs a year. There should be hundreds of thousands of drones who are just past middle age.”

“Well, without their queen, many of them killed themselves.” Misty said, drawing herself up and finding a bit of her spine. “The rest left. The North wasn’t a good hunting ground anymore, so they left in search of easier prey. Some went to Griffonia. Others to Equestria. Only spies and saboteurs stayed behind.”

“The Northern Changeling Hive coinhabited the North with the Crystal Empire for nearly twenty years. Changelings made friends with crystal ponies, found work, built houses. Some of them married crystal ponies or adopted foals. They wouldn’t just leave.”

“I’m sorry, I understand this is a museum and you’re a historical artifact, so we can make some exceptions to the rules.” Misty glared down the length of her muzzle. “But in this day and age, the thing you’re mostly known for is poisoning your own family and trying to murder our princess, Ms. Fifth-in-Line-For-The-Equestrian-Throne. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust your appraisal of the virtue of the changeling race.”

With an apologetic glance, she turned to the rest of the group: “And in any case, the facts are the facts. The Crystal Empire proper was formally declared changeling free in 29 AR, and the greater North was declared as such in 37 AR. Survivors lasted longer in weaker nations, but Equestria’s last infestation died off about six years ago.”

Misty took a step back, resuming her habit of walking backwards while talking to the group. “Now, if you continue this way, we have a collection of authentic shed carapaces.”

Twilight and her friends found Cheval sitting on the steps outside the entrance to the Changeling exhibit.

“Oh my gosh.” Twilight was breathless. “I am so sorry. I can’t believe I got distracted. I can’t believe it. That was such a teenager moment I am so—”

“It’s fine.” Cheval shrugged. Her eyes were downcast, and her voice quiet. “It’s fine.”

Twilight looked to her, then to the exhibit. Her friends shuffled uncomfortably. “Did you go in there?”

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“No! No. Not… not all of them. We still have two left in Ponyville.” Twilight bit her lip. “And there’s rumors there might be a previously unknown hive in the Amber Isles. Nopony’s ever seen it, but if they’re hiding then—”

“Please don’t try to make me feel better. You’re being a good aunt, I know.”

Twilight and her friends looked at each other. Sky Guard reached out and put a talon on Cheval’s shoulder. Twilight pressed into her side. “I… I know you probably can’t forgive Flurry. I don’t know if you should forgive her. Ever. Some things are… but you’re here. Now. And you need to have hope. Things can—”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Twilight.” Cheval drew in a breath. “She’s right. We’re all monsters. The world is better off without us.”

Nopony knew what to say to that.

“I’d like to go home now,” Cheval said. “I’m tired.”

The Ponyville Hive

Light Step did a lot of radio interviews; she was something of a famous pony. Shortly after the war ended, she was asked to give an interview on her latest avante-garde art installation, The Showmare. It was a return to her roots, graffitied onto the side of an abandoned factory in the industrial district. The whole thing was getting rave reviews, and everypony in Canterlot knew it was the new thing they just had to see.

She and the interviewer sat down. The little light went on to say they were live, and the radio pony cleared her throat. “Hello, Light. Thank you for joining us today.”

“Hello, everypony,” she said into her microphone. Then she said, “And if we have any changelings listening, I live in the large white house on the north road leading into Ponyville. I have shelter and affection for any creature in need. I’m the sister of Princess Twilight, and she will protect you from anypony who comes after you. If you can make it to Ponyville, you’ll be safe. Flurry Heart can’t get you here.”

Then she talked about her art or whatever. The Showmare wasn’t great.

When she got back to her house late that evening, she got out the spare blankets and the cot. Double Time told her she should go to sleep, but she decided to stay up instead, and Double stayed with her.

That night, two changelings showed up seeking sanctuary. One got the guest bedroom, and one got the cot. The next day, a third arrived, and they had to use the couch cushions to make another bed.

The day after that, a group of twenty-two arrived together. They were all that was left of an engineering battalion that had been halfway home when the war ended. Some were still in uniform.

By the end of the first month, there were seven thousand changelings camped on Light Step’s lawn.

“Hey, Double,” Light gently nudged open the door to their bedroom. “How you feeling?”

Double Time didn’t respond. That was not so unusual, since the war ended. She lay in bed in her natural form and stared out the window.

“Well, I um… I have something for you. For us, really.” Light pushed the door open the rest of the way. A basket levitated beside her. “Look.”

Inside the basket, wrapped in layers of green cloth, was the little face of a baby earth pony colt. He couldn’t have been more than a few months old, and his face still looked squashed in that way that newborns do. He had a pacifier half in and half out of his mouth, but was more curious about what was going on around him. He reached out to Double Time, with his trembling little forehooves.

“That’s a child,” Double Time said.

“Yeah. A mare left him. She walked up and said, ‘you take creatures that aren’t wanted, right?’ And I thought she meant, you know, bugs. So I said yes. And she gave me him.” Light cleared her throat. “I checked. He’s really a pony.”

“Rarity wanted another child, didn’t she? She could adopt him.”

“Oh, um…” Light nodded. “She could. But I was actually thinking you and I should finally—”

“No,” Double said. Then she got out of bed and walked out.

Four years before Cheval left for the Griffonstone Institute of Science, Light had asked Double a question. Light had been in the form of a stallion named Burner, and Double was in the form of a mare named Smoke. And so, as a proper stallion, Light got down on his knees in front of the mare of his dreams.

“Marry me, you wonderful creature,” he said.

She flew away.

The ponies of Ponyville took them in, of course. They were a kind breed.

There wasn’t even a discussion. Every house in Ponyville threw open its spare room to a changeling that needed shelter. Twilight quartered nearly a hundred drones in her palace, and Filthy Rich another twenty in his mansion. But even with everypony working together, Ponyville simply did not have anywhere near seven-thousand unused beds. It was a small town, after all.

So the construction ponies of Ponyville built new cottages, next to the refugee camp that was forming on Light Step’s lawn. The changelings of the worker caste inspected the new buildings with a wary eye, knocked on them with a hoof, and nibbled on the wood a bit.

“Not bad,” they said. Then they piled rocks around the buildings, covered them in resin and spit, and peed on the whole thing to start the hardening process. The buildings that resulted were so solid a rampaging dragon would bounce off the side, and cottages meant to hold two ponies comfortably fit twenty changelings in their pods.

For the next set of structures, the ponies of Ponyville skipped the cottages and gave the changelings the wood directly. The refugee camp on Light’s lawn disappeared tent by tent, and in its place, a miniature hive rose.

“Double,” Light called, chasing Double Time out into the hall. “Double, come on. Don’t be this way, you…”

Double pushed open a hallway window, turned into a pegasus, and flew out into the open air, quickly gaining enough distance to be out of earshot. Not that that stopped Light from shouting, “Bitch!” at Double’s retreating tail.

Then the baby started to cry. It took her awhile to deal with that.

Some of the changelings in Ponyville were nursery workers. On the day of the final battle, they had fled the burning hive with their children stuffed into backpacks and saddlebags. In total, eighteen grubs and thirty-two nymphs survived the journey.

They asked Twilight to inspect them.

“Um…” Twilight asked. “Inspect them for what? I don’t know anything about children’s health. Um. For changelings or ponies.”

“Overall quality,” one of the changelings explained. A large swarm had gathered outside Twilight’s castle, looking up at her silently. “To determine if they’re good. And correct their parents if their upbringing has been deficient.”

“Oh, I can’t.” Twilight blushed and raised a hoof. “I don’t know anything about raising children. I’m kind of a teenager myself.”

“But you’re the…” The spokeschangeling cleared her throat. “Princess. The leader. Of the town. You must decide if the children are good.”

“I’m sure their parents can decide if their own children are…” Twilight frowned, biting her lip. She looked back at Light and Double for direction. “Are good. Can’t they?”

“Of course not,” Double snapped, “Parents love their children. They can’t be objective about them. That’s why in the hive, Amaryllis inspects all the children once a month. Inspected. She lined the little brats up and walked down the line like it was a military review.”

“Don’t talk about inspection that way,” the changeling from the mob said. “It’s important the nymphs have an authority figure to look up to.”

“Why?” Double asked, buzzing over her way. “Why is that important? What’s going to happen if they don’t have an authority figure in their lives? Mmm? What precisely is going to happen?” She got so close, she and the other changeling were nose to nose. “Do you not understand that it’s over? It’s all over. Your queen is dead. She is gone and the hive is gone and they are never coming back and the sooner you clue into that the better!”

“Double, that’s enough,” Twilight snapped. “You don’t have to—”

Double flew away.

The next morning, all seven-thousand changelings lined up on the outskirts of Ponyville so Twilight could inspect the nymphs. She picked one up, and said that it looked, “Very clever.”

For six months, a thousand changelings worked menial jobs in the greater Ponyville area and pooled all the money to send that nymph to a university in Canterlot. They all knew Twilight was only being polite. But it made them feel better.

There was work to be done. Light couldn’t sit around the house waiting for Double to come back. So she levitated her basket beside her, and marched out into the hive.

It was dark, crowded, confusing, and had a smell that was strongly reminiscent of urine and pollen, but that was apparently how changelings preferred it. Some were in their natural forms and some pretended to be ponies, but all of them politely made way for her. If they treated Twilight like their leader, they treated her like an officer. Some even saluted her as she passed.

She was surprised the little one didn’t cry, but the smell and the buzzing of many insectile wings lulled him right to sleep.

The first order of the day was resolving a dispute between the hive and some ponies from outside of town. The ponies were seasonal laborers, who came to Ponyville every year as hired hooves to help with the harvest. But that year, they arrived to find themselves displaced by changeling refugees, who didn’t rest and worked for hugs. After some haggling, she paid them a fair wage to help teach the new arrivals more advanced farming skills. It smoothed things over.

Next, she had to deal with a group of changelings who were uncomfortable being in their natural forms. They preferred to impersonate ponies, but the ponies of Ponyville had made it clear that nopony’s form was to be mimicked without their consent. And so, Light Step gave her consent, and a dozen copies of her ran out into the world, each wearing a prominent purple pin that said: “Secret Shapeshifter”

Finally, she went into Ponyville to run her errands. She had to meet with her sister, send some letters, get more formula for the baby, get her mane cut, and pick up some things. The last item on her list was heading to Bon Bon’s for some candy—that always made her feel better.

When she arrived in the shop, she found the counter unstaffed. A faint rustling and thumping was coming from the back room. Light assumed Bon Bon was hard at work. “Hello?” she called, pushing open the door. “Is anypony…”

Peering through the doorway, she saw Bon Bon In flagrante with two identical Lyras. All three were frozen in alarm at the sight of the open door. The pose they were all in was quite complicated. Both Lyras had their hooves in interesting places, and they were doing something with their horns that caused a magical glow under Bon Bon’s tail. It looked fun.

Light sighed. “Just to check, are any of you my girlfriend?”

“We’re not in a relationship,” one of the Lyra’s snapped.

“Oh my gosh,” the other Lyra quickly covered her privates. “Shut the door!”

“Aaand, the mood is dead,” Bon Bon said, falling back to the floor. “Thanks, Double. Really.”

“Look,” Light said, without closing the door first, “Will you just come home please?”

“I don’t have a home. You have a home,” Double said, still using Lyra’s voice. “I sleep in other buildings you know.”

“Yes, and you sleep with other ponies. Case in point,” Light gestured.

“Shut the door!” the real Lyra yelled. Both Double and Light ignored her.

“Double,” Light spoke quickly, “I accepted that more than a decade ago. I’m fine with it, and we planted a garden together. There’s a mug in the cabinet with your initials on it. It is your home. It is our home. Please talk to me.”

Double scrambled out the door into the alley behind the shop. Lyra, for her part, remembered she was a unicorn -- and with a blast of telekinesis, slammed the door to the front.

Some of the changelings tried to offer Light Step a replacement girlfriend—one who looked just like Double Time, even in her natural form. At first, Light was furious, but then she noticed all the ponies in the group around her were worker caste.

None of them, she realized, really understood what a special somepony was. And so she stopped yelling and spent an hour explaining the birds and the bees to creatures that were, in some regards, very much like bees.

They didn’t get it.

Ponyville was a good town. Nopony minded if Double Time slept around, but when word got out she and Light were on the rocks, she found her comfort food frequently interrupted by good intentions.

Nothing ruins the mood like being asked, “But have you really tried to work things out with her?” midway through cropping a bound pony’s flanks.

It still took three days for Double to come home. Light didn’t hear her enter. She woke up one morning, and there was Double in her bed. She was still trying to decide what to say, when the baby started crying.

“Don’t you dare vanish before I get back,” she said, stumbling out of bed and off to the next room.

When the little one had been fed, burped, and changed, Light returned. To her surprise, Double really was still there, curled up on top of the blankets and staring out the window. “You can’t just show up with a foal,” Double said. “You can’t walk in on your partner and give them a child like it was a toy.”

“You heard the part where someone abandoned him on my doorstep right?” Light grumbled as she slid back into bed. “I’d give him to the nursery workers, but some of them are still unclear on the fact that ponies can’t eat all their food for the week in one enormous meal.”

“Give him to somepony who can take care of him then.”

“We can take care of him.” Light wrapped her legs around Double, holding her from behind. “Don’t you want to create something together?”

“We do. We create art. You paint and I’m your muse.” Double shifted in bed, like she couldn’t get comfortable. “What do you do is beautiful. Looking at it… it makes me feel better.”

“I’m not going to be remembered as an artist. Decades of art school and painting and gallery shows, and if history remembers me, it’s going to be as the mare who saved seven-thousand changelings.” She kissed the back of Double’s head. “It’s a good legacy.”

“I’m sorry. But you’re wrong.” Double gripped Light’s hoof with her own. “You’re a genius, Light. Ponies will be looking at your art for centuries. Little art students are going to bitch at each other about trying to rip your style, just like we did at that age. But all this?” She gestured out the window at the hive beyond. “In fifty years, this is going to be ruins.”

Double’s wings buzzed, tapping against her shell. It made a sound like falling rain. “Nopony will ever want to live in them, or maintain them. But changeling buildings are… are very strong. They’ll stand for centuries. The ruins will last long than we ever will. Tourists will come to Ponyville and take pictures of these weird, mystic-looking structures full of dust and shed carapaces. And there’s going to be a little plaque with your name on it, saying that you did this during your blue period.”

“I wish I understood the hold Amaryllis has on you.” Light let out a breath, and smiled a sad smile. “I don’t know if it’s biological, or magic, or how you were raised, but no matter how many times ponies forgive you, no matter how many good things you do or build, you always think of yourself as Double Time, Changeling Infiltrator. Like the last twenty years were playing pretend, and she’s the real you. Like any day you’re going to go back to being that creature.”

“It’d be pretty impressive if she had a hold on me at this point, seeing as how she’s dead.”

“I don’t know if it’s impressive. But she does.” Light drew in a breath and squeezed Double again. “You still think she is the hive. That without her it’s all over.”

“My species is going to go extinct. I’m not sure how much more over it can be than that.”

“I…” Light hesitated. “I’m sorry. I don’t… I don’t know what…” She stumbled over her words. “Your legacy isn’t just the creatures that Queen Amaryllis squeezed out of her thighs. That’s how you think of it. You came from her and will one day return to her, and your legacy is the next generation she creates. And that’s crap. Your legacy is the ponies you influence and who care about you and the mark you leave on the world.”

Light sniffled. “And if there are parts of the hive you think are worth preserving, you can… you can teach. You’re a drone, remember? You couldn’t breed children before and you can’t breed them now. But you can still raise them. You can still create something in this world that’s a worthy legacy. And…”

She started to choke up, managing a weak: “And fuck you for thinking that my art matters more than this. How much am I going to have to love you before you stop thinking of yourself as an expendable pawn? They matter and you matter.”

For a long time, there was silence between them.

“I don’t have a…” Double spoke slowly. “Pair bonding instinct. You’re really not my girlfriend, Light. You’re not. I don’t feel that.”

“But you love me,” Light said. “I know you love me.”

“I love other ponies too.”

“Yeah, I know, and I don’t care.” Light squeezed her eyes shut. “I know you’re never going to be my little pony wife. You’re not going to dote on foals and coo over grandkids and carry pictures of them around because they’re just so cute. But you’re the creature I’ve chosen as the love of my life, and I can’t imagine raising a foal with anyone else.”

“Our relationship isn’t fair. It never was. I use you. You love me and only me, and stay up late to see if I’ll come home. I run off on you when the conversation gets boring.”

“Yup. You can be kind of manipulative. And do you think I’m so stupid I haven’t noticed that in the last twenty years?” Light stiffened her tone. “Or do you think I’m still the stupid, emotional filly you met in college who can’t make her own decisions?”

“I think I’m a monster, and you deserve better.”

“Well you’re wrong.” She tightened her grip around Double. “And I’m keeping him. Because I don’t think you will run off. I think you’re better than you believe you are. I think this is when you admit that you…”

She couldn’t finish. Her voice cracked, and she lapsed into silence. In the next room, the baby started to cry again.

“I’ll… I’ll…” Light stumbled out of bed. “I need to go.”

Before she made it to the hallway door, Double asked: “What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have one yet.” Light rubbed her eyes. “But, it should be something important to both of us. So. I was thinking of naming him after his uncle. Shining Armor.”

“No. It’s a good idea, but Shining hasn’t been dead long enough to reuse his name like that. It would be disrespectful.” Double thought it over for a moment. “Gallant.”

“I like ‘Gallant,’” Light said. The baby’s crying intensified. “I gotta go.”

When she returned, Double was still there.

Gallant. Like all good pony names, it had layers of meaning. It meant one who is brave and heroic, which he certainly was. He got that from Light’s side of the family. But in old Equestrian, it referred to a stallion with many mare friends, and he was certainly that too.

He got it from Double, everypony said. Ponyville loved to tell stories of his adventures. He was Daring Do for a new generation, punching out griffons and escaping with a beautiful mare.

He even saved Equestria, once. There was a communist superweapon in a volcano base and everything. It was a big deal, at the time.

Of course, by the time he turned forty-five, his adventuring days were done. His mane had turned grey, his interests mundane, and he spent a little more time at home. Like most children of the Ponyville Hive, he’d developed a preference for small spaces and confusing architecture.

One day, while sitting in what used to be Light’s study, he flipped open the newspaper. “CHANGELING PRINCESS CHEVAL SIGHTED IN CRYSTAL EMPIRE,” the headline read. There were pictures.

He got up, walked over to the bookshelf, and from it lifted a special wooden box. It was covered in dust. The last time he’d touched it, his mothers had been alive.

Opening it revealed a collection of books, scrolls, and magical items. On top of all of them was a pair of letters, neatly addressed to the last changeling princess.

He booked his tickets to the Crystal Empire that afternoon.

Chapter 8

When Cheval said she was tired, it was because she wanted to leave the museum. But on the long walk back to the palace, a genuine exhaustion overtook her. Her steps grew heavy, and though it was not even noon, her head started to slump. With the exhaustion came a powerful hunger, as though she had not eaten in weeks.

Twilight and her friends fretted and tried to call her a cab, but Cheval managed to finish the walk to the palace on her own. When she arrived, she clung to Cadence, and devoured all the love her mother had to give.

After she feasted, she fell asleep on the living room couch. Cadence thanked Twilight, but suggested they should leave for now. Then she took up her own place, sitting opposite her daughter and watching her rest.

Cheval slept for the whole day. Cadence didn’t leave her side once.

She awoke shortly before sunset, her eyes fluttering open. She needed a moment to rouse herself, little popping sounds emerging from her joints as she stretched.

“Hey there, sleepy,” Cadence said. “You were tired. You slept all day.”

