New Minds

by Hope

Rating: mature
Tags: Lyra, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Romance, Horror, Queen Chrysalis, Violence, Thorax, Death, Alternate Universe
Length: 2990

A grim exploration of Chrysalis's history in the QCE setting

This is a minor entry in the Queer Crystal Empire setting, consider it to be entry 1.5, exploring the history of Chrysalis in this setting.
Created as a tribute to Kai the Changeling’s birthday.
Cover art used with permission from Underpable, this story was written while listening to a femme cover of "Eat Your Young" originally by Hozier and covered by Justine M.
CW: Murder, laying of eggs, infanticide, cannibalism

Published 2024-12-14 14:50:00 UTC
Last updated 2024-12-14 14:50:00 UTC

Monsters do live in the dark

You think that you know me?

From my fifteen minutes of fame at the hooves of your idols, a snarling villain that was defeated by her latest snack?

You don’t know me, dear reader.

You don’t know me at all.

I’m so much worse than what you know.

It’s been years of planning and desperation. Do you know what it’s like to raise an army you have to birth yourself? On starvation wages, no less, dregs in the gutters of a society that literally does not know that you exist.

My first thousand years are mindless, frantic, until I meet Her.

She dances on a stage, where she belongs. The ponies think this place is lowly and disgraced, a place for carnal desire, but I am the tick that grows fat off the plentiful sweat and blood there. That is my favorite place in all the world, and for some reason a bright beacon of love has walked into it.

It scares me, for a moment, because it is so potent.

But as she sways her hips and blows a kiss to the crowd, I can feel that sweet honey in the back of my throat, and I know that this is what I want. More than breathing, I want it.

She loves us, all of us in that dirty pit at the bottom of the world, and we drink in the love she gives as though it’s the last thing we’ll ever taste.

But no one else in that crowd is like me, no one else is a predator, and as she leaves the stage I abandon the place to stalk her.

It isn’t even a conscious decision, or a desire, but rather it is as natural to me as breathing.

Next time you wonder where the loving and pure ponies of the world have all gone, remember that I’m not the only one that eats them.

She screams in fear when she finds me in her bedroom, but I’m not cruel. I know how to treat my meals, and fear isn’t my flavor.

I become a million things, until I find what she wants. I stand over her as a tan coated pegasus stallion, with green eyes bright and curious, and a mess of white hair. She loves me like this, and I make her forget I’d ever been anything else.

There, for hours, we are intertwined. We whisper tiny loving things in each other’s ears, but no matter the words we use I can taste how much she means them.

As the dawn sun rises, I lick the last tear from her cheeks, and she is nothing but an empty vessel that had once held love.

There’s something else in me now, after that passionate night, not just love. I am greater than I’ve ever been. I can think more clearly, and I can conceptualize myself.

For the first time, I feel shame, and I loathe it.

I’m more careful, each time. As I get smarter, I also become more wary. I’ll be caught quickly if I recklessly drain my meals dry, as nothing riles up a city like a trail of dead bodies. So I’m gentler, even as I pursue the same fatal end.

He’s suave, or at least he tries to be. Innocent, in a way, of how much power he has over others. He’s insecure, and privately desperate.

He craves me, so long as I have the curves that his eyes cling to, and the smile that makes him feel like he’s worth more than the dirt he grew up in.

For months, I am his girlfriend, and we live together. He laughs at everything I say, and he kisses me like he means it.

“Thy brow, art thou unwell, dearest?”

I pull back from the kiss, dazed in the wake of the pleasure, blinking away the stars in my eyes as I try to connect his question to something coherent.

“Pray thy pardon, my lord, too intent upon thy lips by far, I think,” I finally stammer.

He smiles, but he’s worried, and I’m not sure why. He puts the back of his hoof to my forehead, just below my horn.

“So warm, for winter, I fret if thou hast caught up a fever. Perhaps we shall retire for the evening.”

“If it is thy wish,” I bow my head in agreement.

That’s all he wants, I think, is just for me to agree. But as we walk up the stairs and into our apartment I feel something stir in me, something not remotely equine.

I don’t have a word for what I am. It’s an unspoken horror lurking under the surface of the placid pony I portray, and in the time that I’ve had thoughts and words at all, I’ve never suffered any pony to live who saw my true nature.

This feeling, the swelling urgency of it is not something I’d ever felt and I do not know what to do. He gets me into bed and brushes a cool towel across my forehead while I squirm.

It is not pain, no matter how much he thinks it is, it is a burgeoning violence in my heart which is consuming my idle persona. It is a rejoiceful thunder that harkens a lightning that may end the world. It is a bliss that I am fighting on instinct and nothing else.

But it will not be resisted.

It is the true self.

