Today, the woods were very restful and calm. They were like this every day there wasn’t a storm, but today was special, because I was there to enjoy it. I only got to do that two days a week (the rest was work on the lumber mill grounds), and I would have made it all seven if I could. I even had my own bag, a very handy one, where I kept some tools next to my emergency supplies, and it saw a lot of use because I spent so much time doing things in the forest. The peaceful sounds of the woods and the only-slightly-rough terrain and all the creatures just hanging around, all that never gets old to me.
Why would it? “Wood” is my talent. My day job was at the lumber mill, and yet I enjoyed the woods so much that I went there on my days off, too. It was usually whatever I needed it to be. When I wanted to be alone, I went into the woods. When I wanted to see something interesting, I went into the woods. When I wanted to find something to do next, I went into the woods. I got to know the woods very well, in other words, and the woods knew me. Even one black bear knew me after he had a bad day and failed to take it out on me, and I can’t talk to animals like some ponies can. That was how much time I spent not in the woods, but with the woods.
Because of all this, it caught my attention when, not long before I started heading back home, my surprisingly-quiet woods-tromping brought me to a trail of green, slightly-transparent goo. It was a hard-to-see trail, but it was a trail nonetheless, and whatever left it had been dragging itself through the brush. I had not seen a creature that bled like that and left so much of it. This woods-tromping was on one of my days off, so I decided to follow the trail, hoping it would take me to something to entertain me for a while. A strange creature in my neck of the woods was very interesting, indeed, and today was one of the days when I wanted the woods to give me something to do. It was late afternoon at the time, and while I didn’t want to be lost in the woods during the night, I had things in my bag for just such an occasion.
It only took around ten minutes to reach the end of the trail. There was a black shape slumped against a tree in the distance. As I got closer, I saw the puddle of the green slime that was forming underneath it. It looked like a pile of black plates, and I could hardly tell where one piece of it ended and another begin until I got a better look. I first thought that it looked about like you’d expect of a creature which had been trailing internal fluid for some time. As I continued walking, however, I realized what exactly I was looking at. I froze on the spot.
It was a changeling queen.
This was bad news, and I hurriedly remembered everything I could about changelings and their powers. It had to be a trap of some kind. I just couldn’t figure out why she would make herself intentionally look like she was in this situation, though. Every scenario I could come up with assumed that I didn’t have a personal problem with her, which was a big assumption for one such as her. In fact, virtually any disguise would have been better for trapping a pony than the one she had, so she was probably not pretending to be injured.
I took a few hesitant steps forward, and saw that I was approaching from her right side, with her left being propped up against a tree. From where I was standing, all I could see was a big gash just below her right wing, but there was probably more.
The next question I thought about was about how far away her ability to steal love operated. I knew this one: it was touching. I had a friend in the local County Guard which had told me about that. Since she was probably in no state to walk, much less lunge at me, I was safe to get pretty close. The woods had shown me to her for a reason, at least, and they hadn’t steered me wrong yet.
Seeing a changeling queen in the flesh was too good to pass up, so I kept coming closer. I got a better look at her injuries. There was the gash on her side, which went from her right wing to nearly the bottom of her tummy, but there was also another large cut across her front right leg, and cracks in her shell on her right flank which reached almost to her other side. I assumed that her left was in better condition, since that was the one she was laying on. There were also holes in her legs and horn, and her hair was greasy and awful, but I recalled that that was all normal for a changeling queen. I suspected that her width, or lack thereof, was similar, since a queen like her would have had enough food to reach a healthy weight if anypony (anyling?) did. She was around twice as tall as me, so our weights were probably fairly similar.
As I started coming around to the side of her, her head raised up to look at me. I caught a glance at her green slit-eyes and paused for a second. A strained voice came from the creature, asking “Who’s there?”.
If I left now, I would have to find something else to pass the rest of the day, and the woods had left this for me for a reason. If I stayed, I might get injured or killed, but it was unlikely, and it would be the most interesting thing I’d have done for a few years in either direction. Instead of leaving, I set my bag down and sat down on the forest floor a few body-lengths away.
“I am a woodspony,” I responded. From where I was sitting, it could see me without taking it’s head off the tree it was laying on.
“What do you want from me?” it asked slowly.
