Agony.

It should have been all she felt, but her body could not even muster that...

Cold.

That she was still alive at all should have been a miracle...

Wet.

Or maybe more so a curse... that she was made to suffer a slow death...

Rain.

Brief flashes of intense pain lit up in her mind and then extinguished, as her children were snuffed out one by one. Granted the swift release that she was denied...

The rain stung as it ran down and through the deep cracks in her chitin, Dark green ichor pooling on the ground beneath her.

Something was missing.

She could taste the sour dirt of the jagged rock that drilled through her lower back. It had punched through her chest ending a fair bit above her shoulder.

Oh, right.

A deep ragged cough tore through her chest viciously, dark ichor spilling from her downturned lips.

Her foreleg, she was missing her foreleg...

The sky was grey and dark and little light shone on the land around her.
Not that it would have illuminated much...
The ragged stone formations that stood scattered hauntingly around the expanse and the endless swirling dust that permeated everything in sight, was a dreadfully familiar sign of her old home...

The Badlands.

Of course she would die here...

Fate, cruel as it was, always loved it's bloody irony.

A deep sadness bled through her core, only matched by the rivers of the fleeing life essence that ran through her cracked carapace.

Yet even now she did not allow herself to cry.
Perhaps it was pride, or perhaps the way that one of her eyes had been knocked clean from her skull, at this point she couldn't tell...

A flash of light followed by a deep rumbling roar from the heavens signaled that the stinging acidic rain would soon become a storm.

She glared tiredly at the encroaching clouds that even now would deign to mock her passing with their slow insidious touch.

Why?

...

There was no answer, nor had the words truly been spoken aloud, but yet the question remained.

Why?

Why what? She thought dispassionately, she was in no mood for games, nor for much of anything else...
She was dying, what could there possibly still be left to ponder on other than regret and spite?

So then... why? Why was she still clinging on.
She did not wish to die, but it had long since become clear that was to be her fate.

Why was she still alive?

A faint crackling cough pierced her ears, even as weak as it was.
Yet it was not her own.

She'd been too consumed by her own impending demise to notice that the drone who'd clung to her before yet remained...

She moved to try to get a better view, tried being the key word, as the very attempt sent piercing jolts of pure suffering and agony through her broken body. Biting back the scream that would have torn her throat to threads, she instead gingerly and with great effort tried to feel for the drone with her remaining forearm.

Laying just shy of the large stone that had pierced her chest, the drone still clung to her abdomen even in unconsciousness.

Its- their body was damaged, though whole. Their thorax was cracked in numerous places, but the flow of ichor that ran from them was slower, lesser than her own...

She thought no more about it, before beginning to dig into the dark green dusty earth now moist and sticky with the ichor of her wounds. Slowly and painfully she gathered a clump of the substance and attempted, to the best of her diminished ability, to stem the flow of the wounds the drone had suffered.

She knew not why she did it, but as the minutes edged by she lost any chance to think on it...

Darkness was slowly creeping in at the edges of her vision, further and further, darker and darker.

The last thing she saw was of the drone, blearily opening their eyes and meeting her own with alarm.

They spoke to her, but words could no longer reach her, as her forearm went limp in the dust...

She stopped moving...

He was afraid to shake her for fear of making it worse, but he didn't know what else to do!

"No no no! No I... P-please don't die!"

He was barely able to move himself and every stretch, every turn of his body was a gauntlet of pain, yet he tried his best to patch up her wounds with what little slime and dirt he could produce anyways.
It was too little, too late he feared... At this point her wounds barely bled at all, only deepening his growing anxiety.

No no! It couldn't end like this!
He wracked his frayed tether to the bond for anything that could help him save his queen, but found to his growing dread that there was nothing to find, the bond was little else than a waning feeling, ebbing out moment by moment...

Tears flowed freely from him as he sobbed against her chest. Why? Why!
Why couldn't he have just spoken of his worries earlier, instead of cowering behind his brother?!

Maybe then he could have stopped all this from happening, if he could have convinced enough of his kin, maybe she would have listened to them and not gone through with all this!

Why couldn't he have been less of a coward! If he'd been less of a weakling, maybe they could've stopped those ponies from getting to the throne room...

As the storm grew closer in the distance and the rumbling of thunderous clouds groaned louder, a cry of anguish and despair pierced the otherwise silent landscape.

If he'd only been stronger he could have saved them, saved her! Why did he have to be so weak?!

He clung close to the form of his regent, his tears mixing with the dust caked in her wounds. Her body growing colder by the minute.

Please...

He didn't want to be alone...

He didn't know what else to do, so between heaving sobs he called out.
Trying to reach to anyling, calling out to anyone or anything.

A cry for help from a subject to save their queen.
A cry for help from a child to save their mother.

Something In the distance must have heard. For on the horizon, slowly, a large and dark figure began it's approach...

Author's Note

Been a bit, but I guess this'll make for the first time I release a third chapter on a story ay?
Breaking the Gaben curse once and for all!

I don't know about the quality of this chapter compared to the others considering that I may be a bit rusty. Still, I think I managed to cram a lil drama in there and though quite dark, hopefully next chapter we can get the at this point long awaited meeting between parties. 2 of them dying and 1 having recently already done so.

What fun we have aye?

Regardless with me managing to string this together over 2-3 days I'd imagine the next chapter to come out sometime before 2028.

Though genuinely, I do hope to release chapters a little more actively than every 6-12 months in the future.