Once upon a time, there was a kingdom of beautiful creatures called flutterponies. They had wings made of morning dew and magical quicksilver, and they only fed on the love for each other, which made them powerful enough to kill a horrible beast called the Smooze.(But that’s another an entirely different story.) The flutterponies’ only weakness was even though they fed on the love of one another, they were not allowed to feed off the love that came from other species.
One day, Duke Duncan Doughnuts of the small province of Doughnutopia fell smitten with the Princess of the flutterponies, who was named Crystal. She was more gorgeous than any other of the flutter ponies, with a porcelain-white coat and a short-cropped blue mane, her eyes shining like the seven seas.
Crystal’s mother, Queen Rosedust, forbid Duncan from marrying her daughter, for it was against every flutterpony law.
“How could you assume that she’s in love with you?” scolded Rosedrop. “My daughter’s never even meet you, and she would never betray her kingdom by marrying an outsider like yourself!”
“Never say never,” claimed Duke Duncan. “Just let me have dinner with her, and we’ll let her decide.”
“Very well,” said the uneasy mother. “I was never one to go against my Crystal’s wishes, and once she takes a look at you, she’ll reject you faster than I did myself.”
The Duke was troubled by this, and went to his court wizard for assistance.
“Make me a love potion for my bride-to-be,” ordered Duncan Doughnuts. “And make it weak, so I can win her later with by proving my love.”
“Yes, your majesty,” complied the wizard.
Soon, Crystal attended the dinner at Doughnutopia, wearing her best evening gown. “Where is this Duke?’ she asked in her angelic voice. The Duke in question was so overwhelmed by her presence that he could barely speak.
“R-right here, my darling,” he said, bowing low. “It’s an honor to finally meet you.”
“Oh, there must be some mistake,” the Princess said, disappointed. “Mother didn’t tell me you weren’t a flutterpony. I’m sorry, but my land’s law dictates I can never marry you, for I can never truly love you.”
“Never say never,” Duncan repeated, but inside, he was heartbroken. “Excuse me for a moment.” He ran inside the royal kitchen, where the love potion was ready for the unknowing Princess. “Change of plans,” he commanded. “Make the potion have as much strength as possible.”
“But we only need one teaspoon of it already!” retorted the court wizard. “Do you know how hard it is to make a weak love potion??”
“If you were just using one teaspoon, use half the bottle now,” said the Duke.
“HALF THE BOTTLE?!”
“…And use the other half for my drink,” he finished.
There was a moment of silence. “Sir? Are you alright?”
“No,” said the sorrowful ruler, “And I don’t think I’ll ever be. That’s why want be put under the spell, too.”
“But your majesty, if we use that much of the potion, you’ll be in a trance forever! You’ll be unable to feel anything but love for her for the rest of your life!” threatened the court wizard.
“That’s what I’m counting on,” said the Duke solemnly. “If I’m lucky, maybe this pain in my chest will stop.”
The dinner and drinks were prepared, and Princess Crystal sat down on the opposite end of the long table, unwitting of what cruel fate awaited her.
“You know,” said Crystal, watching Duncan Doughnuts eat his last meal, “I do believe I was too hard on you, your highness.” His ears perked up with hope. “You seem like a pretty nice pony, and I think we can become the best of friends!” she finished with the sugarcoated optimism that flutterponies were famous for. Duke Duncan felt like a ton of bricks were dropped on his stomach.
“To friends, then,” he said, raising his glass with the telekinesis of his horn. “Bottoms up.”
“Cheers,” the doomed Princess replied with a sweet smile. They drank, and looked each other straight in the eyes.
“…I’m sorry,” she cooed, a warm feeling of bliss washing over her body. “What were we just discussing?”
“I haven’t the slightest, my love,” answered the stallion she suddenly felt meant the world to her. “I haven’t the slightest.” His eyes glazed over, as if nothing mattered anymore than him than sitting down with her.
“Well, I suppose it wasn’t important …my dearest,” Crystal said, letting the pet name slip past her mouth.
“Please,” Duncan Doughnuts offered. “You must be hungry. Accept my love for you.” Crystal felt the wafts of affection resonating toward her, and she gratefully accepted.
Her eyes flew open in shock as she tasted his love. This was the most delicious, most satisfying, most powerful love she ever dreamed of! What’s more, she felt an alien power surging through her veins. It was like a drug of unstoppable force that made her feel like she was re-born into a higher plane of existence. She must tell her subjects of this wondrous gift from heaven! She flew up to the top of the castle, her hooves wrapped around her courter-no, her husband, yes, that sounded right.