My disguise burns away in green fire, and I find my belly rotund in gravid fullness, and some animalistic passion drives me.

I pull him close even as he stares at the absence of his wife in horror, and I kiss him. I am loved by him, in the momentary lie that can overcome even the most valuable panic. I lay my first clutch of five that day, and I drink his blood as easily as I drank his love.

I name my eldest after him in a fit of emotional attachment and when that egg fails to hatch, I consume it, violence ever benefitting my love.

“My queen, we’ve captured a pony. She stumbled across the hive.”

Thorax. I’m proud of his strength and confidence, but disappointed by his simplicity. There’s no subterfuge or attempt to trick the pony, only a blunt instrument. I’ll have to make one of the other royal grubs into a princess before him, to teach him that he’s at risk of failing. Shame is a powerful tool.

I sit up, and examine the pony, a mint green colored thing with golden eyes and fear befitting her situation.

Here, in my hive, I am goddess bar none. I am life and death, I am mercy and fury, and even the edges of reality start to blur at the edges when I prod them with enough focus.

I can see her past spread out behind her like a trail of hoofsteps. She’s been chasing a mare for a decade, desperate for approval and love. There’s something familiar there.

With green fire and the swish of my tail, I am the object of her desire, and I approach her. She struggles, but Thorax holds her tight in his magic, so I can sniff at her. She’s been running, and she’s been crying. One of her more recent memories is of watching her beloved talk to a stallion. I can’t hear it, but I can pull the memory out of her if I wish.

“I don’t love you, Lyra,” I say, the nasal and cultured tones of my disguise are easy to replicate, and easy to make cruel.

The mint mare flinches, but she’s still defiant. I haven’t stolen her awareness yet, she knows I’m an imitation.

“If I loved you, maybe I would have stopped you from running out into the woods like a foal, and getting captured by monsters.”

“At least you know what you are,” Lyra snaps.

I can’t help the grin on my face as I taste a wisp of love in the air under the anger.

“A monster? Like you,” I reply smoothly, rubbing Bon Bon’s body slowly against hers, breathing on her cheek and making her shiver. “I could kill you, so easily. You’re just a child running from a bad dream, right into a lair of a nightmare.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she lies.

I laugh. Ponies never stop surprising me, and I enjoy it so much.

“Why not, then?” I ask. “Why wouldn’t you be afraid of my magic teasing apart the fibers in your mind, undoing your heart and making you a puppet for my pleasure?”

Fear. Love. She’s getting predictable. The darkness that pulls out her love is counterintuitive but not unfamiliar.

“Because I’ve been invited to attend the wedding of a princess! If I don’t show up, then they’ll find you! They’ll stop you!”

I stop, and look back at her with a wide sharp-toothed grin.

“Oh really?”

Original below:

You think that you know me?

From my fifteen minutes of fame at the hooves of your idols, a snarling villain that was defeated by her latest snack?

You don’t know me, dear reader.

You don’t know me at all.

I’m so much worse.

—

It’s been years of planning and desperation. Do you know what it’s like to raise an army you have to birth yourself? On starvation wages, no less, dregs in the gutters of a society that literally does not know that you exist.

My first thousand years were mindless, frantic, until I met Her.

—

She dances on a stage, where she belongs. The ponies think this place is lowly and disgraced, a place for carnal desire, but I’m the tick that grows fat off the plentiful sweat and blood here. This is my favorite place in all the world, and for some reason a bright beacon of love has walked into it.

It scares me, for a moment, because it’s so potent.

But as she sways her hips and blows a kiss to the crowd, I can feel that sweet honey in the back of my throat, and I know that this is what I want.

She loves us, all of us in that dirty pit at the bottom of the world, and we drink in the love she gives as though it’s the last thing we’ll ever taste.

But no one else in that crowd is like me, no one else is a predator, and as she leaves the stage I abandon the place to stalk her.

It isn’t even a conscious decision, or a desire, but rather it is as natural to me as breathing.

Next time you wonder where the loving and pure ponies of the world have all gone, remember that I’m not the only one that eats them.

She screams in fear when she finds me in her bedroom, but I’m not cruel. I know how to treat my meals, and fear isn’t my flavor.

I become a million things, until I find what she wants. I stand over her as a tan coated pegasus stallion, with green eyes bright and curious, and a mess of white hair. She loves me like this, and I make her forget I’d ever been anything else.

There, for hours, we are intertwined. We whisper tiny loving things in each other’s ears, but no matter the words we use I can taste how much she means them.

As the dawn sun rises, I lick the last tear from her cheeks, and she is nothing but an empty vessel that had once held love.

There’s something else in me now, after that passionate night, not just love. I am greater than I’ve ever been. I can think more clearly, and I can conceptualize myself.

