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!