Changeling Queen: The Changing of Rainbow Dash

by JonOfEquestria

Rating: mature
Tags: Sex, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Rainbow Dash
Length: 6829

Wanderer D's 'Changeling Queen' left a lot unsaid, didn't it? Herein: The Changing of Rainbow Da

Wanderer D's 'Changeling Queen' left a lot unsaid, didn't it? Unwritten spaces on the page. 'Here be monsters', our dear reader imagines. Now the blank edges of the map are filled in. The monsters are real - and they are us. Herein lies the tale of the Changing of Rainbow Dash.

Fair warning, contains sex, a certain amount of violence, and gratuitous shout outs to the Season Three starter (I swear the bit with... well, you'll know it, but it was written before 'the Crystal Empire' aired). Elements are inspired by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality although I think 'The Changing of Rainbow Dash' fails to clear the bar of being Rationalist Fanfic. Twilight just isn't Rational and Reasonable enough.

Thanks to: Wanderer D, for writing 'Changeling Queen', allowing me to play in his sandbox, and for his support whenever I fell over and banged my knee in there; yfellas1, for excellent editing and pre-reading; the bronies of the mlp-vectorclub, especially Proenix (Chrysalis's horn and glow), KalleFlaxx (Rainbow Dash), HornFlakes (non-changeling twilight sparkle), intbrony (Twilight cutiemark) and both Bulia Byak and Josh Andler (for their excellent advanced inkscape guide without which I could not have applied Twilight's hoofholes, nor modified her cutiemark).

Published 2012-11-17 20:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-11-17 20:00:01 UTC

The Changing of Rainbow Dash

Changeling Queen: The Changing of Rainbow Dash

Jon Of Equestria

“Oh!” Rainbow Dash jumped. “Hi! Twilight! Hi, Twilight,” she grinned, rubbing at the purple tail of her main with a forehoof. “Hi Twilight,” she repeated. “You didn’t answer your door, so I let myself in.”

I glanced over. My door was closed. And bolted. Ponyville library was not open for business.

Dash’s eyes followed my gaze. “The window,” she explained, “I let myself in through the window.” She scuffled her horseshoes on my nice clean floor and blushed adorably. “Hi Twilight,” she said again.

I waited till she was done fidgeting her wings.

“So...” shuffle, “say...” fidget, “Twilight?” She asked.

“Yes?” I prompted brightly.

“You don’t happen to have the new Daring Do in yet?” She glanced around. “Do you?”

Normally I’d have been thrilled at Dash’s interest, and a little disappointed that I had to let my friend down, because the Daring Do and the Chitinous Charade hadn’t come in yet.

Today was not an ordinary day.

“I thought I said I’d have it at next week’s First Annual Ponyville Book Faire?” I said - Mayor Mare had been very reasonable about hosting one, the the fourteenth time I’d revised my presentation about it to address her prior objections. Personally, I thought that had been a bit far. Even for such an important event, I thought eleven or twelve revisions would’ve been sufficient. But she was the elected public servant. I was just the librarian.

I found it comforting, that I still cared about books and the Ponyville Book Faire.

“Um, yeah,” Dash said, “but you know I’m fast enough to be the first pony to snag it, and I didn’t want to spoil anypony else’s day.” I was embarrassed for her that she’d try such a blatant lie - had she been taking lessons from Applejack? - and embarrassed for myself that she’d think I’d fall for it, then embarrassed for her again that she might think that.

Then I wondered if, yesterday, she might’ve been right.

I couldn’t possibly imagine what might have happened overnight to make one Twilight Sparkle better at deceiving and detecting deception.

“Really,” I said. It wasn’t a question. More of an interrogation.

“Well... no!” Dash blurted, taking my shoulders in her hooves. “I just really really really want to read it!” Then there Dash was, clutching at my withers. Couldn’t she feel the chitin? Or, perhaps she couldn’t because it wasn’t there. Was my transformation more complete than mere illusion?

Except... if I didn’t just look like a pony, but, really, physically, was a pony - like I’d been just yesterday - then I measurably wasn’t any different from yesterday.

But I didn’t feel like the past-Twilight Sparkle of yesterday.

And I didn’t think like I had then, either.

I thought better. More clearly. Celestia’s Equestria was meritorious - or at least, meritocratic. The best ponies rose to the top, and everypony was the best at one special thing; but... I could see now, and it hurt to do so. Like wearing a monocle of ice that burned my eye-socket even as it sharpened my vision. The flaw in Equestria was in some ways obvious, for ponies with the eyes to see it. Princess Celestia had given them to me, or at least, given me the time and libraries to grow them for myself - but it had taken Queen Chrysalis’s sacrifice to open them.

