Changelings did not know what Hearth’s Warming was, though to their credit they were willing to put their best hoof forward in attempting to understand it, in their own misguided way.

Queen Chrysalis, however, especially did not know what Hearth’s Warming was, and there was not a single fiber of her chitinous shell that had any desire to learn about it.

Not that she was especially aware of the holiday’s existence. Or any day’s existence, really. She thought she had been keeping track of the days gone by, so that at the moment of her escape she would be able to hiss the exact length of time she had been imprisoned into her captor’s ear before twisting their neck. In reality, she had been too busy fuming to think much about that. The truth was that she scarcely even remembered what series of events had led her to being locked in this cell in the first place.

So the only way that she had any reason to know that this day was going to be any different from the others in this interminable span happened to be when the guard came by to deliver her meal.

“Hey.” The gruff voice called out to her, lying on the hard rock floor (she staunchly refused to rely upon the comfort of the cot which was afforded to her).

She groaned angrily and twisted about, grimacing up at him. He stared at her with undeniable sternness, but the softness in his eyes disgusted her. It was in most of them now: pity. They pitied her, the enemy. The very idea was anathema to her. Instinctively, her hate flared within her, but her crooked horn only throbbed dully; the iron ring which encircled the base prevented her from casting magic.

The guard—another plain stallion wearing golden armor, nearly indiscernible from any other—only continued to regard her with that detestable gaze. “Here’s your usual meal,” he said, and through a slot in the bars he levitated a small object, a lumpy marble-like shape, green on the outside but radiating a pinkish light from within. It was a changeling love-sac, a portable container full of love which changelings could use to feed when they lacked a proper source—that is to say, a victim to drain dry. She had assumed that some changelings—traitorous ones—must have told the ponies how to make them in order to feed her. Her only consolation in gnashing them between her teeth was imagining that she was devouring the gonads of these damnable guards. For the time being, though, she would content herself merely with batting it around on the floor.

“And, uh, something else.” Chrysalis looked up again and saw another object floating through the slot. It was a plate, and perched upon it was a…some food she didn’t immediately recognize. A muffin? No, a cupcake. Another infernal pony confection. The dough looked reddish, almost as if tinged with blood (devil’s food, she wanted to say, something that only stuck in her memory because of how appealingly sinister it sounded), and the frosting was white, vanilla, with little green sprinkles. She snarled at it, wanted to toss it aside, smash it beneath her foot, but she scarcely had the energy for that. She could only stare at it venomously while the guard’s magical aura deposited it upon the floor.

“Look, uh…” The guardspony glanced aside whilst rubbing at the back of his head. This must be something outside his typical protocol. “The Princess said…she instructed us to give you some space today. So we’re not going to be posting anyone here in the dungeon for the rest of the day. If you need something, though, just call and somepony will come by.”

Chrysalis only made a defiant scoff in response.

He sighed. “Yeah. Right.” Then he turned away, but before he left he added, “Happy Hearth’s Warming.”

“Hearth’s Warming?” the dark equine repeated, muttering under her breath, once he was out of earshot. She wasn’t sure she recalled what that was from her time spent among the populace of Equestria. Some terrible pony holiday, she could only imagine. She sneered to herself whilst staring at the damnable cupcake. She rolled into a sitting posture, grunting at the aches of her body, and she picked it up from the plate, rolling it about in her claws. It was still so tempting to destroy it. At a time like this, however, though she was loath to admit it, she needed whatever precious moment she could get, anything to latch onto in the midst of this monotony.

So she, being perfectly mindful of pony customs, shoved the whole thing in her mouth. Inelegant garbled noises escaped her while she chewed, gnashing the cupcake into paste between her teeth. There was a sweet taste on her tongue, but changelings were largely numb to the idea of taste and so it hardly fazed her. All she could think was eventually to swallow, and in the process she nearly choked as the cloying mass passed down her esophagus. “Why do ponies even like these—”

But then Chrysalis doubled over, clutching at her stomach. She felt that something was happening within her. She knew that changeling digestive tracts weren’t as accustomed to normal food, but this had to be more than that, churning and rumbling. Had those ponies poisoned her? The idea almost made her want to laugh, to think they finally had the guts to do something so underhanded, to behave in the way a changeling would.

And then she felt her body buckling. All at once, her skin, her shell, felt too tight around her. She knew this sensation, but the last time she’d had to molt was many, many years ago. The intensity of it also made it feel like she had sorely needed to molt in all that time as well. She was crackling and crumbling all around. She looked at one of her arms, and she observed that the outer layer wasn’t merely peeling away, it was being torn apart as the limb beneath bulged and swelled beyond its confines. Her chest grew taut, restricting her ability to breathe, and she looked down at herself just as her bosom billowed outward, obliterating both her shed exoskeleton and the rags she had been wearing. The changeling’s yowls of confused dismay steadily morphed into primal growls, hungering and angry, while her frame bulged and distended all around.

When Chrysalis finally moved to stand, her claws left imprints in the stone beneath her. She rose to her full height, which had been tall to begin with, but now her horn scraped against the ceiling. The cell suddenly seemed incredibly claustrophobic in general, hardly enough room for her to move, her immense, hulking frame occupying most of its volume. She had an urge to reach out and flex her arms, to feel the strength which lurked within them, but there was scarcely any room for that. Even her wings, buzzing impatiently behind her, were cramped.

