Portrait of a Monarch

Chapters

10. Disappearance
1. Hinterland
2. Eyeshine
3. Starburst
4. Ferry
5. Sublimate
6. Marrow
7. Cavity
8. Eventide
9. Lightbulb
11. Huntress
12. Blacklight
13. Amnion
14. Grab
15. Migration
16. Hinterland 2

10. Disappearance

The library of the Crystal Empire opened as normal that morning. Amethyst chatted with visitors about how she had enjoyed her trip to the big city and listening to the talk at the university. When she stepped into the back room to process returns, her gentle smile left her face, and all that remained was Chrysalis’s sharp-eyed stare.

She had information now. The next thing she needed was enough food to sustain her hatchlings when their eggs finally cracked. She had been lucky to find Lightbulb, who wasn’t local, and Eventide, who no one knew had traveled here, but any further disappearances would always increase the risk that she was caught. She needed some kind of concrete excuse to cover her traveling in and out of the city borders, and she needed a reliable way to find her next victims.

The excuse part turned out to be simple enough. There was a nightly train to the Crystal Empire, and for whatever reason the train station was outside of the boundaries of the city; the walk to and from the station after that last service was long, cold, and dark.

That evening, Chrysalis found a small cart for pulling books in Amethyst Maresbury’s house. It had a weatherproof cover, and once she had pulled all the shelving out of the middle of it, it could just fit an unconscious pony if they were curled up tightly.

She harnessed herself to it and began the slow evening walk out to the train station. A couple of her neighbours asked her what she was doing, and Chrysalis informed them that she had started up communication with a professor at Canterlot University who would send her twice-weekly requests for books to issue from her library. Since they were old and fragile, Amethyst insisted on taking them to the train station herself for carriage on the first service the next morning. Not knowing any better, this explanation was barely questioned by ponies around her.

It was almost too easy, and certainly a lot safer than dragging a pony her own size out of the city in a wheelbarrow.

Out in the cold and dark, she pulled away from the road and into the bushes to open the cart cover and pull out a bag of food for Eventide. Bread and carrots and apples. It would be enough for him to live on until her next visit.

She found him huddled against the warm floor, his fur stood on end to keep out the cold and the occasional snowflakes that would drift into the room and land on him. The excitement in his eyes when he had seen her that first time had already faded into a numbness as the aching cold forced him to curl up to survive.

He still stood up when he saw her, though, and he still dipped his head in respect. She dropped the bag of food in front of him and he tried to play himself off as unaffected as he levitated out a slice of bread and began eating it.

“How’s it going?” Eventide asked. If he was disappointed by the lack of a book or blanket he didn’t mention it.

“Things are progressing nicely,” Chrysalis said.

“Yah? I have to ask, are you working alone or have you re-established a hive?” Eventide said.

She paused and decided to humour him. He might be a source of the information she sought.

“I have laid a clutch of eggs to form a new hive. Thorax’s brood of pacifists betrayed me, and I have no interest in returning to them,” Chrysalis said.

“That’s interesting! You know, I couldn’t find any accounts of a queen being replaced while the previous queen survived - if it hadn’t happened to you, I would have assumed it was impossible.” He stopped for a moment, then looked bashful. “Uh, sorry about that, though.”

Chrysalis gave him a withering look, but in reality, she had no ill-will towards him for speaking of these events. In reality she wanted to know what he thought. It was validating to know that she walked in unfamiliar territory. Future queens would speak of her with the reverence she deserved.

“It is of no concern to me. I would rather have a loyal hive, no matter how I have to struggle,” Chrysalis said.

“I didn’t have the chance to mention it anywhere in my talk, but one incident I found really interesting from a very old pony scroll was the mention of a bugmite infestation that wiped out almost every member of a nearby peaceful hive of changelings. The ponies sent assistance, but ultimately the queen and a very small handful of workers had to abandon the hive and form a new one down in San Palomino where the drier conditions would slow the mites down,” Eventide said. “If she could do it, so can you.”

Chrysalis remembered a mention of a San Palomino hive in one of the books she had skimmed.

“I appreciate your forthcomingness.” Chrysalis turned and left him.

The eggs were safe, and Amethyst and Lightbulb still slumbered. Chrysalis took her cart and wheeled back into town.

Excerpt: Changeling Dentition: a brief analysis

Comparison between pre-transformation and post-transformation changeling dentition.

TONGUE:
Pre: long, extended 2-3x length of skull, cleft tip with pronounced ridge separating each half. Compare: monitor lizard
Post: moderate length, extended 0.5-1x the length of skull, cleft tip with pronounced ridge separating each half. Compare: cobra

CENTRAL/LATERAL INCISORS:
Pre: chisel-tipped, slight overbite. Compare: pig
Post: flat, with wide grinding surface. Compare: pony

CANINES:
Pre: pronounced, fang-like, upper tooth significantly larger than lower. Compare: tiger
Post: reduced, flat, with angled grinding surface. Compare: marmoset

PREMOLARS/MOLARS:
Pre: carnassial. Compare: wolf
Post: flat, grinding, continuously growing. Compare: pony

Conclusion: pre-transformation dentition consistent with carnivore. Post-transformation dentition consistent with frugivore or herbivore. Tongue is a sensory organ used to detect energy for feeding.

Additional notes: Primary pre-transformation changeling diet consisted of magical draining of energy; dentition may serve in self defence. Some reports indicate that changelings can eat flesh to bolster their diet in times of starvation.

Primary post-transformation changeling diet consists of shared magical energy within the hive, supplemented with vegetation, fruits, and flowers.

With her system in place, all Chrysalis needed to do was wait for victims to present themselves. She no longer regretted choosing the library as her base of operations; she couldn’t imagine a more suitable place in town. Ponies walked in alone and traveled to solitary parts of the library, and they trusted Amethyst implicitly when she asked them to accompany her places. Here in the centre of the Empire, ponies felt much too safe to ever distrust a kindly librarian.

It only took two days for the opportunity to arise. A blue crystal pony with a pink and purple mane came into the library wanting to access some documents her family had left with the library’s archive. She gave her name as Autumn Gem, and Chrysalis accompanied her into the back room and magicked her unconscious before she realised anything was wrong.

That night, Amethyst traveled with her cart and her delivery for the kindly professor, and Autumn Gem vanished.

Short of room in her egg chamber, Chrysalis suspended the mare in a cocoon in a third warm cave near the other two. Autumn Gem had many friends in the Crystal Empire, which was good for the amount of food she could provide for her young, but bad for how much suspicion she would raise.

She delivered another bag of food for Eventide; more food this time, since he had already finished what she had left before. Chrysalis didn’t know or particularly care how much food a pony needed to survive, but she didn’t want her fount of knowledge expiring here in this cave.

As soon as he saw her he bounced to his hooves. “Hello! Thank you for bringing me food.”

“Don’t take it as kindness. I need you alive,” Chrysalis said.

“Well, I’m flattered either way,” Eventide said, crunching into a carrot. He fumbled the bag with his hooves and then pulled out a book. Palaeopony Era Evidence for Interspecies Interdependence. Chrysalis had already read the relevant chapter on changelings. “Thank you! I only read the changeling chapter, now I can read the rest.”

She ignored his words and looked him over. He looked ruffled and sweaty, but there was no sign of frostbite. He had moved a pile of snow inside to melt on the warm floor so he had something to drink; Chrysalis idly realised she had forgotten to bring him any water. He seemed determined to stay chipper despite his circumstances.

He finished the carrot and looked up at her. “Is Lightbulb okay?”

“Yes. Lightbulb is cocooned and knows nothing of his fate,” Chrysalis said.

“Oh, phew. So long as he’s okay, I’m okay,” Eventide said. “Hey, do you have time to answer some questions? This is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me.”

Chrysalis looked at him, disheveled and trapped alone in a mountain cave, and had to respect his tenacity enough to indulge him. “You have my ear for a moment. Do not waste this opportunity.”

He froze for a moment, clearly scrolling through all his potential questions that he had been stewing on, before finally saying, “The reign of Alate is well-documented due to her conflicts with ponies, and I have a pretty good idea of when you took the throne, but wasn’t there a queen between you and her? What was she like?”

Chrysalis sneered. “Tarsus. Alate was killed in combat with a dragon that attempted to move into the mountains near our hive. Tarsus was selected to rule us. She was -” Like Thorax, Chrysalis had been about to say, but she elected to not give away extra information to Eventide. “She was a weak leader, and the hive starved for it. I stamped the life out of her hoping the hive would choose again, and it chose me.” The memory tasted sweet on her tongue, just like the first pony feast under Chrysalis’s rule.

“Interesting, interesting… How long did she rule for?” Eventide asked. He didn’t react at all to what she had said otherwise.

Pausing for a moment, Chrysalis tried to recall. It had been a long, long time ago, long enough for all of Equestria to have been founded since.

“An autumn and a winter. I remember her sending peaceful messages to the nearest pony settlements around the time the leaves fell, and I remember a long, cold, hungry winter where we did not hunt and instead grew weaker and weaker by the day,” Chrysalis said.

“So about six moons. Interesting that history remembers her at all, then, if her reign was so short,” Eventide said.

Chrysalis hissed. “The messages she sent had consequences. Ponies believed her words and cautiously sent out envoys to meet her, and we were not permitted to feed despite how hungry we were. She tried to build relationships with them while her own hive turned to dust. Once I had destroyed her I set my changelings free on those pony envoys who sought to weaken us. I am sure the results were enough to last in written memory.”

Eventide continued on, undeterred. “You said you listened to my talk - did Tarsus fit the profile of a ‘passive’ changeling queen, like Thorax?”

Of course he had guessed it. This was his field of study. “She was just like him. Weak and pathetic. But when she turned into a queen, none of us changed with her. There was never a chance of us getting the food we needed just from forming friendships.”

His eyes widened and she saw him fumble around for a split second before he remembered he had nothing to take notes with. “So your hive didn’t fully change? And then you changed it back on purpose?”

“Trying to change was a mistake. It left us unable to survive,” Chrysalis said. “I will not apologise for doing what I have done to fill the empty stomachs of my hive.”

“Of course, of course. I actually got into studying changelings while you were still queen, because Princess Twilight was talking to me about how she felt sorry for changelings for being hungry all the time-”

“I don’t want her sympathy!” Chrysalis snarled. “We have enjoyed many times with stomachs full, thanks to my leadership. And if she’d had the grace to lie down and die in a hole like I wanted her to, my hive would have stayed that way instead of becoming flower-eating cowards like they are now.”

Eventide’s eyes widened and his body language became submissive. Chrysalis couldn’t quite taste if he was scared or simply trying to pacify her. He had proved to be an unknown element; his scholarly curiosity seemed stronger than his survival instincts.

“Yes, of course,” Eventide said. “I meant to say I thought that your ability to keep your hive fed even though ponies keep messing it up for you is impressive.”

She ignored that, and left the cave.

The eggs were still growing. They seemed full, almost ready to hatch, and she hadn’t lost many. No doubt she would lose more after hatching, as she always did, but she hoped dearly she would get enough of them to adulthood to start rebuilding.

And then she headed back to the Crystal Empire, looking for another victim.

1. Hinterland

Author's Note

This fic is already complete and new chapters will be uploaded every few days!

Cover art is a collaboration between myself and @radio-tiger, my Lightbulb. You can find me @ieronymous.

1. Hinterland

Hunger.

Every part of Chrysalis’s body ached with hunger.

Arctic air swirled over her, whistling through the holes in her chitin. Her body temperature was dangerously low; she was running against time until hypothermia stiffened her body and dazed her mind.

She didn’t want to die in this snowbank.

Thoughts of hot flesh, pony blood tinged with sweetness and love, running over her tongue and down her throat and warming her from the inside helped her take another step forward.

Her eyes cleared the top of the rise.

Ahead of her she saw the perfect dome of the Crystal Empire, warm and teeming with ponies, and most importantly, pulsing with love. Beating in the chest of the Empire was the Crystal Heart, with enough sustenance contained within it for her entire brood.

She just had to keep walking.

Chrysalis had been walking for so long. The blasts of freezing air made it too difficult for her to fly any distance and the cold was taking its toll on her wings.

Walking was no easier. From her escape in Canterlot, Chrysalis had been forced to travel as far and fast as possible, and while most had been done while stolen away on pony transport, these last few weeks had left her hooves cracked and chipped. Frostbite threatened to break through her carapace and worm its way into the soft tissue within.

Motion caught her eye.

Something scampered in the snow ahead of her. A young snowshoe hare poked its ears out of a burrow, looking on behalf of its siblings whether it was safe out. Chrysalis could taste the trust between this creature and its littermates. It wasn’t quite love, but it would do.

Chrysalis darted forward, her body shifting into that of a lynx, and she caught the hare in long claws.

Once it was dead she turned back into her own form and ripped the hare apart, steam rising from the hot blood and muscle as she swallowed the fresh tissue. The other hares had retreated deep into their burrow, but it was no matter; Chrysalis had enough strength left in her now to push ahead to the Crystal Empire.

The furthest corner of the pony kingdom seemed the safest place to hide, for now. When her strength was up she could cast her net further and pursue others. The lands south of the Badlands had not seen the touch of a changeling hive for many generations.

When she could see ponies in the town she knew they would be able to see her soon, her black carapace standing out on the white drifts of snow like charcoal on paper. Chrysalis turned her form into a hare, a mimic of the one she had just eaten, and hopped the last stretch towards the bubble surrounding the empire.

The remains of a day’s rain wet the grass of the warm pasturelands that surrounded the city. Pegasus-controlled clouds drifted dreamily over the top of the vast protective dome, dappling the sunshine spilling from the sky.

The spring flush of grass covered up Chrysalis’s approach. Ponies labouring the fields flicked an ear at the sound of her paw pads pressing down grass.

Here inside the boundaries of the city the Crystal Heart sang to her. A perfect bubble of love and food, powered by the child of Chrysalis’s former captive. If she could walk boldly into the middle of the city and crunch through the crystal to swallow it down in jagged chunks that tore her throat she would. Gladly.

It was not the time for such overtures. Chrysalis knew she was a shell of the mighty queen she had once been, and recovering her strength for the sake of her brood was more important than maintaining her queenly pride. For now.

She opened her mouth, her tiny teeth parting so she could let the waves of love from the Heart wash over her tongue and through her body. She could feel herself growing stronger just from being near it.

In the past when Chrysalis had laid eggs it had been a few at a time, a cycling of drones and eggs that let Chrysalis keep herself at maximum strength even while carrying out this most important hive function. Now she was the only one caring for a brood of eggs large enough to replace her old hive.

Her paws moved from dirt roads to shiny crystal streets. From down there, the crystal buildings stretched up and away from her, as large as palaces. Ponies saw her and reacted to call her cute, to try beckon her closer with a flower held outstretched.

Chrysalis kept hopping towards the centre of the city.

Sound crackled out of a loudspeaker, startling her.

Cadance’s too-familiar voice rang through her ears. She was addressing the Empire, Shining Armour and her child at her side, and just the sound of their voices was enough to bring back fond memories of Chrysalis at the peak of her power, in disguise as the Princess of Love. If only, if only, if only.

Saliva filled her mouth as she thought of better days. She imagined pulling pink fur from muscle and bone, freeing droplets of blood, lapping them up. She imagined being loved the way only Shining Armour could love: stupidly.

Chrysalis ducked into an alleyway and changed from hare to pony; a shift from prey to prey. She adopted the most unremarkable of pony disguises for this place. She had a pale green coat and a teal mane held back in the strange glittering hairstyles she had seen these ponies wear for millenia.

This city looked the same as it did back then. She even saw some of the same ponies trotting down the street, a thousand years trapped in limbo having taken no toll. This place had once belonged to Princess Amore, the old Princess of Love, and as such the Crystal Empire had always been a home for Chrysalis.

The streets were so perfectly preserved that she could not fend off a sense of deja vu, her hooves clopping into the same places they had over a thousand years ago, long before the fall of Sombra and the banishment of Luna.

Was it her imagination, or was the weather outside this dome even more chaotic than it had been since then? The Crystal Empire had always stood on a knife’s edge, waiting for the great chill that would finally slide it down the throat of the slumbering snowy monsters outside its defences.

Perhaps Sombra’s control over the city, hailing from the Umbrum outside as he did, had brought the city one step closer to ruin. Well, now Sombra was nothing but wisps and ash, and Chrysalis would cannibalise the Empire he had left to build herself up.

She could see the Crystal Palace now. Crystal ponies gathered around the Heart and stared up at their Crystal Princess, adoration radiating off them as she showed off her freakish winged child.

Chrysalis could taste webs of complex protection magic around the palace. She would keep her distance, backing away and aiming to cover the rest of the inner city.

Not all was the same as it had been. Murals and frescoes of Princess Amore which had once dedicated the inner city were long gone, chiselled clean from buildings. Likely Sombra’s work, not Cadance’s. Cadance lacked the edge.

The Empire under Amore had been a rich feeding place. Chrysalis had never lingered here long - the magical enchantments and the remoteness of this place deterred bringing her hive here to feed en masse - but she had once considered replacing Amore the way she would later replace her successor.

Oh, Amore had fought. Chrysalis had lashed out and ripped a chunk of flesh from her neck, almost leaving her bleeding out, but she had been able to reach the Heart and sound the alarm before Chrysalis could finish her off. She would almost feel jealous that Sombra had overpowered her where Chrysalis had not, but time had proved herself the victor. Sombra and Amore were gone, and Chrysalis remained.

All images of Amore were gone from lampposts and street signs, too. They had been replaced by nothing. Cadance didn’t even know there had once been something there.

Chrysalis looked to a fountain, water tinkling against carved crystal. A statue of Amore powering the Heart had once stood here. It was nothing short of a wonder that Sombra had managed to purge her name from time.

The hunger that had been tearing Chrysalis apart since she had laid her brood was starting to ease now. The dark fog in her mind of blood and flesh and hearts beating outside of chests was retreating to the normal level. Survival levels.

While travelling, Chrysalis had once come past here during the reign of Sombra. She had moved on quickly. There was nothing to eat, then.

The next question that dominated Chrysalis’s focus now that she had dragged herself in from the cold was what to do with herself. She had time; while her brood gestated, kept warm by a hot spring buried deep in a cavern in the mountains near the city, Chrysalis needed to fill her crop with love to enrich them when they finally hatched. She could hole up as a cat or canary, dig herself under the snow like those foolish hares from earlier, but she saw no reason to deny herself the opportunity to take advantage of the Crystal Empire’s resources.

She had no desire to live like Thorax once did, picking scraps from the Empire while living cold and alone. She had heard his stories of how he began his quest for independence here.

Chrysalis did not want independence. She wanted dependence; she wanted her hive back. But now they had all transformed, a new hive would have to be the next best thing.

She did have to admit that his logic of feeding from the Empire was sound. The background radiation of love made it a rich feeding ground and they did not expect a changeling attack all the way out here.

Chrysalis fantasised for a moment of smashing his stupid, passive, cowardly face in.

How had someone so weak usurped her? Chrysalis had taken her throne, too, once upon a time, but like a respectable queen she had taken it by force, killed and butchered her predecessor to leave no doubt in the eyes of the hive who was now leading them. Thorax had done nothing but crawl in like a dropped maggot, and now here she was.

She wondered if there was a precedent for a new queen leaving the old queen alive.

She wondered if there was a precedent for the old queen coming back and ripping the new queen into shreds.

Cadance’s announcement had ended. The Crystal Princess had gone back into her perfect little palace, taking Shining Armour and the child with her.

In a better world Shining Armour would be hanging obliviously in the cave next to her brood, mind empty and heart full. There was another world where her siege of Canterlot had ended with Celestia pocked with as many holes as Chrysalis’s own limbs, where Twilight Sparkle had stayed trapped in that cave until she withered, where her hive had finally been full.

Chrysalis turned her head away. How to occupy herself, now.

The one asset that the Empire could hold for Chrysalis aside from food was the information contained within it. Information that had existed here, crystalised, for a thousand years.

Chrysalis was no scholar. The idea of spending her queenly time the way Twilight Sparkle did, frittering it away in dusty old books instead of making plans and moving towards power did not suit her. But she had to admit that perhaps since her reign had begun the world had changed, as well evidenced by her repeated failures to take advantage of ponies.

Once, Chrysalis had fought Celestia horn to horn, and had walked away with permanent scars. Another time, she had won. Now she was nothing, and she would do whatever it took to become something once more.

2. Eyeshine

The Crystal Empire library was a gloomy place. Following older building sensibilities, it featured stretches of cold crystal slabs and towers of poorly labelled books full of dust. A poster at the entrance proudly declared that at the recommendation of Princess Twilight, a new building was being constructed posthaste. For now, it was shadows and solitude, which suited Chrysalis a lot better.

The elderly mare at the counter greeted her as she walked in.

“I haven’t seen you here before, dear. Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked. Her name tag read Amethyst. Another stupid pony name.

“Books on changelings,” Chrysalis said. It had been a long time since she had spoken aloud; the words felt strange and heavy in her mouth.

With a groan, the old librarian pushed herself out of her chair and started leading Chrysalis upstairs. “You’re not the first pony to ask me about that today, you know,” she said with a dry, toothless smile. “Otherwise I’d have to check my reference book.” Each step she took seemed to take a year or two, and more than once Chrysalis imagined pulling her to the top of the stairs by her hair to keep her moving.

