CRACK
It was a small sound, barely noticeable. A small chip of stone fell to the ground beside the statue. The statue in question was large, with three infamous figures placed upon a large stone pillar. Around the pillar were statues of many shapes and sizes, depicting creatures of many different races. The royal gardens held many statues which would draw tourists from all over to come and view the equestrian history encased in these statues. But one of the figures included in this particular statue had just cracked. To the naked eye it may have looked like a hairline fracture, that is if one took the time to inspect the whole statue. The crack had formed on the bottom of the figures left forehoof and wasn’t easily seen.
Slowly the mind of the figure slowly came to, a consciousness awakening within the stone. She was groggy, her mind felt like a swirling mist that couldn’t decide which way to spin. As a statue she was vaguely awake of the goings on around her stone encrusted form but not to the point that she really understood any of it. Now though, now she could think. The first thought that came to her mind was a simple question. She wondered who she was.
She racked her mind, trying to clear away the mist as she thought. She wanted to yawn, and expel the fogginess trapped within her. She wanted to unfurl her wings and let them buzz, letting the sound bring her mind back to her. She wanted to do many things, but could not. She wondered why she could not move. After pondering this for a few minutes she decided that she must be trapped in some sort of spell, but was unsure of how to break it. With that mystery out of the way she returned to her original question. What was her name?
____________________(a few months later)____________________________
CRACK
This was the fifth piece of her prison that has fallen off, at least she thought it was. It was hard to be sure when one couldn’t really keep track due to their own clouded mind. At Least in the time between the cracks her mind had cleared a small bit. It was like the fog of her mind had been escaping through the cracks that had formed in the shell that held her. She now knew that she was a changeling, the realization had come to her a few nights prior. She was a love eating shapeshifter that was known to be feared by all! Or at least they had been. Had been? What a strange thought. Why wouldn’t such a fierce warrior race not be feared?
As she thought to herself, trying to move through the maze of her mind, something within her stirred, something fierce that wanted to be let out. It felt hot, it felt molten. Was this feeling rage? She was almost sure it was. As soon as her rage made its appearance the feeling left and other emotions started to come back one by one. First she felt hurt and betrayed. Why? she could not tell. She then felt some kind of sadness creeping up on her. Once that horrid emotion had faded, she felt confused as to why she was feeling all these emotions in the first place.. Finally she felt a little hungry. With her hunger came the rage, building back up. Her hunger reminded her of something... or maybe somelings? She could not remember their names or faces, or even her own name. This truly was a mystery to her.
____________________(a few months later)____________________________
CRACK
She could remember a story, or at least she thought it was some kind of story. The parts of said story had been coming to her, piece by piece, and she had been retelling it to herself in her mind.
There once was a queen, mighty and strong. She led her Changelings well and over the few hundred years that she had been queen she had stuck firm to the Changeling laws passed down by past queens who ruled their many hives before her. The same dozen or so other queens that ruled the hives of her homeland. They had kept the species secret from the world, only existing in myth and legend. They sent out only the best of her infiltrators to gather precious love from the kingdoms around them, and she had done the same. Tradition held the Changelings to a high standard and that standard kept their race afloat in an ever changing world. But slowly the land around the Changelings started to die out. In the first 100 years of her reign her homeland saw the plants start to die out, and the forests became savannas. By her 200th year the savannas started to become deserts. The change was fast and soon her homeland was taken by the deserts and nations that once fed the hives moved their towns and cities into more fertile land. The hives that didn’t see the signs took the hardest hits. She watched over the years as hive after hive fell, and took in as many Changelings as she could from hives that had lost their queens to the lack of love in the area. Her once warm heart grew resentful of the world, as she watched her fellow queens fall.
She wanted to yell, to scream, but she kept to the changeling laws and kept herself quiet, less the world might hear her screams. At Least her hive had kept going strong throughout the centuries and throughout the desertification of her home. In those times she had thanked that she was one of the newer queens to be hatched. She had built her hive on the edge of her homeland. Her hive was still close enough to civilization that she could get the food required to keep her Lings’ fed. Then one day she looked out her hive as the last hive, aside from her own, fell. She could hear the buzzing from miles away as the Changelings of that hive buzzed and moaned over the loss of their queen. This was 600 years into her reign.
About a hundred and fifty years later she started to notice that her own Changelings started to look a little thin. Looking in the mirror she noticed that she had lost quite a bit of weight as well. Not much weight to impact her health, but enough that it was noticeable. It dawned on her in this moment that even her great stores of food, hundreds of cellars of a sweet slime made from the love that her hive gathered were starting to drain and the infiltrators were taking too long to return to the hive. She pondered this and sent out drones to survey the land, to interview her infiltrators, and to find the source of the problem. The drones all came back that everything was going as it usually did, and that the land looked as it always had.
