The Light Within Us

The mournful spirit lingered on in the days following the funeral. Drones often spent time in the graveyard, some smoothing out the soil that covered their relatives’ ashes, some sitting at the grave markers in deep thought, some talking with other visitors to the graveyard, presumably sharing stories about the deceased drones or discussing what else could be done to honor their memory. Decorating the graves seemed to be popular; I’d seen several drones crafting more elaborate nameplates than the ones placed initially, Antenna was busy with unusually high amounts of flowers even considering the increased demand for decorating the hotel and its surroundings, and I’d received several inquiries about my willingness to produce some buttercup cuttings for planting on the grave sites.

I’d granted all the requests, thankful that my buttercup had grown enough to give so many cuttings at once without it even being noticeable that something had been taken. The tree seeds planted into the ashes had all sprouted, too, and were growing impressively fast, some already being as tall as myself if not taller. Where in the name of eggshells had Antenna found that fertilizer potion? Either way, even if the graveyard was already becoming the memorial grove and looking way nicer than the dull, empty badlands, I wasn’t complaining about getting it to look even nicer than what the trees alone could accomplish; I believed our ancestors would have liked it, had they lived to see our new era. In that regard, a buttercup sprout was intended for my mother’s grave, and another for the grave of the unknown soldiers.

The drones were still visiting the memorial grove regularly, but as the days went on and most of the planting and decorating was finished, they weren’t spending as much time there anymore, and life in the hive gradually returned to its routine pace.

On one especially uneventful day, I grew bored of sitting in the throne room in wait of something to happen or someling to require my advice, and the nymphs just happened to be in the middle of an afternoon nap, so I took an easel and painting supplies from the arts-and-crafts section and flew out into the not-so-bad-anymore badlands. Betterlands?

A spot at a riverbend caught my eye. A tree and some shrubs had grown on one bank, cattails stretched further upstream, and vibrant flowers blanketed the surrounding land. Even a couple of frogs were resting on a rock! I didn’t need to look further to find the scene of my next landscape!

I hadn’t realized how much I missed painting until my brush made its first stroke across the canvas. Royal duties had left me little time for creative pursuits and I’d sacrificed following one personal desire to follow the desire to serve my subjects, but today, the universe had decided my subjects could wait. Inspiration beckoned, and this time, I heeded its call.

My brush danced across the canvas with a rainbow of colors shimmering under the bright summer sun; was it the skill of my magic wielding it or the warmth of the aura coming from my heart? How sweet was the passion that commanded every stroke, how dreamlike the trance that bound me to the canvas, how powerful the bliss that wove life into the shapes and colors!

The bliss and trance were so intense, apparently, that the rest of the world had ceased to exist to me until the painting was almost complete, and I almost ruined it when I noticed a newcomer and recoiled in surprise. He was an elderly unicorn sitting still in the meadow watching me patiently, and though I’d never met him before, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was familiar somehow.

“Please, carry on,” he said. “You don’t have to stop painting on my behalf.”

“Right… uh…” I fumbled frantically with my watercolors and brushes, only to spill the glass of water. “Oops…”

The unicorn levitated everything, spilled water included, back into position. “I apologize for startling you. Perhaps I should have announced my presence?”

“Um… I think I should have noticed you either way,” I admitted. “How long have you been here?”

“I arrived when you were coloring the water.”

“That must have been an hour ago at least! You could have- Um. Were you looking for me? How can I help you?”

He smirked at that. “I wasn’t looking for you specifically, though I won’t complain that I’ve met you. I assumed you would be too busy with royal duties to entertain guests and expected a conversation with some of your subjects unless they had more pressing matters. You are King Thorax of the changelings, I presume?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I said, smiling sheepishly. “I happened to have a moment for myself this afternoon, otherwise I would have been in the throne room most likely-”

“You do not have to justify yourself to me, Your Highness,” he said. “I understand leaders and heroes need to relax from time to time just like everypony else.”