Most everypony else genuinely didn’t see it - save Celestia.

I knew now that it was quite impossible that she didn’t know. I hated her a little, because of that. How dare she be so perfect and preside over this? I’d never asked if she knew of no better way, or just didn’t know how to make the change. I didn’t know which would be worse, or if it even mattered since there was obviously nothing to be done, so for all I’d ever recited the litany of Gendlin -

‘What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
Ponies can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.’

I shied from the question.

I didn’t shy from the realisation itself, though, which made me better than most ponies. The realisation that ponies of the middle class found mates with same kind of social standing. Together, those couples passed on their values to their foals, who in turn took on middle class talents, like librarianship or magic, rather than, say, bowling. I can’t express how impressed I am with Rarity, who’s cutiemark is, basically, mining, but makes her living as a designer. A true member of the creative class, a pony who broke through the crystal ceiling. I can’t tell you how rare she really is, because the Equestrian Census Bureau doesn’t even ask the question. Would I better recall the litany of Gendlin, if my teacher followed it more stringently herself?

So Princess Celestia’s society becomes stratified, like whipped cream and cherries sandwiched between the chocolate sponge layers of a Everfree Forest Gateau. Her attempts to address it fail wilfully - her School for Gifted Unicorns with its bursaries and its blind entrance exams makes little difference. I would not have succeeded if not for my professorial mother and my astronomical father. And if I had failed then, I would’ve lost Spike, I would’ve lost the library, Ponyville, my friends, everything.

I would’ve lost Celestia.

Yet here I was preparing to throw her away. To betray her, because she was wrong. Who’s the greater foal, the false Princess, or the student who remains faithful to her? Which pony is the greater traitor?

Yes, Chrysalis’s methods, her invasion, they were wrong, as wrong as the griffons Lev and Ioseb, who’d tried to make the brutal Griffon Empire more like Celestia’s peaceful Equestria, who’d gone so far as to name themselves Trotsky and Stallion... and whose attempt had drowned the streets of Stalliongrad in blood.

Celestia had taught me that, too, and now I wondered - to stop me doing exactly what I was about to do?

In any-case, if one had to choose a metric for meritocracy - would one not choose Chrysalis’s? That the pony who loves the most, succeeds the most. Wasn’t that the best of all worlds, or, if not, better than Celestia’s Equestria. Didn’t I have an obligation to try to create that, if I could?

Starting with Rainbow Dash.

I grinned, suddenly and entirely falsely, as if my delay and distraction had only been pretend-playing with her instead of wrestling with myself. “Sure thing, Rainbow,” I said. “You’re in luck,” - she wasn’t - “the new Daring Do has come in.”

“You’re the best pony, Twilight,” she said, wrapping her hooves around my neck and hugging me tight. My muzzle came to rest in the tangled, serenely coloured mane cascading down her back. Dash smelled good, of fresh summer skies and light wholesome exertion, a pristine vision I ached to stain. “You know I’ll be done with it in ten seconds flat,” she blushed, adorably. “Not that I didn’t take tomorrow off anyway.”

If I’d had breath in my chest, I would’ve moaned, then, at her love for me, and given the whole game away.

Oh, Rainbow Dash.

You poor, poor thing.

I magicked open the thick, heavy door to my basement, and if my spellglow was a little more green tinged than usual, Dash didn’t notice. “I’ve got it locked up right and tight down in the lab,” I told her. Yes, my laboratory: Deep. Quiet. Soundproof.

Perfect.

Celestia bless her - Celestia save her - Dash trotted eagerly forward, wings fluttering and tail twitching. I was suddenly aware of how uniquely I loved her, even though I loved each and every one of my friends as much as the others, Rarity and Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie and Applejack and Big Mac and Cheerilee and Lyra and Luna and Cadance and my brother and mother and father and Princess Celestia (despite her betrayal), and, yes, Rainbow Dash. I loved all of them, and each of them individually, in a very deep and and personal way. I needed them to be able to accept my love, as I could - I licked my lips, even though I hadn’t meant to - enjoy theirs.

Hers.

I couldn’t bear to be without them.

Her.

Chrysalis had been dead right, before she’d just been dead. I’d lost her, sort of, dying as my lovely love-meal - I didn’t have to lose my friends. But if I wasn’t to lose them, I did have to create a hive. I’d had Chrysalis for less than a thousand heartbeats, but, going the way she had, the way she would’ve wanted to go, the way that had literally been her dying wish, she’d taught me more of practical use in those moments than Celestia had in years. Another damning indictment of the Princess and teacher I loved.