“Species of Equestria section,” Amethyst said, stopping in front of a shelf just as decrepit as all the others. “You’re in good company here.”

Another pony, a unicorn stallion with a grey coat and black mane, was leafing through a couple of books at once. His dull fur and blunt-cut mane marked him apart from the crystal ponies.

Great. She had competition for access to the books. She would have to make conversation with another weevil under her hoof just to see if there was anything here worth learning.

“Sorry. I won’t be in your way long,” the pony said. Amethyst slowly crept away, back to her post.

Chrysalis didn’t bother with a response. She moved ahead and began looking through the books he wasn’t touching.

He avoided eye contact, staring at her nostrils as he smiled and introduced himself. “I’m Professor Eventide, from Canterlot University. You’re interested in changelings too?”

“Yes,” Chrysalis said.

“This book’s my favourite. I’ve already taken all my relevant notes from it, so you can have it if you want,” he said. He levitated a book over to her, titled The Ever-Changing Eye: A History of Changeling Hive Observations.

Regrettably it seemed he was right; this was exactly what she was looking for.

She sat down at a table, cold and hard. It reminded her of her hive.

There was no chance of her letting her guard down while reading, and she spent the rest of the afternoon watching the professor make thoughtful sounds and write notes while rare other patrons wandered in and out.

Some time in the late afternoon the professor finally left, trotting away happily while talking to himself.

The sun lowered and the library was cast into gloom. Amethyst walked the shelves of the building, checking for anyone left there; she was not checking for silverfish behind shelves, where Chrysalis lurked.

A moment later she was a midge, buzzing through the slow, warm evening air, following Amethyst as she locked the front doors of the library and walked two streets down to her own personal residence.

Chrysalis followed her in.

The home was tidy, but cluttered, and totally dark when Amethyst walked inside. Not even the meow of a cat or some other pet met her ears, and she slowly, slowly made her way through the house, lighting sconces and preparing herself for a simple dinner.

The midge that drifted on dust motes behind her looked at the walls, seeing no photo frames, seeing no trace of a life shared with others. Still, Amethyst was well-loved, by the town she had served so faithfully since before even the rise of Sombra.

She was the perfect target.

The fight was over before it began. Amethyst was knocked unconscious in a moment, sedated by changeling magic, and Chrysalis got to work trussing her up. She could be a source of food later; the love and trust that the city placed on her was soaked deep into her flesh. She could be the first meal for her brood when they broke free of their eggs.

For now Chrysalis had no way of getting her out of the city undetected. She pulled Amethyst into the storage cellar next to crystal fruit jam and crystal wine and hung her up there in the darkness. Amethyst had no visitors, and now she would still have no visitors.

Chrysalis changed her form to match Amethyst’s. The old librarian’s body language would be simple enough to imitate. She moved slow, each footfall heavy, and she was prone to bouts of confusion brought on by her advanced age. Chrysalis had watched her all afternoon, mapping each of Amethyst’s motions to her own.

It had been a long time since Chrysalis had gone fully undercover. The chase, the perfect calculations to slot herself into someone else’s life. To her, Amethyst’s entire existence was a series of stage directions and carefully placed words.

The weeks spent stalking Cadance to gain access to Canterlot’s power was her last great stalk. To this day she wished she’d simply killed Cadance and subsumed her instead of leaving her to stumble around catacombs, a snack for later.

Her mercy had been her undoing.

Amethyst posed no threat to her now. Chrysalis was ready to impersonate her tomorrow. Even better, with the mare’s forgetfulness, Chrysalis’s own poor knowledge of the pony book systems wouldn’t be questioned. This library, positioned near the centre of town but left lonely by all but scholars, would be a perfect base of operation.

Excerpt: The Ever-Changing Eye: A History of Changeling Hive Observations, chapter 4

One of the only primary pony sources considered reliable that depicts the Changeling Hive in the pre-Classical pony period is the writings of noted travelling scholar Maredotus. Although modern scholarship agrees that Maredotus’s writings are prone to misinformation and exaggeration due to his inclusion of unverified local accounts into his work, it should be noted that his chapter discussing the hive of the changelings was primarily drawn from his own observations and shows high fidelity with other accounts of this same hive.

Maredotus’s description of this hive including its location is consistent with the hive constructed by the changeling queen known as Alate. In his description it is surrounded with grass and shrublands in poor condition which appeared to be dying. Maredotus relates this to the appearance of coastal crops after ocean waves have deposited salt onto them.

The hive is described as conical and smooth, with only a few of the characteristic pock-marks seen in mature hives. This also lends credence to the idea of this being Alate’s hive. The construction of a full-size changeling hive is one of nature’s engineering miracles and involves the concretion of changeling saliva - otherwise used to restrain captured food sources - with a source of grit to cement together larger stones into the distinctive conical shape.

As discussed in the previous chapter, putting together a consistent chronology for the rise and fall of changeling queens is difficult for a pony observer due to their similar appearances and their individual names being used rarely when “Queen of the Changelings” is often used in formal capacities instead. Alate’s long reign and the sharp shift from the previous queen’s passivity makes distinguishing her reign from prior rulers relatively simple, but the complicated circumstances of her succession - from Tarsus to Chrysalis - means that the actual queen in the hive when observed by Maredotus is difficult to discern.

Maredotus does mention that one of his guides, a unicorn, was capable of illuminating the outer parts of the hive region as he travelled through it. This may indicate that during this time period the magic dampening stone that would serve as Chrysalis’s throne was not installed or was not at full power.

The final key observation to be gleaned from Maredotus’s account of his passage through this area is the presence of a town of ponies nearby to the changeling hive. It seems unlikely that this town would have survived with changelings as neighbours and indeed the identity of this village is now unknown, with studies of maps from Maredotus’s time not showing a pony settlement in the proximity of Alate’s hive site. It is tempting to assume as some scholars do that this may point to this hive not being the one built by Alate and inhabited by the current queen Chrysalis; however, the more likely explanation presented by the authors of this book is simply that recordkeeping of smaller settlements during the preclassical period was not extensive and any pony settlement near a changeling hive likely did not last long.

The opening of the Crystal Empire library was a little late the next morning. Amethyst Maresbury, the head librarian, apologised for losing the keys while fumbling them in the front door, and her patrons shrugged it off as another incidence of the old mare getting one step closer to retirement.

It had been written in Amethyst’s work diary that the local school was bringing in their students to research the Crystal Fair ahead of the ceremony later in the week.

The brood of pony children followed their teacher in, chirping and squawking excitedly at the prospect of an outing. It wasn’t unlike Chrysalis’s own memories of early expeditions outside the hive just after her pupation.

Soon her own brood would be clamouring over each other, desperate to sink their newly budded teeth into the outside world. These children disgusted her, of course, but the love she lapped from the air around them filled her with satisfaction.

The children were writing reports on the Crystal Fair. They bounced up to her desk, asking help to find what they were looking for, and Chrysalis wondered if she had made a mistake picking a library as her hiding place.

She picked herself up from the desk, shuffled towards the shelves with a measured slowness like a wolf imitating the trot of the sheep. The children followed behind her, blind and trusting.

Once she had fumbled her way through guiding the children to books, she sat with a book in front of her, pretending to read while she watched the children move around the library, putting their dirty hooves all over dusty shelves.

Her own offspring would need somewhere more enriching than a warm cave when they hatched. They would need places to test their strength, to work on their mimicry. Chrysalis could remember watching a deer in the woods near the edge of her old hive’s territory, when she had been a juvenile. She had learned to imitate from those experiences. This new hive would need the same experiences.

The fundamental problem, Chrysalis reasoned, was that she had never started a hive from nothing before. Neither had her predecessors. Alate had built the hive that Thorax now inhabited, but she had done it with a full hive of soldiers and drones to build and to focus on raising the young.

Changelings were not great record-keepers. The hive deferred to the queen, and the queen decided what was worth remembering. Chrysalis did not even know the name of Alate’s predecessor; Alate had decided the previous queen was weak, and so her name had been lost to the sands of time, not unlike Sombra’s careful destruction of Amore’s name and visage.

Chrysalis had kept Alate’s name alive. She was a great queen, and Chrysalis’s subjects had benefited from her example to work towards. She had kept Tarsus’s name alive, too. Her subjects had needed an example of what to avoid, lest they end up little more than blood spilled on stone.

She had to admit reading about that pony traveller - Maredotus - had been interesting. The story sounded as though it hailed from around when Chrysalis’s own egg had been laid, in Alate’s hive. Her own lifetime spanned from what the ponies called the “preclassical period” until now. What short lives they led.

One of these books, preserved for a millennium by Sombra’s curse, might hold some knowledge about the last changeling queen who had to rebuild from nothing.

The book that looked the most promising was another of the ones that professor from yesterday had been looking through. This one was titled Palaeopony Era Evidence For Interspecies Interdependence, and it was a thick, dry volume which contained only a single chapter about changelings.

It had already occurred to Chrysalis that if Amethyst Maresbury simultaneously began acting strange and reading endless books concerning changelings that she would be acting a little too obvious, and instead she wandered to the far side of the library and picked out a book at random to concern herself with while children bounced around her.

The theology section. Chrysalis had learned to read when she realised how invaluable a tool it was for infiltrating literate societies like the ponies, but she had never read beyond what was necessary for this, and the idea of tackling one of their dry pony books theorising about nonsense exhausted her.

She opened up one of the heavy books and went back to observing the children.

3. Starburst

It was a day before the Crystal Fair, and tomorrow Chrysalis’s crop would be so full of love from this pony festival that she would sneak out of the city to check on her eggs and nourish them.

For now, she was bristling as she watched a very familiar pink-coated pony walk in, accompanied by another unicorn wearing a cloak.

Starlight Glimmer.

It took every ounce of Chrysalis’s strength to not throw herself across the room and tear the pony limb from limb. She didn’t even need the food, now - she would do it just because it was what Starlight deserved. She would make the other pony watch, too, just to dig the knife in a little deeper.

If she did it now, while there was no one else in the library, she would likely have enough time to clean up so that no one would notice when the pair of them vanished.

But if she didn’t?

Any delay would leave her eggs alone in that cave with no queen to support them. It was hard enough staying away for this long. She could never forgive herself if she sacrificed her future hive for revenge on a pony too stupid to even deserve it.

“Ms Maresbury, are you feeling alright?” Starlight asked.

Slowly Chrysalis lifted her head to make eye contact with Starlight. She could feel that her movements didn’t quite look natural and that the real Amethyst was a much better host than this, but the real Amethyst’s life was not built of anything meaningful like Chrysalis’s was.

“Sorry, dear, I’ve had a slow morning,” Chrysalis said. “I remember mornings as being a lot easier when I was your age! What can I help you with?”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “We’re in town for the fair, and Sunburst wanted to check out his old haunt.”

This Sunburst probably knew the real Amethyst well, then. “It’s good to see you, Sunburst. How have you been doing?” Chrysalis said.

“It’s been great! I, uh, didn’t know how well I’d adjust to Ponyville, but it’s really quite beautiful once you’re there, and Princess Twilight has given me access to her library,” Sunburst said.

Under the desk, Chrysalis was making an impatient gesture with her hoof. It was bad enough having to see Starlight; having to play nice with her was like a slap in the face.

Sunburst kept talking. Chrysalis looked at Starlight, thinking of that pivotal moment after Starlight had destroyed her throne, reaching out to her to infect her with the same poison that had claimed her hive. She had robbed her of everything and had the gall to act as though it was a kindness.

The changeling queen’s role was to feed her hive, and any good queen would do anything that it took to secure enough food for her hive to prosper. Chrysalis had cared for them since before Celestia and Luna had ruled, securing them meal after meal and growing the hive to a fearsome size, and they had cast her away as though she had been doing them wrong. Those pocks on her legs were proof of how committed she had always been to her hive; she had gone toe to toe with an alicorn and walked away with permanent scars to try and help her subjects prosper.

Chrysalis realised that she had been looking vacantly at the air between Sunburst and Starlight while Sunburst prattled on.

“Let’s let Ms Maresbury get back to her work, Sunburst,” Starlight said. “Will we see you at the Crystal Fair?”

“Yes, you will. I’m looking forward to it,” Chrysalis managed to say.

“I - I’ll be up with the Princess, you know, Amethyst. As Flurry’s crystaller, I’ve been called as a guest of honour,” the orange pony said, tipping his nose upwards proudly. When he brought his nose back down again he had to adjust his glasses back into place.

Chrysalis calmed herself, let the words flow into her mouth from what she knew of Amethyst. She was an expert. “I always knew you had something special in you, Sunburst,” she said. There. That was the kind of foolish nonsense ponies were always saying to each other.

Sunburst flushed and smiled at her, thanking her, and then left to show Starlight around the library. Chrysalis watched them go. She had decided to let them live, but there was no harm in imagining a world where she had chosen otherwise.

Excerpt: Palaeopony Era Evidence For Interspecies Interdependence, chapter 8

In prior chapters we have described interdependence as primarily cooperative (mutualistic) or commensal. This chapter we will examine interdependent relationships which fall under parasitism or predation.

Evidence for predatory relationships between other species and ponies are abundant. It is not uncommon to find cave deposits exhibiting wear and injuries on pony bones that are consistent with the feeding patterns of dragons or manticores, and coproliths from roc nesting sites provide additional support for the body of evidence that predation by a broad variety of carnivores during the palaeopony period was a significant risk for these early pony societies. This evidence will be discussed later in the chapter.

Due to the lack of hard tissue such as bones in the anatomy of parasites the preserved evidence for parasitic behaviour is more difficult to analyse. The abundant history of protozoan diseases such as marealia and myoencephalitis in preclassical and ancient pony societies would likely indicate that these parasitic relationships stretch further back than historical record. Furthermore, in finely preserved sedimentary fossil beds it is possible to find evidence of protozoa in the bodies of preserved insects and in coprolite specimens from transmissionary animals within the range of pony habitation at the time.

Eukaryotic parasites that affect ponies vary from the smallest internal worms to botflies all the way up to changelings. Evidence for the smaller parasites such as nematodes and arthropods has been found on some early pre-pony fossils and it can be safely assumed from the presence of these same parasites in related species such as kirin and zebras that this relationship precedes the evolution of the pony species.

Changelings, being a magical predator that does not remove tangible resources from their prey, can be considered in a class of their own. This can be reflected in their size, being of the same or larger size than their prey, and by their eusocial organisation which allows them to attack wider populations of prey rather than target a single organism.

The first known conclusive evidence for the presence of changelings in or around any pony civilisation is the remains of an early hive that was discovered in the San Palomino desert. The dry and natron-filled sand of this desert provided a unique preservative environment for this hive and it has proved an invaluable resource for researchers wanting a safe analogue of a living hive to study.

The nearest settlement to this hive in San Palomino was the trading hub of Burro’s Tail, which experienced its peak in habitation shortly before the course of the Fountaingrass River changed, bringing the majority of the river into underground cave systems and preventing its use for drinking and irrigation. However, clay tablets recovered from Burro’s Tail indicate that the impact of the local changeling population on the town was significant, with rises in town population associated with increases in changeling population, and significant population troughs following these rises. This can likely be attributed to the lower reproductive rate and the increase in child mortality seen in populations drained of love by changelings.

Chrysalis had to admit that she had not before considered that a changeling population might dip when they ran out of food. There was always more food, or there always had been, and keeping a hungry hive working was the best way to keep all eyes on the target.

“Hiya!”

She startled and bared her teeth for just a moment before affecting Amethyst’s weak smile. A pale yellow pegasus pony with a shock of brown and neon red hair was leaning on the counter and casting his eyes all around the library.

Chrysalis wondered if real pony librarians ever got tired of the fact that ponies were always coming in to talk to them.

“I’m looking for a book my friend told me about,” the pegasus said.

“What is it called, dearie?” Chrysalis said.

“I don’t remember, sorry. It was about …. Uhm……” The pegasus retrieved a note from his saddlebag and read it out. “Inbuilt weatherproofing in Crystal Empire architecture.”

Chrysalis had been asked about the crystal buildings by one of the children yesterday and was able to fob off the pegasus to the architecture section to have a look around.

Ponies were so disorganised. If such information was needed in a changeling hive, Chrysalis would deputise someone to gain and hold the knowledge, not spread it out with whichever of her subjects felt like learning about it.

When Chrysalis had been a worker in the hive, she had been chosen by Alate to teach the newly hatched grubs how to defend themselves. Camouflage lessons while they were still larvae, and once they pupated, she had taught them how to fight. Other workers took care of the feeding and cleaning and medical care for the grubs, and another set of drones decided which grubs were to be culled.

Alate’s death had led to a temporary chaos in the hive until Tarsus’s body had told her she was to become their new queen. Tarsus hadn’t been interested in organising the hive and keeping everyone to their assigned tasks, so Chrysalis taken charge, and the hive had flowed smooth like honey ever since.

Until Thorax. Thorax was another Tarsus, really; a weak leader popular only because he was too soft to enforce any of the rules that would keep the hive productive. Chrysalis had heard and seen from afar his new hive overgrown with choking plants and with no dedicated nursery or food stores. It was only through the goodwill of his new pony allies that his hive would survive, and all of Chrysalis’s foolish prior subjects with him.

This library in itself was a symptom of pony weakness. The one benefit was how much easier it was to keep all this information in order when it was organised in writing. When Chrysalis’s new hive was up and running, she would teach some of her subjects to read and write, if only so they could record her deeds for all of history.

4. Ferry

The day of the Crystal Fair began with Princess Cadance’s declaration to the people of the Crystal Empire to enjoy themselves. Chrysalis stood in the crowd and looked up at her and her family, winged by Starlight Glimmer and that unicorn from yesterday. Sunburst.

The people of the Empire scattered and began taking up with festivities like jousting and music, all while the Crystal Heart twirled in the palace, absorbing their love and strengthening itself.

So when an inanimate rock did it, that was something to be celebrated, but when Chrysalis did it, she deserved to have her entire hive wiped out.

She wondered for a moment what it would be like to change shape to imitate the heart and feed from people like that.

The people of the Crystal Empire could eat and make merry and have children and survive happily and safely because they ate oats and carrots and when they were hungry they were fed. She wondered how benevolent others would feel towards ponies if they had to eat other creatures to survive.

As much as it pained her to admit it, Tirek had been one of the only creatures who had understood her plight. He was otherwise a repellent creature; only Chrysalis’s misplaced need to packbond with those around her had been enough to tie her to him and that short pegasus she had traveled with, but at the very least, Tirek understood what it was to be hungry in a way others could not accept.

When she had lost her hive, a piece of Chrysalis’s mind had broken. She could still feel it now, the close mental link she was supposed to have with all of her subjects, now a bloody jagged stump inside her mind. She had tried to bond with anything and everything for a moment: random objects, magical manifestations, that Cozy Glow thing. Chrysalis was steadier, now; she attributed that partly to the eggs she had laid. There was something there for her.

She had been standing listlessly in the plaza outside the library long after Cadance’s speech had ended. Chrysalis didn’t know when they would do their magical spell to pour love into the heart, so she wandered from stall to stall, making distant chitchat with the locals who recognised her.

“Ms Maresbury, how are you?” a very familiar voice said behind Chrysalis.

Her blood turned to ice. Chrysalis slowly turned around, remembering to keep Amethyst’s slow, weak body language in mind, craning her head up to look at the Crystal Princess.

“I’m keeping well, Princess,” Chrysalis murmured. “How is everything at the palace?”

“Very lovely. We’ve had some friends of mine come in for the Fair, and Flurry Heart is getting old enough now to know something exciting is happening. I was going to ask if you could help me pick out some books for her so she can work on her reading?” Cadance said.

“Of course, Princess,” Chrysalis said. Nothing sounded less fun than picking out books for someone else’s slimy grub. Once again Chrysalis wondered if she had made a poor choice of disguises.

“I’ll send Shining Armour to come pick them up in a few days,” Cadance said. “I hope you have a lovely time at the Fair, Ms Maresbury.”

“You too, Princess,” Chrysalis said. She dipped her head and wandered away to find somewhere that hopefully no one would speak to her.

Chrysalis ended up spending her day at the weaving stall. There was something hypnotic about it; it reminded Chrysalis of the short time she had been moved from training duties to helping patch a hole in the hive after a tornado had punched a hole in one wall. Working all the strands together and turning it into a single piece felt like second nature to her.

At the end of it she had a woven basket and a matching lid, run through with a green iridescent ribbon.

“I didn’t know you were so crafty, Ms Maresbury!” the pony running the stall said when she saw how well the weaving had turned out.

“I have my secrets,” Chrysalis said, and attempted to affect a wry smile. Pony facial expressions were so nuanced to make up for their lack of hive connection. Very frustrating.

Finally the time had come to finish charging the Crystal Heart.

Chrysalis mimicked the other ponies and bowed before it, but no love crept from her into the ancient relic. Instead it poured into her mouth, open and dripping with saliva beneath the dull, lank hair of the pony she was mimicking.

She had recovered, finally, from her odyssey. Now she could focus on what was really important. Her new hive.

Excerpt: How to Welcome Your New Changeling Neighbours (pamphlet distributed by Princess Twilight across the cities of Equestria)

Hi there! I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle, and this leaflet was written to help the ponies of Equestria get to know the changelings!

I’m happy to say that with the Changeling Reformation, we the ponies have developed close diplomatic and social ties with Thorax and his hive of changelings. Changelings no longer need to feed on other’s love, and instead are wanting to befriend the ponies of Equestria.