“Flutterponies!” she called with both her vocal chords and telelpathy, reach to the mind & soul of every flutterpony alive. “Hear your Princess: The law that prevents you from feeding on outsiders' love is abolished! Taste what I have tasted, and see the light!” She distributed the smallest scrap of Duncan Doughnut’s love to each subject, not noticing an insatiable hunger for more brewing in each flutterpony she touched.
“Now, I must leave you, for I have a dinner with my husband. Isn’t that right, my little Dunkie-bunkie?” Princess Crystal said she lowered her love back to his seat. Duke Duncan Doughnuts said nothing in return, for feeding every Flutterpony alive left him an emotionless husk of a stallion. (Fishes and loaves, he was not.) His wife paid no notice.
They sat there for a long, long time.
Crystal’s eyes blinked to attention. She had completely lost track of time. How long had she been at this dinner? What time was it? Mother would be furious if she got home late! The flutterpony looked across the table.
“I’m sorry, I really must going, but it was nice meeting new-*GASP!*”
Across the table sat a skeleton of a unicorn, cobwebs adorning its expensive-looking regalia. Indubitably, this was once Duke Duncan Doughnuts, the pony that hosted supper that fateful evening. The Princess screamed with all her horror.
She looked frantically around the room. The castle was in ruins of its former self. Dragon fire scorched the walls. (This was from when dragons attacked the kingdom 800 years prior, when they heard Doughnutopia was tasty when deep-fried and severed with decaf coffee.) Pillars crumbled to the touch. Cockroaches skittered across the floor. The place reeked of filth and decay, a stench cocktail of feces and mud. Dust mites floated through the air in droves. Celestia’s sun set in the west, casting dark shadows from the termite mounds, which were created by the vermin that survived on the rotting wood.
“What the buck happened?” she said, taking quick breaths. She attempted to escape this nightmare, but stumbled out of her chair, weak from not eating in eons. Every bone in her body ached. She coughed up some dust in her throat, eventually hacking up an entire rat skeleton that made its home in there back 450 years ago, but got stuck. Her stomach felt like it was caving in on itself in starvation. She wheezed on each breath she took, as if the filthy air would provide some sort of nutrition.
After a great struggle of crawling, Crystal made her way to a mirror and got to standing upright with the help of a fire poker repurposed into a makeshift walking stick. She studied herself, prepared for the worst.
Which is exactly what she got.
Her pure-white coat was now as black as soot. Her dress, a marvel of its time, was tattered and worn, at the verge of coming to sheds. Her once-beautiful wings decomposed overtime, resembling the spider webs that clung to her wherever she walked throughout the castle. Her mane that was cut short in her stolen youth, now hung low over her face. Fangs bared her through her reflection’s mouth, sharp enough to tear apart a pony’s jugular vein with one bite. Her limbs were so rotted, holes poked through them. Her horn shared a similar fate, the holes making it look almost crooked.
But worst of all were the eyes. Eyes that stared unblinking at her lover for Celestia knows how many years, eyes that had lost all innocence and good will, eyes that turned green and snakelike, eyes that now only shown endless thirst and greed due to fasting for centuries on end, eyes that didn’t belong to a Princess or even a flutterpony, but a monster, twisted by lies and corruption of all things pure.
“Mother of Love and Tolerance, what have I have become?” Crystal said under her breath. Unable to bear the sight of herself anymore, she smashed the mirror into pieces, curled put into a ball, and cried her eyes out.
An hour or so later, Princess Crystal felt a nudging sensation on her shoulder. Her eyes slowly opened, and she turned around. Meeting her gaze was two stallions, both pegasi, looking down on her with the hard expressions of trained soldiers.
“Princess Crystal?” said one of winged ponies.
“D-don’t look at m-me,” sobbed the distressed mare. “I’m a m-monster!”
“If you are a monster…” began the second pony. There was a bright flash of light, and the two soldiers transformed into smaller versions of what Crystal had become, but with blue compound eyes and shorter horns. “..Then you are a monster among friends.”
“S-stay back!” begged the terrified Princess, cringing away in fright and disgust. “Wh-what are you? What do you want with me?”
“We are changelings, my Princess,” explained the first creature with pride. “The next stage in the evolution of flutterponies.”
“LIES!!!” she rejected immediately, throwing a glass shard at her visitors. “You torture me with evil lies! Flutterponies would never willingly allow themselves to become abominations of nature like you!” The very notion left a bad taste her mouth.
But it made sense.
It was impossible! It stood against everything she believed!
But it was likely.
All her friends… everypony she knew and loved…
…were they turned into these… changelings too?
Chrystal fired a barrage of questions. “Who’s responsible for this? Who did this to you? Who did this to ME?”
“You did,” the changelings simultaneously replied.