“I want to be entertained,'' I responded.
The changeling queen went back to staring into space for a second. It looked back at me, and said, “I see you’re still sitting there, and…” it’s voice trailing off to take a particularly challenging breath,”..and not throwing rocks or sticks at me.”
“I don’t really think I would enjoy tormenting an injured creature, even one like you. I just want to talk. You are a changeling queen, so you must have some interesting stories to tell.” I said. I had no quarrel with the changelings. That could have changed in an instant, much like a changeling itself, but they had not yet done me any personal harm, or any of my friends or family. We were far from their Badlands. I still knew that they were not friends of pony kind, but I was not one to adopt other creature’s malice. This was still a little dangerous, though, and I had to be careful.
“Really?” The queen said. “You have the scourge of ponykind here, beaten and bleeding, and you want to ask it about its life story? I appreciate that you aren’t making my suffering worse, but I did not expect *that*, of all things... I suppose I don’t have a reason not to humor you. What would you like to hear about?”
“Well, let’s start with how you ended up here.” I said.
The queen sighed, and then spoke. “I was leading an army of my changelings against Canterlot. We wanted to take the city and feed on the princesses, and then use the chaos that it would cause in order to infiltrate wherever we wanted. We underestimated the power involved, and... failed. We were blown across the country. I suffered some broken chitin when I landed, but then I ran into some guards while trying to get my bearings. I got away from them, but...” It shook its head a little, seemingly motioning to the rest of its body. “That was where I hit my limit”.
Her voice was quiet and sluggish, and I got a little closer to hear it better.
“You tried to attack Canterlot?” I asked. Out here, Canterlot and its princesses didn’t really affect us. Of course, we weren’t exactly economic powerhouses either. If we seceded altogether and didn’t tell them about it, they might not have noticed for weeks or months. We were practically independent already, except for tax collection.
Them attacking such a city was shocking, but it also had very little to do with us. Plus, the princesses usually kept a good handle on things, as they apparently had this time.
“Yes, but please, let’s not talk about that,” It said. It paused for a while, looking nowhere. “I was the most powerful changeling, but look at me. I’m nothing more than a curiosity for a passing laborer. I can only imagine how many of the others will never see the hive again, all because of me. It’s the last thing I want to be thinking about right now.”
“You are dying, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I am afraid so. I will not make it to nightfall. I only wish that I was the only one dying. So many of my kin, my friends and my family, will have perished on this day for my mistakes, and it's only going to get worse.” The queen looked at nothing in particular while she said that.
I did not think it would benefit either of us to press that issue. More interesting was what little I’d heard about this queen.
“You are Queen Chrystalisk, though. You are famed for your cunning and manipulation. Surely, you have a way to survive this?” I asked.
“Chrysalis… My name is Queen Chrysalis”.
“Oh. Right. Still, from what I hear, you are known for plans so clever that many of them go totally unnoticed until after they are already done. If you were to get out of this situation, how would you do it?” I asked again.
The queen just looked at me, saying, “I have considered the ways that I can… agh...” a wince interrupted her train of thought. “...that I can survive. The most likely one would have required you to to bring ten friends along, and that you all get close enough for me to feed until there was nothing left. Then, I would need to wait three days to rest, and after that is when I can even consider getting back to the hive, which would take a few days or weeks and probably require me to drain more ponies completely. But, if at any point, the guards find me... I am worse than dead. I will be healed and fed to a barely survivable level, dragged back to Canterlot, and paraded in the streets until my execution.”
That didn’t seem like something that the princesses would do. Then again, I wouldn’t know.
After a short moment to collect herself, the queen continued, “What do you think they would give me? The needle, the axe, the rope, the guillotine, the crossbow…” I could swear there was a smile from the queen. “...the manticore? I never understood why you ponies even had that punishment. It seems so wasteful and barbaric for your current tastes.”
This was in last month’s paper, so I said, “Actually, we don’t do the manticore anymore.”
“Oh, really?”
“No. It was too expensive to keep, it hadn’t been done in two centuries, and the only known manticore wrangler after the last one retired was very clearly not going to take over.”
The queen seemed to consider that deeply. “Huh. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that.”
“There's more. If you were in Canterlot in the last few days, you might have met the pony who refused to wrangle the manticores. Her name was Fluttershy.”
