Chapters The golden-armored guards at the city gate saluted Cadance quite smartly, and so did every other group of soldiers she met between there and Canterlot Tower. They made the whole city gleam more brightly than ever under Aunt Celestia's sun, but the clatter of military horseshoes at every intersection and the lack of any other ponies on the streets got Cadance's ears twitching. After all, the last time she'd visited—
She stopped outside the palace's arched entryway, let her gaze travel from stalwart face to stalwart face among the guards stationed along the top of the wall. When had she last been to Canterlot? Years ago? Decades, more likely. But certainly it hadn't been centuries!
Had it?
Regardless, there'd been fewer soldiers, she was sure, and quite a number of citizens bustling about their brief, rich, wonderful lives. Starting forward again, Cadance couldn't keep a shiver from rustling her wings. Receiving the invitation to visit this morning, she'd thought several things odd about it: that it hadn't been signed by both her aunts, for one thing, and that the invitation had specified Canterlot Tower rather than her aunts' actual castle. And to find the city so changed?
Picking up her pace, she crossed the courtyard, nodded to the continued salutes, and entered the reception hall—no decorations anywhere, she noted, so it wasn't some local festival or civic occasion. Still, blank marble walls and archways weren't enough to base any conclusions on...
At the top of the grand staircase stood the first non-military pony she'd seen: a russet-brown earth pony mare, her deep crimson mane tied back in a tight bun, a silver chain around her neck that Cadance recalled was the badge of her aunts' castellan. She bowed as Cadance came up the steps. "Good afternoon, your Highness. I am Seneschal, and I'm honored to welcome you back to Canterlot."
"Thank you, Seneschal." The last castellan she'd met, Cadance was sure, had also been named Seneschal, but he'd been a silver-blue unicorn. And from what she remembered of court etiquette, she was fairly certain the castellan of Canterlot Tower should be here greeting her as well.... "I hope I haven't come at a bad time." She glanced down the stairs at the guards.
"Oh, not at all, your Highness." An odd note wavered behind Seneschal's words: relief, Cadance almost thought it was. "In fact, your aunt will be overjoyed to see you."
Which made Cadance shiver again. "My aunts , surely you mean."
Seneschal's ears fell, and she turned, started down the red-carpeted hallway. "Please, princess, if you'll follow me?"
It took Cadance some effort not to leap into the air and swoop past the earth pony to the throne room, but if there was one thing she'd learned in the centuries that she'd sallied forth from the Realm Between to deliver her Calls, it was the importance of protocol to living ponies, especially in tense situations. So she kept her steps measured behind the castellan, stopped at the edge of the red carpet, let Seneschal push the big double doors open and announce, "Presenting her Royal Highness, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza!"
A trumpet fanfare sounded within, very tight and very martial, and Cadance steeled herself for whatever might await her. But still, stepping through the doorway, she almost staggered back at the sight of the majestic white alicorn seated atop the towering dais at the far end of the throne room, her golden plate mail shining as brightly as the summer noontime sun, her mane and tail each a cascading pastel rainbow somehow flowing without benefit of wind, her gentle but stern expression making Cadance want to smile and apologize at the same time. "Aunt Celestia?" she asked.
"Ah, Cadance! Welcome, dearest niece!" Aunt Celestia's voice boomed, the force pushing against Cadance like a storm wind, and when she spread her wings, they seemed to span twice as much space as the last time Cadance had seen her. "Much gladdened are we that thou hast accepted our invitation!" She sprang from her dais and arched so gracefully through the air, Cadance nearly joined the quiet gasps from the soldiers lining the walls. Was this really—?
The alicorn landed beside her with a delicate tapping of her shoes, stretched her head down to rub her cheek against the side of Cadance's neck, and her scent, fresher than the dew of a spring morning, brought Cadance right back to her very first memory, blinking awake in that weather-beaten Canterlot apartment, three smaller ponies staring at her from the other side of a crooked table, their names ringing unbidden in Cadance's head—Smart Cookie was the earth pony directly across from her; the unicorn in the middle was Clover the Clever; and the pegasus Pansy was standing next to her.
The aroma, though, had come from the ponies to Cadance's right, the nearest white and pink and slightly larger than Cadance, a black and dark blue pony about Cadance's same size peering around the white one. And while Cadance had had no idea of their names—nor of her own, for that matter—the warm sunshine scent of the one and the cool moonlight scent of the other spoke to her of kinship: her aunts, she knew in the same unquestionable way that she knew what ponies were, how they thought, how they felt...and how they had brought her into being by means of a magic they themselves didn't fully understand.
Aunt Celestia stepping back returned Cadance to the present, and while her aunt's face remained placid beneath her plumed helmet, the slight rim of white around her eyes told Cadance a different story. Still more than a little awe-struck, though, instead of blurting out the questions that continued popping through her head like sudden mushrooms, Cadance just smiled and said, "Thank you for inviting me, aunt."
The dip of Aunt Celestia's ears was so fast, Cadance almost didn't notice it, and then her aunt was moving away, calling out, "Thou must be exhausted after thy journey! Seneschal! We shall escort our niece to her quarters! Should any matter arise that requires our attention, do not hesitate to summon us!"
The earth pony bowed. "Of course, your Highness."
Cadance spread her wings, started forward to catch up with Aunt Celestia, but her aunt wasn't slowing down, cantering out into the hallway, the guards, already at attention, somehow straightening even further. Practically galloping for an open double doorway Cadance hadn't noticed before, Aunt Celestia unfurled those massive wings, leaped over the railing of the little balcony outside, and rose into the blue of the early afternoon sky. Without a word, not allowing any of her concerns to appear on her face, Cadance followed, rode Aunt Celestia's backdraft like she would the winds behind a thunderstorm, and barely needed to flap her own wings to stay airborne.
To a balcony near the top of the tallest tower she slipped in Aunt Celestia's wake, Cadance not missing the quiver in her aunt's knees and slight scrabbling of her hoofs when she landed and slid from the sunlight into the shadows of the room beyond. The tiniest chill struck Cadance, but chastising herself—she had no reason to suspect Aunt Celestia of anything; no reason at all !—she went inside as well.
It wasn't any of the guest rooms Cadance had stayed in before, and looking around the neat shelves of books, the small keepsakes of glass and gold set here and there over the counters and tabletops throughout the large but somehow intimate space, the way the place swirled with light even though the gauzy curtains were drawn, she quickly realized this was her aunt's room. Aunt Celestia stood facing away in the middle of the floor, everything about her so regal, Cadance might've thought she'd been replaced by a marble statue of herself.
A quick glance, listen, and sniff told her they were alone, so she stepped forward, took a breath, and very carefully asked the question at the top of her list: "Aunt Celestia? Where's Aunt Luna?"
For a moment, nothing. Then a shiver wracked Aunt Celestia from the tips of her ears to the nebulous brush of her tail, and she dropped in place, collapsed with a clatter and a crash to the thick, cream-colored carpet, her armor bursting at the seams and tumbling in pieces around her. With a flash, Cadance was at her side, cradling her weeping aunt in her wings.
***
By mid-afternoon, Cadance had gotten the whole story, Aunt Celestia never moving from the heap she'd made of herself. "So you see," she finished, her voice as quiet and raw as the oldest and sickest pony Cadance had ever Called to the Groves Beyond, "I failed Luna more completely than anypony has ever failed another. I didn't understand what she was feeling, I didn't listen to what she was saying, and when she finally became consumed, I couldn't...even with all the Elements of Harmony, I couldn't...couldn't—"
"Shhhh...." Cadance let the love she felt for her aunt shimmer forth from her horn, stroked the jagged edges of the elder alicorn's pain and grief. "Nothing's harder than trying to help a pony who doesn't want it. Banishing Aunt Luna to the moon till we can discover what happened to her, well, I'd call that a pretty smart idea."
Aunt Celestia shivered against Cadance. "Thank you for saying that, at least." She took a deep breath and raised her head, the gossamer rainbow that had taken the place of her pink mane coursing across half her face. Chuckling, she ran a hoof through it. "Using all six Elements has changed me, Cadance, and has changed the world, too, I fear. More will have to change before we're done, but with both of us here, I think we'll be able to establish a workable set of planetary guidelines till such time as we can bring Luna back."
"Both of us?" Cadance couldn't stop a shiver of her own, and an all-too-familiar tickle, a tickle she'd been feeling on and off for nearly an hour now, ran along the base of her horn. "Aunt Celestia, I'll be more than glad to do what I can to help, of course, but I...I do have my own responsibilities, not just in this world but in the other."
When Aunt Celestia's head turned, the eye not covered by the cascade of her mane gazed down so deep and shimmery, Cadance felt like she was looking into a well. "I know, Cadance, and I'm very sorry for asking, but...please. All these centuries, it's been Luna and I together, and I...I'm not sure how to...how to—" And for all that she was now bigger than any pony Cadance had ever seen, at that moment, her aunt looked as fragile as an eggshell. "If there's any way you can see your way clear to—"
"Of course, Auntie." Ears hot and blushing, Cadance touched her cheek to her aunt's neck. Abandoning her at a time like this was not an option, and while Cadance had no idea how she was going to manage it with her other duties, she forced a smile. "Till Aunt Luna's fit to return, I'll be right here with you."
