The Burden of Knowledge

It was dark, and all Dex Toyaka could remember was fear and pain. The sound of the loud crack still reverberated in his ears. All he could think was “when will it be over” until, finally it all seemed to end and he stopped …stopped existing.

At least that’s what it that gap had felt like. His memories briefly flashed through his eyes just like people said it did when you die. But then, who knew how long afterward, suddenly he was alive again, and his senses all turned back on. He was aware of being out…gone…or something for an amount of time. The feeling of something cold stung parts of his body as he slowly drifted out of sleep and into waking.

He was running through the last moments in his mind trying to pinpoint where exactly things had gone south with Dai. At what point was the lunatic planning out their fates? What could he have done, what could he have noticed to stop all this? What was most frustrating was that he couldn’t pin point exactly what he should have done. It was like a frustrating puzzle he couldn’t figure, like the word on the tip of his tongue he couldn’t find, and even hindsight would have been maybe a small comfort. All he was sure of was that he should have never allowed Dai to leave the Institution for the Criminally Insane in the first place.

Cursing under his breath he shifted and the sting of cold became intolerable, enough to make him open his eyes. The first thing he saw was green and white. Snow. He pulled himself up and stretched. The sky was dark, likely the middle of the night. Snowy hills and bare trees could be seen, with a small town just visible over the horizon. The town had an odd, fairy tale-esque , early German look to the architecture, complete with wooden houses and a windmill.

His vision was obscured by some strands of black hair hanging and something white in both corners of his eyes. It started to irritate him and he shook his face trying to get the white thing out of the way. There was a voice behind him, all of the sudden (perhaps just quiet until now) and it was chuckling.

“What’s the matter? Trying to shake off your face? It doesn’t look that bad,” Dex stiffened.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

“Over heeeeere” Pop “No over here!” Pop “Whoopsie, over here now” Dex continued turning and looking around until he tripped over something. He looked down at what was in his way and gasped. A brown leg of some sort of animal stood in his way. Two white things, connected to him were sprawled in front of him.

Legs with hooves at the end.

Hooves.

He pulled himself up and looked down at himself, slowly raising one hoof up awkwardly until he felt pain. His legs weren’t supposed to go quite that high. He examined one hoof in shock. Suddenly he realized what the white thing in the corners of his eyes was. His snout. He brushed some of the snow off of the figure he tripped over. It was a brown equine being with a copper mane that resembled the hairstyle of one of his brother’s mundane friends. Next to him was another one, a female whose body was light purple, and whose mane was pink and yellow.

They had been changed into small horses.

“Never seen a pony before?” Dex turned around to be faced with an even stranger sight. Some sort of serpent with a number of mix and matched parts. It was looking at him with amusement.

“What is this place?” The being laughed and reached out to poke something on his head sending a wave of unexpected aches to his head.

“Specifically? In the middle of nowhere just outside of Ponyville. Why so aggressive?” Dex moved back and rubbed his head with one hoof.

“Who are you?” The creature moved backward and gave an exaggerated bow.

“I am Discord, your friendly neighborhood Chaos Master.”

“….friendly….chaos master?” Dex repeated eyeing him with disbelief.

“Yes…is that really so hard to believe?” Discord huffed and looked at him hands on…well some middle part of his body that might have been his hips. Dex looked at him with skepticism “Allright if we’re going to play that way who exactly are you? And what are you and your buddies doing sleeping out in the middle of nowhere.” Dex said nothing, not trusting a creature who called themselves the Master of Chaos. “Oh….that’s how it is….” Discord drew close wrapping his tail around him, surrounding him, “How about a game of twenty questions? First….are you a stallion or a mare….I really can’t tell….what with that mane style you have going on…”

Dex gritted his teeth and felt a surge of something from the thing on his head as he felt his temper heat up.

“Ooh did I hit a nerve?” He had to be careful….if he let his anger get the best of him something bad might happen. He wasn’t going to allow an accident to happen over something so petty.