Some changelings are living away from the hive, and may live in a town or city near you. Do not fear! Changelings are our friends, and you can welcome them into your community.

Try inviting a changeling to a local event such as a potluck or gala! They are often proud of their shapeshifting abilities, and many changelings will gladly show them off on request to foals. Changelings eat leaves and flowers much as ponies do.

MYTH: Changelings do not have “hearts” or otherwise are incapable of feeling love.
FACT: Changelings often have strong familial ties to their hivemates and are capable of developing these same attachments to other creatures. See: Dragonlord Ember’s friendship with Thorax, leader of the changelings, or Cranky Doodle Donkey’s friendship with Kevin the changeling.
NB: Like other insects, changelings do have hearts, although they have an “open” circulatory system instead of a “closed” one like us ponies! See your local library for more information.

MYTH: Changelings are known to take your foal and replace them with one of their own.
FACT: There are no recorded instances of this occurring.

MYTH: Changelings eat people.
FACT: Thorax’s changelings do not eat people.

The day’s festivities were over, and surreptitiously Chrysalis had wandered from the city and then turned into a hare and bounded into the snowy foothills surrounding the dome.

She could find her way back to her eggs easily. Even if she wasn’t a good navigator - and she was an excellent navigator - there was a part of her that could feel them, like they were two halves of the same whole. They were hers, and she was theirs.

Outside of the periphery of the city she turned back into her own form, reveling in her natural body and stretching her legs out. Holding herself in the posture of that old mare had stiffened her limbs. She fluttered her wings, sending loose snowflakes glittering away, and started the hike into the foothills of the arctic north.

The thermal spring had been a lucky find. She had tried to find a cave deep enough that the arctic snows outside wouldn’t penetrate into it, but finding a place where the eggs could be kept warm without her intervention was an enormous relief. Normally in the cold she would have workers tending to the eggs, buzzing their bodies next to them in the cold to keep their temperature up, but now this fell to her, and she would take what natural advantages she could get.

She found the cleft in the rock between two rises where the snow had melted, and slipped into the narrow space. It was barely wide enough to fit her body, but she could slip down with a little effort.

The cave inside was a natural formation, with stalactites dangling above. Half of the floor was occupied by a terraced pool of warm, lapping water, which was fed from far below, bringing the power of the earth’s mantle up to protect Chrysalis’s eggs.

This space was humid. She blinked away the fog that clung to her eyes and checked on the eggs.

The cluster was right where she had left it, green and black and grey, cemented together on the wall of the cave. She nuzzled them with her face to check the temperature. Just right. They didn’t need to be as warm as birds or lizards, but they couldn’t get too cold, or the little embryos would die.

Chrysalis lit her horn, letting the green glow shine through the thin walls of the eggs. Inside, the light caused the developing larva to twitch and wriggle. They were alive and well. She breathed a sigh of relief and took a seat on the cave floor to relax.

Channeling the magic she had stored inside herself, she regurgitated the love she had fed on at the festival, letting it wash over the eggs. They would likely hatch without it, but this would ensure they grew up strong enough to help her build her new hive.

It had been hard to accept the loss of her old hive. There were no changelings in the hive that dated from before Chrysalis’s reign; she was the mother to every single one of them. Trying to imagine a world without her subjects where she would build something new, alone, had seemed so impossible until now.

She fantasised for a moment about growing her hive bigger and stronger than Thorax’s, and then bringing the fight to them, evicting them from her hive and punishing them for her disloyalty.

But although Thorax was a pacifist and he had turned her hive into wimps, she knew that there would be casualties. Looking over the eggs and the embryos squirming inside, she found something in herself that she hadn’t experienced before. She didn’t want to fight, if it meant dooming these hatchlings.

It felt like Thorax had slipped some intestinal parasite down her maw. She had no desire to be as weak as him. But there was nothing to be gained from killing him. Even her old hive could be rebuilt elsewhere and better. Let him take that mouldering old hive built by Alate. She would make her own mark on the world.

5. Sublimate

Chrysalis hadn’t intended to sleep next to the eggs, but she found herself dozing off, full of food and comfortable knowing her brood was safe. The exhaustion of the weeks spent traveling north on an empty stomach was steadily beginning to give way to her normal vigour.

She was awoken when a scrap of sunlight made its way through the crevice and into the cave, shining off the warm pool of water and illuminating the inside of the cave like crystal.

The library would need to be opened soon. No doubt she could play it off as Amethyst needing a sleep in after an exciting day, but still, it was best not to arouse suspicion.

Reluctantly she pulled herself away from the clutch of eggs and retraced her way back into the Crystal Empire. The city was waking slowly, no doubt hungover from drinking their fermented drinks all night while Chrysalis cared for her brood.

Movement caught her eye up on the palace balcony as she trotted towards the library. She heard a giggle and saw Cadance’s child - Flurry Heart - swooping off the balcony, diving down over the town square and then riding the warm air back up. Her father stood on the balcony, laughing and watching her fly.

Chrysalis had seen Flurry as a youngling, oversized eyes and wings making her look like some kind of strange doll. Now she was a child and not a baby, and she was turning out the spitting image of her mother.

There was no child more beloved in the entire pony empire. The only known natural born alicorn, and the child of the princess of love. Not to mention she was related to Twilight Sparkle.

This emotion that she felt was not jealousy. Chrysalis had never wanted the life that Cadance had for any reason except what she could gain by impersonating her. The way pony rulers led seemed fickle and pointless to Chrysalis, and the idea of “marrying” someone to be her equal or partner was so antithetical to everything Chrysalis believed that the idea of wanting what Cadance had disgusted her.

But it still had to be said that Chrysalis could never have a child that would be as beloved as Flurry Heart was.

“Good morning, Ms Maresbury!” Shining Armour said, waving down to her.

Chrysalis realised she had lingered for a little too long watching Flurry pirouette through the air. She forced a smile and waved up at Shining Armour.

It was hard to look at him and not replay the dance she had done with him, imitating his fiance as perfectly as she could. She knew him better than almost anyone.

There were so many times she’d been in these lopsided relationships. She had toppled pony rulers and collapsed communities by becoming a non-person, a person who spoke and remembered the right things to be a pony, but was a shadow of one. If Amethyst ever returned to the world, there would be a black hole of time where Chrysalis had taken everything and given nothing.

With the sound of rustling feathers, Flurry Heart landed in front of her and stared up at her with big, questioning eyes. “Hi, Ms Maresbury!”

It pained Chrysalis to do it, but there was no way the real Amethyst wouldn’t be happy to see Flurry. She moved her lips into a quiet smile and looked down at the baby princess. “Hello, Flurry. How are you doing today?”

“I like your cutie mark,” Flurry said.

Chrysalis had devoted less than no time to thinking about Amethyst’s cutie mark, a scroll of paper with two stars next to it. “Thank you, Flurry. What do you think your cutie mark will be?”

“I don’t know…” Flurry said. Her eyes flicked around, her little child brain parsing the question on her own time. “Maybe a cool shield like my dad?”

“You could get a cutie mark in reading if you’re lucky, like me,” Chrysalis said. This conversation couldn’t be over soon enough.

Flurry’s face scrunched up. “I want something cool, like a flying mark.” She flapped her wings and took off the ground again, drifting around Chrysalis like a fly pondering whether to land on a flytrap.

Changelings did not have cutie marks, but Chrysalis understood them in her own way, having been assigned to training young changelings to defend themselves. It was her slot in society, the way she had fit into others until she had decided for herself to become queen.

“When I was little, I wanted to be a queen,” Chrysalis said.

“Don’t you mean a princess?” Flurry said.

“No, a queen,” Chrysalis said lowly. “And then I realised that you have to take such power for yourself.”

Flurry looked up at her, doll eyes uncomprehending.

“Go back to your father, little one. And one day your father will deny my children that mercy,” Chrysalis said. Her voice was so low that she hoped that Flurry didn’t actually hear her. It was a weak and amateurish mistake to give in and break character like this, and with Flurry Heart’s silence from confusion, Chrysalis left to open the library for the morning.

Excerpt: A Brief History of Changelings in Equestria, chapter 9

We note in this chapter a shift in changeling-pony relations from amiable to combative as a change in queens causes the attitude of the hive to shift radically.

The queen (name unknown) which occupied the hive found near the outskirts of the village that would go onto become the city of Manehattan was at some point during this time replaced by the queen known to us as Alate.

As prior noted, the means by which queens are superseded in changeling hives is not fully understood. There is some confirmed element of regicide, where former rulers are deposed by the incumbent ruler through assassination or outright combat, but hive ruler succession remains unbroken in the instance of a queen dying outside the hive. There are no known changeling succession crises and the anatomical changes undergone by changeling queens (increase in size, magical ability, and physical capabilities) indicates some degree of internal biological involvement in queen selection.

In any case, Alate becoming queen of the changeling hive marked several key departures from prior changeling culture. Foremost among these was Alate’s choice to abandon the hive she had grown up in near Manehattan and instead shift her subjects to the current changeling hive, undergoing a rapid rebuilding project that saw the hive developed enough to hold brood within a year.

Contemporary sources indicate that the abandonment of the prior hive occurred rapidly, with pony travelers on amicable terms with the previous queen and her subjects passing by the hive and noticing it had been abandoned within a matter of days.

The other key cultural shift in the changeling hive was willingness to prey on other species, particularly ponies. The means by which the previous hive sustained itself without harming the Manehattanites or other nearby settlements to a degree that is noted in history is unknown; sustaining a hive of that size took considerable resources and where they were drawn from during this time is a source of continuous speculation and research which may never be resolved.

Alate’s desire to move the hive somewhere more remote may have been a preemptive gesture to shield the hive from retaliation when the increase in predatory behaviour inevitably made enemies. Indeed, while the hive before Alate’s reign was only known locally, the campaigns of terror carried out by Alate led to the rise in Equestria-wide knowledge of the changelings, including bringing them to the attention of the then-teenage Celestia and Luna. This would inevitably result in the conflict between Celestia and later changeling queen Chrysalis that caused the magical scarring now considered so distinctive of the changeling people.

The library was quiet that day. There were so few patrons that Chrysalis sat upstairs next to the window, working her way through some of the books Professor Eventide had been reading. It surprised her both how much and how little ponies knew about changelings.

From her position at the window she watched the ponies go about their day like workers and drones, achieving their comparatively pointless goals and chatting amongst themselves.

Up in the sky, the yellow pegasus who had visited the library a few days ago was shifting some clouds from the top of the dome surrounding the city towards the farmlands out at the edge.

In the far distance she could see the rise of mountains where her eggs were concealed. With Sombra’s destruction the worst of the Umbrum threat to her eggs had long dispersed, but she still felt the same uneasiness towards the swirling dark winds outside this dome as she would feel about rats or any encroachment of vermin in the nursery chambers of a hive.

By the time Chrysalis had hatched, Princess Amore’s Crystal Empire had already stood for a long time here at the end of the world, surrounded by circling Umbrum and the kind of cold that could kill in hours, if not minutes.

There were certainly better places to put your empire.

When Chrysalis built a new hive, she planned to take notes from Alate’s own decisions and pick somewhere as remote as she could manage while still being able to reach future victims. Equestria was more densely inhabited than it had been in Alate’s time, but there were still plenty of places she could choose from, surely.

Almost every book in this library dated back from before Sombra’s reign, aside from a small section near the front entrance labelled “modern literature”. Chrysalis got to her feet and made her way downstairs to try and find a map of Equestria.

One of the books on the stand was A New Equestrian Atlas, with a label on the front saying it was from the first census of Twilight’s reign.

She opened the book. For the most part, not much had changed about the world in the last few years since Chrysalis had been a more significant part of it. The Equestrian Empire had extended its borders a little south and north, creeping like black mould onto previously independent land. Their cities grew and their trains and roads crisscrossed land to turn every inch of it into something easily controlled and quantified.

Chrysalis had no desire to leave Equestria fully. There was a reason changelings had lived on this continent for so long; ponies were such a rich repository of food that only a fool would be willing to give this up. But she needed to keep her distance, and pick somewhere she could transform into a fortress even harder to breach than her last hive had been. After all, it too had eventually fallen.

Her eyes landed on the “undiscovered west”, a stretch of forest, swamp, and mountain extended away from the Smokey Mountains across a land bridge off the edge of pony maps. For creatures who prided themselves on their curiosity and resilience, it was incredible how much land ponies had simply avoided going to for fear of finding anything that could challenge their power.

In those mountains she could burrow in and create a hive worthy of her, queen of the changelings, and if they spread and controlled the surrounding lands then the peninsula that stretched out off the west of the map could be hers to do with as she pleased.

That night when Chrysalis left the library she found herself sleeping peacefully, dreaming of her future hive dug into mountains and protected from all those who might challenge her.

6. Marrow

The next morning at the library brought the delivery of a pile of newly printed books fresh from the publishers of the royal libraries in Canterlot. Included in this pile was a number of bulletins to be added to the bulletin board in the library, promising Ponish lessons, weekly sewing club meetups, a town council meeting on the laws and bylaws surrounding the construction of the new library, and right at the bottom, a flyer for an upcoming talk in Canterlot.

Chrysalis would have disinterestedly thrown all the pieces of paper covered in meaningless drivel in the garbage if she hadn’t been startled by her own face on the very last notice.

Her profile, drawn by some royal artist and capturing the terror she was delighted to inspire in the pony populace, was portrayed opposite to the face of Thorax, with his ridiculous antlers and bright colours. The flyer advertised a talk by a professor on “The Impact of Changeling Parasitism on Cultural Evolution of Social Groupings”. She recognised the name on the flyer and realised that it was the very same Eventide pony she had encountered so recently in this library.

He had been researching changelings, so it all made sense. His talk would fall at the end of the week, and there ran a train directly from the Crystal Empire to Canterlot. It was possible.

It pained Chrysalis to admit that this Eventide pony, and other pony historians, might know so much more about how to be queen of the changelings than she did. She knew all the important parts, or at least all the most important things from when she had taken over from Tarsus, but the minutiae of how to rebuild a hive were still outside of her grasp.

Chrysalis had always been good at playing the long game, stretching out her plans into months or years so she could prepare. She had approximately chosen a site for the new hive; once her brood had hatched and grown strong she could travel there and survey the area more closely. She would need a plan of construction. The grubs would hatch with some instincts to burrow and build, but they were blank slates, and Chrysalis would need to become the architect necessary to regain what had been lost.

She thought for a moment of that pegasus’s interest in crystal architecture. There was something to be learned from ponies, unfortunately.

The other things her young would need were food and training. The years Chrysalis had trained young changelings under Alate would come in handy here; no skill of hers was wasted. She would easily be able to teach them the basics of fighting and camouflage, to be expanded on when her new hive was complete.

The last stage was food. Here in the Crystal Empire Chrysalis was confident she could fill her crop with enough love for the changelings to make it through their larval stage and begin pupation, although the slow and steady trips through the frozen wasteland between the city and her cave would no doubt prove frustrating and inconvenient.

Her other alternatives would be to move the changelings, or move the food. It was possible that she could move her young closer into the city, although she knew from experience that young changelings could be difficult to corral; they longed to explore and were aggressive towards anything new in their lives. One adult changeling, even a changeling with Chrysalis’s power and gravitas, might struggle to convince an entire hive of grubs to stay hidden.

Chrysalis could move the food. She could kidnap some select members of the Crystal Empire, those who were loved but left idle enough to not be immediately missed. No doubt the alarm would be raised, but if she was stealthy enough and she timed it correctly, it seemed possible to Chrysalis that she could get her hive to the stage of mature changelings that could defend themselves before it all came crashing down.

She was both very stealthy and very well-timed. This would be the future of the hive. And she already had her first captive.

Excerpt: Analysis of Change-ling Feeding Magic, a report by Mage Meadowbrook.

I find myself writing these words due to the unlikely event of the capture of a predatory change-ling. This creature was found preying around the edge of the swamp, picking off ponies that wandered alone, and with the help of my family, we were able to confine it and bring it back to my hut for study.

From the words of other healers I know who have worked with change-lings before, I expected this one would have infiltrated our peaceful village and fed upon us from there. But instead I find that this one has developed something of a carnivorous habit that I must write on to warn others of.

This change-ling appears to be in some kind of frenzy of hunger, spitting and gasping when any of us so much as speak. If it can communicate with language, perhaps it is a language we do not share.

Our current theory on this carnivorous behaviour is that in periods of starvation change-lings can use their quite intimidating dentition to eat the remains of their prey, removing the last traces of love-magic from them much as a dog might crack bone to eat marrow.

Under the blanket of night Chrysalis freed Amethyst from her cocoon and placed her in the wheelbarrow from Amethyst’s garden, covering her in grass and plant matter. The spell of sedation was still over Amethyst and would remain so until the bubble of slime over her face was removed.

Chrysalis had already resolved to travel to Canterlot to hear Eventide speak. If the moment presented itself and he could be tricked into accompanying her, perhaps he could even be lured back to the Crystal Empire and confined with her brood so his knowledge was on tap at all times.

But Canterlot was not to be taken lightly. Chrysalis had tried to take the city before and even at full power with a healthy hive behind her she had been defeated. If she made any mistake in her current weakened state, Twilight Sparkle or any of her lackeys could easily overpower her.

The first step was to insure herself against any failure if her brood hatched early. That would be Amethyst’s purpose.

Chrysalis had not managed to devise a way to take Amethyst from town without being suspicious. This disguise, a senile old woman removing some green waste on the edge of town, was ridiculous, but ponies were ridiculously trusting, and so she wheeled the unconscious old woman out to the edge of town and through pasturelands.

Once away from civilisation, she turned into a bugbear and slung the unconscious mare over her shoulder as she buzzed away into the hills. It felt good to have her full range of transformation abilities at hand now that she had recovered from starvation.

At the crevice, she slid Amethyst down into the warm stone, leaving her slumped on the cave floor.

The eggs stirred when Chrysalis entered the chamber. A few of the eggs here and there had died, and Chrysalis removed these, expelling them from the thermal cave to freeze out in the snow. It was normal for some eggs to not make it to maturity, but it didn’t make Chrysalis feel any better.

Here she picked up Amethyst and got to work constructing her a new cocoon, hanging next to where the larvae would hatch. If Chrysalis was late home and the eggs hatched before she could care for them, then the unconscious form of Amethyst and her cocoon would provide enough nutrition for them in the meanwhile.

Chrysalis was not quite sure how long these eggs would take to hatch, since this was an unusual incubation, although she suspected they had about two weeks left. The warmth and humidity as well as the extra food Chrysalis had been bringing them was keeping them ticking along nicely.

She lingered for a few hours in the dark, watching the tiny embryos squirm within their eggs. Even after her years under Alate in the nursery, the development of tiny new changelings had never seemed as exciting as this.

It would be a little harder than before to play the disciplinarian this time around, when they were so little and so dependent on her. But she would not let base sentimentality affect how she ran this hive. She wanted to run it in a way that would make her old self and past great queens like Alate proud.

Warm and comfortable, she remembered shoving Tarsus to the ground off her throne, sinking her fangs into her hind leg to weaken her, smashing the old queen’s head against the stone over and over until the queen stopped moving entirely. Although Chrysalis did not welcome her own demise with open wings, she did look forward to the day when one of her very own workers would stand over her, determined and powerful and deadly enough to take the hive for herself. Any good changeling queen would welcome the rise of a more splendid queen to bring the hive higher.

Frankly, Chrysalis was relieved that those other mighty queens were dead and gone so they could not see her sunk so low. Being deposed by a drone and surviving was humiliating. Leaving her last hive to become benign pony-friends was worse.

She nudged her head against the cocoon holding Amethyst and watching it sway from its mooring point on the ceiling. Good and secure. The eggs squirmed in approval, and Chrysalis left the cave before day could break.

She retrieved Amethyst’s wheelbarrow on the edge of town and returned to the house, eyes constantly wide to look out for guards or prying ponies who might catch her in the act. As far as she could tell, she had passed undetected.

Chrysalis caught a scant few hours of sleep before she returned to the library for another day of ponywatching.

In the afternoon, that pegasus pony she had seen around recently came in to return the book he had borrowed.

“Thank you for returning it,” Chrysalis said, not bothering to chase the rigidity and chill out of her voice.

“No problem! I wanted to make sure it got back before I left town,” the pegasus said.

Chrysalis’s eye followed the lightbulb-shaped cutie mark on the pony’s flank.

“You’re leaving?” she said.

“Yeah, my secondment was for the Crystal Fair. I’m on break for a bit and then I’ll be back at the weather factory,” the pegasus said.

Thinking on the fly, Chrysalis smiled. “I have a friend in Cloudsdale. Would it be possible for you to bring them a book I’ve been meaning to return to them?”

“Of course I can,” the pegasus said. “My name’s Lightbulb, by the way.”

“I’m Amethyst,” Chrysalis said. Ponies were so trusting.

She led Lightbulb to the returns room in the library, closing the door behind him and casting the room in shadow.

“Is it just you working here?” Lightbulb said, looking around.

“Yes, until Princess Twilight opens the new library,” Chrysalis said. She pushed through the returns room and into the staff room behind it. Lightbulb’s eyes were flicking around the shelving, fascinated by the inner workings of a library, without a glimmer of suspicion.

The staff room door swung shut behind the pegasus. He fumbled for the lightswitch, lost in the dark.