"Thank you." Aunt Celestia stood, Cadance rising beside her. "I know grief counseling is something you specialize in, so I'll be following your lead a great deal in helping the ponies of Equestria adjust to Luna's absence." She glanced down at the pieces of her armor, and the fury that flashed across her face almost made Cadance leap backwards. The look vanished immediately, though, Aunt Celestia's nose wrinkling, and with a flash of her horn, the golden plate mail puffed away into a scattering of sparks. "So." Aunt Celestia blew out a breath. "First things first, I suppose."
***
Standing atop Canterlot Tower that evening, Cadance watched in awe as Aunt Celestia sent her words wafting across all of Equestria, the depths of her emotion obvious and real, her tone gentle and reassuring—"In your voice," she'd told her aunt, "not the royal Canterlot voice." Cadance had also sent Seneschal and her staff out into the city—"Find any ponies who know how to listen, to empathize, and to console. They'll already be working with their friends and neighbors, but ask them to come to the palace so we can make them available to anypony who needs to talk about all this." And since that final battle between her aunts had apparently raged through the night sky from one end of the country to the other, she would need to expand this program to—
The base of her horn tickled, the same sensation she'd been pushing aside all afternoon, and Cadance swallowed a sigh. Ponies were such hearty creatures, she rarely had more than fifteen or twenty Calls a day, but each one deserved her full attention, something she couldn't really give at the moment.
"Our beloved Luna," Aunt Celestia was saying, "is not gone, but neither is the creature she became, Nightmare Moon. So, until such time as we can return the one without the other—" Cadance felt her mane rustle, her aunt's new power flexing the very fabric of space around her, and the moon began to rise at the eastern horizon. "We will not forget our sister, our princess, our friend." The moon slowly cleared the distant mountains, its silver-white face changed, mottled with a rough but familiar silhouette that brought a lump to Cadance's throat. "We...that is, I thank you."
Aunt Celestia lowered her head, and Cadance stepped up to nuzzle her aunt's neck. "That's a perfect tribute to her."
"She is coming back." The edge in Aunt Celestia's whisper made Cadance's ears dip, but when she looked up, a gentle smile sat on her aunt's face. "Thank you again, Cadance. I can't imagine how terrible this would be without you here." Her wings unfurled. "Now, we'll have a bit of supper, then—"
"Actually, Aunt Celestia, I—" Cadance's voice failed at the immediate distress that replaced her aunt's smile. "I'll be back before sun-up, I promise, but my own duties, they...I...I need to make some arrangements." Not that she'd come up with any plan in the last few hours, but, well, necessity was the broodmare of invention, Smart Cookie often said with that inimitable snorting laugh of hers.
Nodding, Aunt Celestia sucked in a breath. "Yes, of course. This has all been so sudden, I...I understand completely." She drew herself up to her full height, Cadance again a little awe-struck at her aunt's transformation. "For my part, I must speak to Luna's staff this evening, those whom she coerced into supporting her cause. They'll need to know how much I shall be relying upon them until such time as she can retake her rightful place at Night's helm." A flap of her wings lifted her into the gathering twilight. "Until dawn, then, niece."
Cadance watched her go, then quickly let her own magic enfold her, gave in to the itch, the tug, the yearning she always felt when somepony somewhere needed her Call.
The air rustled around her like autumn leaves, and she found herself in a small but nicely furnished bedroom, a sea of love and grief swirling in the stillness. Two ponies huddled together on a sofa pulled up to the bedside, their eyes rimmed with tears, while an old earth pony stallion shivered under the blankets—Cold Press, she knew instantly, was his name, his blue face a sallow gray, his salt-and-pepper mane matted with sweat.
Reaching out with her power, Cadance nourished the love in the room, thickened it, let it spread like a nectar-scented vapor into the sharp and ragged grief surrounding it. The two younger ponies breathed it in, sighed, and relaxed against each other—she wouldn't know their names, of course, until their times came—and Cold Press opened his eyes, a light barely flickering behind them. Cadance caressed that light, felt the resonance of it, and reached through to the Groves Beyond, the love in the room guiding her directly to Press's parents, uncles, aunts, his wife Magenta whom Cadance had Called several years earlier. "Cold Press?" she Called now. "It's time."
The air shimmered open behind her, the summery breezes of the Groves adding their sweetness to the room, and the two younger ponies raised their heads, blinking as if they'd just awoken, Cold Press sitting up for the first time in months, his tired body giving one last exhale and remaining behind.
"Dad?" one of the younger ponies whispered. Press turned, smiled, nodded, drifted past Cadance, and stepped into the waiting embrace of the ponies on the other side of the divide, the younger pony staring after him. "Mom?"
Press and Magenta looked back, and Cadance shaped the love resounding silently back and forth between the worlds, wrapped it like a bow around all the ponies present, then drew the gateway between the realms closed, allowed the shadows of the living world's evening to move into the room once more.
The two living ponies let out sighs in unison, and Cadance knew more tears would follow, sorrow mixed with relief, pain mingling with love. Peace shimmered here, a peace that Cadance considered to be her greatest gift, a peace that gentled the harsher and more transitory emotions, a peace that allowed the more permanent emotions to take root and grow so that the love these ponies had all shared would remain, leading these two younger ponies to the Groves Beyond when it came time for Cadance to Call them.
Perfect. They wouldn't need her further intervention. Flicking her power then to slice into the spaces between space, Cadance headed for the Realm Between, her home both before and after Clover the Clever and her friends had summoned Cadance and her aunts...or whatever it was they'd done. For all the happy hours Cadance had spent in the Groves Beyond with Clover and her mentor Starswirl the Bearded, when they started delving into their various theories about herself and her aunts, Cadance just smiled and nodded. As far as she was concerned, being a timeless manifestation of the love and hope uniting all ponies living and dead in the past, the present, and the future was plenty: she didn't need to know the details.
Her golden shoes clattered on the stones of her front walk, and she turned to take in the afterglow of the sunset, clouds all purple and pink above the calm waters of the bay down the grassy slope from her door. Equestria was lovely, of course—she'd found her little house abandoned there, after all, had brought it through to the Realm Between when just settling to sleep under whatever tree she found herself beside at nightfall had gotten more than a little old—and she adored the infinite blue skies, green hills, and bosky valleys of the Groves Beyond. But Cadance found this spot on the border that divided the living and the dead to be the most beautiful of all.
Smiling, she turned, activated her horn to push open her front door, and had to smile at the sudden wave of relaxation that crackled along her spine, muscles she hadn't even realized she'd had clenched coming loose as she crossed the threshold into her own tidy sitting room.
Which made her smile fade. Usually, Calling a pony across into the Groves Beyond left her as light as a soap bubble, her whole body humming to the music of creation's never-ending dance, another phrase Cookie had come up with several centuries ago that Cadance had been rolling around in her mind ever since. But the way she'd had to put off poor Cold Press's Call for all those hours, it had left her itchy, as if she'd forgotten her bath that morning.
She shuffled her hoofs across the wooden floor, slid onto her favorite sofa, and rested her head on her front legs. There had to be some way she could help Aunt Celestia without neglecting her duties. Her Calls were the priority, of course, but she couldn't just pop away in the middle of whatever tasks her aunt might need to assign her. No, what she needed was—
The idea made her sit up, more ideas sparking from it, a plan springing into place and setting her wings to spreading. She needed some assistants.
***
Sailing out into the living world, she aimed for the most magical forest she knew—the one around her aunts' castle—and started marking down items on her mental checklist. She would need a group of animals, a herd or a pack or something that would know how to work together, creatures with some magic about them already that she could enhance and shape while she was enhancing and shaping their bodies and minds with her own magic, encouraging certain individuals to fall in love and have children so that the traits she was looking for would be passed on.
Those traits got their own section of her invisible list: intelligence, resilience, a work ethic, and something that bred quickly, too, since the sooner she could get these assistants on the job, the better. Maybe she could start with ants. Or beetles. Or—
A buzzing tickled her ears. Pulling into a hover, she followed the sound to a bee hive, lumpy and brown, tucked between the trunk and a large branch near the top of one of the taller trees at the edge of the forest. Big, black, and shiny, the bees darted busily around it, a green glimmer to their wings that prickled Cadance's senses and told her they'd picked up some magical ability or other living so close to her aunts.
Intrigued, she drifted closer to the hive. The world was changing, after all; hadn't Aunt Celestia said something about that? And Cadance had to change with it.
"More tea, Cadance?"
"Yes, thank you."
Eight or nine decades of burning the midnight oil had made her aunt's tea pretty much an essential ingredient in Cadance's life at this point. Whether the blend had changed over the years or not, she didn't know, but after having to cut it with dollops of cream and scoops of sugar for so long, she'd lately found that taking it as straight as Aunt Celestia did somehow perked her up and relaxed her at the same time. And if she was right about what today had in store, she would definitely need to be both sharp and smooth.