The queen seemed distressed by hearing that. “Of course she could do that, and of course this is the first I’m hearing about it. Argh.”
We sat there in silence for a little while, before she had a question for me. “What about you,” she asked, “Why are you here?”
I thought about it for a second before answering. “Well, it’s not every day you get to talk to a changeling, especially not out here, and especially not a queen.”
“No, I mean, why are you so close?”
I noticed that I had absentmindedly moved a bit closer to her. Still just outside of her reach, but closer. “I can move quickly in these woods. In your state, you can’t even move quickly to stand up.”
She looked at me for a few seconds, considering what I had just said. Then, she started to laugh. She only got a few laughs in before she started to groan, as she tried to avoid screaming in pain. “Please,” she said, a few drops of the green blood dripping from her mouth, “don’t… don’t make me laugh again. There’s, nnngghh, a bolt lodged in my chest. It’s innnnnggggh… in my lungs, but they haven’t collapsed because it’s plugging the hole. Argh...”
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You seem to think that eating love requires touch. Whoever told you… told you that is wrong. We can do that to anything within around a body-length-and-a-half of our horn.”
“I learned it from a friend in the local County Guard”, I explained.
“If everything that the princesses’ Royal Guard was told about us resembles that, then I am beginning to understand how they were swept aside so easily.” she said. “They knew nothing about us, actually nothing. I can’t believe I managed to let that golden opportunity go to waste.”
I looked at the distance between us, and sure enough, I was a fair bit into the region where she could feed off of me. “I am close enough for you to drain me, but I feel fine. Is it also wrong that your victims can feel their love draining if they know to feel for it?”
The queen didn’t respond immediately. She was trying to formulate her thoughts. Apparently, it was a complicated thought, since she spent a lot of time thinking about it. “Remember my plans to survive this?” she said after nearly a minute of silence. “Well, I thought about what would happen if I convinced you to get close enough to drain you. If I ate of you until there was nothing left, that would buy my another hour or two. I would still die, and I would still be in great pain.” She took a short pause to collect herself for some more speaking. “But when you started talking to me, I realized that there was something else that you could give me, which you needed to be alright for.”
She took another pause to make sure she wanted to say what she was about to say.
“Woodspony, I am afraid. I don’t want to die. Please, if there was anything I ever asked of a pony in earnest, it was this: stay with me.”
I was no expert in changeling emotions, but there was something permeating every part of her voice. It couldn’t have been anything but genuine fear. I didn’t move closer again, but I realized that, were our roles reversed, I would probably ask her what she was asking me. Besides that, what kind of pony would be if I could make something feel more comfortable at little cost to myself and I didn’t do it?
“I will”, I said.
“Thank you,” she responded. “...Woodspony, do you think that there is an afterlife?”
I went to the local Solarist meetings every Sunday. It didn’t really resonate with me, but my friends all went, and the Church did more for our town than just preach, and used the meetings to get the word out about their other activities. Still, I did have an opinion on the topic. “Well… for us. When we die, good ponies go to Paradise and spend eternity in peace, while bad ponies go to the deep pits of Tartarus.”
The queen had a question about that. “What if I am not a pony?”
It struck me as an odd question. Surely, creating an afterlife was the job of the Changeling Queen just as it was for our Princesses. I thought back on what I had heard about that. “I don’t know about Paradise, you would have to ask Friar Buck about that, but I suspect that your actions against ponykind have sealed you away from there forever regardless. I do know that, in Tartarus, non-ponies can only go if they are still alive, which...” I did not need to finish that sentence. “Shouldn’t you have made your race’s afterlife?”
The queen was briefly confused by this. “No, I’m not that kind of leader.”
“Well, who do the changelings worship if not you?” I asked.
“The spirits of our great ancestors,” she said.
“Well, in that case…” I said, thinking. This really was a conversation for the good Friar. “I would guess that changelings have their own afterlife, with its own ways of getting in. As a queen of the changelings, how do you think you did?”
The answer was quick. “I did terribly. My policies brought us to the brink of starvation, and my plans have destroyed the hive’s last hopes of recovery.”
“That may be the case now, but you have been in your position for around a thousand years, have you not? Surely, there were some rough times back then that you led your changelings through safely.”