“I don’t have time for this.” Dex said. He turned around and started checking on the others. He carefully brushed the snow off of them so that they wouldn’t freeze to death. He could feel Discord watching him and attempting to ask a few more questions before getting bored. Making sure the younger victims were okay was more important. He heard the sound of a pop behind him. As he attended to the kids he noticed small things, like the differences in appendages. Elliott- Skye seemed to have a horn like he did, as did Anamaria. Shiro had wings, one of which was bent in an unusual way. He tried to adjust the wing just a bit so it wouldn’t get bent further. He thought about what he would do. On the one hand…now that they were stuck in this unfamiliar world he should keep eyes on them now more than ever. But his record with his half brother was far from clean. In the previous years it had gained two more bleak spots on it, not only had Dex as an angry , and stupid teenager, been a bully , Skye also believed that Dex had been responsible for the death of his parents and in a test Dex had held his friends as collateral. It gave him an opportunity to test the loyalty of the two mundane teenagers.

Dex had not approved of his mother’s actions regarding her ex-husband, nor had he wanted to take the credit for soliciting their deaths. His anger at his father didn’t go that deep anymore, since he started to learn the complexities of his situation. He was starting to realize that considering the obvious power difference between the two, and his mother’s disregard towards the concept of morals, that she might have done something to hoodwink his father into stay with her. The way his father had needed to take up drinking again just to survive Dex being there…that said it all.

When Dex found out that Skye had become aware of the Psi community and his father’s family he was petrified. He knew it would only be a matter of time before Skye and his little brother were pulled into his mother’s madness, like Kat had already been. Skye made things harder by trying to investigate his family, and get to the bottom of whatever they were doing, Dex didn’t see any reason to stop him, but he had to make sure Skye would be able to handle what he did find. Dex’s attempt at testing him had ended poorly, although he did get Skye to stand up against him in spite of his fear, the night ended in Skye almost being killed by Dex’s own hand. What Skye said had hit a nerve.

“You think you can blame this on me? At the end of the day you’ll know you killed them no matter what I said or did. You can never tell yourself you’re not a murderer.”

Dex shoved the thoughts aside. There was too much bleak history between them for anything good to come of him being near. Especially seeing as now he was suddenly in possession of a magical appendage. He decided that, before he left he would at least make sure that they would survive. He got all of the snow off of Skye and his little brother. Very carefully he moved the younger child over to his older brother with careful nudging and precise movements. Dex was reluctant to use magic lest he harm one of them. He didn’t trust magic. As he maneuvered the child close to his brother’s body heat he heard a shift in the snow.

His heart nearly skipped a beat as he noticed the child’s twin, his ‘student’ Kat come to and start to panic.

“SHHH!” He went over and put a hoof near Kat’s mouth. “Don’t wake them up.” Kat had wings like his brother, as well as light freckles. The only visual difference between the two was Kat’s mane was a little shorter in the front and straighter and was a bit of a darker red compared to Timothy’s pure orange. It seemed whatever force brought them there and changed them recognized that they were identical twins. Kat obeyed taking a few moments to look at his new body again.

“What…. the hell HAPPENED to me?” He replied in a loud whisper, “What happened to you?”

“Transformation I’m assuming.” Dex said, “I don’t pretend to know what blood magic can do.” He spoke of it with obvious dripping disdain for the idea.

“Oh….” Kat said. He gave an awkward flap of one wing. Dex continued checking the kids individually. He noted that many of them had a mark on their hind-side. The only ones who didn’t have it were the twins and the mundane girl, Skye’s friend. Strange. “Are you going to stay?” Dex looked up. There was a pleading note in Kat’s voice.

“No…I can’t. Elliott and I …both having magic, it would only mean trouble.” He looked at the light blue unicorn. Kat looked down, crushed.