“I guess I did.” Cheval moved to sit up, but paused midway through the motion. She turned to look down at herself, and let out a weak chuckle. With more care, she sat up the rest of the way. “Um. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Cadence put on a soft smile. “You were up all night last night. You need some time to adjust.”

“I don’t think that’s why.” Cheval gestured down at her midsection. Her angular, rail-thin build made the slightest change to her figure noticeable. The chitinous plates around her belly were starting to bow outwards. It made her look pudgy.

“That’s from overeating. You’ve barely been pregnant two weeks. It’s too early for any physical symptoms.”

“If I was a pony, it would be. But I’m not creating a foal, am I? I’m creating eggs that are smaller than marbles.” She paused. “About a thousand of them. How much room do a thousand marbles take up? I feel like it wouldn’t be very much. Do I actually get fat when I’m pregnant, or is this little bulge all I get?”

“Don’t worry about—”

“Of course,” she looked her mother in the eye, “you must have considered what you were going to do with them before you unfroze me.”

“I’m…” Cadence paused. Her eyes went to the floor. “I think there are families in Equestria who would be happy to adopt them.”

“But we aren’t in Equestria, are we?” Cheval’s eyes flicked around the room, and a weak smile touched her face. “And the door isn’t open for me to leave.”

“I’m sure Flurry would be fine with your drones going to Equestria,” Cadence’s eyes stayed on the floor. “They can’t start a new hive. They’re no threat.”

“If you’re sure of that, then either you’re a fool or she is,” Cheval’s jaw pulled back into a sneer. “A thousand creatures who know that the survival of their species depends on my freedom. They’d become her thousand most bitter enemies and they’d never stop until I was free or she was dead.”

“I didn’t know what to do.” Cadence’s voice cracked. “I couldn’t refuse a chance to unfreeze you. Not after so many years waiting. I was so afraid you’d shatter. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I want us to…” Her voice wavered. “I want to forgive you. And I want you to be happy again. And I want us to be family again.”

Cheval’s sneer faded. She looked at the floor herself, then back up at her mother. Eventually she rose from the couch, walked over to Cadence’s side of the room, and wrapped her mother in a hug. “I know. I…”

Cadence hugged her back, and into that hug she whispered. “I kept waiting to forget your father. I thought that’s how it was supposed to work. I’m an alicorn. I’m supposed to reset to zero, to find another husband, remarry, care for others. But I couldn’t. I keep rolling over in bed and expecting him to be there. And I keep waiting for you to bound in from your lessons, all excited to show me what you learned.”

Cadence’s eyes filled with tears, and her voice choked up. It was only with effort that she said: “Sometimes I think it’s supposed to be that way. I’m the alicorn of love. I embody love. And all I do is grieve for the husband and the children I lost. That maybe that’s what this world is. Love is pain, and losing the ponies you care about.”

But when it seemed she might cry, she pulled back and looked Cheval right in the eye. She smiled, and held her daughter’s cheek. “But then I think about what your father would say if he heard me like that. It’d be something inspiring, about bucking off your destiny and… and doing what nopony thought you could. And I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to forgive you the way he would, and I believe you will make everypony glad I did. So many things have happened, but under it all, you are still my sweet little filly.”

“I was never a filly.”

“Yes you were. And if I made you feel like you weren’t, it’s because I wasn’t always a great mother.” Despite her tears, Cadence forced her smile to brighten. “But you’re here, now. And now I can make up for past mistakes. We’ll save you and we’ll save your children, and you’ll have the happy life you deserve.”

Cheval took her mother’s hoof, smiled, looked her right in the eye, and lied.

She stayed up late working on her suicide note.

It went through many drafts. After all, she had a lot of ponies to think about. She needed to reassure Cadence that it wasn’t her fault, to reassure Flurry that she didn’t regret putting her on the throne, and to say thank you to Twilight and her friends. They really had meant well.

She considered not saying anything about Sky Guard. She’d only met him that morning, and so it felt strange to include him in her last words. But he was kind to her, and she wanted him to know she appreciated it. She didn’t know him well, but she thought he’d be a good Element of Laughter.

She was still working on the wording of the last paragraph when the little clock on her desk struck midnight.

“Please don’t do this,” Amaryllis said, her voice laced with fear. She was begging.

Cheval, unperturbed, looked at her clock. “Midnight again,” she said, forehooves folded on her desk. “So, are ghosts real after all?”

“Your family needs you. Your children need you,” Amaryllis forced her way around the desk, leaning over the paper to look at Cheval head on. “You’re the savior of our species.”

But Cheval remained undisturbed, and spoke calmly. “Or, is this some kind of changeling hive-mind magic? I understand I have some kind of psychic link to other changelings near me, but I confess, I was always unclear on how that worked. When Double described it, it always seemed vague and wishy-washy.”

Amaryllis pulled back, staring at Cheval with a confused expression. Again, Cheval spoke into the silence: “Or are you the result of a damaged mind? I believe ghosts appear at midnight, so that’s when I conjure you into existence?”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“Who’s joking? You could tell me with certainty if there’s life after death, or if I carry the psychic impressions of an entire species. Either would be big news. So why the silent treatment? What are you?” Cheval leaned forward, but Amaryllis pulled back, and said nothing. “Do you not know? Do you not know what you are? Are you as surprised you’re still around as I am?”

“You’re your mother’s last hope of a happy life.” Amaryllis’s tone again turned pleading. “If you do this, you’re condemning her to eternal misery.”

“Well, now you’re boring. You used to be better at manipulating me than that.” Cheval finished the last paragraph and put down her quill, folding the paper before her. Being a princess, she sealed it with wax.

“Are you enjoying torturing me the way I tortured you?” Amaryllis’s voice wavered up and down. “Fine. Good. I deserve it. I should have been kind to you on the train. I should have been a real mother to you. Say or do whatever you want to me. But don’t let me be the reason my species went extinct!”

“You are the reason your species went extinct. It’s too late for that now.” When the wax was finished drying, Cheval rose from her desk and pulled the sheets off the bed. Without her telekinesis, it was remarkably difficult to tie a noose. She had to use her teeth and three hooves at once, and needed to start over several times.

“No, it’s not. You can create a new hive. You can rebuild everything I destroyed.” Amaryllis kept moving around the bed, trying to stay in Cheval’s field of view as she worked. “Please! I made so many mistakes and hurt so many ponies. Don’t throw away the last chance to make everything right again.”

“Why?” Cheval asked.

“Because this is your chance. You can make the north what it was meant to be. You can create a hive that truely is good and kind and—”

“No,” Cheval said, and though she didn’t interrupt her work, her voice commanded silence—the way Amaryllis’s no longer did. “I understand why this is my chance to build a new hive. But, why should I? Why is the changeling race worth saving?”

Amaryllis was left in silence for a moment. Cheval wrapped another loop in her noose. “It can’t be to save the innocent. The innocent are already dead. You’re proposing to create something new. So, I think it’s a fair question. Why would the universe be any better if we were in it?”

“I know we made mistakes. But your children can be better, and—”

“Maybe they could be. I have my doubts.” She tugged the knot tight with her teeth. “But how would a thousand changelings be any better than a thousand ponies?”

Amaryllis again fell into silence. “A thousand ponies,” Cheval said, “are born every day. Less than that even. Every few hours, I suppose. It isn’t as big a deal as you’re making this out to be.”

“You’re special,” Amaryllis reached out, but couldn’t quite touch her. “You’re different.”

“And you’re boring again.” Her noose done, she tossed one end of the sheets up around a strong lighting fixture, and therein secured it. “Remember what you told me on the ride back from Griffonstone? Lie because you wish to deceive me. Lie with intent. Never lie because you’re afraid to face the truth. Admit you don’t know the answer.”

Cheval pushed a chair under her noose and got up on it. She slipped her long neck through the coils.

“I don’t know the answer,” Amaryllis said, “because I’ve never had a chance to learn. For thousands of years, the changeling race was a slave to hunger. Then they were slaves to me. I made them slaves. I told them what they could be, what they could think, what they could want. I told them what they were and that it was a sin to be anything else. They’ve never had a chance to decide what they are for themselves. I don’t know what the changeling race could be in time, and neither do you.”

Her wings buzzing furiously against her sides, Amaryllis shouted, “The changeling race hasn’t failed; I failed. I failed my hive as its queen, and I failed your father as his lover, and I failed you as your dam. You’re just like all the rest of them. You don’t know what you could be because I’ve defined your entire life. Your identity, your beliefs, your love of the Crystal Empire are all built around protecting your family from me. Around hating me. Hate is the only emotion I ever really understood and I used it to poison everyone around me.”

She struggled for words, finally managing to stammer: “And you’re about to punish the entire world for my mistakes. You are my daughter but you’re not me, and you don’t have to do the same things I did. You are different. You can be different.”

Cheval hesitated. She looked at the floor. Then a faint breath escaped her, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “You’d say anything to get your way.”

“It’s true. Every word of it is true.” Amaryllis fell to her knees by the base of the chair, begging like a supplicant before a throne. “I’m sorry, Cheval. I’m so sorry. Please don’t—”

“I’m tired of you, spirit,” Cheval said. “Begone.”

Amaryllis vanished, and Cheval was alone. She tightened the noose around her neck, and kicked out the chair.

The cord went taut. The knot tightened around her throat. Her legs kicked in the air and she struggled to draw breath. But then, something above her tore. The sheets ripped in half like cheap cloth, and she tumbled to the ground in a pile, gasping for breath.

So instead, she decided to throw herself off the side of the building. But her window wouldn’t open. Then she decided to drink the two bottles of ink in her desk, but they were clearly labeled as child-safe and nontoxic. Then she decided to electrocute herself with the cords from the lamps, before she remembered the royal suite used only firefly lanterns. Finally, she decided to use her letter opener as a dagger, and thereby to disembowel herself.

Without telekinesis, it was very hard to hit herself with the letter opener. She had to repeatedly slam her head against her side. The weak angle of attack combined with the dull edge of the opener left her blows too weak to penetrate her carapace.

On her fifth try, the letter opener stuck in her side and she couldn’t get it out. It jutted out of her, embedded in her dorsal plate.

She was struggling to pull it out when Cadence knocked.

She froze midway through the motion, her eyes wide. Though the door, Cadence said, “I was just thinking. When you were fifteen, I promised I’d stop coming into your room without knocking. Because you were a young mare, not a little filly. You were so indignant. Stomping your little hoof and everything.”

“I’m fine,” Cheval said. “Go away.”

“Twilight enchanted the building. It’s impossible to commit suicide on the castle grounds.” Cadence sniffled. “Can I come in?”

When Cheval didn’t answer, Cadence opened the door anyway. She stepped up to her daughter and said, “Here, let me get that.” It took quite a bit of tugging to get the letter opener out. It came free with a sudden yank and a loud pop.

“There,” Cadence said. “That’s better.”

“That spell on the building,” Cheval said, “was that your idea, or Flurry’s idea?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because you’ve been cagey about why she unfroze me. You’ve been cagey about a lot of things. There are conversations you must have had with her before I woke up, but you’re dancing around the topic. And I don’t think Flurry kept me asleep for fifty-two years only to wake me up because she was feeling sentimental. So I think she had something in mind. Something specific she woke me up to do.”

“You always were the smart one.” Cadence managed a weak laugh. “Flurry is very talented of course. But you were—”

“And she didn’t want to see me herself,” Cheval said. “Maybe because she’s my sister, and she loves me, and she knows she doesn’t have it in her to kill me. She thought it was my destiny to kill you since she was fourteen. If she had it in her to kill me it would have happened long ago.”

“She can be… sentimental.” Cadence paused. “Flurry can be sentimental.”

“So was the spell her idea or your idea?” Cheval swallowed. “Because I think it was your idea. I think that’s you and Twilight undermining what Flurry intended. She’s asking me to do her one last favor.”

“That’s… no. That’s insane. That’s trauma talking.”

“Then tell me,” Cheval demanded. “Tell me why she woke me up.”

But Cadence said nothing.

The next afternoon, guards flooded into the royal suite. Crystal ponies checked for weapons, unicorns scanned for spells, and pegasai took up position near the ceiling, ready to swoop down at the first sign of violence. Two huge earth ponies and two shield-mage unicorns took up position near the door, ready to protect their charge from any physical or magical threat.

“Does Flurry always travel with this much security?” Cheval asked.

“Always, yes,” Cadence said.

Cheval watched another group of guards take up position. “It seems excessive.”

When every guard was in place, and the room so secure that a fly could not have entered undetected, the door to the hallway opened one last time.

The pony that walked in had a pink coat, that grew over wrinkled skin. Her mane was purple with a blue streak—though its colors were washed out, and large patches of it had turned grey. Her left eye was a bright blue, while her right was clouded and bloodshot. The crown that Cadence had once worn sat upon her head.

She was a pegasus, and well past seventy years old. A guard had to help her to her chair.

Nopony knew what to say. Cadence, Flurry, and Cheval all sat in silence. Cheval was staring—gaping. Her mouth hung open half an inch, sharp teeth and plastic caps and all.

Finally, Flurry said: “It’s been a long time.”

The Royal Suite

Cigar Dream was a psychologist. An earth pony, he’d moved to the Crystal Empire shortly after its return. It was a move he made out of a belief that many crystal ponies would struggle to adapt to a world that had forgotten them for a thousand years. He counseled those struggling with grief for relatives long-dead, and helped those without purpose find new reasons to continue living.

When the first war came, he changed the focus of his practice, becoming an expert in traumatic stress so he could help those crystal pony veterans who screamed in the night. When the second, third, fourth and fifth conflicts came, he soothed the fears of the general population, who were consumed by anxiety that their nation would soon fall.

Eighteen years after he arrived in the Crystal Empire, when he was just realizing he was no longer a young doctor but was in fact an old doctor, he got his first changeling patient. Her name was Mirage, and she was fifteen years old.

She was one of Cheval’s clutch sisters—one of the other grubs that had been given to Cadence, who Cadence had in turn given to noteable crystal pony families to raise. Her parents were named Quartz Strike and Rose Cut, and she had two crystal pony sisters named Fire Stone and Heliodor. Her family brought her to therapy because they were worried about her.

Every time she turned into a pony she started crying, and nobody knew why.

Cigar Dream worked with her for years. He wrote a paper on her, with the first objective proof that changelings could suffer from clinical depression. When standard techniques proved ineffective, he experimented, and the two found ways to make her feel better. She began to heal. When the war broke out, she swore herself to the Crystal Empire without hesitation, and sought to join the army.

The army refused her, saying it would be too easy for her to be mistaken for a hostile changeling soldier. So instead she joined the nursing corps, studied medicine with all her free hours, and devoted herself to healing wounded soldiers.

When the secret police came for her, Cigar Dream hid her. He stuffed her under the loose floorboards in his office, and then had an Equestrian pegasus friend fly her to Ponyville, with her transformed into a book in his saddlebags. He never saw her again, but he hoped she was okay.

Years later, when the war was over, Cigar thought about going back to Equestria. He was a well-respected expert in his field, and his practice in the Crystal Empire had done very well, but it didn’t hold the charm for him it once did. He was single well into his forties, but he entertained the thought that he might find an earth pony wife yet.

He was sitting in his chair, smoking and considering the thought, when there came a knock at his door. Two crystal ponies were there, each dressed in identical camouflage uniforms. Their expressions were hard, and they carried weapons. “You will come with us now,” one of them said.

For a long moment, he stared at them. The smoke from his cigar curled up into the air. His dreams of finally meeting the right mare faded before his eyes.

“Finally caught me, did you?” he asked.

The two crystal ponies didn’t answer. They grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him into the back of a waiting carriage.

The carriage had poor suspension. In the back, Cigar Dream felt every bump in the road. He hoped it wasn’t a long ride to wherever he was going to be killed.

He passed the time analyzing his own emotional reactions. He’d seen so many patients struggling to cope with death. Now that it was his turn, he felt almost disappointed his state wasn’t more dramatic.

But as he analyzed, he realized that the quality of the road under the carriage was improving. They were not headed out into the countryside, but into the uptown, where the roads were made of solid quartz and polished smooth. The carriage pulled to a halt, and the two ponies pulled him from the back.

He was outside the Crystal Palace. A wall that did not used to be there surrounded the entire square, protecting the Crystal Heart. It was topped with barbed wire, and manned around the clock by hundreds of guards. The palace itself, once an elegant spire, had been turned into a fortress. Weapons bristled from every balcony and battlement, and squadrons of pegasi circled it at all times, mindful for threats from above.

They brought him inside, to a series of rooms that seemed to be a luxurious apartment. There they sat him down, and told him to wait.

Flurry Heart arrived an hour later.

Her official title was the Warrior Princess of the Crystal Empire, but many ponies simply called her the Alicorn of War. She was eternally eighteen, no child, but a warrior captured at the moment of her greatest vigor. She had the strength of an earth pony knight, the agility of a pegasus raider, and the arcane power of a great mage. And she was armed.

It was her raiment. Celestia would never be seen without her hoofboots and crown, and Flurry Heart would never be seen without her battle armor and glaive.

“You must be Doctor Dream,” she said, taking her seat. She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I’ve heard you’re the most respected psychologist in the Empire. Let me be clear that I detest your profession and all other flavors of hoof-holders. But I’ve heard that you have a history of producing results, and I require your help. If you serve me well and discreetly, you will be richly rewarded.”

Cigar Dream’s mouth had gone dry. It took him several seconds to remember to nod. “What symptoms are you experiencing?”

“Paranoia. I have difficulty trusting ponies.”

“Ah.” He rubbed his hooves together and wished for his notebook, if only so he had something to keep his jaw occupied. “Most ponies with paranoia-like symptoms don’t seek treatment. They don’t believe that they’re unwell. They just think they’re surrounded by very untrustworthy ponies.”

“I’m not a common patient, doctor,” Flurry snapped, a sharp edge entering her tone.

“No.” He croaked, his throat suddenly tight. “But was there a specific incident that made you believe you needed treatment?”

Flurry blew out a breath. “There’s a vacancy in the cabinet. We need a new minister of finance. I thought I’d have to pry my administrators apart to stop them from fighting for the position. But nopony wants the job. There’s a mare named Fairy Gold. Brilliant economist, sharp bureaucrat, and a very ambitious mare. She likes power and she likes money. And as soon as she heard the position was open, she had her own husband break her leg so she could use a hospital visit to Equestria to remove herself from consideration.”

“Mmm.” Cigar nodded once. “And why did she do that?”

“She’s afraid of me.” Flurry stiffened her spine as she said it, sitting up straighter.

“Afraid of you in general?” Cigar gestured. “Or afraid of something more specific?”

“She…” Flurry shifted in her seat. “Felt that… many members of the cabinet end up being… sent away, and—”

“Killed,” Cigar interrupted her. “You mean she felt that you’ve had many members of the cabinet killed.”

Flurry’s eyes narrowed, and her face twisted into a snarl. “They were plotting against me.”

“If…” Cigar felt hot under the firefly lamps, pinpricks of sweat breaking out over his body. “If they really were plotting against you, then you aren’t paranoid. You just have enemies. And if your problem is that ponies think you’re paranoid, you need a public relations advisor. Not a psychologist. Paranoia is when you believe ponies are plotting against you when they aren’t.”

Flurry said nothing. A croak emerged from Cigar’s throat. “If you want treatment, I am…” He struggled to speak. “I will be, happy to treat you. But no good ever comes of trying to treat a pony who doesn’t believe they’re ill. I can’t cure you, if you don’t want to be cured.”

“Silver Scales was a corrupt pony and a terrible minister of finance. He stole from the people and he would have conspired against me, given the opportunity. I do not apologize for demanding genuine loyalty from my subordinates.” Flurry’s words came out hot, and the snarl remained on her face. But as time passed, it slowly faded, replaced by something more hesitant.

“But…” she said, “having him beheaded may have been…”

Her eyes prompted Cigar to bail her out. But he refused, forcing her to say the word. Finally she mumbled: “Unreasonable.”