“How dare you accuse me of such an act!” she snapped, her temper rising.
“You misunderstand, Princess,” apologized the second changeling. “We did not mean that as an insult. This is the greatest blessing that could ever happen to your kingdom, as you will see shortly.”
Crystal was certain that these two were clearly insane. “What do mean, ‘greatest blessing?’ Have you gone blind?”
“There is no time to explain,” said the first changeling swiftly. “We must take you back to the Main Hive,”
“What’s this ‘Main Hive?’ Is this a trick? This is a plot to overthrow the flutterponies, isn’t it?” she accused.
“The main hive is where all changelings call home,” her rescuers calmly told her. “It was once Flutter Valley, but the land has become barren, so we had to build a glorious fortress.”
“Why should I trust you?” asked Crystal.
“Because Queen Rosedust awaits you,” The first changeling answered seriously. “And we have orders to get you as quickly as possible.”
Crystal was carried on the backs of the two changelings, and although they struggled with her weight, they never dared to complain.
The Hive itself was like pitch-black spike sprouting out of the earth, resembling Crystal’s new horn. The structure was so tall and sharp, it seemed like it threatened to tear the sky in half at any moment. Swarms of changelings buzzed through the skies, patrolling the air for anypony unlucky enough to trespass. It was one of the most menacing things Crystal laid eyes on.
The fortress walls & floor were warm to the touch, made out of a slimly substance that eventually hardened into a hollow-sounding sort of rock. While inside, the Princess saw that the castle was based around a gigantic spiral staircase that went as down underground as it did upward,
Cocoons decorated the halls, their transparent-green shells exposing the gruesome process of how new changelings were converted, not born. First, some poor pony was drained of all of their love, not unlike Crystal did to Duncan all those years ago. Then, slowly and painfully, the pony grew a hard exoskeleton, sacrificing flesh from his or her legs to make due. He or she then was finally brainwashed, and this was normally and surprisingly easy, since the first two steps broke either the pony’s strength to fight back, or his/her will to live. (Crystal had to take a few stops to throw up after seeing all of that.)
Finally, they reached the room where Queen Rosedust was being held. She was lying in a soft bed, barely clinging onto life. Her coat was her normal bubblegum pink, but her blond unruly mane turned gray with age, despite alicorns fabled for being immortal. Her skin was winkled beyond belief, to the point of being grotesque. Her eyes were bloodshot from countless hours of lost sleep over her daughter. Bones audibly creaked as she moved, which was a little as possible, seeing that she was on her deathbed. Her butterfly wings had lost all color and became a sickly brown, wilting and crumpling like a flower that was never watered.
“Mother!” Crystal cried out, hugging the old mare. “Something terrible has happened!”
“I know, child,” croaked Rosedust in raspy voice, stroking her daughter’s mane like she did when Crystal was just a foal. “I know all too well.”
“What’s become of the kingdom? Tell me everything!” demanded Crystal.
“Patience, Crissy,” said the Queen, using her daughter’s pet name. “Take a moment; I have forgotten what love tastes like.”
“You what?” said the Princess. “How is that even possible? When was the last time you fed?”
“When you distributed that wretched Duke’s love throughout our subjects,” said Rosedrop bitterly, her wrinkled face turning to a scowl. “Did I not warn you a thousand times NOT to feed off outsiders?”
Crystal tried to remember, but her mind went foggy, as if she had partaken in heavy drinking at the time. Funny, the only thing she’d ever drunk at the time was-
“-The wine!” gasped Princess Crystal. “Duncan Doughnut must’ve poisoned me!”
“I suspected as much,” agreed her mother. “Now you know what happens to flutterponies that consume the love outside their species.”
“They become changelings?” said the Princess, pointing out the obvious.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” sighed Rosedust. “They become addicted to it, fueling their every motive. Eventually, when a changeling is so consumed by its desire to feed, it forgets how to feel love as an emotion itself, so it can’t feed the other flutterponies.”
“Wait,” said Crystal, stopping her mother mid-thought, “I just figured out something: if you knew what turns a flutterpony into a changeling, that must mean this has happened before, so there must be a cure, right?”
“Welll… yes and no,” answered Rosedust. “This has happened before, but only to one or two flutterponies at a time. The simple answer back then would be banishment for the changling, but…”
“…There’s never been outbreak this bad before, has it?” finished Crystal, fully comprehending what she had done now. “You can’t banish them all, because there’s nothing to be banished from.”