I followed Rainbow into the basement and killed the bright fluorescence of the lights - not with magic, simply by flipping the switch. My eyes adjusted instantly in an entirely inequine way.

Rainbow Dash’s didn’t.

“Twilight!” She blurted, and I heard the flap of wings as she turned a tumble into a takeoff, “I can’t see.”

I could. In the fractional light, Rainbow’s lines were more visible than her colour or her shape, and I realised how little her cyan coat suited her, how ill-served she was by the distracting iridescence of her mane. How her - boring, plain, old - feathered wings covered sleek muscles that deserved to be revealed.

She’d earned them, after all.

They rippled as I watched, ready to propel her into her beloved flight or to fight a brutal fight.

Not one she could win, of course. Not against me, not anymore, and anyway I’d stacked the deck against her. Fair was for suckers, and wasn’t that very much new Twilight talking.

Dash had a body many stallions would’ve killed to have possessed, and many mares would’ve died to be tumbled by - though I didn’t expect to have to go quite that far - and if she’d been blessed with Rarity’s white coat, everypony would’ve known it at a glance. I remembered how she’d envied the glittering wings I’d gifted our mutual friend with. Thought of how I could fix all that for her.

Hopefully this reward would be more enduring, albeit as likely pregnant with the possibility of death. I, at least, had to go into this with eyes open.

It was going to be pretty horrible. For Dash, certainly. For me, the worst fear was that I wouldn’t abhor hurting my beloved friend.

“Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, “if you can’t find the light, can you make a light?” She was really doing a very good job of not sounding scared of being trapped in a madmare’s dark laboratory - but I could feel her feelings now. It must’ve all been just a little too fast, even for her. “It’s just I’m flapping around down here, and I don’t want to break something fragile.”

Now that was just too sensible to be anything but bluster, coming from Rainbow Dash.

“You don’t have any poison joke in here, do you?” She asked. “‘Cause I don’t want my wings on upside-down again.” She paused. “Or anything else dangerous?”

Oh Dash. Only me.

Though I thought I probably did have some poison joke down here. Somewhere.

I knew I ought to pounce on Rainbow now, right when she wasn’t expecting it... and I didn’t. I’d had the perfect opportunity upstairs, she’d actually been in my hooves, and I should’ve - but I hadn’t.

“Rainbow Dash,” I said softly. “I’m in love with you.”

I mean, really. What was I expecting? That she’d swoop out of sky and sweep me off my hooves - or, less romantically and more realistically, fly down from the ceiling and crash me to the floor because she couldn’t see? Either way, there was no way she was letting me turn her into a changeling. The Element of Loyalty wasn’t about to betray Equestria and all her friends except Twilight Sparkle just because Twilight Sparkle asked her to - not even though I needed her.

Need that had been naked in my voice.

“Uh, well,” she stammered, “you mean, like, as a friend, right?” There was a pause, punctuated by the agitated beating of wings. “‘Cause I totally love you as a friend, you know that.”

Needed her so bad.

“No,” I whispered, barely audible above the flapping, “not just as a friend.”

“Oh,” Rainbow Dash said, very evenly, like another pony might’ve talked about the weather. Except Dash was adorably into her weather, and the more extreme the better. “Well, that can happen,” she said, and the cocksure weatherpony I knew so well and loved so dearly was back. “It’s ‘cause I’m totally awesome. Doesn’t mean you’re a fillyfooler. We’ll find you a nice stallion and it’ll clear right up - don’t worry, I’ve got lots of spares. Um,” she paused. “You didn’t happen to look directly into the Smoulder, did you?” She said. “Because that’s incurable.”

Nice.

I mean, really. Thanks, Dash. Just what I needed.

With a wing-assisted buzz, I pounced at her.

Unfortunately, I’d dallied long enough for her vision to adjust at least a little - maybe she saw the green of my hornglow, or the light corucsating through my wings, or something - and she caught my grab hooves-on.

“Twilight!?” She screamed. “Holy horseapples, what the buck happened to you!?”

Her wings pulled up, inverted, ready to power-dive-piledrive me into the floor of my own laboratory.

It was a two-storey basement, plenty of room for Dash’s muscles and natural magic to turn power into speed. Concrete would concentrate that velocity, square it and multiply by our combined mass, and concentrate that energy into a single blow. A single blow I’d take upside down and graceless. It could kill me, and I felt absurdly proud that Dash had recognised her danger - Equestria’s and Fluttershy’s and Rarity’s and Pinkie’s and Applejack’s and Scootaloo’s and Spitfire’s and Soarin’s - and acted.