A flash of green and Chrysalis was back in her natural form. She charged a magical blast with her horn and saw the shine of green reflected back in Lightbulb’s eyes before the pegasus gave a shout of fright and flared his wings wide in fear.

It was too late. The trap snapped shut, and Chrysalis’s magical blast hit Lightbulb, knocking him unconscious. He would be harder to move, all long legs and wiry muscles and feathers, but tonight she would transport him out to hang next to Amethyst.

7. Cavity

Chrysalis felt no small amount of apprehension about her journey to Canterlot. So many things could go wrong and leave her eggs to rot alone in the frozen North.

It seemed almost laughable that she was doing this just to learn a small amount of pony knowledge. She had dithered over whether to instead invite Eventide to the Crystal Empire to speak, but if he took a long time to have an opening in his schedule, then she might have moved on by then.

Deeper in her psyche Chrysalis had to admit that part of the appeal of traveling to Canterlot was proving to herself that she could do it. That her infiltration and camouflage abilities were still as sharp as ever, and she wasn’t scared to face any pony princess or delve deep into the heart of their empire.

She had dug through Amethyst’s house to turn up coins so she could book her return ticket. She had found a notepad in the library and some pens, and packed everything into a tasteless quilted saddlebag for the journey. She had dragged Lightbulb’s lifeless form all the way out into the frozen wasteland, stuffing him down the tunnel into the thermal cave and leaving him there as a backup pantry for her soon-to-hatch larvae. She had even notified Cadance that she would be on leave for the day.

That task had caused her trouble. The princess had come to the library to pick up her requested books for Flurry Heart, a request that Chrysalis had completely forgotten about shortly after it had been made. She had bigger things on her mind.

Ever quick on her feet, Chrysalis had claimed she wanted Cadance’s help in selecting books, since Cadance knew the filly better. Cadance had shown just a split second of irritation before capitulating, and they had spent a wordless few minutes in the children’s section, Cadance completely unaware she stood a hair’s breadth away from the queen who had almost been the end of her.

It had been tempting just for a split second to turn and slash Cadance’s throat and gather up rubies of her sweet blood to drop into the waiting mouths of her larvae. Even a scratch’s worth of blood from the Princess of Love would be enough to raise them to adulthood.

When Chrysalis had established her hive in the west, she would return here and repay Cadance in kind for every awkward indignity this experience had pushed upon her. For now, Chrysalis would not pick fights she wasn’t sure she could win.

The ticket she had booked was for the very first train of the morning, slightly before sunrise in the shadowy spring of the Crystal Empire.

Before dawn Chrysalis had lingered in the town square, near enough to the Heart to feed on it but far enough from the palace to not have her disguise ripped away. The enchantments around the palace were immensely powerful and she could sense them like feeling the radiating heat from white-hot iron.

Dew lingered on the cold crystal buildings for longer than felt instinctual. She thought of Lightbulb the weatherpony, and wondered if it would ever be possible for changelings to harness weather magic like pegasi did.

There was room in her new hive for creativity. She would see to that.

The train waited. Amethyst Maresbury was not possessed of enough coins to buy Chrysalis her own private space on the train; she would have to sit with the ponies.

An exhausted stallion with a pair of excited young colts took a seat next to her, the colts chasing each other up and down the main aisle. To Chrysalis’s other side sat an elderly mare who offered her a hard candy. Chrysalis declined.

The ticket taker wandered up and down the carriage, and Chrysalis dutifully presented her tickets. Another patron on the train, a young mare, burst into tears and admitted she didn’t have a ticket, and the ticket taker talked with her until she became calm again. One of the other ponies on the train bought her a ticket, and all was peaceful again.

The machinations of pony society were always curious to watch. In the absence of a central, all-powerful leader, they had invented money and nonsense jobs like ticket taking to keep a firm hand on their infrastructure.

She tucked her hooves under her and got comfortable for the long, dull ride to Canterlot.

Excerpt: Royal Report 2nd Moon, 14th Day.

Celestia reports significant conflict with changeling forces. Description includes the survival of the changelings and leader. Description includes magical combat which resulted in minor injuries to Celestia. Description includes changeling forces retreating. Inference given by Celestia is the return of changeling forces to the hive.

Description includes magical injuries acquired by changeling leader described as perforation with many holes present. Description includes this same perforation appearing on non-leader changelings including those outside of the radius of spell.

Canterlot Station was a chaotic mess of activity, bustling Chrysalis every which way until she managed to extract herself and head for the centre of the city.

Chrysalis hadn’t been to Canterlot since her failed attempt to seize it with Cozy Glow and Tirek, and since then, Twilight Sparkle - the name made her want to spit into the gutter - had taken over control of the pony throne. Although it had been a while, the ceremonial purple hangings depicting her coronation still hung from lampposts and the sides of buildings, declaring her reign.

The last time Chrysalis had confidently walked the streets of Canterlot was in the skin of Cadance, beloved princess of the people, and she could remember so clearly ponies turning to her in the street to smile and praise her and thank her for bringing love to all ponies. It was enough to nauseate Chrysalis. At first, she had been strictly dedicated to upholding the charade, playing Cadance’s part perfectly, smiling and embracing and kissing babies. It had worn on her fast, so that by the time the actual wedding rolled around she was unable to keep up much of a facade.

It had been that, for the most part, that had led to Twilight finding her out. If Chrysalis had more patience for being treated in the ridiculous way that ponies treated Cadance, then perhaps the world would be different now. Perhaps Chrysalis would walk these streets as a victor.

There was still time. Chrysalis was old, as old as the Equestrian monarchy, and while she had never been pushed this low before, Chrysalis knew she would rise again.

She slowly wound her way through the centre of town towards Canterlot University. She had no idea where it was located and the idea of asking for directions repulsed her, so she consulted the map boards in the town regularly as she walked. Travelling on the first train had given her ample time to get to the university while keeping up her affect of Amethyst’s slow, dawdling walk.

Without the Crystal Heart and Cadance at the heart of Canterlot, she couldn’t passively feed from the air around her, and knew that if she didn’t make her train this evening she would be quite hungry.

Canterlot University was a grand old building in the same style as the castle and the other older buildings, made of dressed white stone and sporting tall towers. The front door was made of some golden metal and was propped wide open, ponies of all ages and backgrounds filtering in and out of the building.

There was minimal signage to help her find her way to the professor’s talk, and she was forced to ask for help from one of the employees.

She was led into one of the large lecture theatres. It featured a beautiful wooden stage with curtaining and lighting as though for theatrical productions, and an amphitheatre of cushioned seating. Ponies were already filing in and taking their seats.

Chrysalis’s blood ran cold for just a moment as she saw Twilight Sparkle sitting in the front row with an entire note-taking system spread out on the lecture desk in front of her.

Of course the princess would be here. She prided herself on her bookishness, and this was her city. Chrysalis should have predicted this.

Without missing a step, she kept moving forward, her eyes scanning subtly behind her glasses to get a measure of the room.

Twilight Sparkle was not the only old enemy of Chrysalis in this room. She saw Sunburst and Starlight Glimmer sitting together two rows behind Twilight, talking to each other excitedly and laughing.

A group of bored-looking students sat together near the back of the room, barely paying attention as Eventide prepared his slides and nervously shuffled through his cue cards at the front of the room.

Chrysalis took a seat in the second row, on the opposite side of the room from Twilight.

Twilight got to her feet and met the latest guests at the door. It was all Chrysalis could do not to fly into a rage when she saw them.

Thorax stood there, smiling confidently at the ponies in the room. Accepting their welcoming words and playing nice, as though changelings were meant to kiss the hooves of ponies. He was accompanied by changelings that Chrysalis recognised: Cornicle, a nursery worker, Urtica, who Chrysalis had taught to read, and Pharynx, a once-formidable warrior. They all wore their bright colours and glittery wings as though they weren’t a mark of shame.

Even a moment’s slip-up surrounded by so many enemies would be the end of Chrysalis and her eggs. But it was hard. She kept Amethyst’s face totally normal as she felt adrenaline zing through her body, matched only by the boiling rage that caused her to nervously tap one foot on the floor.

She looked away. Nothing could be gained by venting her anger now, as much as she wanted to.

Thorax went and sat with Twilight, greeting the pony princess like an old friend while the three changelings who had accompanied him went and took seats in the free space.

The rest of the room filled up steadily with university students and fellow professors.

The time for the start of the talk came and went. The professor fussed at the front of the room, glancing at the expectant crowd and then over at the door as though waiting for someone. Finally, a few minutes after he was supposed to start, the professor began to speak.

8. Eventide

“Good - good morning, every creature,” the professor began. He closed his eyes for a moment, let a smile come to his face, and then cleared his throat. “Thank you all for being here for my talk. This is a presentation of my paper, ‘The Impact of Changeling Parasitism on Cultural Evolution of Social Groupings’.”

A slide appeared on screen. The same image from the poster: Chrysalis and Thorax. She snuck a glance at Thorax, who was looking disgustingly bashful, too much in his head to sense her presence.

“I wrote this talk with the intention of delivering it to a lay audience, but please ask me to clarify if there’s anything I haven’t explained fully. Now, a question I and others in my department have had for some time, which launched me into this research project: in the long term, what are the evolutionary consequences of changeling parasitism on the host species?” A click, and the screen image changed to a picture of a louse.

“Let me first briefly define a few things, starting with parasitism. Parasitism is the term used to describe a relationship between two organisms wherein one lives on the resources of the other, in such a way that causes a negative effect. A simple parasite relationship exists between pony lice and ponies, where the louse gets food from drinking pony blood, and ponies get itchy and sick from being bitten. It’s generally in the best interest of the parasite to not outright kill the host, but this can still happen, through overfeeding or through introducing infection or disease, like mosquitoes transmitting marealia and fluffy fever.

Click. The image changed to an illustration of prehistoric ponies using stone tools. “Next, let’s talk about cultural evolution. This is a kind of evolution that takes place not in your genes, but through social change. In many ways it works very similarly to biological evolution - for example, we use our metal tools because the first ponies used stone tools. Nothing has changed about our biology, but we have many thousands of years of skill and knowledge that got us to this point. The differences in pony society structures despite us all being almost identical biologically is evidence of the power of cultural evolution.”

“Cultural evolution can also inform biological evolution; for example, the advent of midwifery has led to more mares surviving foaling, which takes the selective pressure away from mares who would otherwise be selected against for struggling to safely foal.” Professor Eventide levitated a glass of water and took a sip, then changed the slide to a picture of a pair of monkeys screeching at each other.

Chrysalis furtively looked around the room. Twilight Sparkle was on the edge of her seat, taking notes in two notebooks at once; Thorax was watching with eyes half-lidded, interested but already familiar with what was being said; Starlight Glimmer and Sunburst were paying attention but murmuring to each other. What the professor was saying was interesting in the abstract sense, but queens like Chrysalis needed actionable information, not theories about pony lice.

“Parasitism and the burden of parasites can contribute to both cultural and biological evolution. Biologically, we see adaptations like monkeys developing the ability to smell when other monkeys are infected, so they can keep their distance. Culturally, we see adaptations like the development of complex sewage systems to help in breaking the life cycle of internal parasites in ponies. Tracking the impact of parasites in ponies has contributed to multiple medical breakthroughs that have improved our daily lives. You can thank these researchers for the eradication of hoofworm and the low incidence rate today of wing mites, in an example of cultural evolution that has given us an enormous edge over our parasites.”

Click. The image changed to the same illustration of Chrysalis from the start of the presentation. It was strange, looking at a picture of herself with all of her worst enemies. Life threw some unusual situations at her sometimes.

Professor Eventide kept speaking. “With this context in mind, the goal of my research project was to examine any potential cultural or biological evolution that has occurred as a consequence of changeling parasitism. Not just in ponies, but in all recorded species that changelings have preyed upon, since I learned over the course of this study that changeling history stretches back much further than previously thought. I would like to thank Thorax and his changelings for their insight; this study wouldn’t have been possible just a few short years ago.”

Chrysalis resisted the urge to hiss. Thorax giving away valuable knowledge about changeling life was nothing to be proud of, and now it was written down in pony libraries until the end of time.

Still, it was clear that her goal of potentially getting her hands on Eventide wasn’t a bad one; he clearly knew a lot regarding the exact topics she needed to learn about. Even better, like a lot of academics he was too excited about his own work to see danger in someone asking him to follow them for another conversation. All she needed was a way in.

“A brief rundown on changelings, for those who aren’t familiar; changelings are pony-like insects with the unusual requirement of needing to feed upon the social energy known as ‘love’ but which can also consist of trust, friendship, or other positive social bonds, and the unusual ability to magically change their forms to mimic other organisms. An aggressive hive, led by a queen, will undergo excursions in which they will infiltrate the social groupings of other organisms in order to set up situations where they can effectively feed on love. An example of this is the well-known incident where the previous changeling queen, Chrysalis, replaced Princess Cadance in the lead up to her wedding, in order to feed upon not only her fiance’s love but the love that wider Equestria feels for the princess.”

“You may note the presence of Thorax, current leader of the changelings, and how much his and his peoples’ appearances differ from the traditionally known appearance of changelings, as seen in this image of Chrysalis. This relates to one of the key findings of this study: the existence of two different hive states that changelings can biologically experience. For an easy point of comparison, I will describe the life stages of both locusts and aphids, although neither species is particularly closely related to changelings.

Click. A locust appeared on screen. “Locusts are a significant detriment to food stability and economy in Equestria. In their normal form, they are grasshopper-like insects which don’t pose any particular threat to pony life, but under the right conditions, they undergo a physical transformation which causes them to revert to a much hungrier form, which takes flight and can destroy entire fields of crops with terrifying speed. In this traveling form, they reproduce more quickly and need to eat significantly more to survive, speeding up their metabolism to allow them to breed and travel as rapidly as they do. It’s really quite incredible.

“Aphids are also an agricultural pest. They colonise a broad variety of plants and tap into the circulatory systems to suck out nutrients; a good example of crops affected by aphids is brassica crops, like broccoli, cabbage, and kale. Aphids normally reproduce sexually, to introduce genetic variation that lets them survive times of hardship, but when they come across a significant food source, they enter into an asexual phase, where they clone themselves as quickly as possible to take advantage of whatever they’ve found, like a field of potatoes or a meadow with wild mustard in bloom.

The slide changed to a photograph of a wing of changelings soaring over Canterlot. Chrysalis looked at her changelings there. She recognised most of the changelings in the picture; of the ones she recognised, the majority had died either in the aftermath of the invasion or in later skirmishes out of the hive. Of the survivors, they had all betrayed her for Thorax. To the ponies in the room, the changelings in the picture probably all looked exactly the same.

It hurt her to look at so many losses in one image. Changelings were expected to die for the hive, but it was Chrysalis’s responsibility to care for the hive so that they stayed strong and numerous, and looking back through the lens of this image, she couldn’t quite say she had met this responsibility.

Of course, they had failed her too. They had defected, and now they sat together on the other side of the room, tittering and smiling while they watched their leader sell out their secrets to the enemy.

“Changelings are not identical to either of these, but they provide valuable illustrations of what is gained and lost in changing hive phases. We can also compare Chrysalis’s hive and Thorax’s hive to learn a bit more about phase differences. From my time with Thorax, I can conclude that the hive is currently experiencing reduced birth rates and a lower rate of feeding from when the changelings were in their previous form. This lower rate of feeding means that the intracommunity love felt between the members of the hive produces sufficient food to meet the metabolic requirements, meaning that at present, the hive does not need to prey on other species to meet their needs.

This was not something Chrysalis had heard about. She flicked a glance at Thorax, who was listening attentively and without contradiction. It was likely true, then, much to her disappointment.

“My research has yet to conclude what might be the trigger for this biological shift. It does seem to be tied to the status of the changeling leader - Thorax was the first changeling to shift to this passive phase, and his shift catalysed this same reaction in the other changelings. I also know from changeling history that this most recent aggressive phase spearheaded by Chrysalis was originally started by a previous queen, Alate, who changed the hive significantly in the course of her life from a peaceful community with relationships with other species nearby to an aggressive hive.

Chrysalis felt her hackles raise. Alate had been one of the greatest changeling queens to ever live, and she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to tolerate it if she had to listen to some pony professor speak negatively of such a great leader.

The slide clicked over to one featuring a very large dragon. “This begs the question; where was targeted during the aggressive phase preceding the last one? I was very fortunate to have the resources of Princess Twilight Sparkle when attempting to answer this question, and for the first time I can reveal that through conversations with the previous Dragon Lord, Torch, that when his mother was young there was significant changeling parasitism on the dragon community. It is difficult to map this to our pony calendar, but I believe this took place during the Middle Palaeopony Period, approximately fifty-five thousand years ago.

“With this date confirmed by a secondary source, this allows us to delve deeper. Recent archaeological studies arranged in collaboration between Dragon Lord Ember and Princess Twilight Sparkle to allow pony archaeologists access to the dragonlands have published evidence of Lower to Middle Palaeopony dragon settlements that show a degree of architectural collaboration and city-building not present in modern dragon civilisations.” The image changed to a group of ponies at some kind of dig site, surrounded by the remains of very old, large buildings.

“A key question raised by this archaeological expedition was why the dragon culture shifted over time to more individualistic approaches to community, without major collaborative building projects. It’s worth mentioning that this doesn’t seem to have impacted the overall evolutionary fitness of dragons, as they are still numerous and diverse, but this change is interesting nonetheless. This post-city period of dragon history also correlates with the wider appearances of dragons in the historical records of other societies, indicating greater dispersal of the species at this time.

The image changed to some kind of griffon city. Chrysalis had very little experience with griffins; they despised each other so much that there was nothing for changelings to eat there.

“Put a pin in dragon society, and let’s switch over to griffins. As many of you may be aware, the griffon society, centred in Griffonstone, is currently undergoing a reformation after a long period of disarray following the end of the monarchical system. The actual cause for this disruptive period is hotly debated; while the prevailing history theory is that the absence of the relic known as the Idol of Boreas had magical properties that tied griffons together, this has seen pushback in recent years due to counter evidence provided by Equestria’s own Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie, showing that the cultural construct of the Idol may have been the binding force, rather than any inherent properties the Idol possessed.

“Furthermore, with the restoration of some long-neglected parts of Griffonstone has come the restoration of parts of the royal archive which record pervasive social unrest during the reign of the penultimate and the final griffon kings, indicating that the social dissolution at the end of the royal period may have coincided with the loss of the Idol, but was not caused by it. Most excitingly, the royal records also contain accounts of significant conflicts between the royal army and quote-unquote ‘most despairful insectoid ponies’.”

Click. The slide changed to a griffon, a dragon, and a changeling, all pictured together.

“In my work I suggest that the long-term parasitism of changelings on griffons during the late royal period was a key factor leading to the social unrest that ended the griffon monarchy. Further evidence from griffon archives is presented in full in my paper. Specifically, under the assumption this conjecture is true, I would like to examine this phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.

“Changeling predation is usually not fatal, but can lead to significantly reduced evolutionary fitness, as it drains hosts of energy and love required to gather resources and form social bonds for reproduction. Individuals heavily drained by changelings are unlikely to reproduce and pass on their genes, but are also unlikely to culturally contribute due to the emotional and psychological impacts of being fed upon. Over time, I think it’s reasonable to assume that changeling parasitism could have impacts on the biology and culture of a society. In the case of griffons, I am hypothesising that the weak interpersonal bonds and inter-griffon aggressive that characterised the post-royal period is a form of social immune response to changeling feeding; that is, by culturally becoming less loving, griffons were able to make themselves less appealing for feeding.”

Now that was interesting. Chrysalis had always known to avoid griffons for exactly that reason. Would ponies, if Chrysalis loomed over them for long enough, become as rude and dismissive to each other as griffons were?

It disgusted her to admit it, but some of what Eventide had to say was worth hearing. It felt even more important that she capture him and take him home.

“Let us return to the matter of dragons. If we consider that changelings may exert a cultural pressure to dissolve complex codependent societies, and we also know that dragons once lived in more structured societies but dissolved this practice around the time of changeling predation, I don’t think it’s impossible that changelings also led to this. Furthermore, I want to argue that ponies have not fallen victim to this change due to both our numerousness and the relatively diluted impact of parasitism - rather than a consistent campaign across all ponies, the changeling activity in this aggressive phase has been sporadic and targeted, such as the Canterlot wedding siege.”

Eventide was not wrong. Ponies were a rich source of food, and part of the reason they were so rich in food was because there were so many different pony cities to feed on. Every time the well ran dry somewhere, Chrysalis had always been able to find someone else. If there was only one city, no matter how large, Chrysalis could imagine running out of food.

Eventide’s thoughts matched her own. The slide changed to a picture of Thorax’s changeling hive. “Now, let’s return to our metaphors of aphids and locusts. I know I’ve made a lot of assumptions in this last part of my talk, but I do think that these patterns of parasitism are key to understanding biological changes in the changelings themselves. Consider the snowshoe hare, and the lynx; in years where hare populations increase, lynx populations rise, until they reach a point where lynx predation outdoes the reproductive success of hares, and hare populations drop. With less food, lynxes breed less, too.”

The taste of hare blood on Chrysalis’s lips, like metal and sugar.