“Well. Well then. Let’s…” He cleared his throat. “Let’s start you on one session a week. Do you have an hour now?”

Sometimes, patients came to sessions because they needed medical help. Sometimes, they came because they wanted somepony they could talk to.

When the yak raised a statue of Yona in their capital square, and Equestria sent an expeditionary force to protect the yak’s independence, Flurry raged. She screamed obscenities into Cigar Dream’s face, smashed furniture, and threatened to drown Equestria and the north alike in blood.

“It’s Celestia,” she shouted, pacing back and forth across the floor in front of his chair. “She’s always hated us. Always! She tortured my mother by making her a ruler, then left us all to suffer under Amaryllis, and now that the yak are plotting against us in turn, she helps them.”

“Is raising a statue to a war hero really plotting against the Crystal Empire?”

“A war hero for the other side. A collaborator. I put her on trial,” Flurry screamed so hard her voice cracked. “I made her confess to war crimes against her own people!”

“Maybe so,” Cigar weathered the storm, “But is raising a statue of her the same as plotting against the Crystal Empire?”

“You don’t get it. This is how it starts. First, they honor Yona as a war hero. Then they start to say, if she was a hero, she must have fought for the right side. Heroes don’t fight for the villian. Then they say that we must have been the villains. And then one day,” she gestured sharply with a hoof, “years from now, when the Crystal Empire is weak and they’re strong, they’ll turn on us!”

“So you want to attack them. Occupy their nation.”

“Yes, obviously!” she snapped.

“For how long?”

“Until they accept they were on the wrong side of the war.”

“And how long is that?” Cigar asked. “When is it over?”

“It’s over,” Flurry snarled, “when all my enemies are dead!”

“Are the yak your enemies?”

Flurry’s horn glowed. Her glaive swung around, and pressed up against Cigar’s neck. “I don’t find your jokes funny,” she said.

His face had gone white as a sheet. A thin line of blood ran down the edge of her weapon. “I wasn’t joking. The last race that lifted a hoof against you was exterminated to the last child. The yak have raised their hooves against you. And so I’m asking. Are the yak your enemies?”

“I…” Flurry hesitated, then withdrew the blade from his throat. “No. No, they’re… they’re not.”

“I’d like to hear you repeat that. Please say, ‘the yak are not my enemies.’”

“The yak are not my enemies,” Flurry said. It seemed to make her uncomfortable. She stood in silence for several moments after, shifting her stance on the floor. “The yak are not my enemies,” she said again, unbidden.

Cigar rubbed at his throat, and his hoof came back red. “Why don’t we take a break? I think I need a bandage.”

“The changelings were different,” Flurry said as he rose. “They were monsters. They couldn’t be reasoned with.”

Then she said, “I’m not a bad pony.”

The next week, Flurry missed her appointment because a cabinet meeting went long. The week after that, she missed her appointment because she was busy searching for a new Minister of the Interior. Cigar Dream could see the ashen expressions of the ponies in the palace. Guards watched them at all times. A unicorn bureaucrat in a resplendent uniform cried softly at his desk.

When Flurry walked into the royal suite, she sat in her chair quietly. She didn’t rage or smash the furniture. Her glaive rested by her side.

“I didn’t used to be this way,” she said.

The scar on Cigar Dream’s neck hadn’t quite healed yet. But he said, “I believe you.” Then he asked, “Could you tell me your cutie mark story, please?”

“Everypony knows that. Cheval overthrew my mother, I thwarted her, my mother wasn’t fit to rule, blah blah.”

“Everypony knows that story, yes. But those events would have taken place over several days at least. Your cutie mark appears at one specific moment. What was that moment?”

“I, uh…” Flurry gestured at the wall. “I was in the throne room. My coronation.”

“Was that it? They put the crown on your head and your cutie mark appeared in a flash?”

“Yes.”

Cigar hesitated a moment, then he put down his notebook and pen. “A cutie mark doesn’t appear in response to external events. It’s internal. Something about you. Was there something about you that changed when they put the crown on your head?”

Flurry didn’t answer, and so he prompted her again: “What were you thinking at that moment?”

“That I wouldn’t be my mother,” Flurry said. “I… knew the journey ahead would be hard. And I knew I would have to do hard things. I knew there would be ponies who would call me a monster. But I would not hesitate to do what needed to be done.”

“There’s a phrase you use a lot. ‘It’s not over until all my enemies are dead.’ Is that what you were thinking at that moment?”

“I…” Flurry nodded, slowly. “I suppose. More or less.”

“And do you have any enemies left?”

“Yes, it…” She froze, then she shook her head. “No. It’s not like that. The changelings were a scourge on the universe. They needed to be crushed. I did what had to be done.”

“Respectfully, your highness, I didn’t ask that. I asked if you have any enemies left now. You have rivals, certainly. Petty irritations. Incompetent subordinates. But the changeling race is gone, and communism has failed. There are no nations left who seek to conquer us. So today, right now, at this moment, do you have any enemies?”

“I will, one day. I’m immortal. Creatures will grow to hate me.”

“Are you comfortable with hate as an emotion?” Cigar asked.

“I don’t…” Flurry clenched her jaw. “I don’t know what that means.”

“You said you didn’t used to be this way. Do you think you got along better with the bureaucracy when you could all hate Amaryllis together?”

“Hate can’t make a pony an alicorn,” Flurry said softly. “I’m good. I’m a good pony. I embody harmony.”

“We are harmonious with the changelings,” Cigar said, his voice tight. “We haven’t had a dispute with them in years. And with the International Party. There are no discordant notes in silence. Will we be harmonious with the yak next? What about the diamond dogs? What about Equestria?”

Flurry lifted her head. “You’re a sympathizer.”

“I had a changeling patient. One of Cheval’s sisters,” he said. “And you murdered her family.”

Flurry picked up her glaive.

She stared at Cigar, then at her weapon. “You should flee the country,” she said, “before I change my mind.”

Later, Flurry called Twilight to the Crystal Empire. Though long healed from her injuries, Twilight entered the throne room with a contemptuous sneer on her face.

“What is it, Flurry?” she demanded, “Looking for some quality time with your aunt? Or did you want to bend my ear about how your latest atrocities are all for the greater good?”

“No. No.” Flurry lapsed into silence, and stared at the floor for a long time. Long enough that Twilight became uncomfortable, and noticed the haggard expression on Flurry’s face.

Then Flurry said: “It’s over.”

Chapter 10

Before anypony else could say a word, Cheval reached out and put her hoof over Flurry’s. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Flurry’s eyes darted down to Cheval’s hoof, while Cadence folded back her ears, but Cheval had neither notice nor care for their surprise. “I’m…” As she struggled for words, she reached out with a second hoof, wrapping both of them around Flurry’s.

Then she said: “You weren’t supposed to get old.”

“Ah. Well.” Flurry reacted slowly. When she moved, one could imagine her bones creaking. When she thought, dust was knocked from the volumes in her head. “A lot of things happened that weren't supposed to.”

“I know. I know. For you it’s been decades. You’ve…” The little caps on Cheval’s teeth clicked together, and her words momentarily slurred. “Gotten over things. The war. Dad. Me. But for me, you were eighteen last week, and…”

Her teeth clicked again. “I’m sorry. I’m being emotional.” She forced herself to smile, but couldn’t keep the expression on her face. After a moment of silence, she asked, “How are you a pegasus?”

“After I got my cutie mark, I became a proper alicorn. I didn’t age.” Flurry looked at her mother, her expression momentarily uncertain. Lines formed under her eyes, atop already wrinkled skin. “But I lost the power to learn. I was stuck in amber, the same way mother and the others are. And I made mistakes.”

“You mean you made the same mistake over and over? Like Twilight?” Cheval asked.

“Not quite. When I took the throne…” She paused a moment, and remembered. “I was a hard leader. Merciless. Calculating. Aggressive. They called me the Alicorn of War. That was the sort of pony it took, to beat Amaryllis. But when it was over, I couldn’t stop being that pony. I was as brutal to the Empire as I’d been to our enemies, because I couldn’t be anything else.”

She paused again, and it was with a distracted air that she finished: “And Twilight has a spell that turns an alicorn back to a normal pony. So I asked her for a copy. And that was that.”

“That’s a tremendous sacrifice for your ponies.” Cheval again forced herself to smile. It lasted longer, the second time. “The Crystal Empire looks great, you know. Modern, prosperous. And I saw a lot of Equestrian ponies with really shiny coats. Intermarriage, I assume. I mean, we knew ponies would get over that eventually, but it’s nice to see it’s not a big deal anymore. And that monorail thing. That’s…. that’s neat.”

Flurry gave a humorless chuckle: “You um… are you trying to make me feel better?”

“Well, yeah. You’re still my sister.” Cheval squeezed Flurry’s hoof again, and looked down to the table. “I assume we’ll get around to the reason you woke me up soon. But until then, I figured I should say, no hard feelings. If it matters, anymore. To whatever degree it matters, no hard feelings. You’re my sister and I love you and you did what you had to do.”

“Well…” Flurry again looked at Cadence, but Cadence’s expression had turned hard. She glared at Flurry from across the table, and the old mare retreated in the face of that look. “We should talk about that. Yes.”

“Do you have a child?”

Flurry’s head popped up. Cadence’s reaction was as sudden, her ears perking up. Cadence laughed first. “How did you know?”

Cheval shot her mother an incredulous stare. “She’s a monarch and she’s old. Inheritance is obviously the nation’s biggest concern at this point.” Turning back to Flurry, she pressed: “Do you?”

“Yes. When I became a pegasus, my normal fertility was restored. I have three children: Diamond Path, Sapphire Waters, and Ruby Skies.”

“Let me guess,” Cheval smiled, and on the third try, the expression persisted, “Their father is a crystal pony and he named them?”

“Ah. Yes.” Flurry shook her head. “His name is Emerald Wave. It’s uh… a family tradition.”

“Do you love him? Does he make you happy?”

The question left Flurry obviously discomforted, and the struggled to answer. “Yes, I mean. Yes. He very much does. But Cheval, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to. But I’ve got fifty years of gossip to catch up on. And I’m happy you're happy.” She looked at the table as she gathered her thoughts, though her smile had yet to fade. “But fine, we can talk about business. Which one is your heir and how good are they at politics?”

“Diamond Path. And he’s good.” She tried to pull her hoof away, but Cheval didn’t let go. “I wouldn’t call him a profoundly gifted leader, but he’s good. He’s got a level head, he makes sound decisions, and he’s well liked by the people. He’ll be a calm, sensible sort of prince. And that’s what the Empire needs right now, I think. A decompression from my high-intensity rule.”

Cheval let out a faint murmur of understanding. “Any concerns?”

“Ah…” Flurry cleared her throat, then nodded. “He’s a crystal pony. And Celestia has refused to grant him any Equestrian titles. Including peer to alicorns. She says he’s a very nice young stallion who is worthy of being a prince, but that mortal princedom does not endow a divine right to rule.”

Cheval nodded again. “So. Mom and I.”

Cadence shook her head: “I swore I would never rule the Empire again. And it took some doing but Celestia and Luna accepted it.”

“Ah.” Cheval drew in a breath and nodded. “But she hasn’t made the same promises for me. I mean, I assume you asked. But she hasn’t. So she’s reserving the right to liberate your empire and restore the rightful rule of alicorns. Which in this case is me, by peerage. So I complicate the inheritance. Is that all right?”

Flurry nodded: “That’s right.”

“And of course, you couldn’t just smash my statue because you’re not an alicorn either, so Celestia might take that as justification for war. Assuming she hasn’t already made explicit threats to that effect.” Cheval nodded, twice. Her expression serious. “Okay. I can fix it.”

“I don’t need you to—”

“I think it would be best if I traveled to Equestria, said hello to Celestia, and committed honorable suicide in Canterlot Palace. That way none of the blame falls on you.”

Silence hung over the room. Cadence squeezed her eyes shut and looked away. Flurry’s ears folded back.

“What?” Cheval looked around at them. “What is it?”

“The reason…” Flurry hesitated. “Celestia hasn’t made any threats about what I could or couldn’t… I mean. The reason I didn’t break your statue wasn’t because Celestia stopped me. I…”

“I know. You’re my sister and you love me.” Cheval squeezed Flurry’s hooves. “It’s faint, dusty, you haven’t seen me in awhile. It’s not as vigorous as it used to be. But you do still love me, Flurry. You know that, right?”

“I do?” she stared.

“Yes, you do.” Cheval chuckled. “And it’s… it’s fine. It’s not the first time I needed to give you a kick in the tail to get you to do the right thing. You couldn’t put yourself on the throne either. And I know, you don’t want to hurt me. But you can’t leave the Empire to your son with a more legitimate heir to the throne running around and making appearances in public. And honestly, I never planned on outliving you anyway. You were supposed to be immortal, drones only live seventy years. I figured this…”

She pressed her teeth together. The caps clicked. “I mean, everypony has to die sometime.”

Then Flurry said: “You made a mistake.”

“About…” Cheval paused. “Which part?”

“When you put me on the throne.” Flurry’s throat was tight, and she needed a moment to say, “You made a mistake.”

“No. No.” Cheval waved off the concern. “I know you… you did some hard things. I saw the war museum, and the changeling exhibit. And I’m sure Twilight, well. Probably won’t ever like you again. I mean, you did kick her through a wall. But it was all worth it in the end. You beat Amaryllis. The Empire is safe.”

“Why?” Flurry asked. “Why did we need to beat her?”

For a moment, Cheval paused. Her head tilted to the side, and her smile flickered. “What do you mean?” she asked, before letting out an awkward laugh. “She was an evil tyrant trying to annex our kingdom.”

“What would she have done, if she’d annexed us? Ended the rule of law? Governed with an iron fist? Restored the secret police? Maybe. But maybe not. I did all those things. And more. I burned half the north. I spilled rivers of blood. Millions died.”

“Hah.” Cheval’s smile faded. “You’re getting soft in your old age. You know better than that. A good leader doesn’t back down in the face of evil.”

“She wasn’t any worse than me. Maybe she was better. Yak and diamond dogs and dragons all fought for her because they loved her. They fought for me because they were afraid of me. I left scars on the north that still haven’t healed. It will be generations before the yak trust ponies again. And she never committed genocide.”

“You did what you had to do,” Cheval snapped.

“I did what I had to do to hold on to power,” she spoke softly and looked down at the table. “Not… not to protect my ponies. The Crystal Empire, the North, the world is worse off for my having taken the throne. There should never have been an Alicorn of War. The entire idea is wrong. It’s a blasphemy against what alicorns are supposed to be. Twilight is powered by friendship, and Mom is powered by love, and I was powered by hate. Hate and fear of Amaryllis is what made me a ruler; it’s what got me my cutie mark, and in the end, my ponies suffered.”

“No.” Cheval let go of her sister. Her face twisted into a snarl and her hooves hit the table. “You’re so close to the end. Your life’s work is almost complete. Don’t you dare fail me now.”

“I don’t want to be remembered for this.” Flurry’s throat tightened again, and she struggled to form words. “It’s too late to fix what I’ve done. But I was at the point that I either needed to kill you or accept that you might destroy everything I created. And I can’t. I can’t. What I created isn’t worth it and I don’t want to be remembered for killing you.”

“Why? Because I’m innocent?” Cheval sneered, and her voice turned toxic. “So sweet and defenseless? Old mare walks in and this poor, kind creature’s first thought is to give her a big hug. Do you honestly think that because you took away my power to shapeshift you took away my power to manipulate ponies? Are you that stupid? Or has it been so long you forget that the reason I got turned to stone in the first place was two counts of murder and one count of rape?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Flurry struggled for words, her own voice weak. “But ponies are ponies because they can forgive. There must be an end to punishment.”

“I am giving you the end.” Cheval rose up beside the table, towering over Flurry. A changeling queen stood twice the height of a common pony, and Flurry was not a large pegasus. “And if you don’t take it, then things just keep going. Then there’s going to be me, and my,” she bit off a word, “drones. And I like power. I like power too much and it will eventually turn me into something I don’t want to be. Amaryllis was probably a sweet nymph once too. And if I walk away, this will all happen again.”

Flurry’s bodyguards didn’t like how loud Cheval was getting. Two of the earth ponies moved to either side of their charge, placing their hooves to intercept any blow. A pegasus hovered closer. A unicorn’s horn started to glow.

Cheval eyed the guards. Flurry rubbed her jaw with a hoof.

“You’re not a monster, Cheval,” she said. “You’re a pony who made mistakes. Terrible mistakes, yes. But you don’t deserve death. And I won’t let you kill yourself because of me.”

“I’m not giving you a choice.” Cheval glanced at the earth pony bodyguard across the table. “Hey, you.” She grinned. “You know my sister is the Alicorn of War?”

It all happened so fast.

In the first tick of the clock, Cadence started to say something. The unicorn guard with his horn alight began to cast his spell. The earth ponies across the table moved to protect Flurry. With her superior height, Cheval reared up, and grabbed the pegasus hovering above her.

In the second tick, Cheval yanked the pegasus down. Their head smashed into the table, tail and body sticking up. The unicorn fired their spell. The beam struck the pegasus guard in the back. Cadence froze.

In the third and fourth ticks, Cheval threw the pegasus at the earth ponies. Halfway through her arc, the unicorn’s spell resolved, and she turned to stone. A granite statue of a pegasus hit the earth pony bodyguard on the left. It laid him out on the floor, and his bones crunched.

Five seconds into the fight, the remaining earth pony guard lunged across the table and struck Cheval. The blow hit her right in the face, with such force it cracked her carapace. The plastic caps flew off her teeth and scattered on the floor.

So she bit him.

After the fight was over, Flurry’s dozen other bodyguards brought her back to her room. The unicorn whose magic made plastic restraints put new caps on her teeth, and also fastened cuffs for her legs. They were quite effective. She could barely move.

Cadence stayed with her the whole day, talking, listening, trying to get through to her. Cheval ignored her. A old doctor came to mend the cracks in her carapace. It had been years since he worked on a changeling, and he was one of the few who knew how.

Cadence refused to leave when the sun went down. She slept on the floor beside Cheval’s bed.

Eventually, the clock chimed midnight.

“I hate you,” Cheval said. “I hate you so much. There is not enough suffering in the world for what you deserve. And if it had been me on the throne instead of Flurry, I would have been even worse. I wouldn’t have given you a quick death. It would have been public and cruel, and the ponies you sought to enslave would have heard you beg before you died.”

“I know,” Amaryllis said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a little late for that,” she sneered.

“It’s much too late for that.” Amaryllis sat on the bedside, resting a hoof on Cheval's belly. “But not for you. You have a lust for power, but you recognize that that’s wrong. You have a sadistic streak, but you have the self-control not to indulge it. You are my daughter, but you’re not me. You can make different choices. And you’re Shining Armor’s daughter too. I can see him in you.”

Cheval turned her head to the side. It was one of the few ways she could still move. For many long seconds, she struggled to speak. “Begone, spirit. I’m tired of you.”

Amaryllis vanished.

Around 3 AM, the door to Cheval’s room cracked open. She was still awake. Her eyes darted towards the motion.

“Princess Cadence,” said the guard on the other side, “Her Highness, the Princess Flurry Heart, requires your presence in the war room immediately.”

“Mmm?” Cadence cracked an eye. “Tell her I’m with Cheval and she can wait.”

“I believe it is Cheval’s fate she wishes to discuss, Princess.” The guard let a note of doubt enter his tone. “Shall I tell her you are unavailable?”

Cadence hesitated, then rose. “No. But… stay in the room with her. At least four guards in the room with her at all times. She’s on a suicide watch, you understand? And I don’t trust Twilight’s spell. Cheval is too clever.”