She knew it was me. I knew she knew, because I could still feel her love for me, pouring out of her like a rainbow waterfall and tinged with the most terrible sadness. From her point of view, she could save everypony but me.

And herself.

That falling punch, that coming blow, would certainly kill a little pegasus pony, even if they were ready for it, and I wasn’t sure Dash even wanted to survive murdering me.

See previous, regarding love and loyalty.

Not a bucking thing I could do about it - she was above me, and that, in an airborne fight, which she anyway had far more experience at than me, was that.

I turned the room upside down.

Okay, strictly, I inverted the sign of the local gravitational potential energy field.

I’d prepared it, in case there was a test.

Pass-fail. Life or death.

Fragile glassware containing chemicals and biologicals dangerous enough alone began free-falling toward the ceiling.

Dash hit the ceiling first, not with much force, because we were only at about minus point-seven gravities, and anyway closer to it than the floor. Pegasi wings aren’t fragile - ponies are heavy, and they have to support the full weight plus effective inertial forces under high-gee manoeuvering - but it was a weird force loading, falling up into a hard surface.

I heard the snap of breaking cartilage, as my foreleg landed awkwardly atop her wing-

-no. Litany of Gendlin: Admitting the truth doesn’t make it worse.

As I put my hoof on the perfect vulnerable place where wing met flank, crushed it against the ceiling and deliberately snapped Dash’s pinionfeathers.

It was instinct, a changeling’s instinct, but also indisputably mine, and the only reason I knew how to do it was because I’d studied pegasi anatomy, because Twilight Sparkle is such a benightmared bookworm.

Let’s be clear. I knew what it would do her, I love her - and I did it anyway.

Fluttershy wouldn’t care if she was grounded for a year till she moulted in new feathers. Do it to Dash, and it would break her heart - and I had done so without a first thought. Through our link, her love for me flowing between us, I felt that happen, the moment the impact got done rattling her brains and she realised.

If only Cadance and Shiny hadn’t set a spring wedding.

In that moment, guilt flooded me. I wanted nothing more than to pour the love I felt for her back along that conduit between us, just to comfort her, because I loved her.

But I could only do that for a changeling.

For another changeling.

And if Dash were a changeling, I could do more than just comfort her and distract her from her pain.

I could take it away.

I could heal her.

It was the rational thing to do.

Dash’s good wing lashed out at me, and only Queenly reflexes got my forehoof to meet its leading edge. Chitin shattered, it was my turn to scream, and I lost the spell.

Locked together, we fell.

Dash’s rage at what I’d become kneaded into her love for me, a dish spicier than a hot-sauce covered cupcake. Not entirely unpleasant - nopony hangs around with Pinkie for long without acquiring a taste for highly-spiced baked goods - but no good if she was going to continue trying to kill me.

I wrapped my feelings for her up in a fluorescent green ball, glowing and growing on the tip of my serrated horn, and put them inside her head. I hadn’t learned how to do that - I just knew it.

Dash’s iris’s shrank to pinpoints, her eyes rolled like I’d beaten her soundly about the head, and she moaned like a mare with Cadance’s wedding party thumping between her ears.

Then we ran out of room for freefalling.

I took the blow - it was nothing without the force of Dash’s will behind it - and cushioned her against the impact.

The contents of my laboratory came crashing down around us. Expensive magelectronic devices tinkled their way into scrap. Delicate, wondrous constellations of blown glass shattered into a galaxy of shards, freeing chemicals that should never have touched to mix. They hissed and popped as they skittered reactively across the floor, or exploded into flame, or began spewing noxious vapours. A fifty-litre, two-hundred-and-thirty-bar cylinder of farm-fresh pure oxygen rolled through the flames.

“Twi...” Dash drawled into my ear, “my wing hurts.”

“My leg hurts,” I replied, waving that shattered forelimb at her. It flapped uselessly from a new bend just above the elbow, where neither pony nor changeling should’ve had a joint.

“Oh,” Dash said, with a sad little expression on her face, “sorry.” Then she giggled, a giggle which suggested that, maybe, deep inside her head, it hadn’t been a giggle at all. Somewhere trapped within her skull, I thought she might be screaming. “I’d better kiss it better, then,” she said.

The temperature in my lab began to rise.

Dash made little kitten-licks down from my shoulder, tracing hairline fractures in my chitin down to the true injury. As she did so, I could feel the shell knitting itself back together, under the focused touch of her love.

She reached unnatural bend in my foreleg, sticky with blood and sharp-edged with shattered chitin, like a crockpot dropped just before dinner. Lovingly, she began to lap it.