“In times of food availability, changelings need to breed quickly, and eat more to compensate for this, in order to take advantage of the resources available. Therefore, the changeling hive finds an aggressive leader and shifts to their aggressive phase like locusts, and stays in this phase until struggles with finding food or significant population loss pushes the changelings back to their hive. At this time a new, more passive leader will be biologically selected, and will put the hive into a calmer, senescent state, where food requirements are lower. As such, this would explain the varying accounts of changelings given in history. Although it is difficult for me to prove this using mostly historical research, my work with Thorax has lent a lot of credence to these claims, which are also documented more thoroughly in my paper.”

“This talk has married together two major theories I’ve been working on - the two-phase nature of changeling society, which Thorax continues to research to explain how he was selected from his hivemates to lead, and the impacts that these feeding periods have on their hosts. I expect that my findings will be improved upon or even disproved or contradicted by future evidence, and I look forward to the day when we know more about this previously difficult to research topic. I’d like to extend my thanks to the dragon, griffon, and changeling communities for coming together to speak with me and tolerating all my invasive questions about their lives. I’d also like to thank the Princess’s Research Fund for making this work possible.”

Clapping resounded through the lecture hall. Eventide’s talk was done.

Author's Note

The most influential papers for this chapter were:
Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation
The role of social cognition in parasite and pathogen avoidance

9. Lightbulb

As the professor’s talk ended, multiple ponies raised hooves to ask questions. Chrysalis had nothing further to say, at least in public. Her questions for later could wait.

The questions that the professor took consisted mostly of prompts regarding his methodology, and Chrysalis half paid attention until the last of the questions was answered and the audience began to disband and go their separate ways.

Sunburst and Starlight thanked Eventide for his talk and then left the talk, not noticing the elderly librarian’s intense stare burning holes in their skin from behind.

Twilight finished writing up her notes on the talk and eagerly trotted up to the lectern to continue talking. Chrysalis flicked an ear, listening as the princess congratulated the professor for his talk.

“Thank you, Princess,” the professor said, dipping his head into a half-bow to her while she waved the gesture off. “I’m sorry for starting the talk late. Lightbulb was meant to be here, and I tried to wait for him.”

Twilight went to respond, but Chrysalis already wasn’t listening. The pony she had kidnapped was a friend of the professor’s. This was a brilliant opportunity.

She left the lecture hall and ducked into a dark hallway, retreating behind a corner before she changed her appearance into that of the yellow pegasus pony she had left dangling above her eggs. She quickly flexed his powerful wings, took a couple of steps to imitate the lanky pony’s stride, and then sprinted out of the hallway, hooves clattering against the tiled floor.

Chrysalis burst back into the lecture theatre, puffing for breath and awkwardly wheeling her wings to keep her balance.

“I’m so sorry!” she wailed when she saw Eventide.

He cut off his conversation with Twilight and trotted over to her. “Lightbulb, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I missed the first train from the Crystal Empire and I’m so sorry for missing your talk,” Chrysalis said.

Eventide nuzzled her, pressing his neck and chest against hers. Chrysalis hadn’t factored in for the possibility that she was now impersonating Eventide’s significant other, but she was nothing if not adaptable. She knew how to play the part of a lovestruck fool, although Chrysalis had never felt it herself.

She nuzzled him in response, catching her breath. “Did the talk go well?”

“It went great!” Thorax said, a goofy smile on his face unbecoming of the queen of the changelings. “I loved getting to hear the results of all your research, professor.”

“I really enjoyed it, too. These new scientific techniques are very exciting,” Twilight said, her wingtips twitching in excitement. “Where are my manners? Eventide, who’s this?”

“This is my boyf- my partner, Lightbulb. He’s a weatherpony from Cloudsdale, and he specialises in lightning clouds,” Eventide said.

“It’s an honour to meet you, princess,” Chrysalis said, choking back bile as she dipped into a bow for Twilight.

“Oh, how interesting! You know, I read a book by Sparkhoof about the formation of specialised lightning clouds in the weather factories. Are you familiar with her work?” Twilight said, levitating out her notebook to take notes on what Chrysalis would say next.

Chrysalis hoped dearly that she could make it out of this encounter without having to prove her own lack of ability to work with lightning clouds.

She fumbled for a moment, then said, “It would be great to talk with you about this sometime, Princess. But today is his day,” she said with a gesture at Eventide and a smile.

Eventide blushed a little. “I’m just glad you could make it after all.”

“I’ll send you my full list of questions by mail once they’re complete,” Twilight said to Eventide. “I’m so impressed with the breadth and depth of your research project.”

Flushing a little more, Eventide said, “It’s easy work when it’s something you’re passionate about.”

Chrysalis cast a glance at Eventide’s cutie mark. It was a large orange blotch across his flank with a black symbol she didn’t recognise on it.

“Oh, I know! That’s why the study of magic has never been boring for me,” Twilight chittered. “I’ll let you get back to your day, but rest assured, I really enjoyed your talk.”

Chrysalis stood faithfully at Eventide’s side while he spoke to the other attendees and answered further questions about his talk, and Chrysalis smiled and made nice. She even introduced herself to Thorax, who seemed none the wiser that his queen and mother stood in front of him.

Changelings couldn’t automatically see through each other’s disguises, but it was certainly easier for them since they knew what to look for. Thorax not even hesitating was a clear sign of the extreme complacency that had affected him.

Finally it was just Chrysalis and Eventide in the lecture theatre.

“Shall we go get some lunch? I’m starving,” Eventide said, gathering up his belongings. “I was too nervous to eat anything for breakfast, and now I would do dark things to get my hands on a hayburger.”

“Yes, let’s,” Chrysalis said. She could already feel the natural affection Eventide felt for Lightbulb easing the edges of hunger that were sneaking up on her.

“Where did you get that bag?” Eventide asked as he led the way down the university corridors.

Chrysalis startled for a moment as she realised that she was still wearing Amethyst’s quilted bag, which looked quite out of place on the shoulders of a young and energetic pegasus. “It was my grandma’s,” she said, hoping she wasn’t stepping wrong.

“It’s cool. I’ve been meaning to get into quilting,” Eventide said. He led her down the street to a diner.

“Sorry again for missing your talk,” Chrysalis said. This back and forth was already getting banal; she needed a way to trick him to accompany her back to the Crystal Empire, tonight if possible. “I wasn’t expecting to be as tired as I was after the Crystal Fair.”

“How was it?” Eventide asked. He ordered for her, and she ordered, hoping he had some money on him. Thankfully, he did, and they took a place at a booth.

“Good. I found out something really weird about Crystal Empire weather, though. I’m planning to head back there tonight to work on it - you should come with me,” Chrysalis said.

He tilted his head. “Tonight?”

“Yes. You’ll want to take a look, honestly.”

“It’s such short notice…”

“You deserve to take a holiday after you worked so hard on your lecture,” Chrysalis said. She could tell he wasn’t quite buying it, and a moment’s inspiration came to her on how to press him further. “Oh! And to sweeten the deal - when I dropped into the library to pick up that book you told me about, the librarian mare said she had found another book about changelings in the withdrawn bin in the back room.”

She had him now. His ears flicked forward in excitement and he perked up. “Well, I guess I have been working pretty hard.”

“I’ve already got my ticket for the last train tonight,” Chrysalis said. She was looking forward to getting him back to her lair so she could drop this exhausting charade.

“Okay, yes, let’s do it. I’ll just have to drop in home to pick up some luggage and then we can go,” he said.

Their food arrived. Eventide ate like a man possessed while Chrysalis picked at her food and watched him, learning his body language as best she could.

It was too easy.