The queen considered that long and hard. “Yes, there have been some times when I did not know what to do next, but we still pulled through.”
I continued, “And do you think that the average changeling, or even the above-average changeling, could have handled those situations as well as you did?”
The queen seemed to understand where I was going with this. “No, no, only centuries of experience could have solved some of those crises.”
“Well then,” I said, “you may have failed your hive now, but you have saved them many times before. Surely, if the hive dies now, instead of two or five or ten hundreds of years ago, then that still shows that you helped it greatly. It seems to me that, if the changeling afterlife has any fairness, it will give you your dues as a great leader.”
She smiled faintly. “...do you really think so?”
“Well, if your afterlife works like ours, then yes, I believe you will be judged as a good changeling.”
The queen sat, contented in that thought, until her smile suddenly faded. She said, “Look at me. queen of the changelings, and here I am, facing death like a filly. Why was I ever given this job?”
Like a filly? That was a strange way of talking to somepony who was doing you a favor. I said, “And I suppose that changeling young are much better?”
“Yes, actually. In the hive, the beatings continue until you make them stop yourself. If you can…” another strained breath. “...can crawl your way to the nearest adult, you can fight back, so they won’t help.”
“You know, I think I figured out why your society is how it is.” I said, being only as rude as she thought I was.
She said back, with as much pride as her fading voice could muster, “Please... there is always an adult nearby to make sure that it doesn’t get *too* out of hoof. It’s better than trying to keep all the young together. They want to be the most popular by… by nature, trying to make them all get along just makes them fight in ways the teacher can’t keep track of. It teaches them to go behind authority to do what they want.”
“Well, my time in school resembled the first part more than the second. The teacher actually helped the weakest foal in class so that he gave me a black eye next time I tried to beat him up. Is that really how they do schooling in the richer regions?” I asked. Hearing about what they do, it had always seemed that those interior ponies were softer. I suspected before that I may have been understanding it wrong, but no, if that was how their young were taught, then my first reaction may have been correct.
“Yes, actually,” She responded.
“Of course *those* children will be weaker. We aren’t like that here, though.”
“Well, it’s good to hear that some of you ponies have a backbone. Many of our infiltrators have to learn to handle you… you all with much more lightness than they would other changelings... Maybe they would find equals out here. Where are we, anyways?”
I thought of how to explain our location to her, in a way she would understand. “We are in the Whitetail Forest, near a village called Green Hay, far west of Canterlot, not that far away from the Uncharted West” I said, the best description I could come up with. I only knew where my village was in relation to the other nearby villages and Canterlot.
She looked around. “So... this is the Whitetail Forest?”
“Yes”, I responded.
“Very few of our infiltrators ever went this far west... The ones who did said that the forest was very nice.” She paused to catch her breath. “I can see why you and they both liked it. It’s very… peaceful. I haven’t just been in a forest in, well, centuries.”
The two of us spent a few minutes just sitting there, listening to the sounds of the woods. The rustling of the leaves, the wind blowing through the trees, the singing of the birds, the steps of a small rodent that was passing us by. We watched the greens and browns and the spots of color from flowers, all shifting this way and that as the weather wanted. We watched the scant clouds pass overhead, growing and shrinking the shadows of the trees as they went.
The forest is not a quiet place, but when you’re there, you get the sense that all the noise is somewhere else. Nothing that you can’t see is really there, except in a nebulous, disconnected way. You have all the hours in the day to do what you want without anything else seeing you. Watch a small lizard scurry up a tree trunk, or just trace the patterns in the leaves of a shrub with your eyes, whatever you want to do at the time is your business and yours alone. I could get “lost” for hours without actually being lost, just paying attention to the ebb and flow of the plants and the life pitter-pattering around, and today was no exception.
In that time, I asked myself a question: Why was I doing this? It was a big risk, even in her sorry state, since I knew so little about what she could do. And yet, there I was, inching closer without thinking instead of leaving. Yet, every time I thought of some new reason why this was a bad idea, I got an instant response that said, Because it’s the right thing to do. You will never dream of as much as she is seeing leave her in these last hours. I could not argue with that. Even if I tried my best, I would likely never be more than the ruler of a small town, much less that of an entire species, and I definitely wouldn’t live a fraction as long as she had.
