Path of a daughter

The throne room of the Castle of Two Sisters has been rebuilt into a war room with a large, round table in front of the throne currently showing a holographic projection of the Equestrian campaign. Griffon forces have taken the eastern coastline from Manehattan all the way to Maretime Bay, while Nightmare Moon’s forces have successfully cut off central Equestria from the southern port cities through which the states of northern Zebrica have been sending help ever since a full-scale war broke out.

The throne room is empty with the exception of Nightmare Moon observing the map, the Queen and two more of her kin, Nightmare Moon’s bat pony General Grim Sky, and the griffon Commander Arius responsible for relaying communication and the synchronization of operations between Nightmare Moon and the griffon Generals.

“We are stuck pushing north but we’ve recently lost numerous patrols along the southern edge, specifically near the Everfree Forest and the Badlands,” says Nightmare Moon, conjuring a glowing pointer and first aiming it at a wide, open farmlands south of Canterlot before encircling the southeastern front, “As far as we know, there’s nothing in those areas that shouldn’t threaten an organized military unit. Arius, we need the Manehattan force to pressure Celestia’s army for the next month, give or take, so that we can withdraw some forces from the Canterlot line and push deeper into the suspicious areas to the south.”

Arius, deep in thought, circles around the table to see from Nightmare Moon’s point of view. When he’s just in front of her, he rises on his hind legs, turns sharply, and plunges a talon directly into the alicorn’s eye and…

… out through the back of her skull?

A burst of green flame envelops the griffon, revealing a creature curiously similar to the queen’s kin - a sleek, equine mare covered in black carapace instead of a coat, with glowing, teal, iris-less eyes, showing the fangs in her mouth as she smiles. A long and sharp, black spike is protruding from her hoof rammed through Nightmare Moon’s head.

“Queen Chrysalis’ sends her regards and condolences,” the unknown mare chuckles, “The changeling hive will-”

*CRACK!*

Blue, telekinetic glow envelops her and jerks her to the side so violently that the spike growing from her foreleg snaps off. Never ceasing to smile through the whole ordeal, Nightmare Moon pulls the biological weapon still covered in blood and brain matter out of her head and examines it with her healthy eye.

“A spy. That explains why our offensives were so uncoordinated with those of the griffons’ recently,” she looks at Grim Sky as if the strange enemy was just a minor inconvenience, “Send a missive to the griffons that Arius is dead and has been replaced by a changeling assassin. If the changelings have entered the war, they should also scour their own ranks for infiltrators. We’ll be tracking down their base.”

To the Queen, she adds:

“Rake through her mind and figure out where exactly the changeling hive is. Don’t bother being gentle. In case it wasn’t clear from the recent events, I’m suspecting the Everfree or the Badlands,” the alicorn tosses the assassin towards the Queen so hard she bounces off of the marble with a loud crack scattering shards of chitin everywhere. Rubbing her impaled eye as it quickly regenerates, she muses, “Note to self - remember to capture an ophthalmologist in the next raid, I don’t think I could pull off glasses.”

Stumped by the alicorn’s resilience bordering on immortality, the Queen nods towards the twitching and bleeding changeling before turning away and leaving for the dungeons. Her two companions grab the assassin and drag her away in tow.

***

Nightmare changelings, nightmares for short, that’s what she called us. Nightmare Moon wasn’t smart or creative, with her kind of power she never needed to be. Yet, we could never fully shapeshift into someone else, only transform parts of ourselves.

With a gasp, the Queen gets pulled out of the memory by cold biting her all over her paper-thin, drained carapace, into the world of rushing wind, loud, mechanical thudding and, most importantly - gravity.

War-honed reflexes kick in despite starvation and exhaustion, and the Queen braces herself for the impact following her brief drop and saving herself from having the wind knocked out of her. She doesn’t know what the hard thing she just slammed into is, but there’s some give to the material, so she gathers her remaining power, grows an ice-pick like spike out of her hoof, and rams it against the surface. It goes through, stopping the roaring wind from blowing her off of the moving thing she fell onto when the portal spell spat her out. Finally having a second to think and breathe, she looks around.

