The Shadow Traveler Chapter 1: Prologue
My tale begins not like other stories of adventure, mystery, and daring escape, where your story’s hero might start out riding on his noble steed to learn news of a princess’s capture by your textbook psychopathic villain or sitting on a train going to a classical western town out the middle of nowhere to become the new sheriff, the first one not working because why ride another horse when you are already horse-ish in appearance, and second because I am far from the honor code that your run of the mill sheriff holds. My story begins in a dungeon under the palace of the two most powerful rulers in the land of Equestria, two sisters, thousands of years old, both equally stubborn on the never surrender department. You might ask why in Tartarus am I here? Well, I am a Changeling, a creature that looks like a crossbreed of a horse and a fly with blue eyes and the ability to use a lighter form of dark magic to create a hologram of sorts over my own body to completely change my features and voice into anything or anypony imaginable, making me the world’s best spy and if needed, an assassin. Changelings also have the strange ability in order to survive by physically feeding or siphoning off the emotions of others. I am also a Changeling with a very long record of violent crimes, ranging from kidnapping an ambassador to the Griffin Empire, burning down a royal guard outpost in the Equestrian outlands, and it gets more disturbing the further down the list you look. Reading this you may be wondering and asking yourself, “I thought the Changelings changed their ways of violence and became friends with Equestria.” Well, newsflash blockhead! Not every Changeling went full hippie after our dear Queen Chrysalis was dethroned by the pacifist Thorax, thus setting fire to years of the hive’s traditions, and making our hive look like what you humans call the ‘60’s’ but without the drugs and extreme protests.
And yet I still remember the old days, oh yes those were the days, where the queen would just kill one of her subjects even if they just looked at her wrong. I originally served as her adviser of sorts, though more of a glorified spell-checker for her clueless plans for conquest. I must admit her first plan of invasion on the Equestrian capital was good if you call a plan that literally blows up in your face good. What was worse is the fact that I was with the group that was guarding the outside of the palace when the Mane six or whatever they call themselves showed up, I myself being the only Changeling hoofed, or armed if you’re better with that, with a weapon of some sort, my trusty knife made from the fang of a diamond dog, and believe me when I say this, you don’t want to learn how I got it. After getting knocked out by a stray magic bolt to the head, my memory of what happened next was a little fuzzy after that, all I could remember was a bright wall of light and getting thrown halfway across Equestria, landing somewhere in Las Pegasus. After playing a few of the best rounds of poker in my life and then losing it in a high stakes game to some 80-year-old grandma, I returned to the hive, after which I quickly noticed that the queen was already coming up with another plan, this time without my approval, but after further inspection, and to my astonishment, I believed that this was her best plan yet. The plan itself involved kidnapping key figures around Equestria and replacing them with changeling spies, making it so we would have control of Equestria without even having to throw a single spear. Though of course, as this story goes it failed, in the end, all because of a band of misfit heroes coming to save the day, leaving Thorax the hippie to become the hive king. Thorax of course still wanting me to stay as an advisor and help him during his first few days of leadership, asked me to be his royal advisor. After hearing those black-hearted words out of that fool I promptly, without even thinking about it, tried to kill him by throwing my dagger straight into his neck but his brother stopped me before I could grab the weapon out of its sheath. In a fit of rage, I stormed to the front door of the hive declaring that one day I would return to dethrone that joke of a king Thorax and then left without even saying goodbye. After that day I decided to try and seek out Queen Chrysalis to see if the two of us could work together to dethrone Thorax. After a while, I was finally able to locate her in the Everfree Forest only to discover after her last defeat the Queen went off the deep end as one might say and I decided that day, that I would be a changeling without a hive.
After a year of my mid-life crisis crime spree, I was arrested during a con that I had been running for 2 weeks on members of the Royal Guard, the reason behind that was because I was trying to find a way to gain access to the princess’s personal section of the royal library, where it is rumored to hold powerful spell books that once belonged to Starswirl the Bearded. Thus this is how you have found me now, in a dungeon, waiting to be transferred back to the hive to be trialed for my crimes. As I waited in there for the next couple of weeks, I had two guards assigned to keep an eye on me, Breeze and Cliff I believed their names were, and even though they weren’t the brightest stallions I’ve met, they were oddly interesting to be around. Breeze was a part-time painter who had been trying to sell his paintings to the local art gallery for a few years now but isn’t a very good business pony, and Cliff was a father of two Phillies whose only reason for being in the Royal Guard was because his father was in the Guard, his grandfather, even his great grandfather, and so on. Sometimes when the three of us weren’t being watched by their commanding officer we would play poker using the loose rocks from dungeon hallways as poker chips.
Then all too quickly that fateful day came, the day of my prison transfer, where one might expect it to be one of the worst days of their life, for me it was the craziest day of my life.