“I-I want to go with you,” he said. Dex was about to say ‘no’ “I don’t belong here, with them, damnit! You know that. Just because I look like his brother doesn’t mean he’ll accept me….I’m still on the enemy side. “ Dex sighed looking over him. He knew Skye was protective of his family but the matter of Kat was complicated. None of it was Kat’s fault either. Some of it was his fault, because as a teenager he hadn’t had the courage to stand against his mother when she started taking things too far.

“Fine…on one condition....when I tell you do to do something for your own safety, you do it” he said, “If I tell you to run for cover and leave me, you’d best do it”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Good…now we’re going to need to bring them closer to the town so someone will find them.” Dex said.

“But how can we do that without waking them up?” Kat said. Dex bit his lip looking at the unconscious kids. Kat had a good point. He looked around studying his surroundings. He noticed the forest to one side of them.

“You stay here and keep watch ….I’ll go and see if I can find some wood.”Kat looked back towards the others uncertainly.

“What if one of them wakes up?”

“I don’t think they will….even if they do, you’re a child, if I know one thing about my brother he wouldn’t hurt a child…especially one that’s nearly the mirror image of his brother.” Dex said, ‘I’ll be quick.” Kat nodded and went over to the clearing of grass. Dex started towards the forest clumsily sprinting.

*****

Kat walked around on the grass, avoiding the snow with its cold bitter sting, and rubbed his wings against his body for warmth. He circled the small area, and thought about things. His mind drifted back to those last painful moments, and the revelation of where he came from. In the end, all his trying to feel like part of the family was in vain, he never was a part of the family to begin with. When he had been knocked out, he vaguely remembered one very early memory of his pre-Toyaka life. He remembered being held by a woman with auburn hair and freckles, and talked to, gently and quietly.

She was different from the mother he knew somehow, from the way she talked. Mother…Kagami…she could seem ‘sweet’ but even when she spoke in sweet honeyed tones, there was vinegar behind it. No, vinegar wasn’t the right word. She sounded sweet but deadly. Cyanide. She didn’t know how to be gentle, just how to seem that way.

Throughout his short life he had experienced a psychic link that had given him links to this other world. He never spoke to Kagami –Mother (he still couldn’t shake the feeling that thinking of her by her real name would cause trouble. Even if she couldn’t reach him, he felt that something bad might happen if he didn’t pay his proper respects to the Toyaka matriarch) about it. She would be angry. He dismissed them as dreams, dreams he couldn’t explain. It probably made him seem stupid that he had those dreams and didn’t start to connect the dots until he learned, through a little scientific curiosity, that he had ginger roots. But really the honest truth was that he didn’t want to know. His experiment with his hair had been an attempt to try and prove they weren’t real.

Maybe in that way, the traitor had been right in what he always said. Emotions made you stupid. Emotions, like desperation and hope ,could make a kid who could calculate algebra in his head, still be a stupid little boy, who did stupid things, just to belong to the family he grew up in.

“Gyah!” Seized by the urge to give into his compulsion, he raised a hoof to his head, before remembering he no longer had fingers. “Damn!” There was another reason he hated this form. In desperation he stopped pacing and using his mouth, pulled out a small feather from his wings. It had been two days and he wasn’t sure how much longer it would be until his system had run clean of medication. Who knew if it already had when his body was changed into this….this stupid tiny horse thing. He continued pacing stopping every now and then to look toward the forest.

He froze as he saw his twin brother stirring. He had half a mind to run and half a mind to duck and hide. Heart pounding he watched and waited while Timothy Stryke twitched and then change his position. When he didn’t move after that Kat sighed a breath of relief. It seemed like the other boy was either still out cold , or trying to stay asleep not sure he wanted to face what now lied ahead. Maybe he would try to tell himself it was a dream, who knew?

“Katsuya!” Kat was pulled out of his thoughts when he saw Dex approaching with a rickety old sled, crudely fixed, by Dex himself from the looks of it. He pulled it using a rope he held between his teeth. When he made it over, he spat the rope out with a huge breath of air. “I found this just outside the town, probably lost by some child. “

“We’re going to have to get used to holding things with our mouth aren’t we?” He held up a hoof and shook it, “These things are bleeding useless.” Dex gave Kat a severe look for his language. “You’d say the same” the child muttered.