"So." Aunt Celestia sipped her cup, the crackling light from the fireplace only accentuating the cold, pre-dawn darkness outside the windows of the cozy south tower rooms Cadance had adopted as her own. "All's going well, niece?"
Because of course Auntie would have guessed that something was up today. Even without Cadance giving her any information about the project...
"I'm hopeful," Cadance answered. Not that she was trying to keep Aunt Celestia in the dark—an impossibility, anyway. But, well, after all the setbacks, dead ends, close calls, and the one full-fledged disaster she'd been through so far, until she was absolutely sure, she wasn't about to announce that she'd finally solved the problem that had kept her from spending more than three hours asleep during any given twenty-four hour period since Aunt Luna's exile.
"Good." The glow of Aunt Celestia's horn set her cup down and picked her napkin up. "I know this has been a difficult time for you, transitioning from your former way of life to this new one I've forced upon us all, and I don't say often enough how proud I am of you and how grateful I am to you."
Cadance blinked across the little round table, her wings shivering like her aunt's words had scratched an itch she hadn't known she'd had. Shaking herself, she forced a smile and said, "Thank you. I can honestly say that it's been an incredible experience so far, and if all goes well, things'll be getting even more —!" Grabbing her cup, Cadance swallowed her words with her tea, cursed silently, kept her gaze fixed on the teapot Aunt Celestia had given her along with the room, the guard, the duties, and the responsibilities she now held in the living world.
"I see." The gentle smile in her aunt's voice was another thing Cadance knew all too well. "Well, if I can ever be of assistance, you know you have only to ask."
Unable to keep from looking up, Cadance almost felt guilty for not confiding in Aunt Celestia, so open and beautiful and friendly. But— "Yes. I do know that, and it means more to me than I can ever say that you came to me when you needed help after Aunt Luna's...episode." Nearly a century of sleep-deprivation threatened to send her tongue spinning out of control, but focusing her thoughts on her specific feelings of gratitude seemed to settle things a bit. "I've learned so much being here with you, Auntie, and believe me, if I ever need help—" Like if this current version of her experiment blew up in her face like the last one had... "I will definitely come straight to you."
The base of her horn itched with the Call, and it took every ounce of reserve she'd ever cultivated not to leap to her hoofs with a shout. This was it! The final test! A hundred years of trial and error, and now—!
Setting her cup down, Cadance rose slowly and bowed to her aunt. "But if you don't mind, Auntie, I'll let you get on with the dawn. I'll be back in time for lunch, and we can go over the items for this afternoon's court sessions then. OK?"
Aunt Celestia nodded. "I have the utmost confidence in you, Cadance."
Almost as bracing as the tea, her aunt's words made Cadance smile, the magic of her horn turning the air to a shimmer and letting her slip through to the Realm Between, the dark eastern sky here already starting to gray. Taking a breath, Cadance forced herself to slow, forced herself to listen to the calmness of the morning while the light grew around her, forced herself to stop and watch the light stroke over the walls and roof of her little house—and the lumpy brown hive, at least five times the size of the house and stretching up the hill into the trees behind it.
Her heart hummed with the rhythm that began shaking the air. Movement at the hive's entrance, and either drawn by the new morning or by her presence, her dozen assistants buzzed forth: not quite as big as regular ponies; their wings vibrating and translucent; their bodies black and shiny in the dawn; each sporting a stubby, curving horn between their glowing blue eyes. They settled in two rows on the grass along the slope, their leader, the largest of them, as always coming out last, flying over the heads of the others, and landing in front of Cadance with a bow and a single raspy word: "Princess."
A shiver iced down Cadance's back. She'd poured so much love and attention and magic into these bees with their odd ability to make themselves more streamlined during flight; had failed three separate times to fashion anything more than slightly bigger bees; had nurtured the fourth version through multiple generations into hoof-sized creatures with ponyish heads and four legs until their magic became unstable and they nearly burned her house to the ground before she could drain their power and return them to their original state; had watched and coaxed and steered this fifth batch along with even more diligence and care into becoming these, her changelings. And all of it, all of it, had its payoff today.
"Good morning," Cadance said, letting her gaze travel along their ranks to rest at last on their leader. "Are you ready?"
The leader cocked her head, her eyes not the solid blue of the others, a hint of green iris and black pupil there. "Can it be?" she asked. "You're finally letting us work?"
Her excitement overflowing, Cadance couldn't help doing a quick little dance. "It's time, it's time, it's time!" she almost sang. She squelched herself, though, took a breath, looked directly at the leader. "If you're ready."
A flicker of green crackled over the leader's stubby horn. "We are always and entirely what you made us to be, princess."
***
Following the Call brought Cadance to a small house on the outskirts of Fillydelphia, her assistants a string of humming shadows behind her. She nearly clapped her hoofs in joy to see them, and she crossed the first item off her mental checklist of fears: it looked as if her changelings could navigate the passage from the Realm Between to the living world without a single problem.
Now on to fear number two...
She looked back at her assistants, opened her mouth to ask the questions she'd prepared, and stopped when she saw green magic sparkling again up and down the changeling leader's horn. "Their love," she whispered, her eyes halfway closed and her voice rustling as quietly as her wings. "The aroma of it. It's—" She shivered, green lightning now pulsing over the entire hard, black surface of her body, and as Cadance stared, she began bulging and stretching, colors flashing over her where colors hadn't been before. Her neck arched—and a mane burst from it, the hair a pink, purple, and yellow striped pattern Cadance knew well. Limbs and snout lengthening, feathers sprouting to cover her see-through wings, her horn straightening and growing—
Till Cadance was staring at herself. "Intoxicating," the changeling leader finished, her tone a bit pinched but otherwise perfect to Cadance's ears. And for the first time in almost a hundred years, Cadance found herself thinking that this plan might actually work.
Of course, there was still fear number three, and this one, well, it was the biggest fear of all.
Before she could do more than blink at her doppelganger, though, the changeling leader was swooping toward the house, the other eleven trailing in her wake, their forms blurring, fuzzy with green fire. The duplicate Cadance's horn flared, and she sailed through the wall, the real Cadance cloaking herself to become as thin as air and hurrying to catch up.
Peering in the window, she knew at once that the old brick-red mare lying in the bed was a long-retired unicorn firefighter named Douser, another unicorn young enough to be a grandson stretched over a cushion on the floor, and her instincts nearly drove her inside. But Cadance bit her lip, shoved a hoof hard against the wall, forced herself to remain in place, and watched her double drift light as an autumn leaf into the room.
Green magic flared around the changeling's horn, her brow creased in concentration, and Cadance felt something she'd never felt before, something she didn't really have words for. It sifted and shuffled the love and grief radiating from the two mortal ponies in ways Cadance would never have herself even tried in this situation, but the resulting flood of power seemed to fill the changeling leader like water pouring into a balloon. She smacked her lips, pointed her horn at the faint outlines of the other changelings behind her, and sent a cascade of green mist over them, shifting them to have the appearance of ponies that Cadance knew, ponies she'd led through to the Groves Beyond, ponies that were related to Douser and bound to her by love.
The changeling leader turned back to the bed and its occupant then with a confidence that made Cadance's nervousness grow. "Douser?" the changeling called. "It's time."
And it was nothing like a true Call, none of the same boundary crossing magic ringing in it, nothing that would unseal the route between this world and the next; Cadance almost leaped through the window again, decades of doubts crashing through her. This was crazy! How could she have deluded herself for this long into thinking that it might—??
Douser's eyes fluttered open, and all the changelings focused on her, the green mist swirling from them to her and back again. "Oh," she said, her voice as soft as rice paper. "You're here. You're all here..."
A shiver shook Cadance so violently, she almost pitched forward into the wall, and she could only stare as love bloomed up from the old unicorn, the force of it exactly as rich and full-bodied as if Cadance had been there Calling it forth herself. And the changelings, they took her love, and they...they—
She didn't know what they were doing with it. But somehow, Douser was sitting up, leaving her body behind, following the spinning strands of love that connected her to her actual friends and relatives in the Groves Beyond, and wafting out to...to join them, Cadance could tell. Yes, the changelings weren't opening a path directly, but as she'd hoped and dreamed and planned and still hadn't quite believed till this very moment, they were able to take in the love around them and focus it much in the way that a lens focused light. They could then direct that focused love back along the paths that connected all ponies and could send a pony's spirit on in nearly as efficient a fashion as Cadance did with her Call.
It worked, in other words. And that meant—
"Grandma?" a voice asked from inside, and Cadance blinked, saw the younger pony pushing himself up from the cushion and staring around.
One of the changelings squinted and became the very image of Douser, nodding and smiling to her grandson, and the changeling leader stepped to the colt's side. "Never fear," she said, touching her horn to his. "This is the cycle of nature, and those who are now parted will someday soon be reunited." Another flare of green, and she absorbed the love he felt for his grandmother, stretched a portion of it back out into the everlasting mosaic—not quite as skillfully as Cadance, of course, but that she could do it at all made Cadance want to do some more dancing—and made the necessary connections that would lead this pony to the Groves Beyond when his time came.
His eyes seemed to wobble in his head, then he slid back onto his cushion, his breathing relaxed and regular.