Excerpt: Changeling Dissection Report Following Canterlot Invasion

Deceased changeling submitted for analysis at Canterlot University.
Cause of death believed to be blunt force trauma to the head following a confrontation with a baker pony on the streets of Canterlot.
Dissection of sapient creatures without permission normally not permitted by Bioethics Committee; state of war between Equestria and changelings and the specimen already being deceased has allowed for special permission.

~~~~

Commenced examination of holes present on legs.
Interior surface of holes are lined with identical chitin to that on the exoskeleton.
Dissection of right foreleg to investigate further.
Nerve tissue in the leg is redirected from the core to travel around the holes.
Muscle tissue in the leg is truncated in parts by the presence of the hole. Possible loss of leg strength as a result.
Spiracle entry at top of the leg is rerouted to accommodate for the shape of the hole.
Hole appears to have formed during standard development in pupation - i.e distinctive holes appear to have become genetic or otherwise heritable after Celestia’s attack.

The train clattered along the tracks and Eventide leaned against Chrysalis, dozing while she wrapped her wing around him. It was an easy meal to feed off him when he was so exhausted from a long day.

Deciding where to take Eventide was difficult. She wanted him awake and fully conscious so she could interrogate him, but he was a unicorn and possessed of some advanced intelligence, so it was not as simple as cocooning him or placing him in Amethyst’s cellar.

If she took him to the cave she kept her eggs at then he could pose some danger to her unhatched offspring, and his emotional reaction upon seeing Lightbulb confined there could be extreme.

There were other caves in the same area as her own. She had scouted them out before she had selected her one; hers was the largest and the most consistently warm, but if she placed him in another of the nearby crevices, he wouldn’t freeze. The snow and cold outside would prevent him from escaping, particularly if he was disorientated by being transported there unconscious, and he would be dependent on her for food. It was ideal.

The train arrived in the Crystal Empire station, right at the edge of the dome. She waited until most of the passengers had disembarked from the train and then nudged Eventide awake.

“Let’s get to our accommodation, hm?” Chrysalis said, and he blearily nodded and got to his hooves to follow her.

They walked slowly until it was just the two of them walking under the night sky, and then a flash of green light rendered him fully unconscious.

Eventide was easier to move than Lightbulb, but not by much. Once she knew that she was totally alone, Chrysalis simply levitated him into the mountains, hoping the green glow wasn’t visible from the city.

Trotting through the snow felt so much easier than it had when she had first come to the Crystal Empire. Chrysalis was strong and vigorous again; not quite at full power, but more than enough to overpower ponies and survive treks through the snow. Snow flurrying around her hooves passed through the holes in her legs, sending sharp points of cold through her nerves.

The holes had been there so long that she barely thought about them, except for when it was cold, or when she saw Celestia.

The Princess had retired now. She wondered where. Perhaps she could indulge herself once the hive was strong, and find Celestia to beat the life out of her.

It took Chrysalis a moment to find the cave she remembered. The whirling, ever present snows of the frozen north had buried the entrance, and she had to put Eventide down onto a rock to dig and unearth it. Once she found it, she lowered him into the hole, and then followed afterwards.

This cave was a single, poorly sheltered room, although the rock floor was warm enough to keep Eventide from freezing. She placed him on the floor and left him for the moment. When she ducked her head out of the cave, all she could see was white snow and dark skies. Eventide would have no idea which way to flee, if he was stupid enough to try.

She traveled around the side of the rise to find her own cave. The melted snow around the entrance left the crevice looking like an open mouth in the rock.

Slipping inside, she was relieved to see the eggs still bright and squirming, healthy as could be. Lightbulb and Amethyst were still and perfectly preserved in their cocoons, untouched. If Chrysalis needed some extra food, she could try keeping Lightbulb and Eventide in the same cave, although letting a strong flyer like Lightbulb out of his cocoon could prove fatal.

A couple more of the eggs had stopped developing. Chrysalis cast them out in the snow. She had plenty left, and it was normal to lose a few.

The cave was still warm and damp, and she left them so she could get back to Eventide.

Once she returned she released the spell on Eventide and waited patiently. She had the entire night until she needed to be back at the library.

After a few hours of silence broken only by the impossibly soft sound of snow falling, Eventide returned to wakefulness.

He blinked slowly, looking around the cave until he tilted his head up and saw Chrysalis.

If he was afraid, he didn’t show it. Instead he said, “Queen Chrysalis? Is that you?”

“Good, you know my name,” Chrysalis said, letting a smile play over her face. It felt good to be recognised as a queen again.

“I have so many questions for you!” Eventide said, scrambling to a sitting position and feeling around him with his hooves to find his bag. He pulled out a notebook with magic and opened it, looking at her excitedly. Then the gravity of the situation seemed to hit him. “Where are we?” He looked past her, out at the snowy expanse.

“The Frozen North,” Chrysalis said.

Eventide’s ears flopped back. “Where’s Lightbulb?”

“Your pony friend is safe, for now. Provided you cooperate, you may even be reunited with him in the future,” Chrysalis said.

“He didn’t compliment my haircut. I should have known it wasn’t him,” Eventide said. “Did you come to my talk?”

“I found it most interesting,” Chrysalis said. “I brought you here to learn more about your research.”

To her surprise, Eventide perked up again, his tail swishing from side to side in interest. “I’m glad you liked it! You know, I told Princess Twilight that if I could get an interview with you somehow it would be the crowning glory of my work, so don’t go thinking that I wrote my paper without you in mind.”

Chrysalis ignored that attempt at pandering. “Your purpose here is to answer any questions I might have. In exchange you and Lightbulb may be permitted to go free once my time here is over,” she said.

Eventide did not look deterred. “Sounds like a plan. I don’t have my research notes with me at the moment, but I do have a great memory.”

“I would also warn you against escaping. Between here and your rescue lies a great plain of unforgiving cold, and your pony blood will freeze before you find safety,” Chrysalis said.

“Oh, yeah, I figured. You don’t do things by halves.” He looked around the small cave for somewhere to get comfortable and settled on a flat, warm part of the floor. “Clever trick. I’m guessing we’re in a geothermal area.”

Chrysalis didn’t bother to respond to that. “I will bring you food when I can.” She turned to climb back out of the cave, but was stopped by his voice.

“Can you - can you bring me something to read, too? And maybe a blanket,” he said.

She whipped her head back around to him. “You’ll take what you’re given. Just being left alive should be enough to make you grateful for my generosity,” she spat, then left.

After another quick check on her eggs, Chrysalis made her way back to the Crystal Empire, ready to open the library the next morning.

11. Huntress

Chrysalis’s next victim was a pony from out of town, almost a week later. A mint green coat and a white and blue mane. The mare seemed familiar and as she walked around the library looking at music theory books Chrysalis watched her, trying to pin down where she knew this pony from.

Her memory caught up when she saw the pony’s cutie mark. A golden lyre. This was one of the ponies Cadance had picked to be her bridesmaids; it had taken a skilled act of subterfuge for Chrysalis to overpower all three of them.

She was a unicorn, and so Chrysalis had assumed she was from out of town, and now this confirmed it. Even better, she was the last pony in the library, and they were about to close.

Chrysalis locked the front doors while the pony rifled through the shelves, and then walked slowly and calmly up to the unicorn.

“Oh, hey, sorry, I’ll be done in a moment,” she said, not looking back at Chrysalis.

In a flash of green light, Chrysalis was in her own body, lunging towards the unicorn and slamming her to the ground. Her golden eyes shone up at Chrysalis in fear for just a second, and then in another flash, the pony was unconscious.

She had taken food up to Eventide a few days earlier, but it wouldn’t hurt to do it again now. The unicorn was folded into Amethyst’s cart and delivered up to her new place next to Autumn Gem. Eventide’s questions on her last visit were about how the hive worked, and Chrysalis answered a few and gave him some food, as well as a blanket. A reward for good behaviour.

She dumped his food in front of him, and he looked up from where he had been reading. With a blanket he looked a little less miserable.

“Good evening, Queen,” he said with a smile.

Chrysalis grunted. He was showing some respect, at least. “I have some questions for you.”

“Oo, what is it?” He sat up and shook his head. “Guh. Been sleeping badly, for some reason.” He snorted at his own pathetic joke.

Chrysalis ignored that. “How are changeling hives built? I know of what materials they are constructed, but I was raised in Alate’s pre-existing hive and have not myself seen it done.”

“Huh, that’s a tricky one. Changelings keep to their hives for so long that it’s rare to find accounts of one being built, but I have read the yearly records which contain the time period in which Alate was building her hive,” Eventide said. He mounded snow in front of him to illustrate as he spoke. “Your chamber - the queen’s chamber - and the nursery chambers are the core of the hive, with the queen’s chamber above the nursery chambers -”

“I know that part,” Chrysalis hissed.

“Sorry, sorry. What I’m trying to say is that hivebuilding in changelings is pretty similar to termites - you’re a member of the order Blattodea, like termites are - but there’s some key differences. Instead of using wood pulp, changelings use available grit and rocks and then bind them together with sticky saliva that drones make, which helps to make the hive magically changeable. The nursery is actually below ground to keep the temperature more consistent, and then that area gets covered over and the queen’s chamber is built above it. That’s the core structure, then it gets built iteratively out from there. Not that it matters, but Alate’s hive was actually somewhat smaller than other older hives that I’ve had the chance to study.”

“I want you to draw up plans. Instructions. My drones and workers will use them to build,” Chrysalis said.

“Sure. I’m not much of an artist but I’ll give it a go. Can you get me some paper and pencils?” Eventide said.

“Yes. I will bring them next time I return.”

“Thanks! I've finished the book, by the way. I’d love another one but I get it if you don’t want to do that,” Eventide said.

Chrysalis finally snapped. “Why are you being so cooperative? Don’t you know I hold your pegasus friend’s life to ransom? Do you not understand that you helping me here will mean the death of your precious Equestrian society? You should be crawling on the ground and spitting at me in disgust!”

Eventide flinched for a moment as she yelled, but that placid, somewhat excited look came back to his face nearly instantly. “I just find changelings really interesting. I don’t really mind being in this cave if I get to scratch that itch. And you said Lightbulb would be fine if I cooperate, but I don’t really have much control over how this all turns out, so why not?”

Excerpt: The Position of Changelings Within Blattodea

Due to the unusual size and appearance of changelings, their position within the kingdom of animals has long been a source of academic dispute. Although their traits generally indicate that they fall within Arthropoda, and more specifically within Insecta, several traits such as their bidirectional internal lungs, four legs, and complex neurological processing abilities led several competing theories as to the origin of this species.

The eusocial structure that informs changeling feeding, reproduction, and social behaviour has always been viewed as key to unlocking this mystery. Eusocial organisation (a “hive”) is found in both Blattodea and Hymenoptera, as well as several non-insect groups including mammals and crustaceans. Although several traits link changelings to Hymenoptera, most notably the lack of a “king” and the gracile body plan capable of flight, it is now generally considered accurate to place changelings within Blattodea along with cockroaches and termites.

The connection to termites was what eventually informed the placement of this species, although it should be said that it is believed that eusociality in changelings evolved convergently rather than deriving from a common ancestry, as changelings share more physical traits with cockroaches than with termites. A key termite trait examined here is the mechanism by which hives (mounds, in termites) are constructed. Termites process available wood using their saliva to rapidly construct chambers of their mound in a very similar way to how changelings process grit and small stones with magical secretions to build hives.

Like other members of Blattodea, changelings are capable of flight. The harder wing case or elytron of the changeling may falsely give the impression that they are more closely related to beetles, but select observations of members of the cockroach family shows the presence of similar, although less ornamented, elytra. Changeling flight is generally more essential to their lifeplan than any other member of the order, with changelings covering extensive distances to find other creatures to parasitise.

Aside from their more magical properties, two key adaptations allow changelings to reach a maximum size of up to seven hundred times the size of the second largest insect species in the world. The first is the changeling lung, which is a derived spiracle and functions very similarly to the mammalian lung, including muscle structures which allow for negative pressure breathing. This overcomes the difficulty faced by larger insect species in performing gas exchange with efficiency high enough for activity.

The other key adaptation is changeling internal fluid. Members of Insecta have haemolymph, which can contain some haemocyanin for oxygen distribution but which ultimately relies on passive diffusion of oxygen into water, which imposes limitations on the speed of oxygen distribution. Changeling internal fluids are derived from hemolymph, but heavily utilise haemocyanin and some haemoglobin to provide significantly more efficient gas transportation within the body. This internal fluid is colloquially known as ichor.

The library door swung open. Chrysalis heard a familiar voice and looked up calmly, not wanting to jerk her head up or snarl.

It had been five days since she had captured that unicorn, and she was looking for someone new to add to her collection. Someone had come by the library asking about Autumn Gem, but Chrysalis had told them she didn’t remember her coming by.

Now, though, she had to stop her blood from getting up in excitement.

Starlight Glimmer was walking into her library, first thing in the morning. There was no one else in the building, and she was alone, and she seemed distracted. If Chrysalis could catch her with her guard down, then this was her chance to finally exact some revenge.

“Morning, Amethyst. Just grabbing a few spellbooks,” Starlight said without even looking at her. She trotted past the front desk and up the stairs into the magic section, diving into tall shelves and immediately levitating out books to examine.

Chrysalis made her way upstairs pushing her returns cart, wheeling a few shelves away from Starlight and using her magic to creak the cart along to make it seem like she was still there. Instead she was in her natural body, climbing the shelf next to Starlight, silent and creeping.

It felt good to properly hunt. As she reached the top of the shelf, she balanced atop it, making sure her shadow didn’t fall across Starlight’s vision. Starlight hummed and moved to the side, then crouched down to read the spines of books on the bottom shelf.

Chrysalis charged her spell and then dropped from the shelf.

Her hoof slammed into the back of Starlight’s head and crushed her to the ground, Chrysalis’s weight pinning Starlight's body down. There was a split second of reorienting herself before she fired her spell, and in that moment, Starlight teleported, and the green flash of Chrysalis’s magic harmless fired harmlessly against the floor.

“Curse you!” Chrysalis snarled, and then lunged out of the aisle. Starlight was standing in the atrium of the library; Chrysalis changed form to a puma and lunged to close the distance between them, tackling Starlight to the ground and leaving a bloody slash across her back. She turned back into her own form and stood over Starlight, reveling in the splatter of blood across the tiles.

Starlight screamed, scrambled to her hooves, and tried to teleport again, but Chrysalis parried her spell and tried to knock her out again.

With a flare of magic, Starlight summoned a shield and knocked Chrysalis out of the way. She sprinted out of the library, running into town.

Chrysalis cursed again and followed her. She had been reckless. She was a smart hunter instead of just a powerful one, and she needed to act like it.

Chrysalis charged a teleportation spell, turned herself into Starlight injuries and all, and then vanished.

She reappeared next to the Crystal Heart. She was taking a big risk here; Chrysalis had not confirmed whether there were any specifically anti-changeling spells around the palace. But nothing bad happened, and so she let out a wail of fear and sprinted into the palace.

Chrysalis burst into Cadance’s throne room, gasping for air and letting out whimpers of pain.

Cadance jumped to her feet. The two guards on either side of her jumped up too, raising their weapons. This gambit could make things worse, but it could also make things better.

“Changelings - Chrysalis is in the city! I saw her, and she attacked me!” Chrysalis said. She ran right up to Cadance as though she was going to hide behind her, tail tucked between her legs and ears pressed against her head.

“You’re safe here, Starlight,” Cadance said. “What did you see?”

“She was on the edge of town, near the train station.” Chrysalis wanted to remove any suspicions around the library as much as she was able. “When she saw me, it was like she lost control. She turned into some kind of big cat and attacked me, but I got away and teleported here.”

“Go and alert the other guards,” Cadance said, sending the royal guards on their way. She pulled Chrysalis into a brief hug, and Chrysalis had a nauseatingly strange moment of being pressed against Cadance’s soft pink fur that she had once worn herself.

“She’ll likely try and hide. It’s what she does,” Chrysalis said.

Cadance was trying to reassure Chrysalis and was keeping her emotions measured, but to her satisfaction, Chrysalis could see just a spark of fear in her eyes. That was how she liked to be thought of.

“Flurry and Shining are with Twilight this weekend. They’re safe,” Cadance told her.

“That’s good. Hopefully since I’ve raised the alarm she’ll back off and go somewhere else,” Chrysalis said.

One of the guards who had just fled returned. “Princess. We’ve got someone to see you."

He and another guard led in Starlight Glimmer at the tips of their spears. The wounds on her back were still oozing blood, her panicked heartbeat keeping the arteries from clotting.

“She’s a changeling!” Starlight snarled, pointing a hoof at Chrysalis.

“She’s impersonating me!” Chrysalis said to Cadance, adding panic to her tone. Cadance was already drawing away from her, unsure of whom to trust.

Impersonating those injuries wasn’t quite possible; Chrysalis had no blood to ooze. She needed to stay distracting so that Cadance didn’t have the chance to doubt or fear her.

“I’m sorry, Starlight,” Cadance said. She didn’t say it to either of them, but instead to the middle of the room. “Guards, take them both to the dungeons.”

That was what Chrysalis didn’t want. Any amount of time without the ability to go to her eggs and care for them was unacceptable, and although Cadance didn’t know it, it would be a death sentence for Eventide.

“If that’s what it takes,” Starlight said, gritting her teeth.

Chrysalis trembled. “She’s trying to get me alone in the dungeon with her. She’s had a grudge against me since I helped Thorax overthrow her.”

“I know, Starlight,” Cadance said, and this time she did address Chrysalis directly. She was yielding, just a little. “We can’t place them both in the dungeon alone. Guards, I’ll want them actively watched, around the clock.”

Starlight hung her head for a moment, defeated, and Chrysalis loved to see it. Then she lifted her head again, resolute. “I understand completely. Can you give me a first aid kit so I can take care of these cuts?” There was a gleam in her eye, and Chrysalis knew she was in trouble.

Blood was still running down her sides, drying in her fur before it could drop onto the floor. Chrysalis knew she wasn’t managing to copy this, and she couldn’t show the green flare of magic required to change her appearance.

Cadance briefly looked over at Chrysalis, checking on her wounds, and then Chrysalis saw or perhaps smelled how Cadance’s joints stiffened just a little bit as her brain computed what Starlight had already seen.

Chrysalis's skin prickled. She'd been so stupid as to prioritise her grudge over her survival. Now she would need to map her way out of here.

The windows were regular glass and the only other easy way out was the door where there were two guards.

Cadance opened her mouth to speak, her body language pulling her away from Chrysalis, and she knew it was the right time to move. She sent a blast of magical energy into a random window, shattering it, and then ran and jumped in Starlight’s form onto the window sill. She changed, turning into herself for just a moment to see the look of fear on their faces, and then turned into a falcon and dove from the window.

Her cover as Amethyst was potentially destroyed. She had a choice to make - she could accept that it was over and try to make do with the five captives she had now, or she could return to the library immediately and claim to be a victim, not the perpetrator.

Starlight would report that she had been attacked in the library, and she would likely report that the only person she could remember being there was Amethyst. If Chrysalis had a hive backing her up, she would take the riskier option and return to the library.

But she had already made the mistake today of being too bold. She tempered herself to look after her eggs; there would be enough food for them. She had been greedy by attacking someone with as much magical ability as Starlight, and now she was paying the price. She could go hungry to compensate for her own mistakes.

Her decision was made. She took advantage of her swift, lithe body, and headed towards the mountains with as much velocity as she could manage.

She collided with the dome.

Not expecting it, Chrysalis’s speed crushed her against the wall, dazing her. She felt something in her neck crunch in a way it shouldn’t, and she turned back into her natural form, plummeting from the sky for a long second before her wings fluttered and she stopped herself.

In front of her, the force field shimmered, faint glimmers of pink and blue magic running through it.

Chrysalis slammed her hooves against it and found it hard and unyielding.

This had to be some spell they had channeled through the Heart. They didn’t want her to escape; they wanted to track her down.

12. Blacklight

It was not hard for changelings to totally vanish. Butterflies and birds were within the scope of their abilities to transform into, despite their small size, and a changeling could linger as a sparrow or rat until they starved.

The reason that changelings, or Chrysalis in particular, didn’t hide out like this was more a matter of pride and dignity. Chrysalis would rather die as a lynx than hide for long as a hare.

Out on the far corners of the Crystal Empire and its shining dome, Chrysalis sat in a field of oats, nibbling on one and occasionally bounding between fields, her round, wet black eyes watching as pegasi guards crisscrossed overhead and crystal pony homesteads were informed there was a changeling on the loose.

Chrysalis had never felt weaker. She was at the mercy of time, luck, and ponies.

The afternoon faded to night, and the royal guards gave up their search, heading back to the castle. Chrysalis hoped that Starlight’s wounds were festering.

She wondered why they elected to freeze her inside the force field, instead of outside of it. She had only narrowly escaped being turned to stone with Cozy Glow and Tirek, and it was no secret to ponies that she was without her hive. Were they trying to finish stamping her out now that she was cornered and alone?

Nobody would have closed the library tonight. Chrysalis wondered if it would even have occurred to anyone to check.

At least she wouldn’t have to check out and return books anymore.

The first crickets of the spring chirped in the long grass around her as she hid.

How soon after hatching could she move her new hive? They wouldn’t be able to fly until they had pupated, which would be at least another few weeks and a lot of food. Even then, it would not be easy to convince such young changelings to move over such a long distance. Chrysalis was willing to try to transport them somehow, but there would be too many of them to fit inside any transport vessel she could imagine using.

Her long hare ears drooped to either side of her as she allowed herself just a split second of exhaustion and grief over how much work it would take to bring her children to somewhere safe. She had fled here into the frozen north, gravid with eggs, because it seemed like the last place in Equestria she could hide. But it was the last place because it was the worst place, freezing cold and devoid of love except inside this shimmering bubble of pony life.

On the other side of the wall snow was falling as it often did, settling onto the ground, flurries spinning on gusts of wind.

Chrysalis’s internal clock ticked to the hour where she would normally think about going to meet the train as Amethyst, and that was when she knew how she would make it south. She needed to be even more daring than she had ever been before.

She had one asset on hand - she knew that there was no duplicate of Autumn Gem in this city, and that people were looking for her and missing her.

Chrysalis changed into Autumn Gem, making sure she looked appropriately haggard and worn, and began the steady process of limping back into town.

It was evening, but the town was not quiet. Instead all the lights were on in all the homes, and she saw eyes peering at her through half-drawn curtains, crystal ponies regarding her with fear.

She needed to get rid of the force field, and she needed to get out. The train luckily fell outside the dome, so as long as she could get to her eggs without being followed, she would be safe.

As she reached the Crystal Heart, the royal guards approached her, pointing their spears before one of them relaxed. “Autumn Gem? Where have you been?”

“The changelings had me,” Chrysalis said, hanging her head low. She had seen in writings at the library that crystal ponies became dull and cold when they were depressed, and she was imitating that now.

“You know where the changelings are?” the guard said. “Go get Princess Cadance. She’ll want to hear this.”

“How do you know that’s the real Autumn Gem?” another guard said, squinting suspiciously.

“Well, if she’s a changeling, I think Princess Cadance will also want to know about that,” the first guard said.

The other three guards all scampered off, leaving just Chrysalis and the first guard, who was watching her with a mixture of fear and tenderness. “Are you okay, Autumn?”

He knew her. That made it easier. She let tears come to her eyes and her legs trembled. “I - I don’t know. It was so dark.” Then she hit him with the saddest eyes she knew how to muster.

Finally he folded and pulled her into a hug. This was the perfect opportunity for Chrysalis to lift one of the ornamental stone sculptures with her magic and knock him unconscious, leaving him splayed across the floor. Then she hit the pedestal the Crystal Heart stood on with her entire body force directed into a two-footed kick.

The Heart was knocked out of its magical suspension and it flew through the air before hitting the ground. To Chrysalis’s disappointment, it didn’t break, but it did slide across the floor and out of the shadow of the palace. She saw the force field around the city shudder and weaken.

She needed to go now. Turning back into a puma, Chrysalis sprang away from the scene of her crime, bounding down the Crystal Empire streets in long, fluid strides that swallowed the crystal streets below her.

Behind her, her sharp ears caught the sounds of the guards coming back down the stairs and yelling in reaction to seeing their companion knocked out. Chrysalis didn’t know how long it would take them to replace the Crystal Heart and charge up the spell again, so she set herself a deadline of just a few minutes and ran as fast as her legs could carry her.

Outside of the city streets her brown pelt blended into farmland, hiding her from the guards who would no doubt be pursuing her. On her way through a pasture of young barley, she reached her head down and ripped out the biggest mouthful of leaves she could manage. Once she passed through the now-weakened force field, she fluffed her fur against the cold.

Chrysalis perched herself on a high rock overlooking the city, watching to see if she was being followed. She could see pegasus guards on her trail, but here in the expansive dark fields they were short on traces to follow.

After perhaps half an hour of waiting, Chrysalis trusted that she had been lost. She picked up her mouthful of leafy grains and jogged into the mountains.

Her joints were aching by the time she saw the entrance to Eventide’s cave. She trotted in and then saw his meagre belongings scattered on the floor of the cave.

She had gone to the effort to bring him some food on the run and he had done this to her?

Chrysalis’s first place to check was her eggs. He was likely in there, crushing them right now. She sprinted over there and dove into the crevice, her claws extended as she got ready to tear him apart for what he had done-

He was in there, but he had just pulled the cocoon back from Lightbulb’s face and was sitting there chatting to him.

Chrysalis could sense that her sleeping spell on Lightbulb was weak, but still present. Eventide was just talking to him for comfort, and her eggs were safe. She turned back into her natural queenly form.

“Oh, there you are,” Eventide said. “Sorry for escaping. You’ve been gone a while and I was getting lonely. Do you have the paper I asked for?”

Chrysalis puffed out a long breath. If she hadn’t been followed, she would be safe here, at least for a little while. There was surely no easy way for her to be tracked all the way up here.

