Thorax slowly pulled love from the barrier surrounding the city. He did it with great care, as weakening it too much would give Sombra an opportunity to break through and attack the ponies that lived in the city. He needed to eat, though, so pulling from there put him between an angry Queen and her elite guard.

In theory, he could just extract it from the ponies, but not only did he feel less bad about the idea of taking it from the shield, there was also very little love to be had inside the hearts of the populace. It soon became common knowledge that the spell had to be constantly maintained by the Equestrian princess, and the sparks of hope soon were drowned out by a mass of dull acceptance of the inevitable.

Another thing he had to worry about was that draining enough energy to last him half a day left a window to the outside that persisted for an hour or two. He wasn't sure if it was a addition made by one of the spellcasters after the fact or a long term element of the love shield spell, but a couple hours after it was cast, the white ground and gray skies of the outside world were replaced by illusions of grassy meadows and blue, cloudless skies. It did not help the sullen mood of the Empire, but it was pretty to look at. Plus, the improved weather meant that he didn't need to find any shelter from the elements, just somewhere secluded to sleep for the night.

Still, he was hungry when he woke up, and so made a beeline to the shield itself. He finished once his stomach felt satiated again, but the constant hunger of a changeling seemed a little stronger than it was before. He certainly didn't miss the feeling, and it was yet another reason to find the foxes again.

Yes, he had zero luck the previous day, despite spending the whole of it searching the city as thoroughly as he could without arousing suspicion. Twice.

Shaking his head as if it would dismiss the ever-growing dread, he forced himself to walk away from the barrier. While Vix's form helped to escape attention, standing around the temporary hole was pushing it. He also pressed himself to pay more attention to his surroundings, as an infiltrated changeling ought to do.

This halfway situational awareness led him to jump behind a nearby crystal pillar when he noticed emotional signatures suddenly appear very close by. Normally it was difficult to surprise a changeling that's paying attention for that reason, but a quirk with the shield made it impossible for him to sense anything outside of it. Plus, infiltrators were generally taught to act as if nothing happened when they are surprised to minimize calling attention to oneself, but with a couple hours of hindsight, hiding was absolutely the right call.

It took only a second for him to recognize the six ponies gasping for breath, as they were the mares that had managed to fight off a large fraction of the swarm despite being outnumbered. While he himself was terrible at fighting, the other soldiers of the invasion were trained well enough to take down a civilian with little to no effort and keep an experienced guard distracted long enough for another changeling to make a sneak attack. These ponies had managed to beat ten to one odds, though, and were only defeated once most of the rest of the swarm had converged on them, being the last point pf major resistance after about fifteen minutes of fighting. That amount of skill was frankly ridiculous, and the only explanation he could think of was that they must have been some secret wing of the guard that, while extremely proficient, also hid in plain sight, based on the lack of uniforms.

There was also another creature with them that was mainly green and purple that he couldn't tell the species of. They had scales, which pointed to a dragon, but there was no way dragons started off that small. With how big they could get, their newly hatched nymphs had to be at least as big as a full-grown changeling, if not bigger than the Queen.

His reasoning on why the kinda cute creature was not scary enough to count as a dragon was interrupted by another pony passing through the shield, the prince. He was a lot for wear than the last time Thorax noticed him return from a trip out beyond, as he not had something wrong with his horn, though the black spots were just barely visible from this distance, but there were also black spikes of pain shooting out of his emotional core.

After a bit of time spent making sure he was fine, the group of newcomers followed the prince into the city, and figuring it was best way to avoid getting them, Thorax followed them, too. He bounded off into an alleyway the first chance he got, though, as he still had more important matters to deal with. Even if the Empire's dread was slowly getting to him.

"Oh my!" Thorax, stilled disguised as Vix, reflexively turned to the source of the exclamation, the yellow coated and pink maned pegasus from the powerful six. She was looking straight at him. "A fox with a coat white as snow! You should be native to the area, so you must know something!"

Predicting an uncomfortable interrogation in his near future, he ran off. With enough speed, he could lose her and hide in a random alley until she gave up.

"No, wait, I just want to talk to you, I promise!" Thorax risked a look back, and saw that the pegasus was flying just a bit faster than he could run. Losing her would take a bit of trickery. At the first opportunity, he made a couple of tight corners and borrowed the form of one of the older crystal pony nymphs he saw.