The leader of the changelings gave a look around the room, nodded to her troop, and with a flare of her horn, wrapped a green bubble around them and vanished. Cadance swooped after them and popped into the Realm Between just behind them, the sun completely risen by now and sparkling on the black carapaces of her new—and perfect—assistants. "Yes!" she cheered, spinning in a circle above them before landing so she could dance properly with the ground under her hoofs. "You did it! You really, really did it!"
The changeling leader arched an eye ridge. "Was there ever any doubt?"
Cadance couldn't keep from giggling, the results so much better than she had ever dared hope. "There were so many variables to account for! So many details that could've gone wrong!"
"And yet," the changeling said matter-of-factly, "in the end, we triumphed."
"You did." Cadance looked into those blue-green eyes and felt a surge of pride. "Thank you. Thank you for making my life so much easier!"
The changeling leader took a breath. "Chrysalis," she said.
For a few seconds, Cadance could only blink, the word seeming to hang in the air like an unexpectedly odd-smelling butterfly. "I'm sorry?" she finally asked.
"My name." The changeling leader drew herself up to her full height...though Cadance still found herself looking down to meet her gaze. "Ponies all have names, so if I'm to deal with them regularly, I must have one, too." She looked back at the other eleven changelings, all of them watching her with an intensity Cadance could suddenly almost hear. "So I will be Chrysalis. For we are not yet finished being born." Those peculiar eyes came around again to fix on Cadance. "If you don't mind, of course, princess."
The quiet little clattering of their wings against their shells made Cadance shiver again, made her look at them in a way she never had in all the decades of helping them along. Because they weren't a project any more. They were a people , a people who weren't ponies or griffons or dragons or—
Or anything that had ever been seen anywhere before.
"Princess?" The leader—Chrysalis, Cadance reminded herself; her name was Chrysalis—was looking at her with that little sideways tilt to her head.
Cadance struggled to keep her ears upright. "Yes, of course, Chrysalis. You...you've more than earned a name, and...if there's anything I can do to help you and your changelings, please let me—"
"Changelings?" Chrysalis's tiny ear flaps perked. "Oh, I like that. I like that very much."
The pearly-white veil floating along the top of Aunt Celestia's mane made Cadance think of foam on a gently lapping sea. Her every other thought, however, spun and sputtered. "You're getting married?? To Prince Golden??"
Aunt Celestia's eyes sparkled in the full-length mirror, her nose crinkling with one of her enigmatic little smiles. "You'd object to having Goldie as your uncle?"
"That's not it at all!" Cadance realized she was shouting, but in her aunt's room, she knew they wouldn't be overheard. "I've liked him ever since you introduced us after he graduated from your school thirty or forty years ago!" She waved at the over-sized dressmaker's dummy, a gown laid out there as light and lovely as a summer cloud, a golden sunburst tiara balanced on its brow. "But you don't love him!" Lighting up her horn, Cadance searched once more for any shiver of that emotion in her aunt's demeanor, and when she still didn't find it, she stomped a hoof. "And that's terrible !"
The temperature in the room dropped, and Aunt Celestia turned from the mirror, the blank expression on her face not quite hiding an anger Cadance hadn't seen there since the day of Aunt Luna's banishment just over two hundred years ago now. "I love all my little ponies, niece," her aunt said quietly, but the words hit Cadance like a slap.
Ears folding, Cadance bowed, her wings clenched against her sides. "You're right, Auntie, and I'm sorry." Swallowing, she forced her head up, met her aunt's calm but still ferocious gaze. "I have nothing but respect for both you and Prince Golden, and while I know you'll make each other very happy and I'll be honored to be your bridesmaid, I...I don't understand how you and he...why you and he are...are doing this."
Another splintery instant, then Aunt Celestia's head drooped, her anger gone like it had never been there. "Mostly politics. As long as Luna—" Her voice caught, but with a clearing of throat, she went on: "As long as Luna and I kept to our castle, the royal families here in Canterlot could pretend we didn't exist when it suited them. But now that I'm not...using the old castle any longer, there's been a movement gathering among certain unicorns over the last century or so to challenge my right to be called 'princess' within the city limits." She cocked her head. "I'm sure they'd object to you using the title as well if any of them could remember your name: you really need to get out more, Cadance."
It took Cadance some effort not to stomp again. "You mean to say you're only marrying Prince Golden so you can officially join the royal families?"
"So you and I both can officially join the royal families." Her horn glowed, and her veil wafted over to drape across the head of the dressmaker's dummy. "We need their support more than ever till we can devise a cure for Luna, and after Goldie and I are wed, every newborn princess and prince will be my niece or nephew and your cousin. And since Goldie is the direct heir to Princess Platinum, our titles will no longer be in doubt for those so mired in tradition that such things matter."
As with everything her aunt did, it made perfect sense, but— "I'm sorry again, Auntie. It just seems...it seems a cold reason for a marriage."
"I won't deny it." Aunt Celestia sighed, leaned forward, touched her cheek to Cadance's. "But Goldie is the finest pony I've ever known, and—" She chuckled, her breath warm along Cadance's neck. "To tell the truth, he and I have been quietly and pleasantly courting the past several decades."
Something finally tickled Cadance's magic—not quite love, but one of its close relatives—and seeing a blush turn her aunt's neck pink made Cadance giggle. "Courting? Is that what you kids are calling it these days?"
Clearing her throat, Aunt Celestia stepped back with a tap of her horn against the top of Cadance's head. "I did say the marriage was mostly political, didn't I?" Her expression grew more serious. "It means a great deal to me, Cadance, that you'll be there beside me. Thank you."
Shifting her hoofs, Cadance forced a smile. "The vernal equinox, you said?"
Aunt Celestia nodded, and Cadance took a step back. "I'll go mark it on my calendar right now. Then I have some business to see to, and I'll be back in time for sundown." She let her power spring forth, slipped through the slits it made in space, and blew out a breath to feel the sweet green grass of the Realm Between tickle her fetlocks.
The hum in the air pricked her ears as it always did, but after more than a hundred years, she found it kind of soothing. With the rustle of the forest on the hilltop above her little house and the in-and-out whoosh of the water down along the bay shore, it had become the sound of home: the clean, dry scent of the hive, too, stretching up into the trees after so many years and spreading out from there. Cadance took a deep breath, smiled, and pushed her front door open.
This part of the house still looked very much the same—chairs, tables, sofas, bookcases—but Cadance kept going down the hall past the kitchen and the bedroom she rarely used anymore to where the back rooms and back porch had been originally. This part of the house, it wasn't really made of wood anymore, hard and smooth and shiny like glazed ceramic or chocolate brown marble. The back door was now a slightly mooshy substance—very much like wax, Cadance had always thought—and two of her changelings stood outside it as they always did, one on either side.
They bowed in their soft, rustling way, and she nodded in return, asking "Is Chrysalis in?" She hadn't had any itches at the base of her horn for over an hour, of course, so she knew the changelings wouldn't be out on a Call. But they might be busy with other things, she supposed....
"Indeed, princess." One of the changelings squinted, green fire wavering from his horn—or maybe her horn; Cadance still couldn't tell without looking more closely than was polite. The door melted out of the way, and Cadance stepped through before it squished back into place.
Lumpy, brown and winding, the corridor beyond reminded her of caves she'd read about, but it was made from the same resinous substance that encased the back of her house. Green magic crackling along the walls gave the place the shady light of a deep forest, and she smiled at the activity. With Aunt Celestia asking her to handle more duties in the living world over the past hundred years, Cadance had come to rely so greatly on her changelings, she couldn't see how she'd ever managed without them. Yes, she still handled the more delicate Calls herself—any time foals were involved, for instance—but however oddly the changelings worked with the basic fabric of love, they got results very similar to hers.
And, she had to admit, she'd become rather fond of the changeling leaders she'd worked with since the beginning, getting to know them and watching them grow—the first and second were much more insectoid than the last several, but the way they all called themselves Chrysalis, she guessed it had become as much a title as a name.
The thought brought her up short just outside the entrance to the chambers at the center of the hive. She had dealt with four Chrysalises before this one, hadn't she? And yet she'd never run across any of them in the Groves Beyond.
Of course, the Groves Beyond were vast—infinite, really, in their own way. But friends could always find friends there, so it seemed odd that she'd never seen even one of the changeling leaders on her visits. Or any other changeling for that matter...
Shaking her head, she stepped into the antechamber, the two changelings on either side of the entryway snapping to attention. The most recent Chrysalis rested across a sofa made of something semi-squishy and yellowish-green, her strangely pock-marked front legs crossed as one of the smaller changelings polished her shiny black hoofs. "Princess Cadance!" Her face almost literally lighting up, Chrysalis slid forward and stood before bowing, the smaller changeling scooting out of the way. "Always a delight to welcome you to our humble hive!"
The first unforced smile Cadance had given all day crossed her muzzle. "Thank you, Chrysalis. I just wanted to—"
She stopped again, suddenly realizing that she had no idea why she'd come back here.
Chrysalis cocked her head. "You have another Call for us?" Her black tongue flickered over her sharp little incisors. "More love we can spread?"