“You are a child.” Dex said.

“So is Shiro but he can curse like the worst of them when his mother isn’t in earshot”

“He’s at least sixteen though.” Kat pouted digging one hoof in the dirt. “Anyhow…what I need you to do is help me move your brother and the others on this, so I can pull them closer to the town where they’ll be noticed.” Kat nodded giving an awkward salute.

Between the two of them, a twenty year old and an eleven year old, moving the other teenagers and child was quite a task, but still fairly manageable. Dex pulled them to a spot just outside of the city where he prepared a clearing. It probably took about two hours before they were done. The sky was starting to slowly become lighter. As Dex pushed the last row of snow away from the bodies using the sled, he turned to see Katsuya starting to drift off. The boy opened his eyes with a start and shook himself.

“Are we done yet?”

“Yes….all we need is to return this” he nodded at the sled, “back to where it belongs so it can be found by its proper owner.” Katsuya rolled his eyes a bit. “I don’t want to leave any proof that we were here.”

“Can I go with you this time?”

“Yes.” Dex said. Kat was shocked when Dex kneeled down and nodded toward his back. “Get on”

“…wha…?”

“Get on” Dex said gruffly, giving Katsuya a fixed glare. Kat awkwardly climbed on and clung to his teacher and older brother tightly. It was unlike Dex to be like this. He normally would have expected the men to tell him to walk on his own two legs. It’s not that Dex was intentionally cruel, just harsh. Dex was one of the few people that wouldn’t give Kat an anxiety attack if he touched him, but Dex never so much as put a hand on his shoulder. A few times he had grabbed him roughly to stop him from doing something that would hurt himself, usually while chiding him for being a “damned idiot”. Kat was eventually lulled to sleep by the movement of his surface.

******

Returning the sled to its place didn’t take too long. Dex was relieved that the boy fell asleep rather quickly; it’s what he had been counting on after doing all that work. Once he returned he gave the area where the older teens laid one last look over. The snow was pushed far away from their bodies, so they wouldn’t have to worry too much about frostbite, hopefully. The siblings were positions close enough to brush each other so they could share body heat.

He noticed a few of them stirring, fidgeting. It reassured him to know that they alive enough. Who knew how awake they were?

“Take care of each other.” He said. For once, his main worry was not whether he could trust the mundane kids, but whether Shiro and Skye would be able to get past their family’s differences, and their shared grudge. He had discovered last year that Gem and Rusty Tekton were devoted friends, just as devoted as Skye was to them. They were decent, for mundanes.

He left them and started heading towards the opposite direction of the small town, hoping to find a place to stay.

Dex wandered for a few miles, having to take a few moments to rest. His body would ache and sometimes he felt a sting as Katsuya’s limbs brushed against a bruise. He would grit his teeth but keep himself moving forward, not giving too much thought to the pain. It was like what he had been taught, and taught his students, if you dwelled on unpleasant feelings they wouldn’t get any better. Either do something about it if you could, or endure it if you couldn’t. He had to teach that lesson to Shiro on multiple occasions. Shifting bones was not a pleasant experience and the younger boy had a predisposition to complain.

At some point he felt something on his back as the child awoke with a jolt. He had been restless in his sleeping. He was breathing heavily.

“….calm down…you’re safe now.” He kept his voice unusually quiet in tone. His normal brusque manner wouldn’t help a hysterical child.

“I…..It’s fine” However it was an obvious lie, choked out with a small sob.

“Don’t lie….you’re not fine.” Dex said. Katsuya sniffed.

“I’m not weak!” the boy insisted, “I’m fine”

“You’re traumatized, just like the rest of us who were involved.” Dex was headed towards some caved he saw in the distance. He heard Kat sniffle. He had been hard on him before, which he was starting to regret. It seemed like a good idea at the time, when as a younger man, he was trying to prepare Katsuya for life, and at the same time trying to distance himself. He used to think if he was impatient and harsh in teaching his “step-brother” that it would make Kat want less to do with him. But it only made Kat work harder in hopes of earning Dex’s approval.