So the two of us sat, just taking in the experience.
Eventually, the queen spoke up again. “Is it just me, or is it getting... really cold?” Her voice was ragged, strained, and above all, quiet.
“There was a cold front coming in. Maybe it’s that.” I said.
The weather was, in fact, still warm, although it was cooling down in the late afternoon. I got closer to her, close enough to touch a part of her chitin that wasn’t in multiple pieces. It was freezing. At least the blood had mostly stopped coming out of her injuries.
“Woodspony, I want you to know that I am extremely grateful for you standing beside me in my final moments,” she said.
I looked at her, but did not say anything, as I had nothing to say.
“It’s just that I have one more thing to ask you. I know you might not be able to do it, and even if you don’t, you’ve already done more for me than I’d ever have expected a pony to do, but please, at least hear me out.” Desperation was seeping into her voice.
“What is it?” I asked. I may or may not have been able to carry it out, but I could at least listen.
She took her time preparing to speak, and spoke slowly. Very slowly, and very softly. “On the border of our badlands, you’ll see some waystations. The workers there are changelings in disguise. Ask for Spiracles, and when he arrives, tell him my last words for the hive. Tell him... tell him that I’m proud of them, all of them.” She seemed to stumble over the last few words.
I thought for a second, and said, “The badlands are a month or two away, if I recall. I am afraid I cannot make the trip there and back on my own expense.”
“For the service to the hive, you can ask for something from the reliquary. We collect many artifacts we can’t use, and I believe you will be able to find at least one you like. Plus, they can give you some to help ease your way back.” Every word that came out of the queen’s mouth was harder for her to say, and I could see it.
“I will consider it,” I said.
“Thank you. I just… I just…” She began to speak, but found herself at a sudden loss for words.
“…By Aphidus, it’s happening!” she shouted suddenly, seemingly gaining all of her energy back. “I can feel it happening! I don’t want to die! Woodspony, help me! I don’t want to die!” She thrashed around as best her exhausted and battered body could as her breathing sped up until she was hyperventilating, and it was the only thing I could do to hold her close and say to her, “It will be okay, I’m here” over and over again.
Eventually, her pleading gave way to incoherent mumbling, as if she were trying to delay her death asking faster. My embrace and my reassurances that everything would be fine were only able to reduce her begging to a whimper. Then, her talking gave way to a few progressively-slower breaths, and her thrashing was reduced to a shudder. In the end, she breathed out over the course of many seconds, and didn’t breathe in or move ever again.
I stayed there for a little longer, feeling the stillness in her body, and the chill. Her unblinking eyes looked at nothing, and her mouth hung partially open with nothing to keep it closed. Even with her form totally limp, I swore that there was terror on her face. She did not resist or try to get up when I did. She did not resist me going to get my bag, or carrying her to a clearing I knew of nearby, or digging a hole a few feet deep and placing her in it, and she did not resist me shoveling the dirt back into it. I spent the last minutes of daylight placing a few rocks around the grave to mark it. It was a far more bitter experience than I expected when I began.
As I went back to my house, I considered what her final request was. I was not rich, and I had no particular attachment to her. It would be a big investment in time and money, and one I might not get anything back from. However, last time I had done something because the woods showed it to me, I had really helped somecreature out. Plus, she had promised that I would receive some reward. She could have been lying about the message and how the hive would react to me, but if she was lying to the pony she wanted to carry her last words to lure him into a trap, then she wasn’t a good creature by any species’ standards, and it seemed that at least the changelings had liked her.
Once I got home, I realized that I had never gone farther than the nearest villages from my own. It had never appealed to me. I had a map of Equestria, though, and had a good reason to try travelling now, and see what others saw in it. It had been too long since I took a major risk and tried something new, and my life was a little boring these days. That was probably why the woods had shown the queen to me. If this was something the woods were telling me to do, how could I refuse? I wrote a note for the lumber yard, saying that I was going to be gone for a while due to something that I just had to do, and I wrote another for my marefriend, explaining that she would have to trust that I would return and that this was something I couldn’t put off. Then, I repacked my bag for a long journey, bringing a sleeping bag, all the preserving food in the house, a large portion of my savings, and other things, and walked a trail southwest until I was exhausted
