Portrait of a Monarch

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.