Part of me - a new, changeling part of me that didn’t mind that sort of thing - thought how good Dash looked with blood smeared across her muzzle.

Even if it was my own.

She took a twisted, broken, barely-attached piece of chitin between her teeth and snipped.

Yes, of course it hurt, but in that good way.

That oh-so-good way.

I think I moaned, and I know she grinned.

The injury vanished under her loving care.

I felt bad. Dash had healed my foreleg, but her wing was still a mess. She didn’t seem to care, which I would’ve thought impossible. Dash was her wings, and her wings were her, but all that mattered to her now was nuzzling and nibbling her way down to my hoof.

Oh my dashing Rainbow, what have I done to you?

Then her lips found one of the small cavities in my hooves, and I stopped caring about inconsequential things like broken wings or fires. I, Twilight Sparkle the Astronomer, had always supposed the universe was curved, but I hadn’t realised its entirety was an open-ended cylinder three-eighths of an inch across, with Dash’s lips lightly sucking upon its end.

Now I knew that.

Dear Princess Celestia how had Chrysalis walked around with these in the end of her legs!?!

Then Dash slipped her tongue inside and rimmed it.

I forgot my name, I forgot how to read, I forgot how to think, and I...

I found my limbs had locked, sometime after those endless moments that’d comprised the explosive birth, life and heat-death of an entire universe of pleasure. Its cooling remnants made a sticky coating across my floor, and all over Rainbow Dash.

The green goop looked awfully familiar.

Dash rolled in it, coating a thin layer across herself, moaning in something that might’ve been pleasure or pain or both at once. Short blue needles were being left, stuck in the thicker globules smeared across the floor.

Then I realised what they were.

Dear sweet Celestia, her coat was falling out.

Well of course it is, I thought. She’s turning into a changeling. Cyan never suited her anyway. Hadn’t I just been thinking that? My horror at this improvement was entirely irrational. More wrong.

Flames crackled close around us, and I suddenly realised that the goo all over us was oily.

Not the shieldblow, the fire this time-

The laboratory’s fire-suppression systems went off.

-or the flood.

The flames, blazing merrily away amid expensive scrap, doused and went out.

Except the ones in my heart, and other warm wet places. Dash was really, really sexy when her mane was wet.

Quite a lot of her coat had washed away with the goop, leaving her carapace shining under a thin sheen of oil. Droplets of water slid down it, and she coruscated in the firelight, spinning rainbows off into the world. Fabulously, Rarity would’ve said.

Her feathers looked like she’d gone for a cut-rate spa visit, and Aloe had skipped the preening and oiled her with slightly out of date stock, already going slightly green.

“Twi,” she groaned, “I don’t feel so good.”

Well, no. I remembered this, the ecstasy and the pain that it hadn’t spared me, feeling myself change. Changes that had lightened and strengthened little old bookish me would be no difference for athletic Dash - a horn was going to have to burst through her forehead, for Celestia’s sake.

I stood like a helpless idiot, whilst Rainbow Dash hurt in front of me, because of something I’d done.

“Make it go away,” she moaned, writhing on the ground, forehooves clutching at her head. “It’s trying to make me...” it descended into a wordless wail. “Make it stop,” she screamed, her good wing jackhammering the concrete. The floor of my lab was cracking under her blows.

I lowered my lips to hers and kissed her. Hey, it was how Chrysalis had helped me. When in doubt, go with what you know. Go with what’s proven to work. The evidence based policy of Twilight Sparkle’s changeling hive.

She responded, eagerly, as I pumped my love into her. It spilled, metaphysically, everywhere. She was still only almost capable of receiving it. Her pupils scintillated, not between pinpricks and plates, as a pony on drugs; but between circles and slits, like a pony turning into a changeling - and her forehead bulged like a baby unicorn’s.

She screamed, and just didn’t stop, clawing at it with her unshod hooves. If she’d been a griffon instead of a pegasus it might’ve done some good.

I lifted my muzzle from hers, bared my fangs, and tore the top half of her face off.

The nub of her horn popped out, the most adorable thing I’d ever seen - till it poked my eye like a Pinkie Promise gone wrong. Pain alleviated guilt, and moments later it was restored, under the healing balm of her love.

“Twi,” she whimpered, and collapsed.

I stepped over her. I don’t know why. It just felt right, in that moment. I stepped over her crumpled form, lowering my lips to her belly, trailing a line of kisses down towards her tail. Her scent wafted, and I snuffled it. The tip of my horn - sharp like a sword, serrated like a breadknife - teased her, dragging rainbow strands through the wetness.