For the first time, I feel shame, and I loathe it.

—

I’m more careful, each time. As I get smarter, I also become more wary. I’ll be caught quickly if I recklessly drain my meals dry, as nothing riles up a city like a trail of dead bodies. So I’m gentler, even as I pursue the same fatal end.

He’s suave, or at least he tries to be. Innocent, in a way, of how much power he has over others. He’s insecure, and privately desperate.

He craves me, so long as I have the curves that his eyes cling to, and the smile that makes him feel like he’s worth more than the dirt he grew up in.

For months, I am his girlfriend, and we live together. He laughs at everything I say, and he kisses me like he means it.

“Thy brow, art thou unwell, dearest?”

I pull back from the kiss, dazed in the wake of the pleasure, blinking away the stars in my eyes as I try to connect his question to something coherent.

“Pray thy pardon, my lord, too intent upon thy lips by far, I think,” I finally stammer.

He smiles, but he’s worried, and I’m not sure why. He puts the back of his hoof to my forehead, just below my horn.

“So warm, for winter, I fret if thou hast caught up a fever. Perhaps we shall retire for the evening.”

“If it is thy wish,” I bow my head in agreement.

That’s all he wants, I think, is just for me to agree. But as we walk up the stairs and into our apartment I feel something stir in me, something not remotely equine.

I don’t have a word for what I am. It’s an unspoken horror lurking under the surface of the placid pony I portray, and in the time that I’ve had thoughts and words at all, I’ve never suffered any pony to live who saw my true nature.

This feeling, the swelling urgency of it is not something I’d ever felt and I do not know what to do. He gets me into bed and brushes a cool towel across my forehead while I squirm.

It is not pain, no matter how much he thinks it is, it is a burgeoning violence in my heart which is consuming my idle persona. It is a rejoiceful thunder that harkens a lightning that may end the world. It is a bliss that I am fighting on instinct and nothing else.

But it will not be resisted.

It is the true self.

My disguise burns away in green fire, and I find my belly rotund in gravid fullness, and some animalistic passion drives me.

I pull him close even as he stares at the absence of his wife in horror, and I kiss him. I am loved by him, in the momentary lie that can overcome even the most valuable panic. I lay my first clutch of five that day, and I drink his blood as easily as I drank his love.

I name my eldest after him in a fit of emotional attachment and when that egg fails to hatch, I consume it, violence ever benefitting my love.

—

“My queen, we’ve captured a pony. She stumbled across the hive.”

Thorax. I’m proud of his strength and confidence, but disappointed by his simplicity. There’s no subterfuge or attempt to trick the pony, only a blunt instrument. I’ll have to make one of the other royal grubs into a princess before him, to teach him that he’s at risk of failing. Shame is a powerful tool.

I sit up, and examine the pony, a mint green colored thing with golden eyes and fear befitting her situation.

Here, in my hive, I am goddess bar none. I am life and death, I am mercy and fury, and even the edges of reality start to blur at the edges when I prod them with enough focus.

I can see her past spread out behind her like a trail of hoofsteps. She’s been chasing a mare for a decade, desperate for approval and love. There’s something familiar there.

With green fire and the swish of my tail, I am the object of her desire, and I approach her. She struggles, but Thorax holds her tight in his magic, so I can sniff at her. She’s been running, and she’s been crying. One of her more recent memories is of watching her beloved talk to a stallion. I can’t hear it, but I can pull the memory out of her if I wish.

“I don’t love you, Lyra,” I say, the nasal and cultured tones of my disguise are easy to replicate, and easy to make cruel.

The mint mare flinches, but she’s still defiant. I haven’t stolen her awareness yet, she knows I’m an imitation.

“If I loved you, maybe I would have stopped you from running out into the woods like a foal, and getting captured by monsters.”

“At least you know what you are,” Lyra snaps.

I can’t help the grin on my face as I taste a wisp of love in the air under the anger.

“A monster? Like you,” I reply smoothly, rubbing Bon Bon’s body slowly against hers, breathing on her cheek and making her shiver. “I could kill you, so easily. You’re just a child running from a bad dream, right into a lair of a nightmare.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she lies.

I laugh. Ponies never stop surprising me, and I enjoy it so much.

“Why not, then?” I ask. “Why wouldn’t you be afraid of my magic teasing apart the fibers in your mind, undoing your heart and making you a puppet for my pleasure?”

Fear. Love. She’s getting predictable. The darkness that pulls out her love is counterintuitive but not unfamiliar.

“Because I’ve been invited to attend the wedding of a princess! If I don’t show up, then they’ll find you! They’ll stop you!”

I stop, and look back at her with a wide sharp-toothed grin.

“Oh really?”