Letters to the Princess

“Welcome, daughter.” The smile on the insect’s face was repulsive. Ranged around on every side, her children chittered in an uncanny echo. Daughter, daughter, daughter.

“Mother,” Cozy Glow said, the word like ash against her tongue. Rarity’s name, Rarity’s role, perverted and corrupted into this monstrous shape.

Chrysalis.

Half of Cozy’s first pseudo-family, and someone whom she had once hoped never to see again. Old associations are bad for your recovery, said Doctor Healing Word, and true enough, Cozy did not feel particularly recovered.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this little reunion?” hissed Chrysalis, her forked tongue flickering on every sibilant syllable.

Behind her, a drone carried away the most freshly laid egg. According to Twilight Sparkle’s mode of justice, Chrysalis was supposed to be living alone, penitent and dethroned. But the love was flowing thick and green in this new hive, and Cozy was not surprised in the least to find it so.

“I’ll be blunt, Mother dearest,” she said, slipping back so easily into her old saccharine tones. “I need an army, and it looks like you have a couple to spare.”

Chrysalis laughed. “Oh, Cozy. I’ve missed you. Such refreshing wit.”

Cozy Glow giggled, carefree and hollow. “Is that a no, then?”

Chrysalis smiled. “If an army of unreformed changelings turns up in Equestria, where do you think the pony princesses will check first?”

“Unreformed, Mother?” chirped up one of the blank-eyed drones. “But we can all change our forms! What does reforming mean, if not transformation magic?”

Casually, Chrysalis reached out with her vomit-green magic and slammed the drone into the wall. The others stepped calmly out of the way as he slumped to the ground.

“Don’t ask questions, Antennae,” Chrysalis said calmly. “I’ve told you before.”

Antennae did not respond, and one of his nameless brethren dragged him away into a side tunnel.

“No, Cozy dear,” Chrysalis went on. “My drones only go out a few at a time. I have no soldiers to lend out, even to old friends. But you’re welcome to stay a while. Pincer will show you to a room.”

“Thank you,” said Cozy Glow sweetly, simmering with hate.

“But as a lesson from a queen to a little pony who once wanted to be one, let me tell you one thing. Armies are best when you build them yourself.”

A knock on the door. How she was growing to hate those.

“Come in.”

The shuffle of chitinous hooves. The soft swish of changeling magic, resettling flesh. Cozy turned, and the air left her lungs as though she’d been punched.

Flurry Heart, beautiful as always, hair curling softly across her pink throat. Here in a changeling hive.

The irrational, beautiful spike of hope — she’s come to save me from this — died before it was fully formed. Cozy’s eyes were flat and dead. “Get out.”

“Mother said you’d like this form best,” the drone said nervously in Flurry’s voice. “I can do something else? But Mother said you might like to s-share a little love with us.”

“Get out!” Cozy screamed, and as soon as the illusion of Flurry flickered away she bucked him in the face as hard as she could. He gasped and crumpled just like a pony, and Flurry felt again the sick joy of how good it felt to hurt another creature. To externalise the pain instead of internalise.

Cozy Glow paced the length of her lonely room. Back and forth she stalked, back and forth, like a caged tiger. Like an animal stripped of its glorious strength and its native land, penned up in a tiny enclosure for mindless hicks to gawp at.

Her hooves thudded against the green resin floor, every step full of barely-restrained fury.

Flurry Heart.

The name was a constant whisper in the back of her mind. A terrible nagging feeling. It was one Cozy was not used to; the sensation of having failed. She gritted her teeth. How had it happened? She still struggled to wrap her head around it.

All her life, Cozy had wielded her intellect like a weapon. Used it to cudgel and quell and manipulate others into submission. Twisted their minds with it until they gave her what she really wanted.

Since she was a foal, Cozy had been able to manage and change the ponies around her. She could cajole and wheedle and whisper suggestions, and eventually they always worked. Those things were blasé. She hardly remembered a time when they hadn’t come as easily as breathing.

What Cozy wanted — what she had always wanted — was the other sort of power. The one that mattered more than little whispers and nudges ever could. The power that made ponies shudder when you spoke. Avert their gaze from yours. Jump to obey your every command.

The power of fear.

After Cozy Glow’s final defeat, over twenty years ago, she resigned herself to the fact that the power of fear was not one she would ever possess. She had been mighty — she had been an Empress — but all the power she had wielded had still not been enough to help her face up to the alicorns and their raw magical force. She had been forced to content herself with the prospect of a lifetime of the other, softer sort of power; and then once Mama’s lessons began to stick, even that possibility had been surrendered. Cozy had spent her time taking pills, reciting mantras, attending therapy sessions, and trying to quell the monster inside into submission. She had focused on controlling only herself, instead of others — and it had been the most difficult thing she had ever attempted.

Twenty years of brutal, unremitting struggle. Unceasing self-flagellation and eyes full of Mama’s soft disappointment, a thousand times worse than a knife to the back. A subtle stabbing pain in her heart every time she slipped up.

Twenty years of sacrifice. Of pushing her true self into a tiny cell and bracing herself against the door.

And what had she got to show for it?

Nothing. Nothing. A body twitching with repressed urges, a head full of memories so bitter that they hurt, and — and a broken heart. Can’t forget that one.

Cozy stalked the length of her room once more, shaking her head from side to side. Thinking of the way Chrysalis hurled the drone in the throne room out of her way. The thrill it had sparked in her. The way the second drone’s skull had crunched beneath her hooves. It was the first time since Mama — since Mama had — since then that she had felt anything at all.

Yes, there was a lot to be said for the way Chrysalis ruled. A refreshing change from the way the insipid pastel alicorns ruled. Friendship and frippery could only get you so far. None of the ponies leapt to obey the alicorns in the way that Chrysalis’ spawn did.

Ruling generally was a concept Cozy had not given thought to in many years. She had given it up. Thought it was long behind her.

But…why should it be?

Armies are best when you build them yourself.

Really, why should it be? Cozy would be a good ruler — or rather, she would be good at ruling. She would not be good to her subjects. But she would do a better job of the whole thing than Chrysalis, who lived in a damp hole with her innumerable children, insulating the raw stone with their own spittle. No, Cozy would rule with style.

And what was reason was there not to? What reason was there to hold back any longer? Mama was…Rarity was gone. And with her, the Elements of Harmony. A major blow to Princess Twilight. True, the stone spell could be performed by Twilight alone, but she was busy in Canterlot. Go far enough north, and the ponies of Equestria would never even hear about her, let alone want to come and stop her.

Yes, that was an idea. Continue north. Leave Equestria and the Crystal Empire in the dust. Leave the memories of Rarity and alicorn-kind in all its varied and cursed forms far, far behind. Find a few ponies, persuade them to put her in charge, and boom — instant army. And with an army she could conquer. And when Cozy Glow began to conquer, who would be able to stop her?

She would be no Princess, nor even a Queen. She would be an Empress. And why should it not work?

After all, she was not twelve any more.