Less than a second after the transformation finished, the pegasus reached the intersection he was just at and she looked around, not finding the object of her pursuit. She instead saw the changeling's new form, fluttered down to the ground, and hesitantly walked up to him.

"Um, did... did you happen to see a fox run by?" The juxtaposition between the determined mare he was running from and the shy one asking for directions made him blink, but he then nodded and pointed the way further along the path he was on.

"Oh, thank you," she said, amazingly looking relieved that she didn't need to talk to him anymore. As she walked by him, she also muttered, "Don't worry, Fluttershy, this won't be like the Gala was."

Thorax couldn't stop himself from asking, "Who's Fluttershy?"

Not only did the hair on her hackles rise, she also blushed a bit. "O-oh, you h-heard that. Um. That's me." She smiled awkwardly and here eyes darted back and forth, as if seeking an escape from the conversation. Evidently deciding that simplicity was the soul of grace, she flew off to the next intersection and called out, "Mrs. Fox, I'm so sorry for scaring you, I really just want to talk to you."

Left alone once again, Thorax pored over the emotional observations he managed to make while she was in close proximity to him. Her entire surface was made of fear, most of it latent, though he saw some of it awaken when she tried to talk with his current form. There was also a shell of dark repression underneath that. What it was covering was hard to tell, as repression that deep-seated was entirely opague, but he did get small hints of rage, hatred, and love poke through before being ruthlessly shoved back in. Who knew what could happen if the repression was undone too quickly... and that might be a source of the fear as well.

"Hey, what do you know about how the Crystal Empire defended itself before King Sombra?"

He looked up to see a pony that looked like Fluttershy on the outside. The voice was wrong, the mare looked a little bigger than she should have been, and her emotions were different. While there was still a shell of repression, it seemed to be holding in despair similar to the general mood of the Empire and was itself encased in light joy tinged with a bit of frustration.

"You're not Fluttershy."

The pretend-mare's eyes flashed with a bit of bit of panic. "Of course I am," she replied, her mouth not opening at all. "Why, I just love animals and am terrified of... talking to... new ponies...." She sighed, put a hoof to her mane, and unzipped her head in half, revealing that the pony underneath was none other than the all-pink one of the six mare team.

He might as well get some information for himself. "What are you weird foreigners doing here, anyway?"

"Hey, we're not that foreign, we're ponies too! Except for maybe Spike, but he grew up with Twilight, so he's basically a pony anyway, even if you have to watch out for his fire breath when he sneezes or has hiccups, and not give him too many presents on his birthday, which is just sad! What's the point of a birthday without loads of presents? I mean there's still the party, but-" As the mare kept blabbing on and on, one of her costumed hooves slowly rose before lightly slapping herself on the face, breaking herself off. "I'm Pinkie Pie, and we're here to save the Crystal Empire from King Sombra."

Thorax stared in stunned silence for a second. He talked to Kevin a few times, the weirdest changeling in the hive, but even this would be strange for him. Still, he asked, "Wasn't that what the prince, princess, and their guards came here to do?"

"Well, yeah, but the princess has to keep to her spell going constantly, so we're looking for something that can last longer than an alicorn's magic reserve, which can last a while, don't get me wrong, but Princess Cadance hasn't been taking it well, so we need to find something before she's forced to drop the shield and let Sombra just waltz in. Wait, forget I said that, keeping the Crystal Ponies happy and oblivious of their potential enslavement is going to be important soon, even if I'm not supposed to know that yet."

Thorax, uncertain what to make of all that, decided to just ignore most of it and ask, "Why aren't you going out and fighting the king, then? If you're the reinforcements, then you have to good at fighting, good enough to scare him off or defeat him forever?"

She giggled in response. "No, you silly fil- colt, it's way too cold out there. Plus, I'm just a party pony, and I've never been trained to fight. None of my friends have, either. Well, except for Shining Armor, but he's a little busy with other things, and Twilight knows a couple of combat spells, but just as extra stuff for self-defense, not the mind-blowing stuff you can find in other stories where pony mages fling massive spells like they were nothing."

Thorax's transformed jaw hung open for a while, until he voiced his thoughts. "Why are you the ones supposed to save the Empire, then?"