“No. My most excellent disguise as that librarian has been ruined. I will have to reconsider and make new plans,” Chrysalis said. She didn’t want to show any unsteadiness.

“Oh. Well, let me know if you need any help,” Eventide said with that typical blather of his.

“You didn’t destroy my eggs,” Chrysalis said.

Eventide shrugged. “You’d definitely kill me if I did that. Besides, I don’t actually want anything bad to happen to them. They’re beautiful little things, even if I am being held hostage.” He huffed out a laugh. “You’re lucky that Lightbulb is still asleep, I’ll say. He has a real temper; he would absolutely have flipped his shit and destroyed them all by now.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Chrysalis said.

He looked around. “Should I go back to my cave, then?”

“How did you find this place?”

“You always come here after you see me, so I’ve been watching you go and then mapping out which way you went by your hoofprints once you went back to town,” Eventide said.

If Chrysalis was a completely different person she might have laughed. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t. “I don’t expect to be able to return to the city within the next few days, if at all. I brought you what food I could, but the timeline of my plans may need to be accelerated.”

Excerpt: Physical Traits of the Changeling Queen

This report, produced in collaboration with Thorax, leader of the changelings, seeks to provide an anatomical overview of traits displayed by queen changelings. The eusocial nature of changeling society produces three distinct sexes: queen, worker, and drone. This report will focus on the changeling queen, although most anatomy is shared between the three sexes.

Thorax found it prudent to highlight that unlike most changeling queens he was not originally born as a worker (female) but instead as a drone (male). Although he continues to use he/him pronouns in Ponish and prefers to be referred to as a “leader” of the changelings he highlights that he did experience an anatomical shift on transformation to ruler that brought his personal anatomy in line with standard changeling queen anatomy.

The most apparent physical change seen in queen-type changelings is the increase in size. While worker and drone changelings are the size of earth ponies at adulthood, the changeling queen has extended legs and a long neck along with a general increase in trunk size that brings them in line with the height of full-size alicorns.

Another notable change is the increase in horn size and capacity. Although most changelings possess horns of varying morphologies, their magical abilities through said horns are mostly limited to channeling their shapeshifting magic. In comparison, changeling queens are capable of a wide variety of spells, and their horns tend to be larger. Previous changeling queen Chrysalis had a single large horn which curved backwards and had a notch taken out of the base along with the perforations seen across her body, while Thorax has a matched pair of antlers on either side of his horn.

Changeling queens display more extensive ornamentation than drones or workers. Thorax displays greater colour variation across his carapace than his fellow changelings as well as the presence of gem-like protuberances across his chest.

The next morning came with no sign of her pursuers and a thickening of the snowfall which had been gently falling for the last several days. From up on the hillside, Chrysalis had watched the force field go back to full strength as no doubt the spell had been repaired.

She had moved Eventide back to his cave and told him to stay put, and he had devoured what small amount of food she had brought him like he was dying. If she couldn’t secure something more for him to eat soon then she might have to cocoon him for the time being so that he was in stasis.

Chrysalis had tried nuzzling away the snow to see if there was anything growing underneath, but this area of the frozen north was a deadland, and nothing lay underneath but permafrost.

The only area outside the dome that still had some grass was down by the train station, which gave Chrysalis the chance to investigate the location for future heists.

She trotted across the hillside and down towards the train station, changing into a ptarmigan at the last moment before she was visible. It would be slow going, but the bird was sufficiently small and cute to ponies that they were unlikely to view her as suspicious, and she knew they would be on high alert.

Her feathers were brown with tinges of white, imitating the seasonal plumage changes that she had seen ptarmigans go through. It took knowledge and experience to learn to change with the ability that Chrysalis had. She couldn’t imagine a pony understanding the level of skill it took to get to her level, but then, they did not appreciate the finer changeling arts.

There was grass aplenty here in the valley near the station. She would have to come back at night, or turn into a deer, to retrieve some for Eventide.

She hopped around the building. She had seen it when she traveled to and from Canterlot; it was a simple, unreinforced building, remarkable only for the presence of crystal outcroppings around the building. The last service of the train ended at this station; the first service would leave for the Canterlot train line just after dawn.

There was a diagram of the wall showing the stations and where the line went. It ran from here to Canterlot, then split onto multiple lines, one of which would take her past the unexplored west, where she wanted to go.

She wondered how far she could get.

There was a train at the station. A few ponies walking commented on her, and she fluffed her feathers in indignation and hopped out of reach, staring at them with one beady eye.

The train was operated by a pony who was shoveling coal into a fire. It looked like some kind of technical job; she wondered if Eventide might know how to do it, or if it was more specialised knowledge.

She resolved to come back at night and see what they did to lock up the train. She knew from experience that ponies were notoriously bad at defending against regular crimes like theft; they were stupidly trusting.

Chrysalis hopped on her feathered feet down the train line. She remembered from her own journey that the line went without branching all the way to Canterlot, and then hit a switching station. She would need to call ahead to their train station and make them redirect the line so it went the right way. For that, she would need leverage. Hopefully Eventide and her other captives would make appropriate hostages.

She would return tonight to see what security she needed to overcome. Chrysalis had never had a problem with getting into locked places, and she doubted she would start now.

She hopped away over the edge of the grassy area, found some shelter, and emerged as a deer. Then she bent down and wrapped her strong tongue around some grass, ripping it out and chewing it cursorily before swallowing it down to her rumen.

Chrysalis repeated this until her stomach felt full and then bounded away up onto the hillside, staying as a deer as she entered Eventide’s cave and regurgitating the grass as cud onto the floor. Eventide looked at her in disgust and horror.

She turned back into her natural form. “It’s this, or hunger,” Chrysalis said.

He didn’t respond, sniffing the wet blob on the floor tentatively, as though it would attack him. Chrysalis turned and left.

As she circled the hillside to see her eggs in their cave, she spotted a flash of pink out of the corner of her eye. Chrysalis whirled and saw Cadance and a pair of royal guards crossing a field of oats nearest her side of the dome. One of the guards was pointing and gesturing up the hill, exactly towards where Chrysalis was standing. They likely couldn’t see her against the occasional dark rocks that poked through the snowfields, but they would be able to soon.

Author's Note

Four chapters left, believe it or not!

13. Amnion

Chrysalis slipped inside her cave as quickly as she could. Lightbulb was still unconscious, and Amethyst was fully cocooned and oblivious to the world. She crouched to look at her eggs.

There was no chance of moving them until they hatched. They were cemented to each other and to the surface Chrysalis had laid them on. She could see the perfectly formed embryos inside, ready to hatch any day now based on how they wriggled and writhed, but even then she had no way of taking them across the snow without them freezing to death.

Perhaps a powerful teleportation spell could achieve it, but without her magic at full power she couldn’t imagine making it that distance.

The only thing she could think to do now was cover the cave mouth with her body, hidden as a rock, but even so, Eventide was nearby, and she wouldn’t even view it as betrayal for him to tell them where she was. A few caves over, Autumn Gem and that unicorn hung, their very presence revealing her own.

She scanned the cave opening, her eyes plumbing every depth to imagine herself as a rock that would slot perfectly into place, and then she changed.

The ability to see did not stay with her, but she left herself the ability to hear. If her disguise failed - and she knew it would - then she might at least have the opportunity to attack with the advantage of surprise.

She heard in the distance the soft sounds of hooves walking through the snow, and Cadance talking to her guards.

“I don’t want us to split up,” Cadance said. “She’ll take advantage of any moment like that. The three of us will take a look around together and hopefully it won’t come to a fight.”

The sound of metal on metal as the armoured guards saluted.

Crish. Crish. The hoofprints were drawing closer, but not moving directly towards her.

“Hey!” Eventide’s voice, starting as a shout and rendered quiet by the thickly layered snow.

Of course.

“Who is that?” one of the guards said.

“I don’t know,” the other guard said.

Running hooves, with the occasional sound of hoof striking stone. “Oh, thank Celestia you’re here. I’ve been up here for so long in the cold.”

“Careful. He might be a changeling,” the guard said.

“I’m not a changeling. But I can tell you where they are,” Eventide said. “I’m Professor Eventide, from Canterlot University. Do you have anything to eat?”

“My apologies, but no,” Cadance said. Chrysalis heard the sound of a spell charging, then the sparkling sound of it firing. “He’s not a changeling. Starlight taught me how to tell.”

Starlight Glimmer’s contributions to ruining Chrysalis’s life never ended, it would seem.

“Take us to the changeling, please,” the guard said.

Chrysalis tensed her magic, ready to strike. She heard rattling metal and hoofprints striding towards her, getting closer…

And then passing on by.

“I could have sworn it was around here,” Eventide said. “I think I’m going snowblind after how long I’ve been out here.”

There was no way he didn’t remember where it was. Her trick of imitating a rock wall would fool the others, but he had tracked his way here and slid himself through the narrow crevice to reach Lightbulb, and he had shown himself as being possessed of a good memory.

Was he lying? For her benefit?

The group kept walking past Chrysalis and far enough away that she couldn’t quite place their position from hearing.

She had to admire that Eventide had given himself an out instead of confidently leading them away from Chrysalis. He had simply made a mistake; he was snowblind.

“Here! It was this cave,” Eventide’s voice was deliberately loud, carrying around the side of the hill to Chrysalis. “She must have left.”

He had to be at her side cave, where Autumn Gem and the unicorn were being stored.

“Oh my stars! Let’s get them out of there,” Cadance’s voice said, rendered soft by distance.

They might believe it had been Chrysalis’s lair since they had found her cocoons there. And if they believed that, they might leave.

Several long minutes passed.

“You should leave them in the cocoons until you have a doctor on hand,” Eventide said. “The sleeping spell is a little temperamental, and they might need help when they wake up from stasis.”

Soft dragging sounds, and the guard’s metal armour sounds faded into the distance, along with Eventide’s voice telling the guards about how changeling cocoons were constructed.

He was leaving, and he was leaving Lightbulb with her.

She felt a strange weight settle in her chest. She could tell using her changeling senses that he really loved Lightbulb and wanted him to be safe. It seemed unbelievable that he was trusting her with the pegasus, particularly as she had captured him with the explicit purpose of feeding him to her young.

Well, if it came to that, she would feed them Amethyst first. It was the kind thing to do.

After several long minutes of silence, Chrysalis judged it as safe and turned back into her natural form.

The moment her vision was restored she came eye to eye with Cadance.

Excerpt: A Note on Changeling Flight

Let me quickly say that changeling wings, especially with the characteristic holes seen in Chrysalis’s changelings, are not at all sufficient to grant flight on their own like standard insect or bird wings. Although changelings are much lighter than ponies, they are still too heavy to lift themselves in flight without magical assistance.

Instead we see that changelings are privy to the same magical ability that affects pegasi and griffons; that is, they have an innate magic granting the ability of flight. Strangely I might add that due to their magical abilities of transformation channelled through their horns, and the advanced magical abilities of their queen, they share the powers of alicorns.

Cadance was fluttering above the ground, inspecting the caves from the air before she left to follow Eventide and her guards. Chrysalis had transformed right in front of her, and in doing so, she had revealed the location of her precious eggs.

She was not letting Cadance call the guards back.

In a moment she had turned into a manticore and lunged into the air, flapping her wings for a little extra height before she slammed her claws down on Cadance.

The tip of her claw hooked Cadance's chest and ripped apart lush fur to reveal meat underneath, and Cadance gave a grunt of pain, keeping her posture strong. She repelled Chrysalis with a strong magical blast.

Chrysalis whirled, caught her balance, and then stung with her tail. The tip of her stinger caught Cadance in the wing and forced her to stumble onto the ground.

“Chrysalis!” Cadance snarled. “What do you want with my people? Can’t you leave us alone?”

She charged another powerful magical blast and fired it at Chrysalis, who dodged nimbly out of the way. It fired past her and exploded at the mouth of the cave.

Chrysalis couldn’t let Cadance damage her eggs. All of this would be for nothing, and Chrysalis didn’t have it in her to lay another clutch. She moved her body between Cadance and the cave entrance, turning back into her natural form and using her magic to put up a sickly green shield between them.

Eyes full of grief and anger, Cadance fired another blast. Chrysalis’s shield held - barely - but she was pushed back a few steps, putting her haunches into the mouth of the cave.

“You attack my friend Starlight,” Cadance said, firing another blast, pushing Chrysalis back another step. “You kidnap my people - where is Amethyst Maresbury? - and you bring my kingdom into a state of terror. Why won’t you leave?”

Another powerful blast pushed Chrysalis all the way into her cave. Her magic was faltering; it pained her to stay on defence, but if she tried to attack, she would leave her eggs vulnerable. The taste of Cadance's fear and anger filled the air between them.

Chrysalis wasn’t fantasising about defeating Cadance and taking her place. All she wanted was just to survive and for her eggs to survive. Her dreams of ruling pony empires and taking whatever she wanted were being beaten out of her by the indignities she had been put through.

Her body exhausted, Chrysalis put everything she had into another shield, but it wasn’t enough. Cadance knocked the shield away and cornered Chrysalis, looking down through the crevice into the cave. She fired one more blast and Chrysalis could see that if she didn’t do anything it would hit the eggs.

Chrysalis dove into the way of the magical blast. It rocked through her body, shocking her to the tips of her hooves. She let out a gasp of pain and then slumped to the floor.

Cadance slipped down into the crevice.

Chrysalis tried as hard as she could to pull herself back onto her hooves. She felt shoots of pain running through the holes in her legs, weak points that only bothered her when things were truly dire.

Using her last spark of magic, Chrysalis changed form into a bugbear, a favourite of hers for fighting. She couldn’t muster the energy to get herself into the air and instead crouched, using her large body and six limbs to shield as many of her eggs as she could.

Cadance gasped when she saw Lightbulb and Amethyst in their cocoons, her eyes narrowing at Chrysalis. She charged up one more magical blast, and Chrysalis knew this one would kill her.

It made sense that it would end this way. The princess of love, striking out against the wraith that had tormented her family and drained love from her citizens. Chrysalis did what she could to arrange her body to protect her eggs and made her peace.

The blow didn’t come. It seemed Cadance was too merciful to strike a weakened opponent. Chrysalis longed to take advantage of this moment of stupidity, but she had nothing left in her.

“Are those eggs?” Cadance asked. She was looking past Chrysalis, at the little eggs full of squirming grubs that she was trying to hide.

Chrysalis snarled and tried to wanly slash a clawed paw at Cadance, who fluttered back a step to avoid it. It was pointless. She turned back to her natural form and tried to flare her wings out to intimidate Cadance.

“Leave them alone,” she hissed.

“I’m not going to hurt your eggs,” Cadance said, her face softening into concern.

“I don’t want your pity!” Chrysalis yelled with as much force as she could. “If you come one step closer to my children I will turn you into a red paste.”

Cadance kept her distance. “I just want to rescue these ponies. I’m a mother, too, Chrysalis.”

“Take them. I don’t need them.” Chrysalis needed them dearly, but she needed Cadance to leave more.

With one eye kept firmly on Chrysalis, Cadance used her magic to slice down Amethyst’s cocoon and with great effort, she lifted it out of the cave entrance.

There was a sweet smell in Chrysalis’s nostrils. Cadance finished straining herself with Amethyst and turned her attention to Lightbulb, but the exertion had pulled the claw wound open on her chest and loosed a spray of ruby droplets.

Saliva pooled in Chrysalis's mouth. Thick, rich pony blood, ripe for the taking.

Chrysalis stooped and lunged, her long tongue catching blood from the air and then trailing the floor to follow Cadance's blood spatter.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my brood,” Chrysalis said, her voice a low hiss. She swallowed the droplets of blood and felt the searing hot love run down her throat, bringing warmth and magic back to her weary limbs. It wasn’t enough to make Chrysalis strong enough to defeat Cadance, but it might be enough for her to get Cadance out of here for the moment.

Behind her she heard a tiny cry. She knew that sound; she had heard it thousands of times before. One of her grubs had hatched.

Hot fire blazed through Chrysalis’s body. She needed to get Cadance out of her cave as fast as possible, and she wanted to keep Lightbulb if she could. She appreciated Eventide’s loyalty, in a way, but her eggs came first.

Cadance had been regarding her with pity and then disgust, but now all she saw was fear. Chrysalis bounded towards her, hissing and snarling with her tongue fully extended.

More little cries behind her. The eggs were hatching together.

“I will do whatever it takes to raise them and keep them safe,” Chrysalis said. “And if you don’t leave my sight now, I'll peel your flesh from your bones, Princess. Take that librarian and leave!”

Cadance did just that, backing out of the cave and levitating Amethyst’s cocoon down the hill. She hopped down the hill, fluttering her injured wing to break her fall as she got away from the cave as soon as possible.

Chrysalis was not delusional; she knew that it would not be long until Cadance returned with the entire royal guard of the Crystal Empire to get Lightbulb back. Cadance was a planner and would likely put together something well-laid with Starlight to catch her, so Chrysalis needed to be faster.

She turned back to her grubs. Most of them were out of their egg cases now, small and hissing. Chrysalis had filled their stomachs with love harvested from the town before they were born, and they wouldn’t need feeding for at least half a day while they learned what it was to be alive.

They looked excellent, strong and healthy. Chrysalis had never seen so many hatch at the same time before; she wondered what it was that had led them to emerge all at once.

Had it been the fight? She had seen multiple eggs hatch at the same time before if they were fed very close to hatching time.

It hit her. She hadn’t brought them love, she had shown them love by defending them, and they had responded in kind.

She had a moment of disgust at being anything resembling Thorax before she realised that she really did love them. She had proved it, by standing up to an alicorn just to keep them safe.

Chrysalis picked up one of the little grubs. It really was perfectly formed, fat and strong with bright eyes that gazed straight at her. Up close, she could see that unlike the larvae she had produced in her old hive, these ones had fully formed legs, with no holes. They were still hers - they were black and shiny and hissing, unlike Thorax’s band of cowards - but they were whole.

14. Grab

Time was short. She had at most a few hours, and her grubs needed to hatch out on their own, no matter how much she tried to hurry them with pleading and fretting. She knew from experience that changeling larvae couldn’t be cut free from their eggs to hasten hatching; they had to do it themselves, or they wouldn’t start breathing.

She couldn’t leave any of them behind, and because of that, she might get caught.

The sun shifted across the morning sky. As the last of her hatchlings cut themselves loose, she heard hoofsteps approaching her cave and she readied herself for a fight.

“It’s just me. Please don’t kill me.” Eventide’s voice. His head, blocking the daylight from the cave entrance. He had no doubt come back to take Lightbulb from Chrysalis, but she couldn’t afford to lose him now.

Eventide was alone. He picked his way into the cavern awkwardly. He had clearly taken a bath since she had last seen him, and that haggard, hungry look had eased a little from his face.

“What do you want?” Chrysalis said.

“You’re welcome for me leading those guards away. Anyway, I’m here to help you get out of here. If you stay here then you’re fucked; I heard the guards putting together their plan for raiding your cave,” Eventide said. “We need to get you and the eggs to safety.”

“Why are you helping me?” Chrysalis said, her eyes narrowing. He looked past her at the already-hatched grubs, trying to climb her tail and hind legs, and she could see that spark of interest come back into his eyes.

“I want Lightbulb back, safe and sound. And in exchange, I get to help you and your brood get to safety, and I get to claim you blackmailed me at the end,” Eventide said.

Chrysalis barked out a cold laugh. This pony was a freak.

“I’m glad your grubs hatched safely. I was worried when I saw Cadance turn back for you that it was over,” he said.

“This is all to satisfy your pony curiosity?” Chrysalis said.

“Yeah. And you do have Lightbulb; if I leave now you’re going to eat him,” Eventide said with a preemptive wince.

Chrysalis laughed properly this time. “Yes, I am. Pony, do you know how to operate a train?”

“I, uh,” he faltered for a moment. “When I was a kid I loved trains, so maybe? How hard could it be?”

“That is good enough,” Chrysalis said.

Another tiny cry behind her. Chrysalis turned to see the very last larva pip and break its egg, crawling out. She had a healthy brood, with a good mix of workers and drones. Now she needed to act as their queen and get them out of here.

“I’ve packed myself some food and supplies, and I drafted your hive plans like you asked,” Eventide said.

“Good. You will use your magic to lift the cocoon with your Lightbulb inside down to the station. I will take care of my brood. Originally I planned to ambush the last train of the day, but there is no time in hoof for these things. We must take what we can get; after all, Cadance is already on high alert.”

Eventide nodded. He pulled a pocket knife out of his saddlebag and started to cut Lightbulb down. “He’s going to be so pissed when he gets out of here,” Eventide said.

“Take him out now,” Chrysalis said, and with some effort, Eventide magically pulled Lightbulb’s cocoon out of the cave.

She was glad to see the last of this place. It was small and cramped and damp, and she had almost perished here after laying her eggs. She had spent too many nights experiencing a creeping fear of what was to come, and now she was to say goodbye.

It had taken Chrysalis a long time to work out how she was going to transport her young. Her one advantage was that they hatched able to follow orders, and were endlessly loyal to her; free thought came after pupation.

In the Everfree Forest, where Chrysalis had survived for some time, she had once witnessed a father cragadile transporting hundreds of his newly hatched offspring in his slightly opened mouth, their small faces peeking out, dreaming of a future where they, too, were enormous beasts capable of swallowing a pony with a chomp and a spray of blood.

She gathered her brood from the corners of the cave they were crawling into, already exploring with their soft limbs. It relieved her to see how active and inquisitive they were; she had seen plenty of larva in her time that were listless and weak, and knew those ones were not long for this world. They often hatched from defective eggs, and Chrysalis had done what she could to weed those ones out.

Once she remembered she had resented Alate for stationing her in the nursery when Chrysalis was so well suited for the guard or for scouting parties, although Alate had always claimed that her leadership skills were most appropriate for moulding the young. Now she was grateful for how well she knew the tasks.

Chrysalis had them all in front of her. She flared her wings out and told them, in the secret changeling language that they chittered to each other from birth, that they had to enter her mouth and stay still until she turned back into her queenly form. They lined themselves up, their bodies moving almost without their own understanding, until they were ready.

With a flash of green light, Chrysalis became the largest cragadile that she could, or at least, the largest that would still fit out of this cave. It was a risk, because cragadiles were ill-suited to cold, but Chrysalis had learned a lot about pushing through while her limbs froze.

She opened her mouth. The cragadile’s mouth was astoundingly powerful; slow and weak to open, but capable of snapping shut hard and fast enough to shatter a pony’s leg or rip off a pony head. She had never tried to use this body to fight, but already she could feel the poised power at her command, along with the muscular tail perfect for swiping an enemy off their feet.

Instead of any of these things, she held her mouth just a little open, and kept it perfectly still while her grubs climbed in and gripped onto her teeth. They were endlessly trusting and endlessly obedient, and Chrysalis did not know if it was the cragadile’s natural instinct or her own, but there was no way she would close her mouth now.

Excerpt: Changeling Mimicry and its Limitations

I found a willing participant in ‘Kevin’, a changeling that frequently visits Ponyville to meet with his friend, a local donkey. When I told him I was looking for an adult changeling to display their shapeshifting abilities to me he was excited to show me what he could do. I have noted in the past that many changelings view their powers as a point of pride, and even timid Ocellus, my own student, was more than eager to display her favourite morphs.

I had a pre-prepared list of organisms and objects I wanted Kevin to transform into, and I’ll list the results below:

PONY: Like other changelings I’ve seen, Kevin was excellent at transforming into different ponies. He can copy voice and intonation very easily, and even mimic body language in real time. He says copying other sapient creatures comes most easily to him.

GRIFFON: He also excelled in transforming into griffons, and could fly and screech just like a real griffon. He says that although he’s barely met any griffons, it’s very simple for him to figure out how to imitate them. His exact words were ‘almost instinctual’.

DRAGON: Kevin has transformed into dragons in the past, he told me, but only for the purpose of intimidating others, and he has never tried to copy their mannerisms or speech. I had him try to imitate Spike first, which he found to be easy enough; I then asked him to try changing into a large adult dragon, and while he could do it physically, he had not learned dragon mannerisms and so couldn’t replicate them.

YAK: Kevin was not familiar with yaks and so at first struggled to change into one. When I introduced him to Yona he was immediately able to imitate her with high fidelity.

URSA MAJOR: Having travelled through the Everfree Forest, Kevin had actually encountered an Ursa Major before, and he did an excellent job copying it. I was curious as to whether he could replicate their semi-translucency and the glittery/starry effect it provided, and he was able to.

FLASH BEE: I picked flash bee because I doubted that Kevin had ever seen one before, or even heard of one. He hadn’t, and even after I described them to him he couldn’t do it. He needed to see it in the flesh or at least in a series of good photographs.

MUSHROOM: Kevin easily transformed into the mushroom examples I gave him (Calvatia gigantea, Amanita muscaria, Agaricus bisporus) but only the actual mushroom part, as he was unaware until I explained to him that the majority of a mushroom is the mycelium network. Even after this explanation and several diagrams he found it too complex.

STONE: Kevin did a great job morphing into several different stones of various sizes, and could even make up new shapes of stone to morph into. He claimed that it’s easy because stones are very similar regardless of their shape.

BOOK: With any given book, Kevin was able to imitate the cover and shape convincingly, but he was unable to imitate the contents, usually giving the book too few pages (and making the pages thicker). Even with books he knew well he could not repeat the literary contents with any fidelity.

TREE: When given examples Kevin was able to imitate trees he had already seen, although I would note that he couldn’t copy their root structure and so it wouldn’t quite hold up to closer inspection. Kevin was not able to imagine a new type of tree to transform into, and he claimed that trees are too complex.

My conclusion is that changeling shapeshifting seems geared towards transformation into other sapient creatures and extends to an innate ability to imitate the body language, speech patterns, and other idiosyncratic traits of these creatures. They are able to extend this physical change to cover inanimate objects and non-sapient creatures, but this is limited to things they are familiar with and also has a boundary of complexity, where particularly intricate specimens far removed from the animal kingdom were beyond his abilities.