“You can’t put that in me,” she moaned, like a pony who really really wished that that was true. “I’ll be sawn in two.”

“Into what?” - heh-heh-heh.

“Celestia, Twilight, that’s not funny” Dash half screamed. “Into benightmared pieces.”

“If I told you you’d be fine - would you trust me?”

I was actually quite interested in the answer.

“Yes.”

Not even a moment’s hesitation. That was the old Rainbow Dash, right there.

Oh. Dear.

I was going to have to do something drastic.

“It’ll kill you for sure.” I told her, nuzzling her rump. “I’m going to do it anyway. And you’re going to let me.”

The lower half of Rainbow Dash’s face, the half that still resembled a pony, paled to a blue as beautiful as the far horizon.

“The- the fate of Equestria’s at stake, right?” She stammered. “Best young flier saves everypony, named as Captain of the Wonderbolts,” she swallowed, “postponyously.”

Slowly, I shook my head, a stray strand of her dock, sunset-red, tickling my nose.

Tears would’ve poured from her eyes to run, dripping, down her chin. If she’d still had tear ducts, or a face above her cheekbones.

“The fate of Ponyville?”

Headshake.

“Damnit, Fluttershy,” she said, “I knew you’d get me killed.”

Huh?

Past-Twilight Sparkle would’ve said something. Then written a friendship report about it.

I let it go.

“Nothing like that,” I said, licking her cutiemark. “I just want to.”

It made her squeak, like one of Fluttershy’s menagerie, and she had to shake her head before the lust-fog lifted from her eyes.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” She shouted at me. “You’re making another friendship problem, aren’t you!?! Don’t write your apology letter to the Princess in my bucking blood!!!”

“I no longer answer to Princess Celestia,” I told her. Rainbow Dash looked stricken. “And, actually, Spike usually takes dictation, so-”

“Twilight!!!” Rainbow screamed, and it trailed down into sobbing. “Will- will it hurt?”

“Did you sleep with... what was her name?,” I asked. “That Griffon? Gilda?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Rainbow Dash, blushing. “It didn’t end well.”

“Did that hurt?”

“Yes,” she said, “and it wasn’t even all that good.”

“This will be,” I told her. “But it’ll hurt more. Till it doesn’t.” I paused. “Is that why you ended it?”

“Nah. Figured out I wasn’t into mares,” Rainbow Dash said. “Or girl-Griffin’s. She wanted to start it back up, actually. That was why she came. I said no.” Rainbow Dash rolled her slitted eyes. “Then she thought I was sleeping with Pinkie instead of her, which ended worse.”

My brain hiccuped. “Were you?” I asked absently. Dashie-and-Pinkie, sleeping in a tree~

“I don’t do my friends,” Rainbow Dash said. “Or at least, I didn’t. Didn’t used to be into mares either, come to think of it.

“If it helps, I think I’m technically a nymph,” I told her.

“I’ve no idea what that means and I don’t care,” Rainbow Dash said, her dock twitching across my face and tangling with my horn. Past-Twilight would’ve followed with a lecture. I let it drop, and pulled my horn free. I didn’t think Dash needed to hear the details of my sexual immaturity. Strands of severed tail drifted down, and Dash’s scent wafted with them. I was only going to get to be a mature Queen by getting laid, so there really wasn’t anything else for it, and Dash definitely seemed to want it. I tilted my head and licked her. “Oh, Celestia,” she moaned, “just get on with it!”

Let’s be clear - Dash invited me, and she knew what she was signing up for. Sex, with something awful at the end. Ex post facto, she was going to think being a changeling was pretty awesome too. But it was important to me that this Dash, not future-Dash, wanted this. It was a line I didn’t have to cross.

Yet.

I didn’t need to be invited twice. She had that adorable sweetness of hers, that shows only when she’s napping, and even then only on a cloud where she thinks nopony can see her. Not that I’ve spied on Rainbow Dash. I just sometimes have to observe - research - my friends. For friendship reports.

Napping or not, Dash has a beautiful plot. It’s not uncommon to look at a pony’s flank - cutiemark’s better than any business card - yet the constant motion of Rainbow’s wings drew the eye forward, not back, despite her technicolour tail.

Besides, it’s rude to peek beneath the dock.

Rainbow’s rainbow-hued tail twitchy-twitch-twitched, but I didn’t think anything was about to fall. Except maybe our inhibitions.

I nuzzled my way beneath it, and took a long, relaxed lap around the track of Rainbow Dash while she moaned me on. Slow and steady, just like the Running of the Leaves - till it’s time to sprint for the finish, and the crowd screams.