Cheval said nothing. Cadence kissed her goodbye, and promised to return soon. Four guards piled into the room in her absence. They lit her firefly lanterns. “Hello, Princess.”

Cheval looked at the one who had spoken. Her eyes flicked over him. Then, she sneered. “Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?”

“Well, I—”

“Also,” she forcefully spoke over him. “Your camoflauge is the wrong shade of green. That’s a private’s uniform and you look at least thirty. Too old. Your boot-cuffs are done up tight to conceal that the uniform legs are a part of your body. You look like a crystal pony, but you’ve done that saddle up in the unicorn style. Oh, and your eyes aren’t the same color. Heterochromia exists but that’s just sloppy. Nymphs have done better. I knew you’d come, but I am disappointed.”

“Well, hello to you too,” the first guard said. He took a breath, and green fire surrounded him. Changeling magic dispersed out into the air, and before Cheval’s eyes, he assumed his true form.

An elderly earth pony, with greying hair and a bald spot.

“My name’s Gallant. I’m Light Step’s son. And it’s been a long time since I was an adventuring pony, but princess, I’m here to rescue you.”

The Busy Bee

Popcorn, drizzled in yogurt. Wasp cookies. Ant egg soup, served with a sourdough roll. Rice and chopped apples, spiced with cinnamon and cayenne pepper. Unfertilized dragon eggs, hardboiled, served whole with a hammer for the shell.

Not a special hammer—a regular hammer. Like the sort that comes in a toolbox.

Busy Bee was a restauranter. Her parents loved her very much, but they did not understand pony food. To their minds, there were three requirements for a good solid meal: it had to be non-toxic, the foals had to be able to keep it down, and it had to be prepared with love. Everything else was optional.

They were so proud of her, when she got her cutie mark for cooking. They said that she was going to learn to make proper food and crack jokes about her silly old family. But when she went to Canterlot to study at the culinary school, she found their recipes dull. The teachers were wonderful of course, the instruction skilled, and her fellow students kind. But Equestria didn’t need yet another tapas restaurant.

And so she took her savings from a childhood of mowing Twilight’s lawn, and paid one month’s rent on an abandoned storefront in the bad part of Canterlot. Her whole clutch came to help, and in two days, they had the place looking brand-new—floors were polished, glass was cleaned, countertops were repaired. One of them found a giant piece of scrap wood in the dump, lacquered and painted it, and turned it into a sign to hang over the front.

“The Busy Bee,” it read, in flowing yellow-and-black script. Underneath it, smaller text read, “Changeling Food.”

She had a few changeling regulars. Mirror Strike would walk down from Canterlot University every day, order rosewater, and soak in the ambient energy. Gallant would swing by whenever he was in Canterlot, get the wasp cookies, and talk about old times. And changelings from the hive would always stop by when they were visiting the city.

But most of her customers were ponies. It was a pony city.

“Crispy spiders, please,” said a stallion at one table. “And could you, um…” He gestured with a hoof. “If that’s not rude to ask.”

“I dunno,” Busy Bee grinned. “Will you order a dessert too?”

He got the locust pie. In a flash of green, she transformed into a smaller, more elfin version of Princess Celestia. A few patrons applauded, and she took a bow.

“The cinnamon ball, please,” said a mare at another table. “And that comes with apple fries, right?” Once she confirmed that it did, she asked, “And could you like, do Country Charm? He’s so dreamy.”

Busy Bee explained that she couldn’t actually impersonate ponies, but she did turn into a version of Country Charm with blue hair. He flashed his trademark winning smile, and the mare swooned.

“Ant egg soup, please,” said a third patron, a stallion. “And, I’m sorry, but could I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” he grinned. “I do requests.”

“No, it’s not that. I was…” the stallion hesitated. “I was wondering. What’s your special talent?”

Busy gave him a flat look, exaggerated for the customers. “Cooking. Y’know I do like to think the food here is pretty good.”

“No. I mean. Yes. I mean…” He hesitated. “Most ponies can’t do magic that isn’t related to their special talent.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m a changeling. We can all do this.” In a flash of green, he transformed into a near-copy of the stallion, save for a rather obvious palette swap. “But I’ll get you that soup, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. He was quiet after that.

The next day, he was back. He arrived at three in the afternoon, during the slowest hours of the day. He sat at the bar and ordered the apple fries. Busy Bee was a she again, in the form of a powder-blue unicorn.

He was a unicorn as well. Grey, with a bright purple mane, nearly pink. His cutie mark was a stylized eye, with a purple star where the pupil should have been.

“Is your name actually Busy Bee, or is that just the name of the restaurant?” he asked.

“Nope, that’s my real name,” she said, as she was cleaning up. “What’s yours?”

“Steady Eye.” He licked his lips. “I’m an accountant. But it’s not my special talent. Just something to pay the bills. My talent is pony watching.”

“Oh.” She assumed an lecherous grin, flicking her tail across her hindquarters and striking a pose. “Are you watching me?”

“Yes.” He nodded, once. “I hope it’s not presumptuous to say, but it seems like you actually enjoy that sort of attention. You’re not just playing it up to get ponies to tip more.”

“Sometimes I do.” She relaxed her pose and assumed a more normal stance, going back to cleaning up. “It’s not my thing, but I’ve been ugly and I’ve been pretty, and anypony who tells you looks don’t matter is full of it. Ponies treat you differently.”

“I believe that.” He scratched the countertop with a hoof. “I bet they treat stallions and mares differently too.”

“You bet. I am always a stallion when it comes time to negotiate my rent. This big, menacing pegasus. It helps.”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “Which are you normally though? Under the disguise.”

“Looking to see if you swing my way?” She smiled. He blushed. She laughed. “Sorry, champ, but I’m afraid that’s none of your business.”

“No way I could convince you to give me a shot?” he smiled, but stress showed under it. “You… you seem interesting. I’d like to get to know you better.”

“Hey, if you want to make a friend, I’m happy to chat. But we don’t do the whole ‘pair bonding’ thing. I’m not girlfriend material.”

Steady Eye paused. He frowned. “But I thought you were… you know.”

“Do I know?”

“I—I mean,” he stumbled over his words. “A pony. I thought you were a pony. Under the disguise.”

“I’m a changeling. I’m sure I’ve said that to you at least two or three times.”

“Yes, but biologically—”

“Sorry, champ,” she put her hooves up on the counter, and in a flash of green, transformed into a rather menacing looking pegasus stallion, “but I’m afraid my biology is definitely none of your damn business.”

He shrunk back in his chair, his muzzle pulled into a grimace. But after he recovered from the initial shock, he managed a calm, “Of course, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Busy Bee frowned, and lowered his hooves back to the floor. “It’s fine,” he said. “And hey, here. This is my go-to when I get bad news.”

Bee gave him a candy bar made from cockroaches.

Gallant showed up the next Thursday with a mare in tow. He always had a mare in tow. And they weren’t just any mares. They were all young, beautiful, and rich, and somehow head over hooves for the ruffian from Ponyville.

Busy Bee didn’t see the attraction. She’d tried to, several times. But she didn’t.

The latest mare in tow could have been a model. Her coat was the color of snow and her mane was like flowing caramel. When she giggled, it was like bells ringing. And her hips were, to put it traditionally, “child bearing.”

She was all over Gallant. He was all over her. “Were you two going to order, or just make out in my restaurant?”

“We can do both,” Gallant grinned. Then he tugged the mare forward. “Demure, this is Busy Bee, an old friend from Ponyville. Bee, this is her Royal Highness, Princess Demure of the Orchard Isles: tamer of dolphins, cracker of coconuts, vanquisher of communists, and proud ruler of a nation with a total population of about three-thousand.”

“Plus two elephants,” she says, before giggling and nuzzling into his side.

“Plus two elephants,” he added. “They’re sociologists.”

“Well, your Highness, we’re honored to have you here.” Busy Bee cracked a smile of her own. “What brings you so far from home? I’ve only ever seen the Orchard Isles on the back of a globe.”

“Oh, life. Love. The universe.” She gave a happy sigh. “This charming stallion. He saved us from communists you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“There was a submarine base, and—”

“Yes, I know.” Busy Bee laughed. “Since the day he left home. Is he taking you on a tour of the world?”

“Just Equestria. I’ve never seen it, and I have so many questions. I don’t know where I’m going to settle, or what we’re going to do about the throne. There’s so much I’ve never seen.”

Busy Bee paused. “Settle?”

“Well, obviously, I’m going to keep the palace back home,” Demure explained, “but I know Gallant can’t stay there. It’s too remote. He needs a home in Equestria too, and that means I need… oh.” She giggled. “Call it a summer palace. So I can keep my royal dignity. Somewhere the foals can get a Canterlot education.”

“The foals.” Busy Bee glanced between them. “You’re…”

“Oh! You didn't hear?” Gallant’s grin got wider. “I got hitched.”

Busy Bee didn’t smile back. The joy fell off her face. “Huh,” she said. Then she asked, “Gallant, could I talk to you in private real quick?”

The smile fell off Demure’s face as well, and she turned to Gallant for clarification. His confused stare offered no reassurance, but after a moment, he patted her with a hoof. “I’ll be right back,” he whispered. “Sorry. Hold on.”

Busy Bee and Gallant moved into the back of the restaurant. No sooner were they out of earshot then he snapped, “What the hell was that about?”

“I’m a little concerned you’re marrying this mare under false pretenses is what that was about.” Busy drew her mouth back into a line. “She thinks she’s going to have a nice little nuclear family with 2.5 foals and a house in Canterlot.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, drawing out the word. “Because she is.”

“A clutch doesn’t have two children in it,” she spoke slowly, like he was simple-minded, “Is she going to be a nursery worker? Or a teacher? Have you even introduced her to the rest of the hive? What about the rest of the family?”

“What? No.” Gallant frowned. “She’s not going to be any of those things, because she’s not a changeling, she doesn’t have a caste. She’s a pony. She’s going to have foals and then raise them.”

“And what about you?”

“Well, I was planning to be a part of that, yes.”

“You can’t just run off and start your own family in Canterlot.” She poked him in the chest. “Who’s going to take care of the children when you’re recovering? Who’s going to inspect them? Princess Celestia? You’ll be the only one who can teach them to make faces. And what if we need you to help raise a clutch back in Ponyville?”

“You’ll be fine without me. Bee…” He gently pushed her away. “This is happening. Demure is family now.”

“I get that, she seems very nice, but if you do this,” Busy Bee drew a breath, “your children will be ponies.”

“So?” Gallant snorted. “We’re ponies. You’re a pony.”

It’s quite the spectacle, when two changelings fight.

She turned into a dragon, he turned into a razor-tailed monkey to scramble up her neck and out of reach of her bite. She turned into a striking serpent that wrapped the monkey in its coils, and he turned into a tatzlwurm to grapple her right back.

It went on like that.

The bell above the door went ding-a-ling.

“We’re closed,” Busy Bee called, as if the state of the restaurant didn’t make that clear. Bits and pieces of the kitchen had flown all the way to the front, bouncing off of tables and hitting patrons. She was behind the counter, sweeping up a pile of broken glass.

“I figured,” replied Steady Eye. He was standing half-in and half-out of the door, forelegs on the hardwood and rear lets on the street. “But I saw you through the window, and you’re um…” He paused. “Injured.”

She was a little brown earth pony mare, with a slate grey mane and a cutie mark depicting a whisk and a dragon’s egg. Her sides were covered in scratches and bruises, and she had a rapidly purpling black eye.

“I got into a fight,” she said curtly, “I’m not seriously hurt.”

“I’m sorry, I know this is a private moment and I’m a stranger and… yeah.” He stared at her a moment, and took a breath. “But you really looked like you needed somepony to talk to. Even if it’s just a stallion you’re never going to see again.”

“Sure.” She laughed and lifted a hoof. “And hey, you wanted to know what I looked like, right?” With a flick of an ankle, she gestured down at herself. “This is it. This is me. Burned through all my energy reserves changing forms like ten times in a row. You wanted to know if I’m a mare? Well, I am. There you go.”

He stepped in and let the door swing shut behind him. “You sound upset about that.”

“I am upset about that. Because a creature I thought was my friend betrayed me. Betrayed all of us. There’s not a lot of us left!” She snapped the words like a whip. “And if we don’t keep the old ways alive, they’re going to drown in a sea of pony culture. I like ponies. Ponies are my friends. But I don’t want to be one of you and you’re diluting me!”

The last two words emerged as a ragged screech, shouted so loud her voice cracked. They were an accusation, leveled at Steady Eye in leu of his entire race.

So he said, “That’s something worth yelling about.”

“What?” she froze.

“I said, that’s something worth yelling about. Like, you’re very upset. And I can see that. But I think you’re upset about something worth getting upset about. I would be mad if I thought I was losing my culture. So.” He took a seat. “Could you tell me why you opened the restaurant?”

“I like food.”

“You could have opened another tapas place. Made a bunch of money. And there’s no such thing as traditional changeling food. This is all you.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped. “It’s me and my parents. They needed to make solid food because I can’t eat love, and they struggled, because they didn’t have the instincts and also didn’t have taste buds. And you know what most creatures would have done in that situation? They would have taken pony recipes and copied them exactly. Just given up.”

She turned back to her sweeping, furiously working the broom over the floor. Broken glass skittered across the hardwood. “And then there really would be no changeling food. But they knew that solid food was going to be a part of my life, and I was their daughter, and so they wanted to understand it. They wanted to make it ours. And some of what they made was worth preserving. And I serve it here.”

“The soup is good,” he agreed.

“Everything I make is good.”

“You know it’s not over. Right?” Steady Eye asked. “I know there aren’t… I know your people are in a bad way. But that doesn’t mean your traditions are going to die. You sound bitter, but I think what you’ve done here is amazing. You changed without changing who you are.”

“Okay, look,” she turned, “of all the patrons who have ever tried to get under my tail, you’re in the top ten, really. This is very charming. But I’m not girlfriend material. Because at some point, I’m going to go back to Ponyville, so I can help raise a clutch of eight to twelve children. They’ll be around six when I start raising them, because children younger than that are cared for by nursery workers. Once a month, I will line them up outside for Princess Twilight to inspect, and…”

She lifted a hoof, drawing out the silence to emphasize her words. “If I ever do somehow get pregnant, I am giving that child to a nursery worker to be raised in the proper fashion. And when they turn six, maybe they end up in my clutch and maybe they don’t. And I accept that because that is the way things should be.”

“Okay,” Steady Eye said. “And if I accepted that?”

“You can’t just say you accept that.” She let out a dismissive snort.

“Woah, I didn’t say I accepted it.” He lifted a hoof. “I haven’t even asked you out yet and you’re talking about our hypothetical future children. That’s a big escalation above casual conversation. Also you seem crazy and very angry and I don’t know you well enough to know if you’re a creature I’d want to be with.”

He laughed. “But as a hypothetical, if I accepted that, properly, would that matter? Or is my being a pony a dealbreaker? Because no offense, I’m getting the feeling you prefer ponies at a distance.”

“No, it would…” She sighed. “No, I don’t… I like stallions, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I even dated in school. Briefly. It didn’t end well.”

“Fine.”

“I’ve been kissed.”

Steady Eye made a face. “I really didn’t ask that, but okay. Good to know.”

“Yeah, sorry. Shared too much there.” She sighed and lowered her head. “I really can’t deal with this right now.”

“Then, I’ll leave.” He got up from the table. “But hey, I meant what I said earlier. What you’ve built here is wonderful. It’s a labor of love, if you can pardon the pun. I know, probably… well. Your feelings on ponies are complicated. But we’re not trying to hurt you. I like this place.” After a moment he added. “And the soup is good.”

“Everything I make is good,” she replied, adding, “thank you.”

The next time he came by, she said she was free on Thursdays. They went bowling.

Their son, whose name was Double Entry, really felt that accounting school had not adequately prepared him for breaking into an insane dictator’s palace.

Yes, granted, he could shapeshift. And yes, granted, he was quite physically fit, and had won several silver medals for flying in the Cloudsdale circuit. But he felt there should have been some additional steps between that and, “You can be the getaway driver!”

And so he stood under the Crystal Palace in the form of a pegasus, hitched up to a sky chariot and wondering who would take over the accounting practice after he got captured and executed.

Probably Cook Book. She was ambitious.

“Down below!” a voice called. One of his co-conspirators fell out of the sky, landing in the back of his chariot. Then came a second, then a third. Then came Princess Cheval, the last changeling queen, and the sole hope of his species for long term survival.

She was still bound up in plastic restraints, which felt wrong for a rescue.

Gallant was last in. “Alright. Let’s go,” he said.

It was at that moment that a wailing alarm sounded through the palace. Spotlights came on to illuminate the ground, and searchlights lit the sky.

“Let’s go quickly,” Gallant urged. Double Entry broke into a gallop, and the chariot left the ground.

Chapter 12

They shouldn’t have escaped.

The getaway flyer, the pegasus the others called Double Entry, he was fast. He had strong flight muscles and good technique. But he was dragging a chariot and five creatures, while any pegasi in pursuit would carry nothing but their weapons. The underlying reality, the nuance of things, the math—it did not permit victory. Even Rainbow Dash herself would have struggled to win such a race. And that was of course to say nothing of the searchlights and archers and air defenses.

And yet.

As she lay silently on the floor of the chariot, Cheval wondered if such was what life was like for Twilight. If, for some ponies, heroic adventure and daring do really did allow six regular ponies to overcome all odds. Or perhaps, their escape was more directly due to Twilight. Perhaps she did something to fiddle the odds. She used her magical gifts so rarely, ponies forgot how spectacular she was.

But Cheval had no use of her horn, and so could not check to see if they’d been enchanted. All she could do was watch the sky whirl overhead between the bodies of her rescuers. They were ducking, weaving, exchanging magical blasts with the ponies in pursuit.

She couldn't see their faces, from where she was on the floor. But she could see their undercarriages. Really, her view was quite obscene. Gallant was a gifted stallion, the tan mare had stretch marks from having a foal, and the red mare had a rash along her ribs that looked like an allergic reaction.

Closing her eyes helped. She listened to them; to what they said or didn’t say. Gallant was their leader, calm and comfortable with violence. Double Entry was a nervous talker, but he never panicked, and Gallant trusted him in a way he did not trust the others. The red one was Moth Orchid, a coward who screamed with the passing of every projectile.

The tan one was angry, and didn’t want to be where she was. The blue one was quiet, and afraid for things other than her own life. She was the one who held onto Cheval during hard maneuvers, to make certain she didn’t fall out of the chariot.

Eventually, Double Entry’s wingbeats slowed. The chariot descended. The tone of her rescuers shifted, though she had long since stopped listening to their words. They landed.

“Is she asleep?”

Cheval cracked an eye open. All her rescuers were standing in a circle around her. They were inside some kind of stone structure, possibly underground. Ice on the walls marked their passage beyond the borders of the Crystal Empire proper, though they could hardly have gone far.

“I am not,” she said. Her eyes traveled from one to the next. “You introduced yourself as Gallant. I overheard that you are Double Entry and Moth Orchid. But I don’t know you two. What are your names?”

“Mirror Pond,” said the blue one who held her during the ride. She was a unicorn. The tan one, an earth pony, introduced herself as After Image.

“Thank you,” Cheval said. “All of you, for rescuing me. I have many questions about who you are and how you came to be here. But first,” she looked right at Mirror Pond, “could I ask you to remove my restraints?”

Mirror Pond started to move, but Moth Orchid held out a leg to block her. “You might want to hold off on that one.”

“Why?” Mirror asked. “I know she’s on a suicide watch, but we’re all right here. We can keep an eye on her.”

“They don’t put creatures in muzzles because they’re a suicide threat.” Moth gestured at Cheval’s restraints. “I’m also noticing a lot of dried blood on her carapace and, you know, she doesn’t have blood. So I’m pretty sure it’s not hers.”