“Exactly. You haven’t just eliminated every last flutterpony on the planet,” said a grimacing Rosedust, “You’ve made an entire race of outcasts and backstabbers. Do you know that there’s no such thing as trust in this colony? Everpony in here is too paranoid to show affection, because that’ll put themselves in the power of another, and it would end in war of who could brainwash the most followers. In fact, nopony’s fallen in love in deacdes, and I’m starting to think they forgot how to.”
“They all seem to follow you,” said Crystal, her hope rising again. “We could teach them how to love again. It’ll be like it was before!”
“You forget, Crissy,” the ancient mare said with a cough. “Cold-hearted obedience does not equal love. Yes, they may follow me, but they haven’t given me any affection in centuries.”
“You’ve been starving just like I have,” whispered Crystal, grasping the horrible truth. “And it’s killing you, isn’t it?”
Rosedust extended a single hoof from under the covers of her deathbed, partially covered in black exoskeleton. “Remember when you touched every flutterpony with Duke’s love? You touched me, too, and look what it did to me. I have resisted the hunger for generations to pass, and I believe death is a mercy for me now.”
“NO!” yelled her daughter. “I can’t lose you! I’ve lost my home, I’ve lost my subjects, I’ve lost my species, and I’ve lost my FACE! You’re the only thing left in this world for me!” Tears streamed freely down her face, but it was no use. She swore she felt the Queen’s heart beating slower each passing second. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m afraid I have no choice in the matter,” said the dying mother with a sad smile. “But I can leave you with a way to survive.” Her horn lit up, and a pattern of memories flowed into her daughter’s mind. “This is how to do spell for changing your appearance, for ponies have come to know and fear the changeling race. That is how the modern version of our species lives, by taking a form that is not our own.”
Crystal instantly knew what she wanted shapeshift into: the body that she had before this mess. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her old features, but found that she could not. Whenever she tried to think anything about her past, his accursed face dominated her mind. No matter how hard she focused, she tragically had forgotten what she even looked like. All because of him.
“I know you’re upset,” said Rosedust, understanding that her daughter had forgotten her own face. But promise me this: You’ll never lash out on others for this. Never harm anypony just because you’re angry at the world. Never drop the flutterpony ideals for vengeance.” And with that, Queen Rosedrop died in her offspring’s hooves, a single tear dropping from her face.
Crystal thought about her mother’s last words. She compared them to all the shambles of her kingdom that she had seen. She tried every possible way of looking at her dilemma, desperately seeking a way to forget what he had done to her life. She tried with every ounce of mercy and kindness still left in her broken heart, but failed. There was no concivable way she could find herself to forgive how he destroyed everything she knew and loved.
“Never say never,” she hissed to herself, a deep and powerful hatred boiling in the pit of her stomach.
So that, my children, is how the little Princess became your lovey Queen Chrysalis. Why did I change my name, you ask?
Because everything else was taken from me, that’s why. Crystal trusted a complete stranger. Crystal had her whole world crushed into nothing because of it. So, I became the ruler the changelings wanted me to be. Ruthless. Cruel. Intelligent. Most all, untouchable. Chrysalis would never let a bumbling Duke trick her, because now I trust no one.
After mourning the death my sweet, stupidly ignorant mother (whom I later figured out was just as gullible as ‘the old me’ was, as he tricked her into letting me attend that dinner, did he not?), I came up with the most brilliant, brilliant plan that would acquire me vengeance on ponykind.
I invented Hearts and Hooves Day.
It was rather simple, really. Send some scouts out under the guise of traveling storytellers, spinning the tale of a little princess that was foolish enough to be invited to dinner with a colt she barely knew. (Some parts had to be cut out, of course. Did you know that nopony knows what a flutterpony even is anymore, and changelings are little more than the idle discussion of conspiracy theorists? Such a pity. Worked my flank off to ensure that, but it’s still a pity.) The moral of the story was to spread love on a certain day of the year, and it eventually became a lovely holiday celebrated by all with a very special somepony. Romantic, isn’t it?
What the foals DIDN’T know that on the very same day, all my children come out to feed. It’s like our own personal buffet day, isn’t that nice? Each and every year, we feast. Each and every year, we get a little stronger. Each and every year, we capture a few ponies, increasing our numbers, our magnificent army. We are so very close to our goal, I can taste it. Do you know what will happen when we finally get enough firepower to take over a major city, say… Canterlot? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen, my children:
The shred of the weak little princess inside me is finally going to get her happily ever after.
Author's Note
A picture of Rosedust from the MLP movie back when G1 was airing:
…What the hell is on her head?
A horn? An antenna? Some mutation-induced combination of both?
Anyways, if you’re left scratching your head about Duke Duncan Doughnuts of Doughtopia, it’s a shoutout to one best HiE fics out there. Check it out, and not just in order to figure out WTF I’m talking about.