"No, actually. I—" Her thoughts still refusing to settle, Cadance blinked at the changeling. "Might we talk a bit? If...if you have the time, I mean."
Those odd blue and green eyes widened. "My time is your time, princess, and always has been." Chrysalis stepped away from her couch, gestured to it with a front hoof. "Please, make yourself comfortable." She glanced at the three other changelings in the room. "Would you rather we were alone?"
Spreading her wings, Cadance rose and let herself drift down onto the spongy green sofa, quite soft and pleasant, she was a little surprised to discover. "I..." She felt a blush start along her cheeks. "I don't want to be a bother."
A half-smile wrinkled Chrysalis's stubby snout. "Think nothing of it." She nodded to the others, but they were already trooping for the entryway. Chrysalis's horn glowed to seal the waxy door, and she turned a concerned look on Cadance. "Is everything all right, princess?"
Cadance opened her mouth, still not sure what might come out, and found herself telling Chrysalis all about Aunt Celestia's plan to wed Prince Golden. "He's a wonderful pony," she finished after a long stretch of explaining the situation. "And while I can understand what Aunt Celestia's doing, marrying a mortal pony just seems...seems..." She had to let her voice trail off, still not sure why the idea struck her as wrong.
Chrysalis had stood quietly the whole time, her translucent wings folded against her sides, but now she cocked her head. "Marrying?" she asked into the silence.
"Ah." Cadance backtracked a little in her thoughts. "Two ponies get married when they love each other so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives together."
"Lives?" Chrysalis shook her head. "Surely if you're talking about love, you must mean their deaths. For love and death are as intertwined as those braids in your mane. In fact, I've often wondered how anything that living ponies feel could truly be called love at all." She shrugged. "If you'll pardon me saying so."
"Not be called love?" A second of incomprehension, then Cadance thought she had it. "Oh! Because you've only ever experienced the web of love at the end of a pony's life! But you see, it's during their lives that ponies spin the strands that support them at the end, that connect them to their families and friends in the Groves Beyond, that allow us to guide them on into their final positions in that web. The amount of love that most ponies create while they're alive is simply enormous!"
Chrysalis was staring, her forehead wrinkled and her mouth partway open. Cadance flared her horn. "Let me see if I can show you." Summoning one of her art books from the front room, she flipped it open to a photograph of the unicorn sculptor Obsidian Shard standing beside a chunk of marble three times larger than she was. "As ponies grow, they build a block of love as big and solid as the stone in this picture. They love widely, deeply, sometimes even extravagantly, building the love that supports the entire foundation of the cosmos."
"That—" Chrysalis's eyes flickered back and forth between the picture and Cadance. "That can't be right!"
Cadance sent out a pulse of magic to turn the page. "But by the time you and I get to feel that love, right at the end of a pony's life—" The photo there had been taken six months later and showed Shard standing beside the sculpture she'd called First Flight , a pegasus foal reared back on her hind legs, her wings unfurled, her front hoofs reaching for the sky. "By then, they're refined their love, perfected it, carved it away to the essentials, and formed an exquisite piece of art from it."
Other magic began tugging at Cadance's, and she let the book go, let the green glow from Chrysalis's horn support it in front of her, the changeling's wings open and fluttering behind her. "You...you mean to say that this child-sized object—" She tapped the photo with a hoof. "This is as much love as a pony has at the end of its life? While this—" She flipped the page back, her hoof shaking as it touched the picture of the original chunk of marble. "This represents the amount it creates before it reaches the end of its life??"
"'Its life'?" Cadance couldn't help asking, a little chill whisking down her back.
Chrysalis waved a hoof in the air. "His, hers, whatever." She brought the hoof back down, practically caressing the photo of the big stone block. "But are you seriously telling me that this is analogous to how much love a pony will generate before that pony dies?"
The word 'generate' made Cadance a little uncomfortable, too, but that, she couldn't deny, was her own fault. "Chrysalis, I need to apologize to you."
"Princess?" Chrysalis looked up from the book, the confusion on her face even bigger.
"I've neglected your education." Cadance shook her head. "To truly Call ponies at the end of their lives, you need to understand the rest of their lives, too. So—" Taking a breath, Cadance blew it out, pushed a front hoof through the air to symbolize pushing the past away. "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to ask you to join me at Aunt Celestia's wedding."
"In...in the living world?" It didn't seem possible, but Chrysalis's eyes grew even wider. "You...and I?"
Cadance nodded. "You need to see love outside the context of death, and while Auntie may not really love Prince Golden—"
"Oh, but she must , Princess!" Chrysalis's magic flared, the book spinning around to show Cadance the first photo to Obsidian Shard again. "If ponies build up these blocks of love when they move through life only to then focus them down into smaller objects when they move toward death, then a pony who doesn't die must continue building an ever-greater block of love!" Chrysalis was shivering, her scent strange and ticklish in Cadance's nose, like the air just before a thunderstorm. "Can you imagine how great your aunt's need to expend that love must be?"
"But..." Cadance swallowed. "I'm a pony who doesn't die, too...."
Chrysalis's wings froze in place, the odd note in her scent crumbling away. "Ah. Yes. Well. Perhaps the comparison between love and marble isn't quite one-to-one. Still, I would very much like to see your aunt's wedding, thank you." She glanced down at herself, then flickered to become a pink unicorn just slightly smaller than an adult mare. "Something like this, I suppose, would be more suitable?"
It took Cadance some effort to rise. "Yes, that...that should be fine. The wedding's not till the vernal equinox, so I'll...I'll write it on the calendar in the kitchen."
Whether Chrysalis bowed to her or not as she left, Cadance wasn't sure. She also realized when she reached the back door that she'd left her book behind. But flexing her magic to melt the door out of the way and reform it after she crossed into her tidy little house once more, she was too busy thinking about love. She could sense it the way sunflowers sensed the sun, could detect the pull of it like hummingbirds flocking to honeysuckle, could move it around and channel it like pegasi working a storm front, but—
What did it feel like? What was it like to be in love?
The nurse changelings clasped their front hoofs to their chests, the buzzing of their wings sounding anxious to Cadance's ears. Clustered in a cloud overhead, they kept their solid blue eyes focused on the workers going from little hexagonal tube to little hexagonal tube and plugging the ends with the translucent green wax they secreted from their abdomens. Craning her neck, Cadance gave a whistle. "That's, what? Another two dozen?"
"Twenty-nine, to be precise." Chrysalis blew out a breath and shook her head, the one strand of blackish-blue hair that drooped between her eyes waving back and forth. She had the best mane of any Chrysalis yet, but 'patchy' was still the kindest word Cadance could think of to describe it. "The most I've ever managed at one time."
Cadance couldn't help shaking her head as well. "It does seem odd, doesn't it?"
"Laying eggs?" Chrysalis gave a sideways glance and a crooked smile. "I'll have you know that it's the most natural thing in the world for some of us."
With a laugh, Cadance poked a hoof into Chrysalis's hard black side. "You know what I mean, Chrys."
"Do I?" The changeling leader poked Cadance, the pock marks in her legs much deeper than her predecessors'. "'Cause to be honest, all I've really had time to think about the past however many weeks is getting set to squeeze these little darlings out." She gestured to the wall, the workers sealing in the last of the eggs. "But now I can leave the hard work to the professionals." She nodded to the hovering nurses, and while they weren't quite as pony-like as Chrysalis, Cadance could still tell that several of them were blushing.
"Professionals." The word made Cadance sigh. "I could use a few of those in Canterlot right about now."
"Oh? Your aunt going in for egg-laying?"
That almost got another laugh out of Cadance, but a memory choked it off: Aunt Celestia, head bowed and draped in black at Uncle Goldie's funeral not quite a century ago now. Walking into their room to Call him had been the hardest thing Cadance had ever done, and she still marveled at the way neither Aunt Celestia nor Uncle Goldie had voiced a single hint that they might want Cadance to delay uncle's Call for even a moment. Aunt Celestia had merely looked at her, had nodded, then had lowered her head so she and Uncle Goldie could share one last kiss, the ancient unicorn barely able to move his lips.
Cadance had Called his name, and the love that had swirled through the room, Cadance hadn't felt anything like it before or since. Time and space itself had parted like a curtain on a stage to reveal all Unicornia's kings and queens ranging along the rolling green hills of the Groves Beyond, Princess Platinum smiling at their forefront. Uncle Goldie had sat up as young and impossibly handsome as Cadance remembered from their first meeting, his now unbreathing body remaining behind, and he and Aunt Celestia had bowed to one another before Prince Golden had turned and moved away, the curtain drawing closed behind him.
That night, she'd sat up with Aunt Celestia, her seneschal, and her closest advisers, the bunch of them eating and drinking, laughing and crying and remembering Uncle Goldie. But for all the new bonds of love she could sense connecting her and Aunt Celestia to the infinite web that encompassed every mortal pony who lived and died, Cadance still wasn't feeling that love.