"That's because we're really good friends," she answered, grinning while poking him in the side with her elbow.

He just gave her a confused look.

Pinkie stepped back, saying, "Say it with me, everypony," before rearing up on her hindlegs and raising her forelegs straight up in the air. She spread them out to draw an arc in the air as she shouted, "Friendship Is Magic!" She looked around with a bit of annoyance at noling else joining in, then dropped down to all fours again, grabbed the pretend-colt, and pressed him against her side cheek-to-cheek while pointing her other arm into the sky. "We always have each other's back, and so long as we believe in each other, we can do just about anything!"

Thorax continued to silently look at her, less confused, more incredulous, while also struggling his way out of her grip.

After he managed to escape, Pinkie suddenly raised her wrist near her face and said, "Gosh, look at the time, I'll miss our meeting under the castle if I don't hurry it up. Bye, random crystal colt!" She zipped up the head of her costume and dashed off, leaving Thorax with a lot to think about.

After a minute or so, he pushed it to the side and went back to what he was doing before getting distracted, swapping to Vix's form yet again.

Thorax was at the outskirts again when the barrier truly fell. He had just been feeding off it earlier, though he had stopped early with how much it had flickered. While it was worrying, he learned to ignore it as it had been happening since around midnight, though the frequency has been steadily increasing. It even collapsed completely for a few seconds, just long enough for Sombra to react to it, but it came back in the nick of time.

This time, the darkness outside took no chances, and rocketed inside the shield's radius. Once that was done, the mist swept a wide area, though much more slowly than that initial movement. Thorax, of course, turned tail and ran, wanting nothing to do with anything that happened here.

Hoping the buildings would slow it down, he ran into the city, avoiding the center that he expected Sombra to aim for. However, every time he looked back, not only was the blackness gaining on him, it was also corrupting the crystals that made up the buildings behind him.

All the running was in vain, as another part of the dark fog suddenly appeared in front of him, and the two waves washed over him. He could feel the darkness encroaching, trying to change him... then it suddenly receded.

He looked around at the darkness surrounding him, confused. The only difference he could find was his hunger growing to a level he never, ever felt before, but the suddenness shocked him out of acting on it.

Some time later (the hunger fighting to take control made it hard to tell how much), he could sense a massive amount of love and hope suddenly appear nearby, and the unnatural need to feed shoved his mind from the controls. He dropped the disguise, prepped his wings (which were rapidly gaining holes, but it didn't hurt at all), and flew at a leisurely pace towards the center of the city.

Something gave his mind enough of an opening to force him to hover in place. The love had densely concentrated to a single point, and he could remember two other times when it happened. In both of them, it had been used to devastating effect.

The point then emitted a lot of that love energy in an expanding sphere, convincing the ravenous need to feed to give up the wheel again with the agreement that leaving was top priority.

Nothing could escape the Crystal Heart's power, though, and the pulse hit him hard. As it launched him away from yet another pony city, it at least had the courtesy to remove Sombra's influence on him, banishing almost all of the hunger from his mind.

Eventually, he landed in the snow yet again, still awake, the city easily visible with the clouds clearing up to show a bright, sunny sky. Apparently, the Crystal Heart was too busy ridding the Empire of its old oppressor to really do much anything about him. In fact, he might even have just been collateral damage.

Then, he could sense the Heart's influence yet again, this time pulsing with hope. It launched into the sky streaming lights stretching off into the distance, announcing to the world that the Crystal Empire was back, with a bright future ahead of it.

It was enough to give even him hope, and swelling with the conviction that even if he couldn't find the foxes again, he might find someling willing to accept him as the changeling he was, he stood up and started walking back to the Empire.

A few steps later, his hoof broke clean through a suspended snow layer and fell down the tunnel underneath, sliding until his head hit a stalagmite of ice, knocking him unconscious.

Author's Note

Something I thought of while writing this is that the old changelings (or at least their hunger) acted a lot like dark magic, with the need to keep feeding mirroring the need to keep casting the spell. Especially with how the changelings look like after they reformed, it's entirely possible that someone (not necessarily a changeling) corrupted the entire species with dark magic to the point where it became hereditary to some degree, even if only in a way similar to how bloodborne diseases can transmit from mother to child.

Also, I might have a serious habit of turning focus characters into the universe's playthings.