“Finally…finally…!” Chrysalis bellowed with laughter. “I can finally—!” Only to then, upon reaching up to her forehead to yank off the inhibitor ring around her horn, be met with a numbing shock. “Ugh, fine, still no magic,” she grumbled, then pulling away the loose scraps of skin which were still hanging from her horn, mixing in with the stringy blue mess of her mane. “This should still be more than adequate for my purposes.”

She leaned over and placed her hands upon the bars of the cell, and with a casual flexing of her musculature the metal lattice was rent and thrown aside, the stone frame crumbling as she brusquely shouldered through. There was a little more room in the hall outside, giving her more freedom to relish in her newfound enormity. It wasn’t exactly easy to get a full sense of herself without the benefit of a mirror, but it was still plain to see how much of her there was. The dark flesh spread out from her, heaving breasts which spilled out from her chest, thick arms down beyond the shoulders, bulging with contours of muscle. It was harder to see below the canopy of cleavage, but she could still feel the way her legs tensed and flexed, thighs grinding together, and there was just a hint of wobble in her buttocks.

“Ha…now I think I can understand how Tirek felt,” she remarked with a toothy grin while curling her fingers and elbow and shoulder, watching the way the sleek black surface distended. “I just need to find someone to take this damned inhibitor off and then I can be completely unstoppable! But until then…I can still wreak as much havoc as I feel like!”

The changeling queen cackled with mad laughter as she stomped forward, out through the halls of the dungeon. True to the guard’s word, there was nopony present, all of them having left to attend to whatever task had been deemed so important that they didn’t need to be here, watching over one of the most dangerous criminals in the country’s history. It wasn’t exactly like they were needed for anything else—Chrysalis had been the first prisoner in the palace in quite a while; the ponies were too soft to deal with dissidents in a more punitive manner.

Chrysalis didn’t exactly know where she was going, taking several minutes to remember the way out of the dungeon complex, but she didn’t mind much at first as there was plenty of destruction for her to make along the way. She raked her claws along the walls, gouging stone and metal alike. She ripped doors off their hinges and threw them aside like they were paper weights. She found the empty guard station and made a mess of it, overturning everything inside. Everywhere she went, she left a trail of prints etched into the floor, spiderwebs of cracks stretching out erratically. Her laughter echoed throughout the empty halls.

Eventually, inevitably, though, she made her way to the exit, ascending the stairs to a large door. She was prepared to burst her way out into the palace proper and make her presence known with all the bombast she could muster. The gate fell before her just as easily as any other, two halves wrested from their hinges and falling aside. She bellowed victoriously.

And then she emerged and found herself surrounded by a host of royal guards. She might have hoped to catch some ponies unawares so she could easily swat them aside, but they were all brandishing swords and spears and mana-lit horns, as if they had been waiting for her. It wasn’t just a meager handful of them either—they filled the room, seemingly the entirety of the guard packed into one space.

But even that wasn’t the most pertinent detail that she observed.

“Well, would you look at that, Sister,” Celestia announced with a sly smirk spread across her muzzle, “it’s the star of the show.”

“Took her long enough,” Luna replied with a huff, “I was just beginning to think she would not take the invitation.”

The two alicorns stood across from Chrysalis, and they were enormous. It was still not exactly easy to gauge her own size, but she had a suspicion that she was looking at two mirror images of herself. The princesses were outrageously muscular, of a scale that would put bodybuilders to shame, only outdone by their own curvaceousness, huge breasts which defied the spans of their arms and broad hips and thighs. The most distinct difference was that, while Chrysalis had rendered herself nude, they wore matching spandex singlets. The uniforms weren’t colors suited to their royal palettes, rather the same mix of red and white and green, an oddly familiar combination.

“What…what is this?” Chrysalis demanded, fighting with herself to maintain her sense of importance.

“You know, Chrysalis, I’m just going to get straight to the point,” Celestia admitted, still bearing that enigmatic, infuriating smile, “we were bored and decided we wanted something to entertain ourselves with, so why not have a wrestling match with our resident criminal mastermind? We were sure that our guardsponies would appreciate it as well.”

There were a few tentative cheers from the crowd.

“And we thought that you, at least, would appreciate a good show of strength,” Luna added, glaring venomously across the clearing at the changeling, her expression far stonier. “Be thankful that we decided to make it an even playing field for you.”

“But please, don’t think too much of our little spectacle,” Celestia then said, and she extended her arms and open palms, “should you be victorious, you shall be free to go.”

Luna didn’t look quite as pleased by those words but made no interjection.

Chrysalis stared back at them, disbelieving. Her hate boiled within her—hate for being tricked, hate for having the rug pulled out from under her, hate for having her sense of power taken from her. But, more than anything else, Chrysalis thrived on hate.

“Fine!” she spat, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, “I’ll take both of you on! I’ll take on all of Canterlot if I have to!”

“I have been waiting for this,” Luna growled, crossing her arms over her bosom and cracking her knuckles.

“This shall be a Hearth’s Warming truly worth remembering,” Celestia mused, her grin widening, wings spreading out grandly behind her.

Author's Note

(Note: The next part is non-pony-related so there will be no upload here tomorrow, tune in on Wednesday for the Thrilling Conclusion™.)

This may have had the most basic setup out of the lot of them but I still had to go out of my way to overcomplicate and protract the whole thing as usual.

Ironically, coming after the last few, this is probably the most normy of the whole bunch.

When does this take place? Iunno.

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