Yes, I’d licked her before, but that was nothing, that was grooming. Now I shoved my muzzle in - not uninvited - and drew my first deep, direct breath of her. My lips were there, and my tongue, and she was far softer than either - yet my horn was harder and sharper than both.

“Twilight,” she moaned, her rump squirming around my face. “That’s not what you promised me.”

Right. It wasn’t.

I felt almost - almost - guilty, but it might just have been muscle-memory association as I drew my head down. The cheeks of her rump squeezed the flat of my horn as I did so, and the pressure sent a frisson through me: Pleasure, and the anticipation of yet greater pleasure to come.

Lips found one of the holes in my hindhooves, and I yelped, stunned, because it was stunning. I just hadn’t realised my legs were that long, now. My eyes met Dash’s, and hers were full of challenge. Race you to your orgasm, basically, if I knew my Dash the way I thought I did.

Which was stupid. I was so obviously in a position to pleasure her more than she could me. I mean, who and what did she think I was? Who did she think she was?

But then, that was Dash, wasn’t it? Boldness beyond reason, results wrenched from dreams. She knew she was absolutely Dash, and there was no way she was going to let herself lose.

I was in for a very intense experience.

Lips teased my hindhoofholes, and the experience somehow felt richer and deeper and dirtier than when she’d done so to my forelegs.

Her wet, little red tongue rimmed one of my spiracles.

I put the tip of my gooey green horn on her sexy plothole and rimmed her right back.

She whimpered into me. I could feel every air current of her breath swirling within my hoofhole, my gills - I hadn’t known I’d had gills - sucking that warmth in, freeing my metabolism, priming my body for sex.

Unicorn horns are pretty bucking scary if you don’t have one, when you think about it. I mean, they’re long and hard and basically a bony extrusion of our skulls, entirely unlike those blood-bag sausages stallions have dangling between their hindlegs. If you’re a filly, a unicorn doesn’t need to mount you. You don’t get a chance to gallop away. We can just trot right up behind you while you’re unwary, lower our heads and put our horn into your unsuspecting plotholes. You’d love it. It’s scientifically impossible that a stallion’s blood-pressure-dependant thing could ever be harder, nor more fulfilling, than a softly glowing horn. Their heart would explode trying. That’s the magic - and the slow enrapture of the brightest pegasi and earthpony mares by fillyfooling unicorns is one of the many small, subtle ways Equestria’s racism perpetuates itself.

I’d second-authored a research paper with Princess Celestia on it. I’d felt so proud when it was filed onto microfiche in the Canterlot Royal Archives - even if nopony has ever viewed it even once.

Celestia refused to shrink Equestria’s government down till it fit in pony’s bedrooms to actually do something about it, of course. ‘Love is love’, she’d said.

Lesson learned, Princess - but I didn’t agree. I believed that state could be a force for good in Equestria, and I was all the state my changelings would ever need.

If it seems I’m being too analytical for the moment - I am. Because if I gave myself over to it, I’d pound Dash into rubble and ruin her utterly. And that I couldn’t let myself do. I was Twilight Sparkle, Queen of the Changlings. I had my self controlled, more thoroughly than any pony who ever wore a bit.

Dash took advantage of my distraction to lift her good wing to my flank and stroke me. Its touch was as soft as a cloud, and left my carapace polished under sheen of turquoise oil - but tricolour lightning bolts struck within my thorax, and it was my turn to whimper.

I reacted without thinking.

It’s like this: A pony only thinks she’s a pony. She’s really a mind in a brain in a skull that’s roped to a pony by a nervous system. On the inside of that pony’s plothole, there’s some very soft skin coated the highly sensitive ends of that system. But behind those are the nerves themselves, and somewhere back in that mass of soft pulsating flesh they twine together into strings and cords. My sharp changeling’s horn sliced through the flesh that cosseted them, and kissed Rainbow’s nerves directly. I pinned Dash on those ropes, wrung those cords from her throat, plucked those strings and played a whole symphony of pleasure out inside her.

“Twilight, it hurts~” Rainbow Dash crooned, and the pain was accenture that gave the notes meaning, “~so good.”

She couldn’t bleed out of her plothole and die, of course. I loved her, like the warm wet world around the glowing goo of my horn she was - and I was making her more a changeling every moment. She healed, if not as fast as I could hurt her, as fast as I did hurt her, and because I was her Queen I didn’t have to imagine how incredible it felt.

It changed her. I changed her, the hard black chitin of a changeling replacing her soft pony-plothole-flesh, forming into and around the greater hardness of my horn. Extrusions pushed up and through my hornholes, filled its notches to completion - and beyond.