She'd been thinking about it a lot since then, and she'd finally found herself comparing it to the sensation of standing on a hill with a perfect summer breeze playing around her, tickling her wings and caressing her mane. She could swirl the breeze with her feathers or puff her cheeks and blow it around, influencing its direction, but as soon as she took a breath and drew the breeze into her lungs, it literally stopped being a breeze. It sat there inside her completely quiet and still till she blew it back out again.
In the same way, even though spreading the sweet warmth of love among all ponies everywhere seemed to be her reason for existing in Equestria in the first place, Cadance had always imagined herself floating along the outside edges of that love, herding it and guiding it but never experiencing it.
Another poke at her side, and a clearing of throat. "Cadance? You in there?"
Blinking, she turned, saw Chrysalis blinking back. "Getting a Call?" the changeling asked.
It took her a few seconds to swallow against the dryness in her throat and shake her head. "No, I...I was just—" With an effort, she pushed her gloomy thoughts away and focused on the absolutely non-gloomy happenings in the nursery around her. "I was just trying to remember: we don't have the birthday party for them till after they actually hatch, right?"
Chrysalis rolled her eyes. "Fine. Don't tell me the latest political intrigues roiling the golden halls of Canterlot. It's not like it matters." A slow smile crept over her snout. "Other than you and your aunt, all little ponies come to my hoofs eventually." She shrugged. "Oh, and your hoofs, too, I suppose."
Clearing her throat, Cadance gave the changeling a sideways glance. "You know how creepy that sounds, right?"
"Creepy?" Chrysalis frowned. "It's just nature, Cadance. I mean, why d'you think I'm pumping these out?" She waved a hoof at the egg wall. "With all the ponies being born nowadays, we'll need another three teams up and running by the end of the century to handle all the Calls."
"That's true." Aunt Celestia's domestic policy ministers had been producing reports on this very subject for the last hundred years, their predictions getting more alarming by the decade: the big cities on the east coast were already straining the limits of their water supplies, not to mention the tricky logistics of growing and transporting enough food in the surrounding farmland to support the residents. But the solutions these so-called professionals proposed—everything from encouraging ponies to move west and start new towns in Equestria's frontier to mandating how many foals a family could have—did nothing but cause more arguments with the various other so-called professionals on Auntie's staff. Cadance blew out a breath. "The population's really surging, isn't it?"
"I'll say." With a grin, Chrysalis nudged her in the side again. "Reading through your history books, I'm convinced it comes from your Aunt Luna not being around to poke through ponies' dreams at night. Knowing she's not peering over their shoulders, more ponies are engaging in, oh, let's call them procreational activities, shall we?"
It took Cadance a moment to realize what Chrysalis meant, and when she did, she had to laugh. "Everything always comes back to egg-laying with you, doesn't it?"
"Like I say." Buzzing into a hover, Chrysalis spread her front legs. "It's all perfectly natural."
"Uh-huh ." The more Cadance thought about what Chrysalis was saying, though... "Keep telling yourself that, Chrys. And get some rest: I've had six Calls rustling at me all day, and I'm betting two or three of them'll break this evening. I'll be out in the city, but I'll send you a location as soon as I know it."
She heard Chrysalis give a throaty chuckle. "Looking forward to it."
Smiling, Cadance flared her horn and hopped into the antechamber of her rooms in Canterlot Tower, the sunlight of a late winter afternoon wavering around the curtains. A tendril of her magic pulled the front door open, and she nodded to the bowing guards stationed outside. "My aunt's meeting with her domestic policy group right now, isn't she?"
They said that she was, so Cadance trotted down the hall to that wing of the palace and slid into the conference room, Aunt Celestia flicking her a glance and a nod while keeping her attention riveted on yet another presentation detailing the stresses on Manehattan's overtaxed aqueducts.
The report wrapped up eventually, and Aunt Celestia thanked the minister. "Let's call it a day, shall we, fillies and gentlecolts?" she asked then, the flow of magic from her horn tapping the gavel on the table before her.
"Seconded," several of the ministers said, and Aunt Celestia blinked, smiled sheepishly, and tapped her gavel again.
Bidding the princesses a good evening, the ministers trooped from the room, and Cadance wondered why Aunt Celestia smelled so salty. Her gaveling the meeting closed without going through the proper procedure seemed odd, too...
But Aunt Celestia's smile strengthened to its usual reassuring intensity as she turned it on Cadance. "Niece. All's well, I take it?"
"It is. But I've been thinking..." And she told Aunt Celestia Chrysalis's idea about why the population might be rising—not mentioning where the idea had come from, of course: she'd stood on the brink of telling her aunt about the changelings dozens of times over the past several centuries, but she'd never actually jumped off that particular ledge. After all, Cadance kept telling herself, Aunt Celestia didn't share every detail of how she ran night and day, and the changelings were purely internal to the Realm Between. No reason to bother her aunt with their existence. No reason at all.
"Interesting," Aunt Celestia said when Cadance finished. "To tell you the truth, I'd forgotten Luna's role as Guardian of Dreams, and I certainly never considered the effect her vigilance might've had on ponies' romantic lives." A quill pen rose in the flex of her magic and jotted a quick note on a piece of parchment. "I'll add restarting the Dream Patrol to my list." She rolled the parchment up, and it vanished with a flash. "Thank you, Cadance, but if you'll excuse me, I have a somewhat urgent matter I must see to before sundown."
Cadance's ears perked. "Oh? Anything I can do to help?"
Indecision tugged at Aunt Celestia's face, but it was gone so quickly—and Cadance so rarely saw it there—she could almost tell herself she'd imagined it. "Not really," her aunt said in her usual smooth voice. "But—" That smoothness went a little lumpy. "Should I be...delayed in returning this evening, would you be so kind as to see to the sunset and the moonrise?"
"Me?" Cadance knew the principles involved, of course, but she'd never actually performed the duties. "Is...are...are you sure you don't need any—?"
"I'm testing a theory." Aunt Celestia started for the door. "If I'm right, all of Equestria will rejoice. If I'm wrong, well, either everything will still be fine, or you'll need to ask Seneschal for the instructions I've left with him. I'll ask that you please follow them."
Unleashing her magic, Cadance popped into the doorway directly in front of her aunt. "OK. Getting a little cryptic there, Auntie."
"Cadance..." Aunt Celestia drew herself up to her full height, but she wasn't glaring, Cadance was glad to see. "Please. This is something I have to do."
"Alone?"
"Alone." Closing her eyes, Aunt Celestia drooped just a bit. "I'm sorry." Something like a grin twitched her mouth, and Cadance could almost smell the fondness in her gaze as soft and warm as freshly-baked bread. "On the bright side, however this turns out, it shouldn't take long."
Not sure what else she could do, Cadance took a breath and stepped out of the way. "You'll be careful?"
Aunt Celestia cocked her head. "I'll give it a try." She touched her horn lightly to Cadance's, then sauntered off down the hall with a nonchalance that Cadance knew was absolutely phony. Nervousness floated around her aunt like that pastel mane, and the thought that there even was something that could make Aunt Celestia nervous tightened Cadance's stomach so much, she nearly ran after her, nearly threw out a wall of magic to block her progress, nearly tried to pull up a glare of her own to aim at her aunt. But...
Cadance sighed, turned away, started toward the back staircase that led to the kitchen. Aunt Celestia respected Cadance's privacy with regard to her realm, after all. Cadance needed to do the same for Auntie.
Down the stairs and into the kitchen, Cadance greeted the serving staff with nods and smiles and profound thanks when they had her watercress sandwiches and fruit punch prepared and waiting: she'd forgotten all about lunch, and here it was nearly dinnertime.
Settling at one of the little corner tables the staff used for their own meals, she'd taken two bites and was in the middle of the third when the floor shifted under her hoofs. Flailing with her magic, she caught the edge of the counter before she could topple over, then sprang upright, looking around quickly with wide eyes. "Is everypony all right??" she called.
The cooks were going about their duties as if nothing had happened, the sou chef blinking at her from the pot she was stirring. "Princess?" the unicorn mare asked.
Still shaking, Cadance took in details: not a single movement from any of the pans hanging above the stove tops, not a single pony showing any sign of disturbance. "I—" she started to say, but the floor rocked beneath her again, so violently this time, Cadance couldn't keep from crying out as the whole room danced sideways and spilled her like a sack of potatoes onto the floor.
"Princess!" she heard the sou chef shout, but Cadance couldn't answer, vertigo sweeping over her in waves, her vision swirling so that the cooks rushing toward her in their white regalia looked like bedsheets caught in a tornado. Pain exploded in her chest, made her cry out, and something inside her, a part of her she hadn't thought about in more than half a millennium, crumpled all at once to dust and ashes.