Mirror’s expression rapidly shifted though surprise, confusion, and finally anger. “Call her a whore why don’t you?” she snapped. “She’s your princess. You should be ashamed.”

“Twilight is my princess,” Moth snapped back. “Just because she—”

Gallant stepped in before the two could come to blows, physically imposing himself between them. “That’s enough,” he said, raising his voice to emphasize the command. “Double, please remove her muzzle but not her other restraints.”

Double Entry nodded, and knelt beside her. The others watched in silence as he removed the muzzle from her jaw and the caps from her teeth. The blood from the guard she bit had long since turned brown, but it stained her teeth and jaw yet. Moth’s lip curled. The others looked uncomfortable.

Of course, Cheval said “thank you,” before she took the time to stretch out her jaw. It was only polite.

“So,” Gallant said, “you probably have questions about who we are.”

“Yes,” Cheval drew in a breath, looking up at all of them. “But first I have questions about what you are. You have changeling names. Proper ones. Mirror this and Double that and all manner of sly references to illusion.”

“We are changelings,” Mirror Pond said. “We’re from the Ponyville Hive. A lot of survivors fled there after the war. We were… um. Born ponies, I suppose you would say. Some of us, like Gallant, think we’re still ponies. Some of us think we aren’t really anymore. We can shapeshift a little, though we aren’t as good at it as true-blooded changelings.”

“Is that why your disguises were so mismatched?” Cheval glanced at Gallant, who nodded. She thought about that for a moment, nodded, and asked: “And how did you become…” She paused. “This?”

“We were adopted into the hive when we were very young,” Mirror replied. “There are ways it can be taught.”

“There have been ponies adopted by changelings before. They didn’t gain the power to shapeshift.” Cheval’s eyes narrowed faintly, watching all of them closely. “What else was done to you?”

It was Gallant who spoke next. “There’s a degree of ritual involved.”

“Dark magic. Right.” Cheval shut her eyes and rested her head on the stone floor. “Shapechanging at will is quite the gift. What is the sacrifice offered, to receive such a tremendous boon?”

“The same as for all changeling magic,” After Image said. “We need to be loved. We can’t sense love like a true-blood; we can’t survive off it—we need solid food like a regular pony. But if nobody loves us, we get sick. Sometimes we can die.”

“One wonders how you deal with such a burden.” She glanced at After Image, and then at the stretch marks on her belly. “Do your children love you?”

After Image’s eyes hardened, and Moth Orchid glared as well. But before either of them could speak, Mirror Pond cut in: “All ponies need love to survive. The mare or stallion who isn’t loved doesn’t have a life worth living. We’re not any worse off. We’re just more honest.”

Mirror Pond swallowed, gathered her courage, and said: “And I’m proud of what I am.”

“You’re a drone,” Cheval snapped. “And you’re loyal to your hive because you have to be. Because that’s the one place where you’re loved unconditionally and can always get what you need. Because you were indoctrinated to think that the hive matters, somehow.”

“Hey, look,” Moth said, her tone all light and sing-song. “Our once-and-promised future princess is a toxic bitch.”

“She’s stressed,” Double Entry snapped. “I applaud your ability to hear that a creature is a suicide risk and then be offended that they don’t find the time to be more polite.”

“Double is right,” Gallant said to every creature, not just Moth. “We should give her her space.”

“Yeah, well, not to put too fine a point on it?” Moth pushed back, “but unless you brought a doctor’s bag I don’t know about, the drugs that prevent her from shapeshifting or using magic are going to wear off soon. And I feel like when that happens we’re going to have a problem.”

“Don’t worry,” Cheval said, smiling oh-so sweetly. “I only bite ponies.”

That stilled the conversation for a few long seconds. Gallant ended things. “It’s late. And we’re not going anywhere until morning. Put a few blankets over her and let her sleep.”

So they did.

It was still early morning when Double Entry nudged her awake. “Hey,” he said, rocking her shoulder with a hoof. Her eyes fluttered open, and he offered her water. “It will be time to go, soon.”

“Thank you.” She sipped from the canteen he offered, and when she was done, asked: “Where are we? What is this place?”

“A bunker,” he gestured around them. The stonework was old, and covered in dust. Racks of weapons were braced against one wall, long since given over to rust. “Built by the changelings during the war. Part of the siegeworks surrounding the Crystal Empire. Flurry never found it, so it seemed like a good place to hide.”

“Mmm,” Cheval looked him over, head to hoof. “May I ask you a question?”

“Um…” He rubbed his hooves together. “Sure. But we’ll have to go soon.”

“What am I, to you?”

“Oh. To…” He cleared her throat and nodded. “You mean, do I think you’re my princess?”

She nodded. “That’s part of it, I suppose.”

“Well. No.” Taking his time to pick his words carefully, he went on. “Twilight is my princess. A hive needs to have a leader. Some creature has to inspect the children and settle disputes and provide a good example. But, while Twilight is a great leader, she isn’t our ruler. She’s more of a figurehead. And to be honest, I like it that way. I like being a changeling, and I am proud to be one. But I don’t want to go back to the old days, where a queen ruled the hive with an iron hoof.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I think we need more true-blooded changelings.” He gestured vaguely at her midriff. “We could survive without you. We can have foals, and teach them to make faces. But… as a people, the loss of the first generation diminished us. And without you, that will never heal.”

“So I’m not your queen, or your princess. To you, I’m a pregnant teenager, and you want to lay claim on my children.”

“Well, I, um…” A hot blush appeared in his face, and his eyes went down to the floor. “It’s different, for the others.”

“Mirror Pond does think I’m her queen. And she does want the old days back, of a strong hive and a single leader whose word is absolute. Doesn't she?”

“We’re all different.” Double Entry let out a breath. “I’m here for the hive. After Image owes Gallant a favor. Moth Orchid’s grandmother—a true-blood—guilted her into it. And Gallant doesn’t even think of himself as a changeling. He’s a pony, and he didn’t teach his children how to make faces. But he promised his mother he would. Double Time. I think you knew her?”

“I did know her,” Cheval said. “I tortured her, once. She defied me, so I cracked her mind like a walnut and undid years of healing in a second.”

“Well.” Double Entry paused. “That may be. But she made Gallant swear he would rescue you, when the time came. So I think she forgave you. Um… and I’m named after her. Kind of. I don’t know if that matters.”

“It probably doesn’t,” Cheval rolled over. “But we should go. Could you please remove the restraints on my legs? I’d like to walk.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Double Entry eyed her bonds. “No. Sorry.”

A railway line passed within two-hundred paces of the bunker. The coal train was run by yak laborers. Where no crystal ponies could see, they came to a halt on the tracks. Cheval and her rescues leapt into the crew compartment, and the train started off again.

In the tight confines of the train, it was difficult for Cheval to get time alone with Mirror Pond. But eventually, the others went up to the engine to speak with the crew.

“I think some of the feeling in my horn is coming back,” Cheval said. “It’s a mild tingling so far, but hopefully I’ll have my magic soon.”

“That’s wonderful.” Mirror Pond smiled. “You’ll be healed before you know it.”

“Some sleep helped. It helped me feel better as well. You were very understanding. Thank you, Mirror.”

“Oh, well…” Mirror smiled. “I mean, you’d had a rough day.”

“Very rough. I wasn’t prepared, to meet a creature who thinks I’m their queen.” Her words made Mirror Pond hesitate, but before Mirror could correct her, Cheval asked, “That is how you feel, right?

“Um…” Mirror was obviously caught off guard. “I, uh… I suppose so. I could call you, ‘your highness’ if your like.”

“That won’t be necessary. But I’d like to ask you a favor.” When Cheval spoke, Mirror’s eyes went down to the ropes on her legs. She anticipated what the favor would be, and braced herself for it.

Then, Cheval said, “I had a question about Gallant,” and all of Mirror’s preparation was for nothing.

“What?” she blinked, momentarily stunned. “Um, sure. What about him?”

“He considers himself a pony, not a changeling. He didn’t teach his children to make faces. Or so I heard.” She checked Mirror’s expression for confirmation before she went on. “Am I right that that was a controversial decision, in the hive?”

“Oh. Hah. Yes.” Mirror smiled a faint little smile. “He didn’t make a lot of friends. I heard he even got into a fight over it.”

“But he’s your friend. You respect him.”

“Of course. He’s a hero.” She cleared her throat. “You know, he saved Equestria. A bunch of times. There are books about him.”

“I’m sure,” Cheval said smoothly. But then she changed tacts, and it was with a faintly curious air that she asked. “Do you think his children are worse off?”

Again, Mirror froze. “What?”

“Are his children worse off because they’re ponies and not changelings?”

“No, I mean…” She paused. “No. They’re very sweet. He has three. Two colts and a filly. They’re grown now, but—”

“You don’t think they’re any worse off for being ponies. But you’re proud of what you are.” Cheval locked eyes with Mirror, and spoke slowly and firmly. “From what Moth said last night, ‘whore’ is still a slur for changelings. It is, isn’t it? Because you need to be loved. But it’s not true. You’ve never manipulated a pony to make them love you. You don’t need to. Your family loves you. Is that right?”

“Yes. My, uh…” Mirror froze, her eyes going to the floor. “I have four brother and sisters. And my parents love me. And my grandfather loved me when I was little. He was a true-blood. Died just last month. He’d have wanted to meet you.”

“So you can’t travel, the way Gallant’s children can. You need to be near the hive. You need to care about the hive. You’re bound to it. All you’ve ever done, to help your family, to show your love for your friends, all of it is reflected in that place.” Cheval drew in a breath. “And without me, it will eventually die.”

“I uh…” Mirror stumbled. “I’m not sure that—”

“Mirror, look at me,” Cheval commanded.

Mirror’s head snapped up. They locked eyes, and Cheval pinned her to the spot. And then, Cheval spoke.

“You want the old ways back,” her voice was barely above a whisper. “Well, I’m old enough to remember those ways. So let me tell you what they were like. The old ways are when drones swear, I am nothing without the hive. It’s when all that love and emotional investment that makes you proud of what you are gets turned against you. It’s when the bonds that tie you to your family become chains. And you become my slave.”

“It’s not—”

Cheval’s face twisted into a snarl, and her already hard tone turned threatening. “Drones do not speak in the queen’s presence unless asked a question.”

Mirror’s jaw snapped shut. It was pure reflex that made her obey. But they could hardly continue the conversation in silence, so Cheval asked her a question: “Is that what you want?”

“Stop it,” Mirror snapped, her voice tight. “It’s not like that. Things have changed. And you’re not Amaryllis.”

“You don’t know that. We’ve only just met. Maybe I could be kind, or just, or any of the other things that make a pony a good ruler. But you don’t know. You’re in love with a fantasy.” Then she asked. “How will the world be better, Mirror? How will it be better, if the true changeling race returns?”

“You deserve to exist.”

“That’s not an answer. You just said, there’s nothing wrong with being a pony. Gallant’s children aren’t any worse off. If all of you had happy lives, and loved each other, and raised your children well, but you didn’t teach them to make faces and in time the changeling race died. How would the world be worse off?”

“How would it be better off?” she snapped. “Huh?”

“The R-word,” Cheval answered.

An angry flush rose into Mirror’s face. “That’s not love. It doesn’t happen.”

“Never? It never happens anywhere ever? No changeling has ever abused their shapeshifting powers? Pretended to be somepony else and slept with a mare or stallion?”

Mirror’s voice trembled. “Shut up.”

“Your parents loved you,” Cheval snapped, “your grandparents loved you. And you want to pay back their love. You want to be worthy of it. And maybe you are. But what they did to you was wrong and what we are is bad. It would be better if you were a pony. And it would be better if I didn’t exist.”

Then Cheval said, “Drone, I command you to untie me.”

Mirror bit her lip. She lowered her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “You don’t have your powers back yet. You can’t control my mind.”

“And yet, you still feel compelled to obey me, don’t you? The same way all your comrades came here, even though none of you really think I’d make your lives any better.” She pushed her legs forward. “Untie me. Now.”

“No,” Mirror snapped. “No, I…”

She reached for Cheval’s bindings. She almost did it. But at the last moment, she pulled herself back. “You don’t know half as much as you think you do. I mean. How could you?”

Still recovering, still tense, Mirror shook herself out. “I’m a pony who was raised by changelings, and I consider myself a changeling. You’re a changeling who was raised by ponies. Have you ever even set hoof in a hive? Have you ever spent time there, seen the children, talked to the young ones about picking a caste? I don’t think so. Sure, you’ve got the bloodline, but in your heart I don’t think you’re a changeling at all. You’re a pony with a massive self-loathing complex. And who could blame you?”

“I did things, Mirror.”

“Fifty years ago!”

Cheval snorted, “Last week.”

“You’ve been punished enough!” She shouted. “And… and fuck you. You can’t condemn my culture because you read some books about it half a century ago, and you’ve decided it’s worthless. No creature has that power. Even if you are my queen. You haven't even seen my hive."

“Do you really think seeing your quaint little house in Ponyville is going to change my answer?”

“I don’t know,” Mirror snapped. “Will it? Will you actually explore Ponyville and see what there is to see?”

“There’s nothing there.”

“Fine.” She sniffed. “Then promise me you’ll actually do it. Promise you’ll actually see the Ponyville hive, and not just throw yourself off the train at the first chance.”

“Why should I?”

“Because Double Time wanted you to, and you abused her. You did things to her no creature has the right to do.” Mirror Pond drew her back her mouth into a snarl. “So if you’re actually sorry instead of just bitter, and you actually want to make things right, you’ll honor her last request.”

Cheval paused, her eyes went down to her legs. “I… it’s not…”

“No more fancy talking,” Mirror stepped up to her. “Yes or no?”

After a long pause, Cheval mumbled a quiet: “Fine.”

The Ponyville Train Station

Princess Cheval was free.

Ponyville could hardly talk about anything else. It was in the papers, and on the radio. There was gossip in the barbershops and the hair salons, in the cafes and in the markets. Every creature knew she’d soon come to Ponyville—her nation was waiting for her. Parties were prepared in her honor, gifts were wrapped, and cameras were made ready for the moment she stepped off the train.

It was such a grand occasion that many creatures traveled to Ponyville just to wait. The entire Apple clan assembled, all the ponies who were once Elements of Harmony returned to their childhood home, and remote members of the Sparkle family came to meet their niece.

Every changeling who had left the hive returned home as well. It was a grand family reunion.

One changeling, a mare named Brightside, decided it was a good opportunity to introduce her family to her boyfriend. His name was Ocean Breeze, and he was a pegasus pony. They took the train down from Manehatten, and he got to sleep in the spare room that was right next to her bedroom and conveniently had a connecting door.

It went so well at first. Her grandmother sniffed him and proclaimed that he did, in fact, love her. He told jokes and her relatives laughed. But around noon on the second day of their visit, he asked her question.

“Why is this such a big deal?” They were together in one of Ponyville’s cafes, near the hive, but with a distinctly pony flavor to the food. For lunch, they both preferred muffins to roast spiders.

“What do you mean?” Brightside laughed. “She’s the future queen of my people.”

“Celestia is the ruler of your people right now. When she appears on TV, you shout, ‘Hey Sunbutt, you’ve got a divine right to kiss my ass.’”

“I don’t believe in alicorn rule.”

“No.” Ocean Breeze tilted his head to one side. “But you do believe in the birthright of a teenager from the Crystal Empire who spent fifty years turned to stone?”

“Oh come on, that’s totally not the same.” Brightside rolled her eyes. “Celestia isn't literally the mother to her people.”

“Cheval isn’t your mother.”

“She’ll be mother to lots of other changelings.”

“No she won’t. She’ll lay a lot of eggs, but she won’t raise them all herself.” He poked at his food. “I thought you said parents are the creatures who love their children?”

“Okay, fine.” Brightside’s scoffed, and the next roll of her eyes was somewhat less friendly than the first had been. “But you know laying thousands of eggs is still a big deal, right?”

“I’m not saying she isn’t a big deal. But you’re like… excited.” He gestured at her, momentarily struggling for words. “I haven’t seen you this wrapped up in something in awhile. I’m sorry; I’m not trying to be picky. I just don’t get it.”

“It’s important to me. It’s like, I don’t want to have foals. But if I did have foals, it would matter that they know how to make faces.” She poked at her toast, suddenly lacking an appetite. “And I want to be here to see her reconnect with her culture.”

“Okay. That’s good.” He took in a breath and nodded. “Are you getting her something?”

“No. No. I mean, I’m sure Princess Twilight will. And all the important ponies. But she doesn’t want or need gifts from the common folk.” She paused. “Why did you think I was getting her something?”

“A lot of your family members seem to be wrapping up gifts.”

“That’s for each other.” Brightside looked off at the hive. “It’s fine.”

Later, while Ocean Breeze was visiting some pegasus friends in Cloudsdale, Brightside dropped in on her parents.

“Hey, mom? Dad? A quick question.” She poked her head into the living room. “You’re not, um, getting Princess Cheval anything, are you? Like, that would be silly.”

“Oh, yeah, we are,” her mother said. “We heard that she didn’t speak vespid very well, and if she does speak it, it’ll be the old-hive version. So your father and I thought, she should have a guide on slang in bilingual towns. You know, which vespid words have just become part of Ponyville equestrian and vice-versa?”

“So you got her a book?”

“Well,” her father said, “we couldn’t find a guide like that. So your mother and her clutch all got together and wrote one. Then they all signed it.”

“Oh.” Brightside paused. “That’s… remarkably thoughtful.”

“You could sign it too if you…” her mother started to say, but Brightside has already walked out.

When she got back to the streets of Ponyville, she stared up at the sky for a few long seconds. Then she stamped her hoof and shouted, “Fuck!”

“Hey there, my clutch-sister,” Brightside lifted a leg to hoofbump the creature in front of her. “How’s it hanging?”

Snaggle, who was indeed a mare and who was indeed part of Brightside’s clutch, stared at her for a long moment. “You are actually a changeling, how do you sound like a pony doing a bad impression?”

“I’ve lived in Manehatten awhile, okay?” Brightside lowered her hoof un-bumped. “Listen, I need a favor. Are you getting Princess Cheval anything?”

Snaggle was a barber. In the true Ponyville style, she worked in a combination movie theater and barbershop called And, Cut! Patrons got their hair cut while watching a film, and there was popcorn after. It was an entirely sensible business model, with the only problem being that most movies took slightly longer than a haircut, and so patrons tended to occupy the chairs for some time.

At least it left Snaggle plenty of time to stand around and gossip.

“Sure,” she said. “I heard she was taught to shapeshift the old way. Like, taught to impersonate ponies? So Snap Shot and I did some posing and some photo-editing, and we made a portfolio of ponies who don’t exist. So she can transform the way she’s used too without stealing anypony’s face.”

“That’s great. Really.” Brightside rubbed her face. “Is there still time for me to help make it?”

“It’s pretty much done. But you can sign it too if you want.”

“No. That’s…” She frowned. “Did you have any other gift ideas, maybe? Ideas you didn’t end up using?”

“Not really. But, come on, don’t worry. It’s not about getting her something.” Snaggle gestured at the hive around them. “For her, last week, she was just schoolfilly. Now she’s the long-awaited princess of an exiled people. She doesn’t know us, and she doesn’t know our culture. So just… give her something that helps her understand you.”

“That helps her understand me.” Brightside’s tone was skeptical.

“Or, not you, but you know, us.” Snaggle gestured all around them. “Us. This strange and wonderful hybrid of pastel herbivorous mammals and tie-dye predatory insects. What does being a changeling mean to you?”

Brightside stared, and so Snaggle repeated: “Get her that.”

“Hey there…” She paused. “Clutch-brother.”

Xerox, who was indeed a stallion and who was indeed part of Brightside’s clutch stared at her.