She held my horn in her plothole, and she squeezed.

It was a very nice try to win our challenge in a way I hadn’t considered, leveraging her transformation into one of my changelings to increase my pleasure. Turning my gift of power right back on me. It was quick, and bold, which was all Dash, and astute, which astounded me. And it felt amazing.

It also didn’t work.

Dash’s virgin changeling plothole locked itself around me, and I milled my horn into the master key of her.

Not that it didn’t take all my effort and concentration - but Twilight Sparkle never fails a test, because I focus for them. They’re very important.

A bit later - once I’d passed - I realised Dash was screaming. Not in a bad way, but loudly enough that I worried about the quality of my lab’s soundproofing.

I sat on her face.

She made love to me. Pinkie had never baked anything so delicious.

“You lied to me,” Dash said, awhile later. An idle comment, from within a sticky, gooey green coating of, well, me, that covered her from wingtip to wingtip, furthest strand of dock to the wet tip of her nose, hindhooves to the thoroughly relaxed points of her ears. It’d come out of me, and now it was turning her into a changeling. Very efficient, a little bit gross, and a lot sexy.

I’d basically had my head dunked in Dashie. “I’m a Changeling Queen now,” I said, “deceit comes with the territory.”

“AJ’s going to love that,” Rainbow whispered.

Urk. I hadn’t thought of that.

I dismissed it as future-Twilight’s problem.

Rainbow Dash thought it was my-future-problem too, mewling adorably and curling up, wounded wing forgotten. A thick film was already forming on the fluid coating her.

“Twi?” Rainbow murmured, stuck inside her sticky coating. “What is becoming of me?” Her eyelids were fluttering, as she struggled to stay awake.

“Hush,” I whispered, lowering my horn to her sticky casing, and gently poking it through. She didn’t even struggle, much, as I filled it with sloppy green goo, till it blew up like a balloon, like a boiled sweet with a sticky Dashie centre. She snuggled down into the goop. “Soft as a cloud,” I heard her mumble, before sleep took her. I floated my Dashie up to my bedroom and stuck her on the ceiling. She’d would’ve hated being underground anyway.

Then I left.

There really wasn’t anything else I could do there, anyway.

Sometime later, after the rising of Celestia’s sun - that was going to be a problem, later, when I ruled Equestria, if she wasn’t prepared to be rational and reasonable about things - Rainbow Dash trotted down from my bedroom-balcony, like it was just any other day when she’d crashed through an upper story window of my library.

But it wasn’t a normal day, and she wasn’t the normal Dash.

Rainbow Dash, yes, but my Rainbow Dash.

Her rainbow mane danced, and coruscating translucent wings flashed every colour across my walls, a living prism.

She was unmistakably a changeling. Unmistakably my creature.

I felt her love for me like a kick between my hindquarters, and I liked it. “Hi Twi,” she said, as sunnily as the day, “what’re we doing today?”

I turned on her.

“Uh, I mean, whataya command, your Maj?”

“Breakfast first,” I responded, wrapping my hooves around her neck, “questions later,” I finished, and locked our lips together. She kissed me back with interest, and I mean that literally. She gave me her love, which felt good; and I poured a generous dose of mine back into her, which felt better - but I held something back. It was instinctive, and understanding came to me as naturally as the act itself had: A Changeling Queen loved all her changelings alike, whether they’d been lucky in love yesterday or not.

I’m a food-stamp program, I realised. Or maybe a food-bank program. Of love. For changelings.

Anyway, interest, see.

“By the way,” I told her as the kiss broke, “you don’t need to bow and scrape. It doesn’t suit you - and you’re still my friend. I don’t want your deference. Just your love.” I grinned a very Rainbow Dash grin. “Do whatever you want.”

“If you give me that,” Rainbow Dash said, “I’ll abuse it.” She paused. “Abuse you.”

I shifted, exposing the sheer length of my flank to her. “Enjoy it,” I whispered, sliding out of my own form and into Applejack’s, flashing through Spitfire’s, into Soarin’s - fully equipped. I’d studied up overnight, and the new addition fascinated her. I drew it back, gradually, and she was so absorbed in watching it shrink she didn’t notice until it was gone that the form I’d picked was her own. She blushed, and I turned back to myself - the unicorn Twilight Sparkle of the day before yesterday. Gradually, I let it morph into me - Twilight Sparkle, Queen of all Changelings. Even if ‘all changelings’ meant only Spike and Rainbow Dash, whom I’d just renounced my authority over.

“That one,” she said, softly. “You. Just you.”

“Be. More. Specific.”

“The pony you were always meant to be,” she replied. “Your Majesty.”