Portrait of a Monarch

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.