Once he realized this he tried to soften his approach, while still being effective and let some fondness for his devoted student show. But even then he couldn’t completely, because, to his great embarrassment, he had never learned how. Throughout his bleak childhood, he had only learned how to numb his emotions, occasionally letting them out in dangerous bursts of temper. After being so out of touch with his emotions for so long, to prevent accusations of empathic ability.

The head of household’s son, the head of the family business could not be an empath. As if being the rivals of the ’upstanding’ Stryke family wasn’t bad enough. The Toyaka’s got everything they had through hard work, underhanded means, and, most of all, a reputation as the biggest bully on the playground.

“….You don’t seem traumatized.” Katsuya said.

“Well…I had practice” Dex said, “sometimes when you live long enough and you’ll gain that.” It shouldn’t be that way, but he couldn’t deny that growing up in this family, one was conditioned to seeing shocking things, and learning to hide secrets. Katsuya stayed quiet for a while as Dex pushed himself to reach the caves. Once they made it, he positioned himself so as to allow Kat to slide off landing on his feet, and then he started resting himself. He took a few moments to adjust his legs comfortably.

But he didn’t sleep, oh no, not yet.

He was the adult, he needed to be sharp. It was fortunate that he did too, because at some point Kat got up and wandered farther in the caves, after awaking from another nightmare. There was the sound of a strange hissing Dex got up without thinking and went to defend Katsuya from what it was. It was a strange black creature with beaded eyes and fangs barely bigger than Katsuya himself. On instinct Dex raised hoof and knocked the creature away as it launched itself at him.

“…….damn….” Kat said quietly, admiring how he had nearly knocked it out of the cave. The creature scrambled to its feet and skittered off.

“Did it hurt you?” Dex asked.

“No….it just…it jumped at me.”

“Stay close to me.” The two of them returned to their spot, with Kat curled up right by Dex. He watched as the child drifted back to sleep. He started to nod off a bit himself, and fought sleep until they were interrupted again. The creature returned, with its mother.

Or that was who Dex assumed the tall dark creature that came in and pointed a horn to his head to be.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t blast your head off.” She said. To her credit she didn’t raise her voice; she was able to maintain command without it. Her voice, bug-like in a way, was full of sweetened poison, just like his own mother.

“Self defense” Dex responded levelly. “I assume that you are here because your child was threatened. I had the same motives when your child threatened my student here.” He nodded down to Katsuya. “He was already considerably weakened and I had to defend him.”

She looked somewhat taken aback by his answer for a few moments.

“Are we not entitled to protection and safety as you are?”

*****

In the days after the failed press conference, Chrysalis found herself feeling more anxious than she did triumphant. She should be happy, one would think, that she had gotten this far. But all she thought about some days was how this plan could fail. That she should quit while she was still ahead. She would attempt to keep that half of her smothered. It only reminded her of her failures in the past. But she had learned from them.

She had learned that she should not underestimate whatever power came from the Princess of Love. She had been skeptical of love as a whole since, as far as she could remember even in her pre-changeling days that it had never done much except weaken her. Things that the ponies valued like love and friendship (only for each other though, the ‘loving kind ponies’ could be downright nasty when a changeling dared to show its face to them) did little for her. Friendship led to her becoming a changeling, love had resulted in heartbreak when she tried to turn to Steelshoe for support. But of course “Perfect Little Miss Love” would have special powers when it came to her specialty.

Chrysalis would go to her ‘room’ within the hive to check if the horn was still there. The horn of Sombra, found lying near the border between the chilly far north and Equestria after some nasty arctic storms. A unicorn’s horn was a magical object by its nature. Normally it would cease working after its owner died at some point, but Sombra was a little more than the average unicorn and his horn was charged full of black magic, which preserved it after his death. It was a cursed object…but still magical. Chrysalis treated it with utmost reverence and caution, knowing to whom it used to belong. Steelshoe had rebuffed her in her time of need, true. But even as she grew bitter, she could not completely let go. It made her feel two very strong feelings, sadness remembering what she had with Steel, and what could have been; and resentment knowing that the black magic he drowned himself effectively killed him, and replaced him with Sombra. By the time he rose to power, Steelshoe had died, and Sombra had taken his place.