“Look, sorry, I’m having a bad day, okay?” Brightside sighed and covered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to make it weird.”

“It wasn’t weird,” he paused. “I mean, it was a little formal. But, we are clutch siblings. You could just call me your brother. It’s not like that distinction matters in this instance.”

“Yeah, I’ll note that for next time.” Brightside snapped. “What are you getting Princess Cheval?”

Xerox didn’t live in Ponyville either, but was rather a psychatrist in Canterlot. Returning to Ponyville for her visit, he’d chosen to rent a room in an inn, and so it was from his suitcase that he produced a gift.

“It’s a few specific pages from the Survey on Non-Pony Employment in the Greater Canterlot Area with some specific passages highlighted.” He offered her the document, though it had no fancy wrapping. He wasn’t the wrapper type, having instead put it in a simple manilla envelope.

“And,” he added, “I included some pictures. Since she’s from the Crystal Empire, she was probably raised to believe that changelings are all whores or spies. So seeing shapeshifting powers used for other professions might help her. There’s a bunch of actors in here, a nature conservationist who uses them to hide from animals…”

He trailed off as Brightside’s frustration became obvious on her face. She tossed the report back to the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m a baker,” she sighed. “I don’t use my powers at work. Sometimes I go whole weeks without changing forms. And the main thing I use my powers for is turning into mares from my boyfriend’s dreams, only, we don’t do that much, because he really does like what I actually look like.”

“A bit too much information there,” Xerox paused. “But, good for you two. That sounds like a very healthy relationship.”

“Do you have any other gift ideas?” She raised a hoof. “And don’t say I can sign this one.”

“Come on, Brightside. You don’t have to do anything. Being a changeling just isn’t that big a deal to you.”

“Yes, it is,” she snapped, pointing at herself with a hoof. “I am servant of this hive and a loyal drone.”

“Yeah, I know.” He shrugged. “But you live in Manehatten, and you’re a baker, and all your friends are ponies, and you never worry about being loved because you’ve got a great boyfriend. Like just… show up and take pictures of her. It’s not a big deal.”

“Hey, you, you’re the new Element of Generosity right?”

River Breeze, who was halfway through taking a bite of her sandwich, froze midway through the action. With glacial slowness, she chewed once. Then again. Then a third time. She swallowed. “Who are you?”

“Hi. I’m Brightside. I’m a changeling.” Uninvited, she sat at River Breeze’s cafe table. “But you are, right?”

“I’m the old Element of Generosity actually. The new Element of Generosity is in the Crystal Empire with Twilight.”

“But before you were the old one you were the new one, right?”

River Breeze didn’t know what to say to that, which was fine, because Brightside went on without her. “I need a thoughtful gift idea. And I thought, you’d be an expert in this! Like, the expert. See, Princess Cheval is coming to town, and every changeling is getting her something personal and thoughtful that’s about what our culture means to them. And like, I can’t think of anything.”

“So… you want to me to come up with something thoughtful and authentic and meaningful so you can copy it?” River Breeze scrunched up her muzzle. “That’s kind of old ways isn’t it? I think she already knows how that part works.”

“Wow. That’s racist.” Brightside grimaced, then laughed, then reached across the table. “But seriously I need help.”

“Okay, let’s back up.” River Breeze levitated her napkin to her mouth, and carefully wiped away some bits of mayonnaise and hay. “Why does it matter so much to you? With so many creatures giving gifts, the odds are very low she’ll ever open yours.”

“I need to show I’m…” She gestured vaguely. “One of us. Not just a pony with powers she never uses. That I’m a good daughter, and a good drone. That I’m loyal to my people.”

“Okay. Why does that matter so much to you?” River Breeze lifted a hoof. “And answer without telling me what you are. I know what you are. What are you feeling?”

“But it’s about what I am. I’m a loyal part of the hive. I belong to something.” She touched her chest with her hoof. “Without that, I’m just… a baker with a cute boyfriend and no foals who drinks too much wine.”

“Okay,” River Breeze shrugged. “Then publicly swear yourself to her as the first member of her new hive guard. That’s your gift.”

“I’m not a soldier.” She frowned. “She doesn't even have a hive-guard. Does she?”

“No. I don’t think she’ll want one. So you can call yourself a changeling warrior, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and you won’t have to actually do anything to earn it.” River Breeze spread her hooves. “Because it seems that that’s what being a changeling is to you. It’s not about the powers or the traditions or living in a hive. It’s about belonging to something. So belong to her.”

When Brightside gaped, River Breeze shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll get it.”

Slapping a former Element of Generosity probably wasn't a good idea. Particularly given that there were three more former Elements of Generosity in that same cafe to hold her down, plus two Elements of Laughter and one dragon-assistant who reminded everypony of Spike.

On the upside though, there were a lot of ponies eager to help with her friendship problem.

After she was done singing her friendship song, Brightside stormed back into the hive. She went to her parents house, then up to her room, and slammed the door behind her like she was a petulant teenager all over again. She threw herself onto the bed and pressed her head down into the pillow, waiting for sleep that would not come.

After what felt like hours, the connecting door to the side room opened, and Ocean Breeze stepped in. “Hey, cutie,” he said, but when he laid eyes upon her, he froze. “What’s wrong?”

“Why do you love me?”

“Woah.” He rushed to her side, resting his hoof on her shoulder. “Where’d that come from?”

“It comes from the land of my not being anything special,” she buried her head deep in the pillow. “It comes from the place where I always thought, I don’t know, I had this mystic destiny. Or lineage. Or I was, like, a small part of something big and important. But it turns out, nope. It’s just an excuse to feel good about yourself because of things you didn’t do. Like stuffy old noble ponies who are proud of their lineage even though they didn’t do anything for it except be born.”

“You’re special to me,” he insisted. “You make me happy and—”

“Oh, yeah. We were a whirlwind romance. ‘Well, like, we hung out at a few parties, and once he took me home and that was fun, and after I noticed I didn’t feel tired and achy and hungry, so I was like, oh shit he must love me a little.’ Story tell our foals.” She rubbed at her face with a hoof. “No. That was bitchy. I’m so… dammit, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. Really.” He frowned. “But you know I fell in love with the mare who puts hearts on her cookies and spends every Saturday feeding stale bread to ducks. Right? I fell in love with her, not some mystic hero or a shapeshifting super spy.”

“I know, I just… I always thought I mattered. Somehow. And…”

When she trailed off into silence, Ocean Breeze slipped into bed with her, wrapping his legs around her chest. “You matter to me,” he said. “Do you want to go home? We’re only here to make you happy. If things are stressing you out, we can go back to Manehatten.”

“No. We might as well stay,” she sighed. “I’ll get to see a Princess. That’s big I guess.”

“You could shout she has a divine right to kiss your ass.”

“Ha ha.” Brightside shut her eyes. “No, it’s…” She licked her lips. “It’s fine. We’ll snap a few pictures and go home early. Nothing’s going to happen anyway. It’s just an old trueblood waving at crowds.”

Tens of thousands stood outside the Ponyville train station, waiting for Cheval to arrive: ponies, changelings, diamond dogs, griffons, dragons, and more. As always, the flyers had the best view. Ocean Breeze had woken her up early, she’d taken the form of a pegasus, and together they’d flown to the station before dawn.

All the spots on the station roof were already taken, but they found a cloud out over the outskirts of Ponyville and borrowed it. It made a comfortable perch, and they were able to watch the crowd form.

An enterprising pegasus was selling hayburgers out of a sky chariot. They got two, and from his saddlebags, Ocean Breeze produced a flask. Brightside giggled, kissed him, and took somewhat more than her half.

When the train arrived just past eleven, Brightside was already braced for disappointment. What was this creature going to do or say, to match the sight of the crowd? Creatures of all kinds packed the streets, the skies, the roofs, all gathered to welcome a teenage mare.

“They’re all like me, aren’t they?” she asked Ocean. He didn’t have an answer. “They think it makes them special.”

Her train—no royal conveyance but a regular passenger line—pulled into the station. A few crystal ponies stepped out, then Gallant and a few other changelings she knew, then a few members of Celestia’s royal guard.

Finally, Cheval emerged. Her shell was black, her wings were by her side, and she squinted into the sunlight. She stared at the crowd, was though she not sure what she was seeing.

Then, she shivered. She shuddered, a motion so severe it was visible from a distance. She gripped her stomach with a hoof, and doubled over as though in pain, bending her spine around herself.

“What’s happening?” Ocean Breeze sat up, fear running through his words. It was becoming obvious to him, to her, to the entire crowd, that something was wrong with Cheval. Her escorts and guards were trying to help her, but the shaking wasn’t passing.

“Oh no.” Brightside’s hoof shot to her face. “They took her away from Cadence. None of her escorts love her. She’s having hunger pangs.”

“That looks like more than pangs.” On the ground below, Cheval was shaking at the knees, her escorts holding her up as she threatened to tumble over.

“She should be able to go for weeks without eating. It must be because she’s pregnant.” Looking over the crowd, Brightside saw a few old truebloods trying to push their way to the platform—drones with greying shells and weak bodies. “Right. Right.”

Without another word, Brightside leapt from her cloud. An ungraceful flyer, she crashed down to the train platform face first. She recovered quickly, charged past a group of royal guards. One swung at her, and in a flash of green, she transformed into a filly. The blow whiffed above her considerably shorter head, and in another flash, she transformed back. She crossed the last few steps to Cheval in one massive leap.

And wrapped her up in a hug.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’ll be okay.” Cheval was shaking so hard that Brightside struggled to grip her. But she held on anyway. She didn’t know if it was possible to make herself love a creature, but she tried. She thought the kindest thoughts she could about Cheval, and hoped for her to recover.

Something hit her from behind. It was another changeling, trying to wrap his legs around her and Cheval both. Then another hugged Cheval from her other side. Then another came, and another. The crowd swarmed up over the platform, pushing aside the royal guard and Cheval’s escorts. Every creature that could hugged her, and those who could not hugged eachother.

The pressure was intense. Cheval’s hard shell was in front of her and the crowd was behind her. Brightside feared being crushed under the weight. She struggled to breathe, but she didn’t move.

And eventually, Cheval stopped shaking.

Chapter 14

When the hunger passed, and the pain faded, and Cheval’s gut no longer threatened to devour the rest of her body, she lifted her head.

Right in front of her was a little blue mare, hugging as tight as she could. Beside the mare was a stallion, beside them a little colt, beside them a griffon. It went on like that, and they were all around her. In every direction was a sea of bodies, of faces, of people. They loved her, not as a mother loves her children, but as ponies love their dreams. Their love tasted like hope and wanting and fear.

Cheval ate it.

She waited then, for ponies to start getting sick. Or perhaps, for one of them to say something, to do something other than stand there and prostrate themselves before her. She waited for one of them to object to being her prey.

But they were looking at her, and eventually, she could wait no more. “I’m fine,” she said, barely above a whisper. Then she cleared her throat, and spoke as a princess should. “Thank you. I’m fine.”

So large a mob could not disentangle itself quickly. Ponies close enough to hear her tried to shuffle back, but accomplished little more than to bump the noses and chests of the creatures behind them. An uncertain mumble passed through the crowd, rippling through them like waves on the surface of a lake.

And so Cheval spread her wings, and they buzzed like a dragonfly. She flew to the top of the traincar, and sat like she was on a throne. Changelings did not possess the power of the Royal Canterlot Voice, but Flurry’s drugs had worn off during the long trip. In a flash of green, she took the form of an alicorn with a grey coat, blue mane, and a swarm of insects for a cutie mark.

“Would all the changelings in the front please turn into flying creatures and make room for those behind them?” she spoke. “I do not want any creature getting trampled.”

The crowd flashed like a line of firecrackers and a strange swarm took to the air. Trueblooded changelings, hawks, sparrows, pegasi, griffons, alicorns and more all took off at once. A few bumped heads during their ascent, but there were no serious injuries. The skies over Ponyville were thick with them.

During the first war, so long ago, Shining Armor learned a lesson about the dangers of changeling air power. And Cheval didn’t know what to say.

When the silence grew too long, Gallant took the form of a pegasus and flew up to sit beside her. His shapeshifting skills really were quite poor. She didn’t know if it was his age, his natural inclination, or a weakness shared by this new changeling breed.

“Your eyes aren’t the same color,” she mumbled. “And your pinions are different shades too.”

“Tell them you want to see the hive,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”

And so she raised her voice and said, “Thank you. Your love sustains me, and sustains future generations of our race.” Then, “show me this hive you have built.”

They stamped their hooves, shouted, and cheered.

For the first time in her life, Cheval stood in a structure built with the assumption that all the residents could walk on walls. In her natural form, she clung to the underside of a dance hall ceiling, and her subjects laughed. They said she looked like a pony tourist, tail dangling “up” behind her.

But they didn’t love her any less for it. She was raised in the Crystal Empire, they said. Of course she wasn’t familiar with changeling architecture.

Then there was music. There were parties. There were gifts, presented by all the changelings of Ponyville. Brightside’s mother gave her guide to slang, and Cheval made an earnest attempt to read from it, eliciting peals of laughter as she accidentally implied Celestia and a slice of cake were in a sexual relationship. Brightside’s sister got her a book of forms, and Cheval transformed into several of them, all while wearing a pin that read, “Secret Shapeshifter.”

The report from Xerox she promised to read later, but several creatures did insist on telling her that a famous changeling actor recently won some kind of award for their role in a TV show she hadn’t heard of. She didn’t remember his name, but they all seemed to think it was a big deal.

Hundreds of others waited to see her, and the gifts piled up. But near the end of the line, one gift stood out from the rest. It was from the changelings (and ponies) of the Ponyville Quarry, made by all of them together, and carefully transported into town by a team of twenty strong earth ponies.

It was a throne made out of black stone, like the one Amaryllis had once sat on.

Then, one of the truebloods produced Amaryllis’s crown. It wasn’t a replica, but the thing itself. It was still dented on one side, and one of the tines was broken off. It had hit the ground quite hard after it fell from her head, and Flurry had stepped on it.

Gallant tried to intervene, to shoo the quarry ponies and truebloods away. But Cheval politely pushed him back and spoke for herself.

“Thank you,” she said. “But this is not the time. Changelings are ruled by a queen, but ponies are ruled by princesses. We have many ponies among us. Some of you think of yourselves as ponies. I would not want to offer disrespect to that noble race by making so important a decision in haste. Maybe I will take the title ‘Queen of the Changelings’ one day. Or, maybe I will remain a princess. I do not yet know your world well enough to say what is best. But my mother’s crown will still be waiting, when we are all ready.”

The crowd said that she was very wise. They stomped their hooves and clapped and called her a great leader.

Cheval bade them all to enjoy the festivities, and excused herself. She was tired.

Light Step’s house wasn’t exactly a palace. Swarms of refugees had lived in it for many years, and the building itself had begun to suffer from the ravages of time. But since the children left home and Demure passed away, Gallant couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

He’d made up the guest room for Cheval. In a room whose walls were no longer quite straight, she sat on a bed covered in an old quilt. Amaryllis’s crown was in front of her.

It was black, with little blue baubles on the end of each tine. They matched the color of her mane and tail.

“I’d like to talk to Gallant alone,” she said to her rescuers. “Give us privacy, please.”

Mirror Pond and Double Entry and Moth and all the others filed out, vanishing down the stairs. When only he was left, she shut the door to the hallway. Then she said, “We need to go to Canterlot.”

He paused, then frowned. “Why?”

“I need to renounce my claim to the Crystal Empire. Publicly. Ideally in front of Celestia. To force her to accept it.” Her wings buzzed against her side. “And, I need to forfeit the changeling nation’s claim to the original hive. To any territory in the North.”

Again, he asked, “Why?”

“Because there are still yaks so bitter about the outcome of the war they risked their lives to help me escape. Because this place we’re standing in is called the Ponyville Hive, but the one in the north is just the Hive. Definitive article. And because Celestia is clearly reserving the right to kick Diamond Path off his throne and put me in his place.”

When Gallant didn’t say anything, Cheval’s tone turned snappish: “Don’t you get it? The Crystal Empire isn’t safe. Everything that was done can still be undone.”

“Your nation is outside,” he gestured at the window. “You’re their beacon of hope. You’re their leader. Why is the security of the Empire the first thing you’re thinking of?”

“Because they’re not my nation.” Her voice was tight, run through with emotion. “I was raised in the Crystal Empire. I was raised in a palace, and my friends were crystal ponies. I don’t know how to walk on walls and I barely speak vespid. What ties me to these creatures, exactly?”

“They love you.”

Cheval sneered, looking off into a corner of the room. “They love a fantasy.”

“It’s a fantasy that you give hope that their race will survive?”

“They’re not changelings, Gallant. I thought you knew that.” She scoffed. “They’re ponies with shapeshifting powers.”

“Does that distinction really matter?”

“It does. It does matter. Because this is all very sweet, but you know what it is?” Her voice rose, and her sneer sharpened. “It’s Ponyville. This is what ponies are like, in the most Equestrian town there ever was. They’re kind. They’re kind and loving all the way down to the bottom of their souls. And if you take a creature like that and tell it it’s a changeling, it’ll come up with a version of the changeling race that’s so sweet and so fluffy.”

It was with a bitter tone, she finished: “But it’s a lie. These aren’t changelings. They’re ponies playing pretend.”

“Because you care for them, so they can’t possibly be like you.” Gallant said. “Is that right?”

Before Cheval could answer, he pushed open the door to the hall and walked out. She stared at the open doorway, mouth open. Sounds of rummaging carried through the hall, and it wasn’t long before Gallant returned. He had a large wooden box with him, covered in dust.

“This was made by my mothers. Double Time and Light Step, in case you forgot.” He put the box on the bed and brushed off the dust. “They made me promise I would rescue you, and once you were safely back in Equestria, to return it to you. It’s everything that’s left of old changeling culture. The original, from the northern hive.”

He unlatched the box. Inside it was a collection of books, scrolls in cases, a handful of magical items, and bundles of letters. “These were all that could be saved from the hive’s library, before it burned. Copies of them are still in print in Equestria. But these are the originals.”

Slowly, Cheval picked up one of the books. The old binding cracked when she opened it, but the book held together. The writing inside was in equestrian, since vespid had no written form.

“Cupid’s Broken Bow,” she read the title aloud.

“It’s a story about a pony named Aro who suffers a traumatic brain injury and loses the ability to feel romantic love,” Gallant said. “They travel to the changeling hive in the hope of a cure. There, they meet a gatherer who is fascinated to meet a pony they can’t feed on. It’s the first time they’ve met a pony they can interact with like a person, instead of like prey. They talk about everything: life, humor, carpentry. They talk about carpentry a lot actually. At the end, Amaryllis finds a cure for Aro’s condition, but they ask not to be healed. They like who they are, and the friend they’ve made.”

“Well.” She shut the book. “That’s fine.”

“This one,” Gallant picked up another book, “is a collection of essays on how to start a business or hold a job. The hive didn’t have money, and lots of workers who moved out into the North got fleeced because they didn’t know any better.”

“Yes, it’s fine.”

“This one is An Unworthy Proposal. It was a quite famous essay, published shortly after the hive reformed. It argues for the abolition of the caste system, in favor of individual clutches being free to determine their own destiny. The author was arrested for—”

“You think I can’t lie on paper?” Cheval asked. “My powers to deceive are somehow limited to verbal communication?”

Gallant considered that. Then he plucked two letters from the pile. “These are for you. The one with the blue seal was written by Light.” He put that one back in the box. “The one with the red seal was written by Double Time.”

Cheval started to push the letter away, but before she could, Gallant snapped: “Given what you did, I think reading it is the least you owe her.”

A mix of emotions played over Cheval’s face: shock, guilt, uncertainty, and finally, anger. She snatched the letter from Gallant’s grasp.