I am immensely grateful to Kevin for his contributions to my research.

Chrysalis pulled herself out of the crevice, the rocky protrusions on her back catching on the roof of the crevice as she did. Eventide was so startled by her terrifying appearance that for a split second he dropped Lightbulb’s cocoon before quickly catching it again.

“Let’s - let’s get moving, eh?” Eventide said. She could hear his breathing rate inch up.

Chrysalis started walking. The snow was unpleasant on her limbs and belly, making her feel sluggish and uncomfortable, and it was packed deep enough that she had to force her chest through it with each stride. Her eye, perched on the side of her head, scanned over the hillside. She was too low to the ground to see any of the Crystal Empire, and her hearing didn’t catch anything.

“When I left they were still preparing. We should have time,” Eventide said. He started trotting ahead of her across the hillside. She wouldn’t say it, but she was grateful; emerging from the cave in this form had disoriented her a little.

The grubs seemed to be staying put, all balanced in her mouth. It was a tight fit, and some had retreated further back into her gullet to find some space. She found herself able to cover her throat to stop herself from swallowing them.

“I can see the station from up here,” Eventide said. “There’s no train there now, but there’s a bunch of people gathered on the platform. Hopefully that means one is about to arrive.”

Chrysalis tried to vocalise to respond, and found a deep, sinister burbling sound rising in her. Eventide didn’t react, and she wondered if it had been too low-pitched for pony hearing.

As they cleared the last rise, the train station came into focus. She had no doubt that her appearance would be terrifying enough to get the ponies to flee, but she needed to wait until the train had arrived and emptied, or it might prove too chaotic.

“You should probably see if we can kidnap the current train driver. Rather than trusting me to do it, I mean,” Eventide said.

Motion caught her eye, and she turned her head. There was a train snaking its way through the frozen north; they were in luck.

Eventide had paused next to her, clearly waiting for her word. Up here on the hill they were no more than a strange shape for the ponies waiting on the train platform below.

The train pulled into the station; ponies disembarked, and the train cooled down as the luggage cart was unpacked. Now was the time.

With the advantage of the downhill slope she broke into a lurching gallop down the hill, letting that guttural sound out of her throat. The first pony to notice her was a crystal pony, who let out a shriek of alarm and started running towards the city, leaving everyone behind.

Fear spread quickly through the group of waiting ponies. Some ran inside the station building, hoping that Chrysalis couldn’t fit through the door; others followed the first pony and ran towards the city.

Behind her she heard the soft crunching sounds of Eventide trotting down the hill behind her.

To her frustration, some of the ponies unloading the luggage were hiding inside the luggage car. She wondered if there was a way to separate each of the cars of the train. But first, she needed to put her babies somewhere safe.

Chrysalis picked a train carriage with a double door entrance and shoved the front half of her body into the train, hovering her snout above some of the seats. Then she changed back into her natural form, sending her grubs bouncing down onto the seats.

She spoke to them and told them to stay on the cushions for now, and then moved out of the way as Eventide hopped onto the train and gently placed Lightbulb’s cocoon down onto the floor, leaning against the wall.

“Go and find a way to detach the carriages behind us from the train,” Chrysalis said. “I will take care of the train driver.”

Eventide nodded and ran to the back of the carriage, sliding open the rear door. Chrysalis left her grubs in his care, something that felt natural now that he had proven his loyalty, although the idea of leaving her children in the hands of some pony would have previously disgusted her. Needs must.

The train driver was an elderly unicorn who didn’t react as she jumped into his cabin. He was concentrating on cleaning up something underneath the mess of levers and pulleys and switches that made up the control surface. The cabin was hot, hot enough that Chrysalis felt nauseated coming in from the cold snow.

“Train driver pony,” Chrysalis said, raising her voice to be heard above the hissing steam.

“What was that?” the old unicorn said, his voice muffled by the wrench in his mouth. He turned to face her, nudging his cap out of his eyes, and then flinched in terror, all four legs splayed onto the metal flooring. “Changeling! Help!” he yelled as the wrench clattered to the floor.

“Nopony is coming to help,” Chrysalis purred. “I need you to make this train operational. You’re taking me through Canterlot Station to the undiscovered west.”

“Or what?” the train driver said, puffing his chest out.

“Or you’re going in there,” Chrysalis said, pointing a hoof at the mouth of the coal burner. “My unicorn accomplice will get this train working anyway, and your pathetic resistance will have been for nothing.”

“Y-yes, ma’am,” the driver said, deflating.

“Does this train have a radio? I will need to call ahead to warn ponies to stay out of my way,” Chrysalis said.

He picked up a boxy unit with a mouthpiece and earpiece and gave it to her. “I can get the train running in a few minutes,” he said.

Eventide would likely know how to use the radio. Chrysalis picked it up with her magic. She would prefer to stay here and supervise the train driver to ensure he wasn’t playing any games with her, but there was no way she was leaving her brood without her for that long.

She could send Eventide to supervise, but that might give the pair of them the chance to collude. She trusted Eventide to an extent, but Chrysalis did not believe in completely trusting any pony.

Chrysalis would have to trust that her threats, and the fear this pony felt towards her, would be enough.

“Good. Don’t fail me. I want to be out of pony lands posthaste,” Chrysalis said.

She leapt out of the train cabin and into the passenger car. Eventide had taken a seat on one of the benches, a respectful distance away from her grubs, who were already starting to get a little impatient.

“Take this radio,” Chrysalis said. “Get it working. We’ll need to call ahead to Canterlot Station so they direct this train to the right place.”

Eventide nodded, taking the radio from her. “Oh, cool. It uses a magical relay system with the radio spikes along the train tracks to -” he caught her facial expression. “You don’t care. Right. Yeah, I can get it working, no problem.”

Chrysalis spent a few minutes moving her grubs to different bench seats to give them room to move around. No doubt their fussiness now was to an extent hunger, and Chrysalis did what she could to feed them. It would be gauche now to suggest taking any part of Lightbulb for them.

Underneath her, she felt the train steadily start to move off. They were headed south.

15. Migration

“This is Professor Eventide of Canterlot University-”

“How did you access this radio line?” the voice on the other side demanded.

“I, along with my partner Lightbulb and the train driver of the Canterlot-Crystal Empire line have been kidnapped by Queen Chrysalis of the changelings. We’re under threat of death right now and we're being held on the train, which is currently heading south,” Eventide said. He didn’t even hesitate as he lied. Chrysalis had seen changeling soldiers less capable of selling it.

There were several seconds of silence on the other side of the phone line, before a different, much more serious voice started speaking. “Professor Eventide, this is Controller Grand Central, calling you from Canterlot Train Station. We hear your report of being hijacked. What are the hijacker’s demands?”

“Queen Chrysalis is demanding safe passage by train to the unexplored west. According to the maps I’ve been looking at, the minor stop at Whitetail Wood is the closest place to where she wants to go,” Eventide said. “I would like to stress that I have been a captive of Queen Chrysalis for some weeks now, Controller, and she will make good on her threats. I strongly recommend you do what she wants.”

Chrysalis grinned. It felt good to have some leverage and power again, even if it would be temporary.

Eventide began describing what she wanted to have happen at Canterlot Station, and Chrysalis focused again on settling her grubs.

“I’ve done all of this for you,” she said to them. She looked at the window at the scenery passing by; it was already transitioning from endless snow to the temperate pastures of Equestria. “Soon you all will be free to grow up and help me rebuild, and we will thrive together in our new hive.”

The grubs eased a little. Chrysalis realised she had managed to feed them with her own affection again. It certainly was convenient.

She wondered if she would transform into one of Eventide’s described ‘pacifist’ changelings if she kept this up, like Thorax had. She hoped not.

The pride of changelings was their ability to survive by feeding on others, tricking and sneaking their way into pony’s lives. Chrysalis had always been proud of her abilities, and she hoped to pass them on to her new hive, not join Thorax in befriending ponies and becoming an embarrassment.

Thorax had willingly changed to become the new queen. Chrysalis would not let it happen to her, and she hoped that this conviction was a strong enough ward to keep this fate away.

Eventide put the radio away. “Alright, looks like we have clear passage through Canterlot Station. He said a lot of things about a hostage exchange or setting up negotiations with you, but I fobbed him off. Said you were too unstable and I was afraid for my life.”

“Excellent,” Chrysalis said. “There is still a chance we may be waylaid at the Canterlot Station, perhaps by the royal guards attempting to stop us from continuing.”

“Honestly, I doubt it. Too risky to try to slow down a speeding train with hostages onboard, and they don’t have any way of communicating with our driver, unless he has a second hidden radio, which I don’t think he does,” Eventide said.

Chrysalis could see a mountain range in the far distance, to the west. On the east side a vast series of canyons and gorges opened the ground like clawmarks. She recognised none of the terrain, aside from snippets caught through these same windows when she had traveled to Canterlot as Amethyst.

The train was traveling faster this time around. No doubt the driver was prepared to take her threats literally and wanted to get her to her destination as fast as possible. It was already getting later in the afternoon now; perhaps he thought if he didn’t get her there by midnight she would appear in the driver’s cabin and make good on her promise.

“Do queens normally take an active role in raising larvae, or is this just the result of exceptional circumstances?” Eventide asked.

“The queen’s duty is to produce eggs and lead feeding missions,” Chrysalis said. “But more importantly it is her job to do whatever it takes to keep the hive at its strongest. And if that means I spend my time caring for grubs, then so be it. No task is beneath me if there is no changeling else who could do it.”

Chrysalis had not always thought of things this way, she could admit. When she had taken control of the hive from Tarsus, she had been the recipient of a healthy, hungry hive that wanted nothing more than to follow her orders. It was easy to take these things for granted, and her series of easy victories against foolish pony leaders had only added to her feeling of untouchability.

She could still remember the moment she had turned from a confident young changeling princess into a fear-inspiring queen; she would never forget the feeling of Celestia’s spell tearing through her body as she tried to push through the spell and finally slay the pony ruler.

The smell of ichor sprayed around her body, her changelings in a state of shock as they dealt with their wounds, and her legs faltering while she tried to keep advancing on Celestia.

What had made her stop was seeing her own guts bulging out one of the holes in her side and realising that pushing forward would lead to her defeat.

Well, she had eventually been defeated, and it was from the creeping influence of friendship, not an honourable loss on the battlefield.

One of her grubs nudged her hoof, rubbing its little legs against one of the holes Celestia had blasted. These grubs would grow up without them.

The radio crackled to life as they approached Canterlot. Chrysalis had been watching the mountain with the city perched on the side grow larger out the train window, and she thought they had at most a quarter of an hour before they arrived.

“We see your train approaching the city,” the radio said.

“Yes, that’s us. Are we all good for the switcher to the west line?” Eventide said.

“We’ve cancelled incoming trains to make way for you. Can you verify your safety?” Grand Central said.

“Yes, Lightbulb and myself are safe. I can’t see the driver since he’s in the train cabin, but since the train is still going, I’m guessing he’s okay,” Eventide said.

“The current plan is to have you stop and let Queen Chrysalis and her changelings off the train at Whitetail Woods and then have you and the other hostages proceed forward to Los Pegasus Station,” Grand said. “Is that acceptable to Chrysalis?”

Eventide shot a look at Chrysalis, who gave a disinterested shrug. Exactly what happened to this train after she left it was of no interest to her. She was hoping that she could make sufficient headway to the west before the ponies came looking for her for reprisal.

Would they chase her down if she didn’t have any hostages left? No doubt they would want her imprisoned, no matter that her hive could not survive without her there.

If there was anything changelings could do, it was hide.

The station was approaching. Chrysalis could feel the train slowing down as they approached the tunnel under the mountain; she thought for a moment that it was just slowing to take the turn safely, but the slowing continued until they crawled into the station and came to a stop at a platform.

Excerpt: Princess Celestia’s Diary, 2nd Moon, 15th Day

Although I am most delighted that the threat posed by Queen Chrysalis and her changelings has been vanquished for the time being, one mystery still remains. The spell that I prepared to combat Chrysalis was intended to remove the love she had drained and banish her back to her own lands, but instead it peppered her and her subjects’ bodies with holes.

I have never seen this reaction before. The changelings fled shortly afterwards, seemingly unaffected by these perforations, so I did not have the chance to look more closely at what my magic had wrought.

My current theory as to why this might have happened is that Chrysalis’s desire to attack me was stronger than the love-draining spell she had used, and so instead of being banished the love was simply ripped piecemeal from her body.

None of the trains were moving. The platforms closest to where they were coming through were deserted. Chrysalis could see ponies hiding away from the platforms, inside the ticket booths and behind other trains. She could have heard a pin fall as their train rolled to a stop.

“Why are we stopping?” Chrysalis snarled.

The elderly train driver pulled himself out of the cabin. Chrysalis whirled out of the train car door and in a moment was standing in front of him while he trembled in fear.

“Why are we stopping?” Chrysalis repeated in his face.

“It’s the train, ma’am. We need to refill the tender with water, or we won’t have enough steam to make it to Whitetail Woods,” he said, shrinking away.

Chrysalis didn’t know enough about trains to know if this was true. She whirled around and poked her head through the carriage doors.

“The driver says we need to put water in the train. Is this true?” Chrysalis asked.

“Yes, probably. Do you want me to come supervise?” Eventide said.

Chrysalis squinted for a moment. “No. I will monitor the situation from here.”

She took up a position standing stiffly next to the train, her eyes fixed on the driver, while he called for help refilling the train. From inside a workshop, another unicorn carefully levitated the water hose into the tender.

The driver’s eyes were flickering back to her every few seconds. Chrysalis was glad to see it.

She was surprised that Twilight or another Canterlot official or guard hadn’t come down to supervise, but then again, this stop was unexpected. The last thing she needed was another tussle with a fully powered up alicorn, especially one as magically capable as Twilight.

The enormous station was completely silent aside from the train hissing and the water gurgling. It was like a hive, with tunnels emerging from the station in all directions and ponies creeping between walls and structures to monitor her.

“It’s ready,” the train driver said, his voice weak.

“Good. Get us going again,” Chrysalis said. She watched as he climbed back into the cabin and started preparing the train to move again. Once she was sure he wasn’t about to scarper, she got back into the train.

Eventide was in there trying to corral her grubs into not following her out the door. Chrysalis spoke a few sharp words to the grubs and they immediately stopped resisting and got back to minding their own business.

The train started to move. Chrysalis locked eyes with a few of the hiding ponies for just a moment before the train was out on the other side of the mountain, approaching Ponyville.

Yes, she had seen this on the map. This line would go through Ponyville on its way to Whitetail Woods. She had wondered for a moment if Twilight Sparkle’s friends might decide to involve themselves in her journey; she wouldn’t put it past them.

They thought that she had Eventide at knifepoint; Twilight was a friend or at least acquaintance of his, and no doubt she was involving herself in this series of events.

“I will return Lightbulb to you after I have arrived. Once freed from his cocoon he should regain consciousness quickly; the cocoon extends my stasis spell, and will cease functioning when the cocoon is broken,” Chrysalis told Eventide.

“Oh, good. I’d ask if we can wake him up now, but I’m not sure he’ll be calm when he wakes up,” Eventide said.

“Do as you wish,” Chrysalis said. She was confident she could overpower Lightbulb again if need be.

Eventide dithered, and Chrysalis went back to looking out the window.

They were approaching Ponyville now. The station was small, and was also deserted, aside from the orange pony - Applejack? - standing on the platform.

The train whooshed past Applejack too without hesitation. Chrysalis wondered what she was planning, if she had some intention of trying to lasso the train to rescue her captives, but all she did was stare Chrysalis down through the train window, implicitly threatening.

Chrysalis was becoming more certain that even when she reached the west, she would not be safe.

The grubs were already fussing enough to want to move around the train. Chrysalis wished she had some kind of enclosure to keep them in, but this would have to do. She ensured that the windows were closed and the doors firmly latched before helping them down from the bench seats and letting them crawl all over the floor. They immediately began trying to fight each other and chase each other around, and Chrysalis allowed herself a rare smile.

A sharp impact slammed her in the back and sent her sprawling. She moved her legs as quickly as possible to avoid landing on any of her grubs, bouncing off her hooves and flapping her wings to pull herself into the air and turn around.

Lightbulb lunged at her, wings flared and mouth open to bite, while Eventide yelled behind him to get him to stop.

“Lightbulb! It’s okay! You don’t understand!” Eventide said.

Lightbulb froze mid-lunge while Chrysalis charged magic to try and fight him off. She was still not at her strongest after her fight with Cadance earlier in the day - and it felt like this day had taken forever - but she was strong enough to duel a pegasus.

“You don’t want to fight me,” Chrysalis hissed.

“Where am I?” Lightbulb said. “What did you do to me?”

“Eventide. You let Lightbulb out of his cage; you deal with the consequences,” Chrysalis said.

“Sweetie. We’re helping Chrysalis get her larvae to safety in exchange for your freedom. There’s nothing to get worked up about, we’re going to be fine,” Eventide said.

“We’re helping her?” Lightbulb said. He backed up a couple of steps, taking his hooves away from the grubs, and Chrysalis relaxed.

“Yeah. Look, we’re going to the unexplored west on this train. We’ll be there in a few hours and then it will all be sorted. I thought you’d want to be awake to see it all played out,” Eventide said.

“I … would rather I was awake,” Lightbulb admitted. “How long have I been out?”

“A couple of weeks,” Eventide said.

“Weeks?” Lightbulb said, his voice strangled.

“Yes. You should be happy; I’m saving you from getting eaten right now,” Eventide said happily.

“You’re insane,” Lightbulb said. Eventide gave a benign shrug, and Lightbulb frowned. “And you’re not doing this just for your scholarly interests, of course.”

Eventide smiled. “Of course. I’d never do something crazy like this just to satisfy my curiosity.”

Lightbulb barely reacted to this, turning his attention back to Chrysalis. “The backroom of the library,” he said. A statement, not a question.

“Amethyst Maresbury made a most perfect disguise, and you walked right into my clutches. I must thank you; your disappearance gave me the perfect disguise with which to lure in Professor Eventide,” Chrysalis said.

Lightbulb ignored this, peering past her. Chrysalis had put her body between Lightbulb and her grubs, who were continuing to obliviously play with each other on the floor.

“Well, obviously I’m not going to hurt a bunch of babies,” Lightbulb huffed, finally fully disengaging with Chrysalis and walking to the other end of the passenger car to aggressively sit down on the bench. Eventide followed him and the pair started talking quietly enough that Chrysalis didn’t care to listen.

Chrysalis watched Ponyville recede from their view as they headed towards the last switching station of their ride. This one was remote, with no passenger station attached to it.

Night was rapidly falling. The train line wasn’t lit all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, and sunset orange blazed across the fields.

The open crop fields of Ponyville had transformed into a temperate forest regrowing its leaves for spring. There was a slight shudder as they were directed south at the switch, and the trees grew thicker as they headed into Whitetail Woods. They were almost there.

She felt the train begin to slow a long time before the station. At the high speed they had been traveling, it would take a long time for them to come to a complete stop.

“I will transport my brood out of here the way I brought them in here,” Chrysalis told Eventide. “You will go ahead and inform the train driver that he is safe and needs to head forward to that city that the radio pony mentioned. Then we will part ways.”

“Wait! I’ve got the documents I said I would prep for you,” Eventide said, levitating off his saddlebag and handing it over to Chrysalis.

“Ah, yes. The plans for my new and most beautiful hive,” Chrysalis said.

Eventide nodded. “Thank you for letting me study you,” he said. “It’s my life’s dearest wish.”

Chrysalis let out an indifferent grunt. “I appreciate your loyalty, pony. You would make a good changeling if you were born in a better body.”

Eventide laughed at that, but Chrysalis hadn’t been joking.

The train finally came to a stop. Chrysalis instructed her brood on what to do, climbed out of the train, and turned back into the giant cragadile, the saddlebag now laying around her vast neck. She saw Lightbulb jump in terror, to her delight. Then she opened her mouth and felt her brood carefully climb in, and once she was sure they were all in her mouth, she retreated from the train and began withdrawing towards the dying light of the setting sun.

Eventide waved goodbye with a hoof and called, “I’ll come visit you!” at her retreating back.

Chrysalis did not respond. But she made a mental note to let her changelings know to not kill grey unicorns on sight.

Author's Note

Last chapter will be posted tomorrow!

16. Hinterland 2

It was good to be free of the burning cold of the far north. Here the land was mostly covered in subtropical jungle, warm and wet with thick undergrowth that would have impeded the progress of a smaller animal.

Chrysalis planned to run through the night. If the ponies were planning reprisal they would likely wait until daytime, spending their time now fussing over her ex-captives.

She was surprised to find that her cragadile form was versatile and resilient in this terrain, which was much closer to what it had been built for. Her flat body squeezed through undergrowth and her stubby, hard claws kept her footing even.

If she tilted her head to the side she could see the lowland swamps to the north of her and the mountain ranges to the south. Mountain ranges were a good sign; lots of free rock and grit for building a hive with.

Hives fared best on dry, flat ground where they could create a pest-free zone around them. Chrysalis had to hope she would find someone like that as she trotted west.

She could feel her body grow hungrier the longer she ran in the night, and despite her control over them her grubs started to fuss, wanting to be fed. She found that new place within herself that was fiercely protective over them and willing to do all of this ridiculous nonsense just to let them grow up safe and sound. They calmed a little, but it wouldn’t last. Once she got hungry enough she would have to try and find some local creature to feed on to gain enough energy to push forward.

The jungle got lighter as the subalpine area stretched down to meet the swamplands. Soon it would peter out and she would be exposed to the skies. She opted to take a break and go to hunt now while it was still dark and while she could still hide her young.

She turned back into her natural form and found a hollow log that she could coerce them into. Like all babies they had no idea that they could ever be in any danger, so Chrysalis knew that she would have to put them somewhere they couldn’t get out and cause trouble.

Once she had them settled she took to the air and started browsing the foliage around her. Her night vision was much more keen than a pony’s, and she soon found a family of monkeys sleeping together in the canopy of a tree.

When she returned to the log, her grubs cried out for her, and she dropped the skinned corpse of a monkey down to them and told them to eat. When she heard the squelch of their mouthparts on flesh she went to the stream to wash the blood off her face and hooves.

Their first solid meal, so early. She was happy they were eating so vigorously.

The rosy fingers of dawn were creeping over the horizon back the way she’d come. Back towards Equestria, and pony civilisation. Chrysalis would return there one day a fully powered queen, but for now, the light of dawn brought only a feeling of vulnerability that she didn’t enjoy.

She returned to cragadile form, where her rocky back would camouflage her from the skies, and once again began her interminable march west.

As the sun rose she caught movement in the corners of her eyes and saw royal pegasus guards flying overhead. With them were blue-costumed pegasi, including the rainbow one that was friends with Twilight Sparkle.

Suspicious behaviour would be to react. Chrysalis steadily left the jungle, following the downhill slope to the wetlands that filled the bottom of this enormous valley, and kept walking as though she wasn’t being watched. She took time to pause and to swim like any normal cragadile would, always watching the pegasi to monitor them, until around midday they finally peeled away and left her be.

They might be back, but there was no way they could search this entire peninsula just to find her once she had traveled far enough. Eventide or Lightbulb might still give her plans up, but she felt confident enough in saying that Eventide had shown that he wasn’t one to deceive her.

The valley slowly rose under her feet, and the wetlands transitioned to grassland divided by a meandering, wide river. She was walled in on both sides by the sloping mountain ranges; ahead of her the mountain ranges came together, leaving only a narrow pass with which to continue west. Here the grasslands were surrounded by a bowl of mountains that would protect her and her grubs from any foot soldiers.

It was perfect.

Excerpt: Royal Guard Notes on Changeling Defector

Notes recorded from an interview with Sepal, a changeling who left Queen Chrysalis’s hive in the months following the changeling siege of Canterlot.

Sepal is forthcoming about the poor conditions in Chrysalis’s hive, describing a culture of fear and intimidation which begins with childhood bullying and progresses to a strictly controlled society. Sepal is uncertain as to whether this is considered ‘normal’ changeling behaviour due to unfamiliarity with any other kind of changeling social structure.

Sepal describes the paranoia experienced by the hive queen which has led her to become overly vengeful against ponies to the detriment of the health of the hive, which has periods of going hungry as a result of Chrysalis’s inactivity during periods of plotting against Equestria.

Sepal is a younger changeling (hatched within the last four years) and has no insight as to how far into Chrysalis’s history this behaviour extends.

Sepal describes himself as loyal to his fellow changelings but disloyal to Chrysalis due to the harm she has caused the hive. He states that if conditions in the hive were to improve, with Chrysalis showing care for her subjects, then he would be more than happy to return.

Note: When Thorax became the changeling leader, Sepal repatriated to the changeling hive.

In a glacial valley in the unexplored west, a cragadile stops, spits out a hundred or so grubs from its mouth, and then transforms back into an insect queen.

The queen checks on her grubs, patting each one on the head, and promises them they will have somewhere to shelter by tonight, just in case it gets cold. She pulls the saddlebag off her back and takes out papers and a few books left to her by a strange unicorn, and goes through them. Minutes later she transforms into a maulwurf, using the mole-like body to dig out a hollow for her grubs to rest in.

She flies away as a bugbear and brings back rocks and logs to position over the nest, protecting her grubs from the skies, then climbs inside the shelter and lets her grubs curl up with her for comfort.

Her love feeds them. The queen finds herself wondering if she would have been capable of these acts years ago when the hive was something to be taken for granted, an extension of herself incapable of having needs of its own.

A glow begins in her horn and starts to spread down her body. She lets out a cry of purest despair, and her grubs move away from her, fearing for their safety.

There’s no need; their queen is merely transforming.

The queen fights the process the whole way until the light dissipates. She looks over her limbs, desperate to make sure she hasn’t lost the black lustre of her carapace, but she is instead what she used to be; whole, without the voids torn through her.

The perforations which had covered her body for the last millennia have faded away, leaving her body smooth and complete.

She lets out a sigh of relief, flutters her newly repaired wings, and returns to caring for her brood.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading!