Portrait of a Monarch

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.