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.