“Get out,” she said, “or I throw you out.”

Cheval didn’t open the letter. She lay in bed, the open box untouched beside her. The clock on the wall told her it wasn’t even 8 PM, so she shut her eyes and willed it to move faster.

Midnight couldn’t come fast enough.

“I hate you,” she said, hugging a pillow like it was a lover. “I hate you so much.”

When Amaryllis didn’t say anything, Cheval picked up the crown off the bed and threw it. It passed through Amaryllis without slowing down, knocking over a lamp behind her.

“There you go,” Cheval snapped. “It’s yours. Take it. I don’t want it.”

But Amaryllis could only say: “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry enough.” Cheval turned away, going back to hugging her pillow. “What… what do you think you’re going to do? Make up for sixteen years of being a terrible mother with one good haunting?”

“No. It’s too late for that. But I wanted…” She let out a breath. “I wanted you to see that you’re different. And you are different.”

“I’m not.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “In the train station today, I felt the love of tens of thousands. They adored me, and I took what I wanted, and when I was done I used what was left to control them. They’d die for me, if I asked right.”

“I know.”

“They’d wage war,” she said. “If I told them that the Crystal Empire and the North alike were mine by right, they’d petition Celestia to make it so. I could drown the North in blood.”

“You could.”

“I’d be the liberator. Of the crystal ponies and the yak and the diamond dogs and the griffons and every other race and nation Flurry wronged. I’d have built the empire you always wanted—a core of changelings surrounded by servant races who love us.”

“It’s a beautiful vision,” Amaryllis agreed. “Enticing. Like being aroused. Lustful. Your body knows what it wants and how easy it would be to take it.”

Silence hung between them for several long seconds. “But you didn’t,” Amaryllis said. “You didn’t take it. And you didn’t look like you were enjoying yourself either. You were terrified.”

Cheval dragged a hoof over the old quilt. It was a quick, spastic little motion, like a dog pawing at the ground. “I don’t want to be that creature.”

“You’re not.”

“I was. I am. Nobody cares about Gia and Gideon because they were peasants. Just two little minions of the International Party. If I’d abused and murdered two princesses, ponies wouldn’t be so quick to forgive.” Her voice cracked. “But they were my friends and I betrayed them.”

“You did,” Amaryllis agreed. “Double Time betrayed a lot of ponies. Did she deserve what you did to her?”

“No, she…” Cheval froze. “She earned her redemption. You could see it.”

“But there was a time when she hadn’t earned it yet. When she was nothing but a mass murderer with a royal pardon, like a piece of paper somehow made her victims less dead. That’s who she was when your mother met her. Your real mother. And Cadence forgave her.”

“She made a mistake.”

“No, she didn’t.” Amaryllis sat by the edge of the bed, and rested a hoof on Cheval’s side. “And she didn’t make a mistake when she adopted you. You should read what Double had to say.”

Cheval’s horn glowed, and she levitated over the letter with the red seal. The paper crinkled as she opened it, and old wax crumbled away. Her eyes flicked over the paper, randomly settling somewhere in the middle.

It was my job to teach you about your people, Double wrote, and I failed. Instead of teaching you about our best moments, I taught you about our worst. I showed you how to lie and I showed you how to kill. And then I wondered why you turned out like me.

Your mother always loved you, and it wasn’t ever cheap. If she doesn’t understand you, it doesn’t mean she cares about you any less. You were too young to remember how she struggled—

There was more after that, but Cheval couldn’t focus on the paper. She shut her eyes and squeezed the pillow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted any of this. All I wanted was to be a pony, okay? I’m sixteen. I wanted to be a teenager and get acne and be awkward around colts and have a normal life. I don’t want to be this thing and I don’t want to rule anyone and I miss my family. But now this is all happening and I don’t know how to deal with it.”

She shivered in bed, and with a faint voice continued: “I need help. I need help and you’re the only one who has any idea what I’m going through. Please…” She struggled with the words. “Please stay.”

There was no answer, and when Cheval rolled over to look, she was alone in the bedroom.

She never saw Amaryllis again.

The War Room

Diamond Path had been a quiet, nervous colt—the sort of pony who preferred reading to partying and who didn’t like to speak until he knew what to say. But when he’d turned sixteen, her mother had asked him if he wanted to be the crown prince.

“You don’t have to say yes,” she’d said. “You're a fine young stallion, and your father and I will love you just the same no matter what. But if you want to be the heir to the Crystal Empire, you need to act like it.”

He did want to be his mother’s heir. And so he took elocution lessons, learned the finer points of social grace, and joined the army. At thirty, he was no longer a young colt, and when he walked into a room he walked like he owned it.

“Prince Diamond Path,” announced one of the guards at the door to the war room, and the general staff shot to their hooves. Crystal ponies in uniforms, ponies with medals, ponies who had won battles and watched their friends die stood at attention. They waited for him to dismiss them as he walked to the head to the table.

But he did not dismiss them. He let them stand there, stiff as boards, while he slowly examined the room. “Admiral Sapphire,” he said, “where is my mother?”

“Princess Flurry Heart was tired after the events of the day,” the Admiral began. “She was unavailable to—”

“Has she delegated the power to resolve this crisis, to myself or anypony else in this room?” His voice was like a whip, and nopony dared answer. “Then this meeting is not appropriate. She is your sovereign. You will sit and you will wait for her to arrive.”

He clapped a hoof on the table for attention, then pointed at a four-star general, chosen at random. “You! Fetch my mother, now. Everypony else, sit.”

They sat. They waited in silence for nearly a quarter-hour, as Diamond Patch watched them. With his eyes, he dared them to speak. Then Flurry Heart arrived, and everypony had to stand again.

“Diamond,” Flurry said. They exchanged a short hug, and a chair was produced for her. When she sat, one could imagine her bones rattling in her joints. A grey hair fell from her head. “What’s this about?”

“We’re discussing Cheval’s escape,” he said. “The government must declare an official position.”

“No. No.” Flurry waved a hoof. “It’s… it’s a trivial matter. She’s one mare. And Equestria already has changelings. No comment. That’s our… that’s our position.”

Silence hung over the room. Diamond didn’t dare to frown. But several of the general staff lacked his self control. One officer said, “Your Highness, Cheval was seen by many ponies in the city. Word of her escape is spreading. The secret police do not have the rumors under control. We must do something.”

“A rumor that Cheval escaped is hardly going to upset the apple cart, is it?” Flurry asked. “The people will never accept a changeling as their ruler. Her claim to the throne is a joke. And we kept her under control for… well. We can contain any threat she poses.”

“Respectfully, your highness,” said an old pegasus, her uniform decorated with flyer’s medals, “the general population does not see it that way. The changeling is an insidious and highly adaptable foe, and despite her being bound from horn to hoof, she escaped custody in less than a week. The threat to the Empire is real, and if we don’t do something, ponies will begin to panic.”

“She’s a teenager. Not a threat,” Flurry said. “She only escaped because Twilight helped her. It…” She waved the matter off. “You’re making a grand affair out of nothing. Say that Twilight took her. Nothing is wrong.”

“We should have her killed at once,” said a young general, with only one star, and no medals to speak of. “We have agents in Ponyville. We could activate them at any time.”

“Absolutely not!” Flurry snapped. “She…”

But Flurry struggled for words. Diamond Path lept in to fill the gap: “She is under Celestia’s protection. The actions you propose amount to a declaration of war—something the Empire is not prepared to support at this time.”

“Yes,” Flurry said. “Yes.”

“General Auger,” Diamond addressed the pony wearing dark sunglasses, who sat near the back. “Your department will draft statements for release to the general population. They must contain the following core points. First, Cheval only escaped due to Twilight’s help. Second, while we could have prevented her escape at any time, we held back out of a desire not to harm Princess Twilight. Third, Equestria’s actions in this regard are deplorable, and they hurt their own population by reintroducing this inferior breed. Bring out the pictures of the whorehouses again.”

Auger nodded, and one of his aides took detailed notes. The other officers lifted their heads. “Fourth,” Diamond said, “there have been changelings in Equestria for decades. They fear the Empire’s might, and have not dared set hoof in our borders. That fact has not changed. The power of the armed forces will protect the people, as it has since the great war.”

Once he was sure he was understood, Diamond went on: “General Zircon, I understand that several yak assisted Cheval’s escape as well. I want them found and publicly executed. Admiral Ferrous, produce a list of sanctions we can impose on Equestria to punish them for this violation of our sovereignty…”

And so it went. The ponies in uniforms nodded and took notes. And then Diamond turned to his mother. “With your permission.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“Good. You’re all dismissed.”

The officers left. Diamond rested a hoof on his mother’s shoulder, to show that she wasn’t going anywhere. When the two of them were alone, he shut the door to the war room. Then he asked, “What the hell was that?”

“I’m tired, Diamond.” She lifted a hoof to her face. “I’m an old mare. I have bad days.”

“We all have bad days. It’s why we plan in advance, so when the survival of the Empire is at stake we won’t have to wing it.” He pulled out a chair and turned it around, sitting so he could face her head on. “Did you have a plan?”

Flurry Heart said nothing. Her wings tightened against her sides, and she turned her head to the floor.

“Oh,” Diamond said. He sat back, looked at the ceiling. “Fuck,” he said. Then he snarled. “Fuck!” His hoof knocked a glass from the table, and it shattered on the floor. Water splattered everywhere.

“I didn’t know Twilight would help her.”

“You didn’t…” Diamond was left breathless, and a strange sort of smile touched his face. “I trusted you. We all trusted you. You’re a political mastermind. You always have a plan. Me, them, the whole general staff, the whole Empire, we all trusted that you knew what you were doing. That if you unfroze the last changeling queen, there was some kind of plan behind it.”

“The plan was that I didn’t want you to kill her to secure your rule.”

He laughed, staring off into the corner of the room. “Why not?”

“Because she’s my sister.”

“Oh, is she? My dear auntie Cheval?” Diamond turned back to glare at her. “No, mother, she’s not your sister. She’s a monster. She is a shapeshifting parasite that exists to manipulate ponies so she can use them as food and slave labor. Remember that? Do you remember that?”

“You believe that because it’s what I told you when you were little,” Flurry let out a snort, her expression momentarily sharpening. “And what if I was wrong?”

“Then you’ll be remembered as history’s greatest monster. The pony who rounded up millions of innocents and shoved the corpses under the ice lakes, because the ground was too hard to dig mass graves.”

Flurry’s breath caught in her throat. She turned away, looking into the corner of the room.

“What?” Diamond snorted. “Did you think sparing Cheval’s life was going to change anything? That you’d somehow be remembered for your last act of mercy, instead of for the millions of acts of brutality that came before it?”

“What was I supposed to do?” She turned back to him. Her voice was tight, and she started to choke up. “Smash her to bits? Pretend I’d never thought to question myself? What we did was wrong, Diamond. It was so wrong.”

“She poisoned grandma and grandpa,” Diamond said. “You told me about that. She smiled at your father, and told him she loved him, gave him a hug, and used it to slip drugs into his coffee. She’d have enslaved us all if you gave her the chance.”

“I know.” Flurry started to tear up. “And I know she’s… that in some ways, she’s a monster. But in other ways, she’s one of us. And your grandmother was right to take her in. I forgave her, Diamond. I forgave her for betraying us.”

“And you think that changes a thing?” he shook his head. “You know that when a cargo train gets up to full speed, it can take it ten miles to stop? Ten miles, from when the driver slams on the brakes to when the train stops moving.”

“I don’t—”

“The Empire can’t stop on a bit either. You told millions of ponies that changelings are degenerate scum, who will impersonate their spouses and abuse their children. That any extreme measures were justified in the face of such a threat. And they believed you. They killed for you. And now that you say something different, do you think they’re just going to stop?”

“We’re ponies. We’re a kind breed. They’ll come around.”

Then, Diamond said, “The general staff thinks you’ve gone senile and wants you overthrown.”

Silence hung in the air. Flurry wrapped her wings around herself. “They’ve told you?”

“They’ve started inviting me to planning meetings without you. And the 101st has been removed from the city in favor of the 132nd. They’re loyal to General Auger personally, and he reassured me that if I had need of capable air troops, they wouldn’t make the sort of mistakes that allowed Cheval to escape.”

Flurry said nothing, so Diamond went on. “Am I wrong?”

“No. That’s an invitation to a coup.”

“So, do you want to be overthrown?”

“No.” She shook her head. “But tell me something, Diamond. What if I was wrong? I’m not asking about politics. I’m not asking about the Empire, or about the people, or about saving face. I’m asking you as a person. Did I really raise a son who is comfortable with mass murder? Does it really not…”

She frowned at him, furrowing her brow. “Does it not bother you?”

“Mother…” Diamond sighed. “I don’t think you were wrong. But I also don’t think children inherit the sins of their parents. If you really did kill millions of innocent creatures, it happened before I was born. And it happened while Cheval was in stasis. If you want to make things right with those who were wronged, you can’t do it by talking to me, and you can’t do it by talking to her.”

He let the silence hang between them. Flurry teared up, and stared at the floor.

When it was clear she had nothing to say, Diamond spoke one last time. “You’re going to abdicate the throne now. I’ll draft your public address.”

Chapter 16

In the morning, Cheval asked Mirror Pond to teach her vespid.

Then she asked Gallant to find her a history teacher—somepony qualified to catch her up on the last fifty-two years of world history. She asked Moth Orchid to bring her the changelings of Ponyville who were opposed to her becoming their queen, so that she could understand their concerns. And she asked After Image to explain what “television” was.

The last question was the easiest to answer. While Gallant and the other house guests ate breakfast, Cheval sipped a glass of rosewater and watched Saturday morning cartoons.

“Why do the robot unicorns always miss when they shoot at Captain Mustang?” she asked.

“Because his name is in the title of the show,” Gallant explained.

Some of her questions could not be answered by any creature who still lived, but those who had passed away had left written instructions. One of the scrolls left behind by Double and Light detailed the reproductive process of a changeling queen, giving instructions to both Cheval and those who would help care for her eggs.

“Hello, every creature,” she said to a hall filled with three-hundred volunteers. So many times, she’d spoken in public, to crowds ranging from tens to tens-of-thousands. But the sight of three-hundred creatures who had offered to raise her children for her tightened her throat, and her words stuck there.

Finally, she managed, “So, I finally learned exactly how this works this morning. Turns out I do get fat after all. So that’s a disappointment.” They laughed.

When Twilight returned, they had tea together and went to inspect the children. There was practice walking on walls. A couple asked her to marry them, and it turned out that neither of them were changelings, just ponies from Ponyville who thought the idea was neat. She went for walks in the morning, and creatures waved.

She even walked up the street and bought muffins from the bakery. Of course, she couldn’t eat them, and in fact did not know what to do with them once she had them, but that was not the point. No creature made a big deal about it.

When Flurry abdicated the throne, citing her age and the need for a “gradual, peaceful transition of power,” it was barely news. Diamond Path had already been influential in government for years and every creature knew he was just like his mother. Changelings cursed Flurry’s name, and cursed Celestia for not doing anything to stop her, but everything was business-as-usual.

Until suddenly it wasn’t.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Cheval was sitting with her history instructor, learning about the downfall of communism. “So,” she was asking, “what is it with griffons and brightly colored track suits?”

But before he could answer, she leapt to her hooves; wings spread, eyes wide, horn aglow, legs braced on the ground. Her natural magic—emerald green like all changelings—flared. A bubble shield appeared around her.

“What?” her instructor asked. “What’s wrong?”

For a moment, she didn’t know. The action had been purely instinctive. And though she stammered for only a few seconds, that was time enough. Three changelings burst into the room, two through the door, one crashing in through the window from the street. They rushed to her side, though once they arrived, they too were unclear on why.

It was Cheval who said, “The hive is under attack.”

The concept of the hive mind had always been vague to her. Double Time had struggled to explain it, using phrases like “the psychic connection between the clutches” or “the unconscious understanding shared by the hive.” In her youth, Cheval had rolled her eyes.

But in Ponyville, it ceased to be vague. Quite the opposite; it was painfully specific. The hive mind was the thing that pressed in around her, that made her heart race, that flooded her body with nervous energy. It was the thing that screamed her home was in peril, and all the good in the world would soon perish at the hands of evil creatures.

“Come with me,” she commanded. The drones around her obeyed.

Ponyville swarmed. The pony residents, unable to hear the call, were left confused and frightened. To their eyes, their changeling friends had gone mad. Many ponies fled, rushing towards the safety of Twilight’s palace.

But a few ponies stayed with their changeling friends, and ran towards the danger. Without a word, the swarm converged on the train station. Cheval broke into a gallop.

A train was stopped there that bore the seal of the Crystal Empire. Its engine had been knocked from the tracks, and the passenger cars were covered in all manner of beasts.

Dragons smashed the windows and set the interior of the cars alight. When the crystal ponies inside fled, they were carried off in the talons of rocs and griffons. One crystal pony soldier, sword clenched in his jaw, struggled to fend off a pack of wolves. One got him in the ankle, and then transformed into a diminutive, two-headed hydra. The hydra’s second jaw got his other rear leg. Then both heads pulled in different directions.

The soldiers on the train fought valiantly, but they were impossibly outnumbered. One spun a halberd through the air like the blades of a fan, fending off a dozen manticores as though he were one of the great heroes of legend. But a unicorn—who might have been a changeling, or who might have been a pony—shot him in the leg with a magical blast.

He fell. The manticores pounced on him together. Blood splattered the side of the train.

Cheval’s eyes glowed, and with all her might she screamed, “Stop!”

The violence did not stop in an instant. Hot blooded fury granted the most common of creatures uncommon strength and they resisted her command. But she dug in her hooves and spoke in a voice that tolerated no dissent, and gradually the sounds of fighting abated. The swarm backed away.

Of the four-car train, little remained. One of the cars was on fire, a second overrun and stained by so much blood it was clear there were no survivors. The third and fourth still held a small garrison of crystal pony soldiers, surrounded on all sides by a furious horde a thousand times their number.

“They’re hunters,” said one changeling.

“They’re here to kill the princess,” said another.

“Murderers!” screamed a third. In a flash, she became a unicorn whose horn blazed like fire.

Then Cheval took the form of an alicorn. She was pink, with a thin build and a blue mane. Her tail was curled at the tips, and she wore a regalia of gold. It was a form that looked very much like Princess Cadence, save perhaps for her father’s hair. With a booming voice, she shouted over the mob: “Who is in command?”

Time passed. The burning car crackled, and plumes of smoke rose into the air. Finally, from one of the intact cars, two more soldiers emerged. Behind them, walking with a limp, was Flurry Heart.

Flurry tried to say something. But she no longer had the power of the Royal Canterlot Voice, and she could not be heard over the mob.

“Holy shit, it’s her!” said one changeling.

“Burn her alive,” said another.

“Shove her under the ice!” screamed a third.

The swarm advanced a step. Cheval felt the pressure of them all around her, and could no longer hold it back. Flurry was trying to shout, but she couldn’t make out a word.

A leader, Cheval had been taught, never gives a command they know will not be obeyed. And so she spoke again, “You will capture Flurry Heart alive. Alive. A quick death is more than she deserves. I have questions for her and she will confess her crimes before she dies.”

The swarm accepted that in a way they might not have accepted other commands. One changeling near Cheval asked, “What about the guards?”

“Use your best judgement,” Cheval said.

No other order would have been obeyed. It didn’t change what happened next.

“What were you thinking?”

Twilight arrived at a dead gallop, several minutes too late to save any of Flurry’s bodyguards. But she was able to save Flurry herself, levitating her out of the swarm’s reach. She teleported all three of them back to her palace.

And so it was that Twilight, Cheval, and Flurry all came to be seated around the same table. And the question had to be asked.