“Thanks… oh, and just call me Thorax, please. I still don’t like all those high titles. Probably never will, heh…”

“Very well, Thorax.”

“Now, how can I help you, sir?”

“If we’re abandoning titles, it’s only fair that it goes both ways. Just call me Starswirl.”

Of course! Starswirl the Bearded! Twilight had mentioned his return from limbo and placed busts of him and the other Pillars in her school’s main lobby! How could I have forgotten?

But what was he doing here?

I must have looked either too starstruck to speak or utterly confused, if not both, as he chuckled to himself and said, “I see my reputation precedes me even if my face was unfamiliar to you after a millennium of absence.”

“Have I offended you? I’m sorry-”

“Not in the slightest. I would have taken offense in the past, but I’ve since come to realize that when one becomes merely a legend, he should expect the public not to know him in the flesh.”

So I, and probably a number of others, had still offended him to some degree, but he was trying not to take it personally. Fair enough… “Still, Twilight told me about your return and I saw your bust in her school. That doesn’t really excuse me.”

“I like to think I’m not quite as stiff as that bust is portraying me. At least, I hope to appear more approachable than a block of stone.”

“You saw the bust?”

“Princess Twilight was kind enough to invite me to her school not long ago and to show me everything. I must say, I’m impressed by what she’s accomplished.”

“Yeah, that’s Twilight… there’s no task, challenge, or obstacle she couldn’t handle…”

He nodded. “Courtesy of the magic of friendship, I’m told. I regret to say I never cared much for friendship back in my time… who knows what the world would have become had I understood friendship better… Then again, we are fortunate that someone else understood when it mattered.”

“Like I said, Twilight can-”

“Not only Twilight,” he interrupted me. “I understand you were a disciple of friendship long before there was a school; a disciple that taught a nation and has since passed the torch for one of his subjects to follow in his hoofsteps.”

I rubbed the back of my head awkwardly. “Aw, you’re making it sound more impressive than it was…”

“Your Ocellus would argue I’m not making it sound nearly as impressive as it actually was.”

“You’ve met Ocellus?!” I facehoofed to myself. “Of course you have. Why would Twilight neglect to introduce one of her most hardworking students?”

“The most hardworking, I dare say after what little time I had to make that judgment. It is curious you are not her father; she has your humility. Are you perhaps more distantly related?”

“If I am, either the records that trace our lineage to a common ancestor have been lost, or noling has cared to look. But one doesn’t need a blood bond to share a common trait, nor is it a promise of likeness. For example, my own brother couldn’t be more different from me than he is, and if you’ve met Ocellus, you had to have noticed her obsession with books rivals that of Twilight’s, and the two of them can’t be related at all since they’re not even the same species!”

“Then it must be an acquired trait nurtured by the people she looks up to.” He stroked his beard. “That would explain why she was so starstruck after Twilight introduced us compared to how I saw her in passing shortly before, while she was unaware of my presence… and why she spoke so highly about you when I asked about her home.”

How much had she said?! Not that I necessarily minded, but if somepony as used to praise and adoration as Starswirl must have been was impressed… “Aw, I don’t think I’m that praiseworthy… maybe that adoration is making her see me as better than I really am…”

“Even if we take that into consideration, the fact remains that it took her almost a full hour to wind down-”

“An hour?!”

“-and it didn’t sound forced at all. In fact, it’s what inspired me to visit the changeling land and see that wonder of hers with my own eyes, conditions permitting. I would have gotten around to it eventually anyway unless my age caught up with me first, but she made me curious to do it sooner rather than later.”

“I’m sure you would have gotten to visit us either way, not that I’m not honored to meet you now!”

“I’m older than I look, Thorax, and so much has changed in a thousand years that, even now that I’ve devoted myself to traveling the world in order to catch up with the changes and documenting them in my memoirs, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I can’t rely much on others to help; my fellow Pillars have returned to their homes and started over, and I myself have no descendants to turn to, having dedicated my life to serving Equestria in its early days. Longevity spells help, but even they can only do so much to a mortal, even one wielding a powerful magic.”