I’m on the roof of something fast and loud.

The fraction of a second to take in the blurry, white scenery rushing past whizzes by as a black figure of her kin flies over her like a rag doll, bouncing off of the roof. The Queen doesn’t wait for anything, drags herself onto all fours, turns around, slides along the metal, frosted-over roof, and uses the leverage of her hooked hoof to jump onto the next of the moving roofs across which the helpless nightmare’s body is currently rolling.

Changeling memories operate on the principle of a hive mind. With the last twenty survivors of a species instinctively sharing and storing knowledge as a collective, most of what they’ve learned over their lifetime is gone. Finally, however, the Queen’s mind comes up with a concept:

A train. We dropped onto the roof of a train.

Ice cracks and shatters when she lands on the next car and slips, the shards cutting her soft carapace and spraying her face. She doesn’t stop herself, instead using her speed and momentum to slide towards the barely conscious nightmare weakly grasping for anything to stop it from moving. Only once she’s within reach, she stabs her hoof into the roof again and grabs the exhausted equine. Their hive links are so weak they can’t communicate, and only up this close the Queen can recognize the mental signature of rank 7 pushing past the brink of death.

The Queen looks across the train. Thankfully, while it’s freezing cold, it’s not snowing, so she can see eighteen other shapes lying spread eagle, scattered across the ten cars of the train, all watching her.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

I’m not losing more of you.

To never lose a war of attrition behind enemy lines, Nightmare Moon’s twisted changelings feed on fear instead of love, and one tool to allow them to do so consistently is their access to sleep magic.

The Queen transforms her hook-hoof into a clawed one and raises it while biting her fangs into the ice covering the roof to slow her immediate slide. Agony followed by numbness quickly spikes through her muzzle as she makes a series of claw signals meaning:

“Split up, use sleep spell, feed, non-lethal unless it’s life or death. Extract back here.”

She doesn’t wait for confirmations and casts a sleeping spell of her own on the car underneath her. If she’s lucky, it’ll last a couple minutes. Her vision swims from the effort and her raised foreleg fails her. Sliding to the back of the car along with 7, the Queen herself has no idea where she’s getting the strength to keep going. Somehow -it’s all a blur now- in a semi-delirious state, she manages to drag 7 down to the space between the cars and then into the open section of the car itself, barely conscious enough to figure out the mysterious inner workings of a handle.

Door to the left. Rattle but don’t open.

Rattle again. They don’t swing open but slide to the side.

A room. A window on the other side with a table underneath. Useless.

Four ponies, two on a padded bench lining the room’s left and right wall each. Finally.

The Queen pulls 7 inside, closes the door behind them, and limps over to the closest sleeper, her eyes closing on their own. Thankfully, her feeding instinct takes over as she struggles to even breathe, much less stand. The pony whimpers and shudders in their sleep as the Queen’s power induces a terrifying dream in them, and slowly, painfully slowly, their fear begins to flow and nourish her.

As soon as she starts feeling her limbs again and can breathe more than just ragged, shallow breaths, she also starts sharing the regained energy with 7, stabilizing the near-dead nightmare over the course of two minutes.

The door slams open and two muscular earth pony stallions rush inside, immediately tackling the Queen. She knocks one out with a perfectly aimed blow to his temple, but the other one gets her into a leg lock. If her carapace wasn’t skin-thin, it would be the stupidest decision possible. Now, though, she can feel his foreleg tightening around her neck and doesn’t have the strength to grow a spike to stab him or anything else anymore.

She stops resisting entirely when the next figure rushes into the coupe. It’s a unicorn stallion with bright blue eyes, sandy blond mane, and bronze-colored changeling carapace instead of a coat. He freezes when he sees her, his eyes bulge, and his jaw drops.

He recognizes her.

Despite the Queen seeing him what was for her almost twenty years ago in his cell in the Castle of Two Sisters before he managed to escape, he looks almost just like he did then. The magical portal must have taken the nightmares through dimensions to a fixed point in time. His reaction only cements the idea that it was a much shorter time for him than for her.

With a raspy, exhausted voice, barely more than a whisper, the Queen says:

“Hi… dad?”