"The Elements!" she cried out, flinging herself to her hoofs. She'd only wielded the Element of Kindness once when she'd taken part in the defeat of Discord; she'd ceded her use of the amulet to Aunt Celestia immediately afterwards as part of her move into the shadows of the Realm Between. But the connection had still been there evidently until this very moment, and the jagged throbbing of its removal was enough to tell her that something horrible was happening to—
"Aunt Celestia!" Cadance clenched her eyes, forced her mind to still, took a breath, and pushed outward with every bit of magic she possessed. She could just sense her aunt in the distance but growing rapidly closer. Falling, Cadance thought she was, tumbling from a great height, her feathers singed and the Elements hanging listless from her neck. With a leap, Cadance passed through the upper floors of Canterlot Tower like so much smoke, her horn firing wave after wave of pink and blue flame in a direction that didn't quite exist in the material world. If she could manage to slow Aunt Celestia a bit, interrupt her headlong plunge, maybe—
The leading edge of her magic met Aunt Celestia then and shattered like a plate of glass, the force of the blow slapping Cadance so hard, it jarred her teeth. The upward push she'd provided, though, seemed to be just enough, Aunt Celestia's huge wings bursting from her sides and turning her drop into a glide. Cadance came spinning out into real space about a foot above the platform at the top of the tower, Aunt Celestia exploding not far overhead like a meteor, lightning blasting from the fireball around her.
She came down hoofs first, though, the whole palace shaking when she hit, sparks shooting as she skidded across the platform's stonework. Cadance could only hover and gape, Aunt Celestia slewing to a stop at the end of four channels, black and smoking and carved several inches deep into the rock. For one breathless moment, Aunt Celestia stood where she'd landed, her sides heaving, steam rising from her, then she slowly collapsed, her legs folding her into a pile of white, gold, and gray.
Cadance flashed to her side, pumped her wings to waft as strong and cooling a breeze as she could across her. "Aunt! What happened?? What did you do??"
"I was wrong." Aunt Celestia's voice sounded as rough as hoofs on a chalkboard. "Oh, so terribly wrong..."
Now that she was closer, Cadance could see and smell the burns crisscrossing her aunt's body, and she set about smoothing as much love and healing over them as she could manage. "What happened?" she asked again.
"The Elements..." Aunt Celestia moved her head, shook the flow of her mane so it splayed across the roof beside her, and a clattering clank brought Cadance's eyes down to her aunt's long neck, the five Elements of Harmony fastened there one above the other. "I had thought I'd found a way for...for Luna to return, so I took the Elements, tried to...to approach her, tried to...to..." Her voice trailed off, and Cadance saw the shimmer of tears between her aunt's clenched eyelids.
The Elements didn't look right, the light of the late afternoon sun not glinting off them the way Cadance remembered. Of course, it had been more than five centuries since she'd last seen them, but she was fairly certain the edges of each necklace weren't supposed to be as cold and gray and dead-looking as basalt. A chill rustled her mane. "I'm guessing Aunt Luna wasn't ready."
Aunt Celestia drew in a massive breath and let it out, her whole body shuddering. "I've never seen such fury. But when I used the Elements in the manner I'd devised, they didn't...I couldn't..." Another long, deep breath shook her. "I felt the tiara of Magic explode from my brow, and the other five, they...they no longer respond to my touch as once they did, and they weigh, oh, so heavily upon me...."
Concentrating, Cadance sent a curl from her horn to loosen the clasps at the back of the necklaces, had to wince at the hollow clanks they made dropping onto the surface of the platform. Aunt Celestia seemed to notice, too, her eyes popping open and her ears folding down. She struggled to get her front hoofs under herself, dragged her head up to stare at the Elements. "Then it's true," she whispered. "Luna and I have altered them yet again." She bent down to nudge the nearest—Honesty, Cadance thought it was, the gem in the center still bearing the shape of Clover the Clever's cutie mark. "They have faded to my senses, and I can feel them continuing to fade."
Cadance's mind raced. "But...the Elements are keeping Aunt Luna bound, aren't they? If they lose their power—"
"Six hundred, perhaps seven hundred years." Aunt Celestia raised her head to gaze into the deepening blue of early evening. "As surely as the stars circle 'round the sky, the day will come when Luna will escape her prison, and without the Elements, Equestria will be helpless before her." She lowered her gaze and focused it so sharply on Cadance that she could almost feel it. "Somehow, we must find another way."
"Yes." Thoughts of Elements and eggs and population growth swirled through Cadance's mind, half an idea forming there. "We must."
"More tea, Cadance?"
"Yes, thank you." Levitating her cup, Cadance could scarcely force herself to meet her aunt's gaze. But then she'd had the same trouble for most of the past two hundred years...
Still, she managed a smile, but when her aunt returned it, Cadance had to stifle a shiver. Anypony else would probably have called Aunt Celestia's smile gentle and contented, but after five centuries, Cadance had become attuned to every tiny shift in her aunt's mood, could sense them as easily as she could feel air currents flowing through her pinions when she was in flight. And the subtle scent of unhappiness in the room at that moment scraped the inside of her nose as if somepony in the neighborhood was spreading compost.
"All's going well?" Aunt Celestia asked, the curtains behind her billowing around the open door of her sitting room balcony, the twilight of a midsummer evening slowly fading to the full and starry night Cadance had helped her aunt set up earlier in the week.
Which was one reason for that quiet little stench, Cadance knew. Ever since the Elements of Harmony had begun their slow slump into uselessness, she'd been assisting Aunt Celestia in her task of setting the cosmos on a more automated path, of trying to find ways for the sun and stars to rise and set on their own. We have five centuries, her aunt had said to her one morning eight or nine decades ago after their last attempt to pre-program the sun's movements had resulted in a whirling, sparking solar display that had confused every rooster in Equestria. Luna and I will likely destroy each other when she returns in madness, so my only real hope is that I can leave behind a simpler mechanism for keeping the world working.
"Cadance?"
"Yes!" Jolted from her reverie, Cadance gave her aunt a smile so phony, it felt like a porcelain mask, cold and heavy and too-perfectly formed. "Everything's quite well, thank you!"
Except, she didn't say, for the way she'd largely abandoned her own long-term project to solve the problem with the Elements of Harmony. After that horrible, horrible revelation from the creature who'd been calling herself Chrysalis a hundred years ago, Cadance had starting bursting into cold sweats every time she so much as thought about those monsters she'd created. She'd spent less than an hour a week, she guessed, in the Realm Between since that day, and those few times she couldn't avoid the current Chrysalis, it was even harder to meet her gaze than Aunt Celestia's....
Cadance hadn't abandoned her duties, of course, so many Calls coming in these days, in fact, that she often needed three cups of Aunt Celestia's powerful tea just to keep up. She was visiting a lot more of the country, too, since Aunt Celestia had authorized the construction of the intercontinental railroad some sixty years ago, and with ponies more easily able to move around Equestria, the population pressures on the cities of the living world had receded. Still, on a good day, Cadance could maybe manage a quarter of the Calls she received—all nine of the changeling teams were working day and night to guide ponies into the Groves Beyond—and Cadance, she just...just—
Her jaw tightened. 'Hate' wasn't a word she used as a general rule, but every time she went out on a Call recently, it seemed, two more came buzzing at her horn! With no choice but to conjure up messages for Chrysalis giving the locations of the other dying ponies, well, 'hate' was the only word Cadance could think of for the feeling that coursed through her.
"You're certain?" Aunt Celestia asked, that same gentle smile on her snout, and staring at her, Cadance couldn't remember what she'd last said out loud, didn't know if she'd missed something else Auntie had said, wasn't certain where—
An all-too familiar itch tingled the base of her horn, and for the first time in her long, long life, Cadance felt grateful for it. Standing, she let her tea cup settle to the table and bowed her head. "You'll forgive me, Aunt Celestia, but some business has just arisen."
"Of course, niece." The dampness of her aunt's quiet unhappiness still floated in the air like a light mist. "Shall I see you at dawn?"
The plaintive note in her question, Cadance thought, would've surprised those who seemed to revere Aunt Celestia as some infallible divine empress, and the first real smile Cadance had felt in quite some time tugged at her lips. Leaning across the table, she kissed her aunt's cheek. "I wouldn't miss it."
A fair percentage of the gloom around Aunt Celestia whisked away as if a breeze had blown through, and Cadance activated her horn, let the lightness in the air bear her through the spaces between space till she stepped out into a shabby little one room cabin, a bed its only piece of furniture. Equestria's far west coast, the salt scent in the air and the in-and-out whoosh of waves within easy trotting distance told her. The boughs of pine trees waved late afternoon shadows through the dusty windows, but the unicorn on the bed absorbed her attention immediately, a grizzled old stallion named Dory, she knew as she always did, the cutie mark on his sweat-grimy flank a small boat of some sort.
That he lay alone in the house—alone in this whole stretch of woods as far as Cadance could tell—was bad enough, but her blood almost froze at the sight of the glowing strands binding him to the vast mosaic of love that surrounded all ponies living and dead: as threadbare as his blanket, the strands barely shone, shakier than the breaths he took.
Without another thought, she leaped to his side, slipped her magic around him like a sling. "Dory?" She wasn't Calling him yet, not in this weakened condition. "Can you hear me?"
"Help." He groaned, the sound low and rusty as a long-disused gate. "I...I don't...don't—"
"It's all right, Dory." Wrapping the slightest sliver of power around his few feeble strands for fear they might snap, she traced them to a long-dead father, mother, and brother, all of whom Dory had argued bitterly with before striking out on his own...and none of whom he'd ever seen or spoken to again.
"Don't..." His eyes came open almost as creakily as his voice. "Don't wanna die alone..."