Over the next few decades she would go over her hundreds of years worth of documents. Night after night she would read over old paperwork, over and over again and found that decade by decade the love that was delivered had decreased. Not by much to be fair, usually by point one to point zero one percent. Though the more she looked the more it confused her. She had a steady increase of infiltrators every year. Adding about a dozen or so to their ranks every year, and even years when many more died than were trained their numbers stayed healthy. Finally the mystery finally solved itself as she had her drones remap her homeland, now called the Badlands. What she found horrified her.
Long ago she had watched her home turn to the desert, watched the grass turn to sand but the desertification had slowed almost to a stop hundreds of years ago. Looking at the new map, compared to the last map she had made about a hundred or so years ago, she now knew why her hive was in trouble. The dessert had spread even further, much further then she had thought was possible. The desert had grown once more, and at an alarming rate. Just like last time the nearby towns of bison, ponies and other creatures had once again moved, leaving loveless ghost towns. “How have we not noticed?” The queen wondered. The only thing that she could think of was that it had happened at a steady pace over the past century, slow enough that her Changelings hadn’t really noticed, but fast enough to put them in an increasingly tight spot.
The reason why her hive was now thinning was simple. The infiltrators needed to use much more energy over the desert, much more energy to find a town to infiltrate, and much more energy to bring back the love they gathered over their week long infiltration. And using energy meant consuming the love they gathered to use as fuel. A changeling can only carry so much love at a time. She had watched past hives die to this problem, and this situation sneak up on queen after queen, and now it was her turn.
The queen felt defeated in that moment. If she had caught on to the problem, even a few decades sooner, she could have trained more infiltrators, stopping the beginnings of this shortage. She could have planned, she could have rationed. Now the shortage had begun, and any attempt to train enough infiltrators to bring the love they needed would take at least another decade. Infiltrators were trained from birth and they needed time to master their skills. True she could send drones to do the job, but one slip up and their hive would be exposed. The laws of her dying race were now working against her. Nevertheless she would have to trust that the way of her race was right. She would train more infiltrators, and hopefully after a decade or so of rationing there would be enough for the hive to swing back into a place of balance.
Sadly this would not be the case. With rationing came a new found tiredness among her Changelings. The hive became darker, the Changelings became more easily angered as their bellies rumbled, and their queen felt like going mad. What was worse was the new infiltrators that had been trained were a sloppy bunch. Their growling stomachs made it hard for the young lings’ to really concentrate on their lessons. The lessons that were supposed to help save their hive. The queen didn’t know what to do... So she screamed.
She walked out of the hive and screamed, loud and long. She screamed about so many things that day. She screamed about her lost kingdom, her lost fellow queens, even her hivemates were beginning to fall to hunger. Then she decided something. Before anything else was going to be lost, she would discard something instead. The rules that they had held onto for so long were now obsolete. They were killing the Changelings. The Changelings needed a change, and she knew she was the one to usher in this change. The Queen then set her eyes on a nearby pony nation. Equestria was the name, and she knew that her hive would soon have a new home. It was now time to quit hiding, time to fight for her race, time to scream out into the world and declare that the Changelings would not go down without a fight.
The rest of the story was blocked by the heavy cloud of mist in her mind, but what she knew of this story she liked. The queen was doing her best for her hive, and taking on the world for it. Surly such a tale would have a righteous end, would it not?
____________________(a few months later)____________________________
CRACK
By now the mist was almost gone, and the ending of her story infuriated her. The story of the queen continued with failure after failure, with a lot of betrayal thrown in to rub salt in the poor queens wounds. The Changelings the queen cared for had betrayed her, and had thrown their ancestral image to the curb. No more were the Changelings black as a moonless night, no longer were they fierce and strong, no longer did they carry the look of Changelings before them who had fallen to the desert. True she had wanted change for her Changelings, but not like this. Not to throw away the one of the only things that connected them to their ancestors. Not to spit in the face of everything that defined their species. Her rage made her feel as if she were on fire.
It dawned on her who’s story she had been reminiscing about this whole time. She finally remembered her name. And the stone cracked one final time.
CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK
The changeling queen burst from her stony prison and fell to the ground. She coughed, and hacked, but most importantly, she breathed. “My name...” she whispered to herself as she charged her magic. “My name is...” She gritted her teeth forcing her head high, her muzzle pointed to the stars as she screamed once again. “I. AM. QUEEN. CHRYSALIS.” Her horn flashed a Brilliant green as her voice boomed, echoing out of the garden that she and her old accomplices were placed in. In a flash she was gone, off to plot her return to her hive, to plot her revenge on the ponies who had robbed her of her life and her hive, off to scream into the night like she had been doing for so long now.