“I wanted to say I was sorry,” Flurry answered. “To… whomever was left. The last survivors of the old hive. Their children. To the creatures I actually wronged.”

“Oh, you’re sorry are you?” Twilight snapped. “Well I’m sure they’ll be pleased as punch to hear that. Meanwhile, you got your loyal servants killed for nothing, and there’s an angry mob outside screaming for your blood.”

“I didn’t… it wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” Flurry said. “I was going to surrender and—”

“And they jumped to conclusions before you could.” Twilight’s tone turned caustic, and her hoof hit the table. “How tragic. Here you are, trying to do the noble thing, and these yokels see a train with your seal on it, and somehow come to the conclusion that the soldiers inside it are here to kill their families. I mean, what could have led them to think that?”

“I made a mistake,” Flurry snapped, her voice thick.

“A mistake is a well-intentioned error,” Twilight curled her lip. “You haven’t had good intentions since you started puberty.”

“Twilight,” Cheval said, “I’d like some time with my sister now.”

“Oh, no,” Twilight shook her head, her words coming fast and sharp. “I don’t care how much you love her. If you think she’s walking out of this just because of family ties you—”

“Twilight, my sister is going to die soon, and if you don’t give me some time alone with her I’m going to be the second creature in my family to kick you through a solid wall.”

Twilight’s jaw opened without a sound. A few moments later, it snapped shut. “You’re… emotional,” she said. “And that’s… fair. I mean. That’s fair. I’ll be… I’ll be out in the hall if you need me.”

She shut the door behind her.

“These aren’t your victims,” Cheval said. “Your victims are dead. It’s too late to say sorry.”

“They’re the closest thing,” Flurry sniffed. “The closest that’s left.”

“It won’t make a bit of difference.”

“I know.” Flurry turned her head down to the table. “But what else is there to do? I don’t have long left. And this is… this is all that’s left. I’m going to say sorry. And then the mob outside can kill me.”

Cheval considered that. Then she said, “No.”

Flurry lifted her head, and Cheval went on: “If you’re torn apart by an angry mob, all anypony will remember is how you died. They’ll say, at the end of your life, you had a change of heart. You repented for your actions, and died to wash yourself of your sins.”

“Well, that…” Flurry paused. “That was the idea.”

“Yeah. No.” Cheval gave a small shake of her head. “Wanting to preserve your legacy and being sorry aren’t the same thing. And if you’re actually sorry, if you actually want to make things right, there is something you can do.”

“What is it?” Flurry asked.

“You can stand trial for your crimes. You can confess to everything, publicly, in detail. You can implicate the ponies still in power in the Crystal Empire who helped you. You can implicate the ponies in Equestria who didn’t stop you.”

“I’m…” a frown touched her face. “I’m not the ruler of the Crystal Empire anymore. I was deposed. I assumed you figured that out. I have no power to make anypony stand trial for—”

“You have the power to shame the Crystal Empire in front of the rest of the world. You have the power to make the crystal ponies who are still loyal to you personally question what they did. You have the power to shame Celestia.”

“Shame her into what?” Flurry asked. “Deposing my son? Plunging the Empire into another war?”

“If you care about keeping your son on the throne more than you care about making things right, you really haven’t learned anything, and you’re not repentant in the least. You’re just a coward who’s afraid of death, and what people will say about her after she’s gone.”

Flurry looked away, but Cheval did too, each staring into a corner of the room. “I should hate you,” Cheval said. “You did things to them. Things so horrible I can’t even picture them. But I can’t picture them. What I did to two griffons, that I can see and feel. There was blood and tears and the smell of burnt feathers. But the things you did are only numbers. I can’t picture a million bodies.”

She drew in a breath. “So I don’t hate you. I look at you, and I see my wonderful sister, and I can’t believe you got so old. You were beautiful once.”

“Heh,” Flurry squeezed her eyes shut. “You’re immortal. You’ll see other ponies get old.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Cheval warned. “I can’t hate you for the numbers. But I can hate you for being a coward. You’re better than that. You always were. And if you’re weak now, it’s because you’ve chosen to be weak. It’s because you don’t actually care.”

“I care.”

“Prove it. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean doing whatever will make ponies sad that you’re gone. It means doing whatever will help heal the world. Even if it guarantees you’re remembered as a monster.” Cheval’s voice hardened, and she made a sudden turn for the door. “I’m getting Twilight.”

“Wait,” Flurry lifted a hoof. “In the Crystal Empire, you said I still loved you. Is that true?”

“Yeah,” Cheval said. “But I loved mom and dad. It didn’t stop me from betraying them.”

“What are you…” Flurry gestured. “About mom?”

“Well, I was going to start by confessing everything to her. And then…” Cheval shrugged. “And then I don’t know. We’ll see if she wants to forgive me. And she may not. Victims don’t owe their abusers an ‘it’s all okay.’ If it hurts, sometimes it’s because you deserve it.”

“I want to be buried next to dad,” she said.

For a long time, Cheval was silent.

“Okay,” she said. Then she left to get Twilight.

The Future

Once upon a time, there was a changeling named Mirage. She was one of Cheval’s clutch-sisters, gifted to Cadence by Amaryllis. When Cadence decided to accept only one grub into the royal household, Mirage was given to a crystal pony family to raise as their own.

Her parents were Quartz Strike and Rose Cut, and they loved her very much. She had two crystal pony sisters named Fire Stone and Heliodor. And when she was a young teenager, she suffered from depression, and spent time with the psychiatrist who would later treat Flurry Heart.

She and her family lived in a two-story house on Idol Lane, six blocks from the palace and two from the library. When Quartz Strike spoke up against the Empire’s persecution of changelings and defended his daughter, the secret police came to that house in the middle of the night. They broke the door down, and a dozen ponies rushed inside.

Mirage escaped. The rest of her family did not.

With Cigar Dream’s help, she fled to Equestria, and thereafter to the Ponyville Hive. She became passing friends with Light, completed her medical training and became a doctor, and was one of the few changelings qualified to treat pony illnesses.

She also adopted two children: an earth pony filly and a unicorn colt. She told them stories about the little two-story house in Idol Lane. She talked about how beautiful it was, about the gardens full of crystal berries, about the flowering trees and the library up the street.

Her son was named Petrograph, and he worked in the Ponyville quarry. There, he met an earth pony mare named Breccia, and they had four children.

One of those children was named Castaway. She was a unicorn and a changeling, and she grew up hearing stories from her grandmother, including the stories about the little two-story house on Idol Lane.

When the time came that the Empire formally abolished its laws forbidding changelings from entering its borders, she booked a ticket on a train leaving Ponyville. Several of her pony friends went with her for safety. The customs guards at the border harassed her, insulted her, and forced her to wear a red band that read: “WARNING, SHAPESHIFTER.”

But she made it through. She walked the streets of the Crystal Empire, and found the little two-story house. It was as beautiful as her grandmother had said, and the crystalline trees outside it grew flowers like diamonds.

It didn’t take long for the pony couple living inside to notice her. Her band was noticeable, and they both eyed it as they walked up to the gate. “Excuse me,” said the mare. “But this isn’t your neighborhood. You’ve got no business here. Leave or I call the police.”

“Actually,” Castaway said, “it is my neighborhood.” Though the bars of the house’s little gate, she floated an envelope.

Inside was a deed, stamped with an Equestrian seal: “You see, that’s my house.”

With the reopening of easy transit to the Empire, tourism increased in both directions. Crystal ponies became a more common sight in Canterlot.

Busy Bee rarely saw them in her restaurant—the sign over the door kept them at bay. But once, she was at a food fair in the nice part of Canterlot and a gaggle of them walked up to her booth.

“Um…” one of them asked, a mare whose exquisite mane and tail served as a functional substitute for a personality. “Hey, you sell, um, bug food. But you’re not like, one of them, right?”

“No, of course not.” Busy Bee giggled. “You don’t think they’d let me set up a booth here if I was, do you? I mean, Canterlot is a civilized, pony city.”

“Oh, good.” The mare smiled, and she and all her friends trotted up. “Because, this smells delicious. What do you recommend?”

“Well, I’ve got a lovely dish here made from ants. Ponies call it firecracker curry, since the ants release little bursts of flavor when you bite down. But the traditional vespid name is,” she struggled to make the right buzz with a pony throat, “{I’m going to pee in your food, bitch}.”

“Ooh, fancy.” The mare gave the booth another sniff. “Can we take three?”

Busy Bee rang them up.

There was once a changeling name Ersatz, who had a chance to kill Flurry Heart, and refused because of a promise she made to a dying stallion. She didn’t survive the war, but her clutch raised a crystal pony named Lucky Sweep. He studied music at Queen Novo’s Conservatory and escaped the fighting.

He never learned to make faces and never thought of himself as a changeling, but he cried when he learned his sisters were dead. Living in exile in Harmonizing Heights, he wrote plays and songs and recorded movies criticizing Flurry’s regime. He called her a tyrant and a murderer and a self-important fool, and he did it in a way that made hippogriffs laugh.

They laughed, and they stayed out of the war. They refused Flurry’s offer of a military alliance. That was the deal.

When free passage into the far north reopened, he returned home for the first time in more than fifty years. Having been a child when the war broke out, he was one of very few creatures left that remembered growing up in the old northern hive. The entire structure had burned, but the stone frame remained.

He stood in an empty room, fresh snow and old ash mingling around his hooves, when he became aware that a creature was watching him. Turning, he saw Cheval, and bowed low to the ground. “Your highness.”

“Don’t let me interrupt,” she said. “You seemed lost in thought.”

“Yes. Um… this was my bedroom, once,” he gestured around the space. “My name is Lucky Sweep. You’re my um… you’re my aunt.”

“It’s good to meet you, Lucky Sweep. Tell me, do you want your old room back?”

He chuckled, rubbing the back of his head with a hoof. “It uh… it might need some cleaning. And a coat of paint.”

But Cheval only smiled and said. “I think we can arrange that.”

Light Step got a statue of herself outside her old dorm.

She’d have been frustrated to know that she did end up being remembered for her art, rather than for starting the Ponyville Hive. Twilight got all the credit for that. She’d have been even more frustrated to know that the students mostly invoked her name during trivia games.

“Okay, okay,” said one stallion. He was sitting on the quad with five friends. Together, they were one earth pony, one unicorn, one pegasus, one crystal pony, one changeling, and one thestral. They joked that they were clearly the friend group from the front of the packets they got on orientation day.

From his deck of cards, he drew another question: “This famous artist once resolved a family dispute by spraypainting an image of Princess Cadence vomiting on the side of a train.”

After a few moments of silence, his thestral friend asked: “Do you mean, like, they spraypainted the picture on the side of a train? Or did they paint her throwing up onto a train?”

“Oh, you want to accuse me of complicity in crimes that happened before I was born?” Diamond Path shouted, “My mother acted without the knowledge of the general staff and her crimes are her own.”

“You expect me to believe,” the reporter demand, “that Flurry Heart ran a government where the heads of her armed forces signed orders without reading them, where the disappearance of millions of citizens went unnoticed, and where no questions were asked when—”

“The changelings were not citizens of the Crystal Empire!” Diamond snarled.

“Then do you deny the thousands of crystal ponies who were lead away for questioning her orders?” The reporter’s hoof hit the desk. “Who were killed for trying to protect their changeling neighbors?”

“That’s it,” Diamond pushed the microphone away. “This interview is over.”

Fifteen years after Cheval’s return, Twilight found five wonderful new friends to keep her company. The new Element of Loyalty was a crystal pony colt, and the new Element of Honesty was one of Cheval’s children. Together, they learned a friendship lesson about overcoming racism.

Twilight had learned that lesson twenty-seven times before, but after consulting all her books and sticky notes, she decided the twenty-eighth time was the best.

And then it was over.

Shrine fillies hung up firefly lanterns and handed little crystal flowers to those who had come to grieve. The sun set and the sky grew dark. Soon, Cadence and Cheval were the only two creatures left in the graveyard.

To their left was Shining Armor’s grave. Ponies still left him flowers or offerings; they still lit candles and left poems in the dirt.

Next to him was Flurry Heart. Her headstone was bare.

“We need to write something,” Cadence eventually said.

“Ponies are going to deface it anyway. Spraypaint it or knock it over” Cheval shrugged. “Put her name. She’s next to dad. That’s all that matters.”

“She deserves more than the name.”

Cheval glanced at her mother, then down to the headstone. Her horn glowed green, and magic etched the stone away.

“FLURRY HEART,” it read, “LOVED BY HER FAMILY”

Then Cadence’s horn glowed, and she added one more line: “SHE DID NOTHING THE WORLD CANNOT HEAL”

“That’s good,” Cheval said. “That’s good.”

She turned into a pony so that she could cry, and when the crying was done, they both left.

Author's Note

Thanks to everyone who stuck with me through this series. It's been a great ride.

Field Hospital 7A, Fifth Equestrian Army Group

Shining Armor was dying.

In books, he thought, dying was a passive affair. It was something that happened on its own while a character did other things. But as he lay in bed, soaked in his own sweat, a bucket by the bedside for when he vomited blood, it occurred to him that dying felt like quite the active chore.

It has been easier, earlier. Then he’d had orders to give, officers to quickly promote, final letters to dictate to friends and family. He’d dictated a formal letter to Celestia, informing her he was no longer fit to fulfill his duties as Captain of the Guard. Then he send her a personal letter, thanking her for everything she’d ever done, and asking her to keep Cadence and Twilight company through the long years ahead.

He’d summoned Cadence and Flurry to his side, but they wouldn’t arrive in time. All his affairs were in order. And so there was nothing left to do but die. It was an active verb. He was spending his last moments in the mortal world dying.

He hated it.

In the field there were things to do. But in his hospital bed, which was full of lumps and itched furiously, which smelled like antiseptics and bile, in that bed there was nothing to do but think. To think about the daughter he didn’t save, or the wife he was leaving alone for eternity. Or the fact that he didn’t really believe in an afterlife.

His stomach revolted. The world spun. He rolled over to the side of the bed and vomited a mix of brown and red into the bucket. It burned when it came up.

“Here you go, sir.” A bottle of water floated into his sight. Shining looked at the creature offering it to him, took the water, and swished the taste of vomit out of his mouth. He spat it up into the bucket, and it took him effort to get comfortable in bed again. He didn’t have much strength left.

“So,” he said, “you’re not my real doctor.”

The creature, who looked very much like Shining’s doctor, looked down at herself. She appeared to be a young unicorn mare, green-coated, white haired, with medical red cross for a cutie mark. A white lab coat hung over her shoulders, a stethoscope around her neck, and a collection of bracelets on all four legs.

Chagrined, she finally asked: “What gave me away?”

“Your bracelets are fused to your ankles.” He pointed with a hoof. The bracelets on her ankles were tight, so snug they were flush against her skin. “The real doctor’s bracelets are loose. They shake or jingle when she walks.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She smiled and shook out a leg. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d like it if I assaulted a medic, so I couldn’t steal her clothes. I faked a message saying she was urgently needed at a field hospital about ten miles away.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t make you sick. I don’t think any of us did. Or if we did I didn’t know about it.”

“I believe you.”

She paused at that, tilting her head to one side: “Really?”

“Would it make a difference if I didn’t?” He tried to laugh, but it came up as a belch with a foul odor, and a spasm of pain wracked him. “If it doesn’t matter either way, I’d rather trust you.”

“Oh.” She nodded quickly. “My, um. My name. My real name, is Ersatz. I’m a spy in one of your artillery units. And I’m your daughter. I’m not here in an official capacity. I wasn’t ordered to be here, I mean. But I heard you were…”

She indicated the bed with a nose. “I had blue hair, when I was a grub. But now I have a frill and it turned red in my nymph phase. I don’t look that much like you anymore. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Shining let out a breath. “But why do you say you’re my daughter? I never loved you.”

“I know. But you’re the reason I exist. And, my brother always wanted to meet you.” A section of her skin melted, and from inside that gristly pocket, she produced a small folded photograph. When Shining took it and unfolded it, he saw a colt in that awkward teenage phase. A crystal pony, with a coat like diamonds and a mane like garnets. His cutie mark was almost visible—something with shapes and a musical note.

“After the first war,” Erstaz said, “My clutch heard about you adopting a changeling. And we thought, aren’t we supposed to be good now? Like, don’t we believe that friendship is magic and love conquers all? And there were so many war orphans. So we adopted one. The caregivers and teachers and all the nymphs. Like a group pet.”

“Cute kid.” Shining managed to smile.

“He always wanted to meet you. Um. I already said that. But he asked if you’re his stepfather, and I said I didn’t know. Because, in the hive, you wouldn’t be my father. But we’re siblings, and he’s a pony, so maybe that counts.” She cleared her throat. “His name is Lucky Sweep.”

“You love him?”

“Yeah.” She chuckled. “I’d have strangled him if I didn’t. You things are impossible to raise. You need love and food and to be kept out of danger, and when you’re little, you somehow manage to create more poop than could possibly have been formed from the food that went into you. Diapers are ridiculous. We all had to install the hive’s first toilet just so I could explain potty training. And then I discovered puberty is a thing. You can’t just crawl into a cocoon and grow up over two weeks like a respectable species. You’ve gotta go through eight years of being angry balls of hormones.”

Shining managed a laugh. “It’s true. He learned he could defy you?”

“He was going to be a diplomat for the hive. To Equestria. Straight A’s, perfect performance, he was inducted into a caste like a proper changeling, and then he goes and gets a cutie mark for musical theater and says he’s going to run away from home.” Erstaz put on airs of frustration, but her face was covered by a broad smile.

“Did he?”

“No. He’s a huge wuss.” She giggled. “He’s studying music at Queen Novo’s Conservatory at Harmonizing Heights. He wanted to go to the Crystal Empire, but we all wanted him far away from the war. And he loves it there.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Shining handed the picture back. “If you’d like, I could write him a letter. From his ‘stepfather.’”

Shining dictated a short letter full of encouraging words. Erstaz wrote it diligently, and tucked it and the picture back into her skin-pocket. Then she said, “There are a few others who would like to see you. If I bring them, will you promise not to shout?”

“I want you to promise me something first,” Shining said, and after Erstaz nodded, he continued. “I know you’re a soldier, and you’ll do what your queen commands. But promise you won’t do anything that would make your brother stop loving you if he knew. Don’t go back to being what you were.”

After a moment, Erstaz nodded. “I promise.”

“And don’t kill my wife or daughters. Promise that too.”

“Okay.” She bit her lip, then nodded again. “Okay, I swear.”

“Good.” He gestured with a hoof. “Go ahead and bring the others.”

There were four more spies. Shining joked that learning how many infiltrators were running around his army was the most embarrassing way to die. There were two changeling soldiers who crossed the lines when they heard he was dying. Their disguises were crude and unrealistic—it wasn’t their caste. There was one defector, who had switched over to the Equestrian side at the start of the war and never looked back.

They talked about their lives and their families, and he made all of them make the same promises Erstaz did.

They stayed with him until he died.

Three years later, Flurry Heart shrugged off her battle armor. The metal plates hit the ground with a clatter. “That gets heavier every day, I swear.”

She’d been with the artillery when the sun set, and didn’t want to walk back to the infantry camp until she was sure the ammunition problems were dealt with. Colonel Rain had offered her the use of his command tent for personal quarters for the evening.

The other officers were distracted. Flurry Heart was tired, soaked with sweat, and wearing no more armor than a thin underlayer of cloth. And she’d turned her back to the room.

Erstaz picked up a knife from the table. She took a step Flurry’s way. For a half a moment, she froze.

“Your Highness,” she said, offering the knife to Flurry. “Respectfully, there are changeling spies in the camp. It is not appropriate for you to be unarmored and unarmed with your back to the door. Something could happen.”

Flurry thanked for for her diligence, took the knife, and promptly forgot the entire incident.