“I hope I’m not being rude, but how old exactly are you?”

“Centuries. I was there long before the births of Celestia and Luna, before the founding of Equestria, even before the changelings came into existence. I believe I may actually be responsible for the creation of your kind, or at the very least, for unleashing the first changelings into the world.”

“I’m not sure I understand… Are we a result of some kind of magical experiment gone wrong?”

“Not an experiment as such, but a chain of spontaneous events. You see, way back before the founding of Equestria, the pony tribes were divided and lived separately in hatred of one another, hatred so deeply ingrained that it stuck within the ponies’ bones after they died, permeating the graveyards. Such a concentrated well of emotions leaves a mark on the land. Add to that the magic of the unicorns who were buried alive because the doctors of that era didn’t know better, and a dark magic was born and infested the ground, and later when one such graveyard flooded, the resulting lake became cursed as well. It grew a carnivorous tree that consumed the unicorns’ bones, preyed on a nearby colony of insects, and drank the underlying dark hatred.”

“I think I see where this is going… but where do you come in?”

“I happened to travel past that lake in my youth. I observed what I just described to you as it was happening, made notes of it in my journal for future reference, and before I left, I nailed a warning sign into the carnivorous tree. I heard a loud crack as if a tree had fallen shortly afterwards but thought nothing of it, as this was in a forest, but when I returned to study the lake years later, I found the cursed tree had been split open for a while. It was another few years before the changeling swarms first openly attacked a pony settlement, but sporadic reports of previously-unknown insectoid monsters were already popping up; I traced the first one to barely a week after I first visited that lake.”

“The changelings must have grown in that tree, and the nail you drove into it must have provided them a way out,” I mused.

“That’s what I surmised too. And since only so many changelings could fit in that tree, those years of their sporadic sightings before their first open assault must be when they gathered their strength and grew in numbers.”

“And since we were forged in hatred, it makes sense that we’d have an insatiable hunger for love. The one thing missing from us, destined to remain missing until we learned to create it ourselves… just like our unicorn ancestors failed to do.”

“A likely theory,” Starswirl agreed. “It can be expanded on: your new colors are probably either an outward manifestation of that love, or a legacy of the unicorns’ colors once the darkness of the hatred was purged from you.”

I pondered everything he’d told me. “This is a lot, but I still don’t get one thing: why is Chrysalis different? I mean, why has her base form always been different from that of every other changeling? And why was I born different?”

“I don’t know for sure. She may have come from a very powerful unicorn, an especially evil one, one that was still alive when the tree consumed them, which would be possible if they arrived later than the others and were to drown in the lake or the tree snatched them as they were passing by, or maybe there was an unaccounted-for alicorn in one of the graves. She could also have come from a different insect than the rest of you, or there could have been magical forces at work inside the tree itself that decided to create one changeling different from the rest for some reason. Maybe she was supposed to become a biological queen, but that probably didn’t work, given that changelings mate in pairs. We might never know. As for you, maybe you had a spontaneous mutation that affected your perception of love, or whatever good was left in your species after all this time beat the odds against the overwhelming darkness in the process of creating you.”

“Do you still know where that tree was? I’m wondering if we can do something about the dark aura.”

“The tree remains as far as I know, unless it rotted away since I last saw it. The area was cleansed of dark magic, the lake was drained, the remaining skeletons relocated, and a network of caves was discovered underneath in the process. Given the area’s past, it was eventually decided to put the caves to use as what is now known as Tartarus.”

“...oh.” That was about as much as I could say, given the amount of new information to process and their implications.

“It seemed apt at the time,” he said. “If I’d known changelings would be good one day…”

“It’s alright,” I interjected, more for his benefit that I really believed my own words. “I understand. Still, it’s a lot to take in, and I’m not sure how the others would feel about it.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about it! “They deserve to know, but let’s not rush into making it public, okay?”

“I will not speak of it until you do.”

“Thank you. Now, you’ve seen our origin and our history; may I show you the particulars of how we turned out?”