She had a feeling the Steelshoe would have wanted the Empress to regain her rightful place. At least that’s what she told herself. There were times she laid awake at night, wondering, if Steelshoe were still alive, would he consider the Empress dead and the Changeling Queen something that had risen in her place? Was it even fair of her to think that of him? She had to think of it this way, because she simply could not reconcile the nobleman’s son with the creature who wiped out unicorns and drove pegasi from his land. Her feeling toward ponies were fraught with complication, but even she had boundaries she clung to, lines she would not cross. There were things that were just evil, and she had to hold on to that, so she wouldn’t lose her mind in all the terrible things she learned of, when she committed an act of murder.

Right now though, she had to take it one step at a time. First step was getting her kingdom back; second step was separating it from Equestria. She wanted her life back.

“Queen! “ The temptation to check the horn again receded…for now. A small changeling came in bruised and limping. He threw himself down in a bow. “I apologize, I-I a unicorn, and a foal took up residence in th-the place I was sent to watch. The unicorn attacked me when I was defending myself against his foal.”

“What?”

“He w-was pretty tall, white, had a long black mane and he looked kind of beat up. I thought he’d be weak but smacked me a whole three feet.”

“Take me to him.” What Chrysalis expected perhaps was another pony who would look upon her as a monster in horror and take for granted that he had a position of privilege over her. Someone who would blast a changeling for looking at him wrong. What he didn’t expect was the weary eyed lean unicorn stallion with the look of a broken survivor. When she confronted him, he spoke with reason, and made a statement that confused her.

“Are we not entitled to protection and safety as you are?”

DID HE JUST…?

No…it couldn’t be…

This pony with a Canterlot accent had just compared himself, putting himself on the same level as a changeling.

On one hand such a statement irked her, and she almost wanted to find it offensive. Except, no ‘’proper pony” would dare equate themselves with a changeling. Changelings were in the eyes of ponies (and some griffins), outcasts, rogues. Cursed ponies. This strange foolish unicorn didn’t even realize what he was saying. Chrysalis looked at him

“Do you not have a home?”

“….our home befell a disaster, at the time we really have nowhere to stay.” He said. Chrysalis raised a brow.

“I see…..I suppose that is fair.” She said. “Did you not have any friends or family to stay with no one who would take you in?”

“We do not wish to put anyone out. For the night we’ll stay here, perhaps we will move along in the morning.” He said, “I apologize for the harm I caused your child. We have just experienced a bit of a shock, you see and when we were threatened, I acted first on impulse.”

“Is the foal your child?” She asked.

“No he’s my brother.”

“Quite the age difference.” She said ,her voice full of amused skepticism.

“Long story.” The unicorn said, with a half shrug. Chrysalis looked over the unicorn for a long time. He was different from most Equestrian ponies, he acted in violence against one of her subjects, true, but he did it in defense, and he apologized after. She found herself feeling curious about him, but still slightly on her guard. After all he was still a pony. But having allies never hurt. She might even be able to use a pony ally. Goodness knows the Equestrians nor the Crystal Ponies would take anything from a Changeling seriously.

“Well…we have space in the Hive, if you don’t mind staying with changelings. Most ponies do.” She said. The unicorn furrowed his brows thinking for a moment.

“We have no such problems…so long as we will not be a burden on you.”Chrysalis gave a sweet smile.

“Of course not. We are always happy to help someone in need.” A bit of a lie, yes, but it was for a good cause, this stallion and his foal might be able to pay her back by helping in her plan. She led the two back to her hive, feeling victorious.

Sometimes wonderful things came in strange packages.