"You're not, Dory." He'd never married, she discovered as she inched further along the strands, had never socialized with the other fisherponies in the town not far to the south, hadn't spoken more than six dozen words to the shopkeeper there over the five decades he'd lived in this cabin. Not good. Not good at all .
With a flick of her horn, she opened the way through to the Groves Beyond to see the parents and the brother waiting there silently—Fly Tier, Caster, and Tackle Box were their names, but the rest of their information didn't spring immediately to mind. Because she hadn't Called them, she realized suddenly, her panic inching up another notch. That meant one of the changeling teams had escorted them, and Cadance had spent so little time in the Realm Between the past century, she couldn't recall the last time she and Chrysalis had gotten together for an update session, those quiet little sit-downs where they magically exchanged the details of the Calls they'd separately performed.
So she didn't know these ponies, their expressions hard even in the soft green shadows of the Groves Beyond, and the air around them smelled of nothing but dry duty, Cadance barely able to find a speck of love in them. And if she couldn't cocoon Dory in that gentle envelope, the very fabric of the Groves themselves—
Could he even go there without being firmly enmeshed in love? It was a question she'd never considered in all the thousands of years that she'd been Calling ponies. Cadance could tell that Dory's body only had another few moments, but with no love to embrace him, could he enter the Groves?
Another wheezing breath from the bed, and Cadance shook herself, touched her horn to his, said "I'm here, Dory."
Dory wasn't looking at her, his attention fixed on the ponies standing in the shimmering doorway to the Groves. "They never wanted me," he grumbled, Cadance's ears twitching, his words hollow and echoing as if coming up from behind an iron wall of grouchiness he'd built around himself. "And I never wanted them. Never wanted no pony..."
Taking a breath of her own, Cadance shoved her panic aside and knelt beside the bed. "But Dory," she murmured. "You just said you didn't want to die alone."
His eyes wavered, and Cadance wove her magic through the quivering strands of his love like a gardener placing supports under the drooping vines of some failing plant. "Think of it this way," she went on, raising her voice enough to reach Dory's relatives watching from the Groves Beyond. "Love—real love—is less an emotion than it is an act of will, a conscious choice. Love is a way of looking at the world as it really is and accepting it, accepting that we're all a part of it and all a part of each other. Yes, it's hard; yes, it can take an effort. But while I've seen how ponies can survive without love, I've also seen how they can't live without it. And they can't die without it, either."
The ponies on the other side were quivering a little now, but Dory seemed to have relaxed, his eyes closed instead of clenched, his breathing shallow but not gasping. Cadance took the strengthening bonds on both sides and coaxed them along as gently as she could. "Things happened," she said, "between the three of you. But who was right and who was wrong, none of that matters now. It never really did. What matters is that you're a family. Maybe you don't like each other, sure, but love...love is deeper than that. Love is a connection that binds every individual mind and body to every other individual mind and body and to the entirety of the universe. It's a connection you can feel right now despite everything if you...if you just let yourself feel it."
The effort of nursing their love along made sweat start over Cadance's brow, but when the bare embers she'd sensed upon entering the cabin flickered into the tiniest tongue of a flame, she felt her neck muscles unknot just a bit. "Talk to one another." She gave Dory's cheek a kiss and turned to see similar tiny flames hovering above Fly, Caster, and Tackle. "Now that the pressures of life are gone, you might find it a little easier." Pushing herself up onto all fours, Cadance spread her hoofs on the cabin's splintery floor. "Dory," she Called. "It's time."
Dory gave one last exhale and sat up, a younger but still somehow grizzled-looking version of himself stepping from the body he was leaving behind. He didn't rush toward the three waiting beyond the wavery doorway as most other ponies did after she'd Called them, but bowing to her, he walked to them, more than a little uncertainty in the set of all their shoulders. Still, Cadance didn't take another breath till he'd actually stepped through into the Groves, the curtain drawing closed and leaving her alone in the cabin.
She was shaking, she realized, her muscles still tight and bunched like rocks under her skin. Needing to stretch, she stumbled to the cabin door, pushed it aside with her magic, and forced herself outside into the scant sunlight, big clouds drifting through the afternoon blue above the pine trees. Her lungs sucked in air with a gasp, and for all that she didn't want to think about it, she couldn't help the panic flashing through her brain. What in the wide, wide world of Equestria had just happened ?? Had she really come within a hair's breadth of losing Dory??
A throat cleared ahead of her, and Cadance's head snapped up. Had Aunt Celestia followed her?? Had she seen the—??
But it wasn't Aunt Celestia. The current version of Chrysalis stood at the edge of the pine forest that pushed close around Dory's cabin, her black hide standing out against the softer gray shadows of the trees, her green eyes seeming to glow slightly. "Nice job in there," she said.
Cadance couldn't move, couldn't think, wasn't even sure it was her voice she heard saying, "I'm sorry, Chrysalis, so...so sorry."
Chrysalis did some blinking, her expression as blank as any Cadance had ever seen. "For what exactly, if I might ask?"
"Everything." Stepping toward the changeling, Cadance didn't try to stop her own shaking, didn't try to push the image from her mind of this Chrysalis quickly and efficiently cracking the skull of the previous Chrysalis and swallowing down whatever she found inside. "I won't lie to you, Chrys, and say I'm OK with how you changelings deal with your dead. But you and I have to work together for the good of all ponies everywhere. I mean, if we'd been holding our regular update sessions, I could've addressed Dory's problems years ago, and that...that...that—" She couldn't find a word for the fiasco that had nearly just swallowed up Dory, so she settled for waving a hoof at the cabin behind her. "That would never have happened!"
"I agree." Chrysalis sidled into the fluky sunlight of the clearing, her gaze flicking back and forth between Cadance's and the ground. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry I didn't find a better way to tell you. But you have to know, Cady—" Like the last few changeling leaders, this Chrysalis was Cadance's height, her luminous eyes now looking straight into Cadance's. "The one time I tried Calling one of us the way we Call you ponies..." Her voice trailed off, and Cadance saw those green eyes waver.
With less effort than before, Cadance took another step toward her, Chrysalis breathing in and out. "One of my first lieutenants, he...he wanted to pass as you ponies pass." Her ears folded tight into the spongy hair of her mane. "And we tried, Cady, we did. But the love, it...it didn't swirl the way it does during a Call, and it didn't...didn't taste right at all. And when he...when he breathed his last, he just...there wasn't...he didn't...didn't—" She stopped, closed her eyes, opened them again, and fixed them on Cadance's. "We're not ponies. We never have been, and we never will be. But we need each other, ponies and changelings, and you need to remember that."
"I will." Taking another step, she leaned forward, touched the side of her neck gently to Chrysalis's. "Can you forgive me for forgetting?"
The quickest of nuzzles, and Chrysalis slid away, a smile curling around the points of her teeth. "I'm sure I'll think of a way you can make it up to me someday." Her smile faded. "But you're absolutely right about our update session. The sooner, the better."
"Give me half an hour." Cadance powered up her horn. "I need to talk to Aunt Celestia."
Chrysalis started, her gauzy wings shooting out. "Really? You...you're finally going to tell her about us ?"
"Oh." Cadance swallowed. "No, I...I was thinking of my plan for the Elements of Harmony."
That got her an eye roll from Chrysalis. "Of course you were."
"But it's because of you. Because—" Cadance stopped, swallowed, realized that she needed to say this. "Because I...I've been thinking of you as monsters for a while now." Heat splashed across her cheeks, but she forced herself to hold Chrysalis's gaze. "I thought I'd made a mistake when I created you, and I didn't...didn't trust myself to do any work with ponies."
The woods had gone completely silent, quieter than Cadance had thought a spot in the living world could get, and Chrysalis wasn't moving at all, even the usual buzz of her wings suspended. "I used to think that," Cadance finished. "I don't anymore, and I...I'm so sorry that I ever did. I...I hope you can forgive me for that, too?"
Another stretch of stillness, then Chrysalis gave a sniff. "I'll add it to your account." Her horn glowed green, the air darkening around her. "And I'll see you back at the house in half an hour." The darkness shimmered into a globe, surrounded her, then whisked away, leaving Cadance alone in the woods.
Feeling better about, well, about everything , really, Cadance split the air open and stepped back to the aunt's rooms at Canterlot Tower.
"Well, all in all,—" The genealogy chart covered five generations now and had gotten so big, Cadance could actually feel her magic straining to unfold the thing against the throne room wall, the only space tall enough to hold it. "The project's been going pretty well."
"Goodness!" Aunt Celestia's horn glowed, and the chart's weight vanished, her aunt lifting it with seemingly no effort at all. "But what am I looking at here, niece?"
Stepping back into the otherwise empty chamber—Aunt Celestia had told the current Seneschal that they were holding a 'Princess Summit' this afternoon—Cadance let a spot of light sprout from the tip of her horn and used it to underline the seven hundred and fifty names written in small letters along the top of the chart. "It's the result of me realizing two things: first, that I usually only meet ponies on the worst day of their lives, and second, that ponies are more themselves when they're grieving. Getting to know these ponies here while I was Calling their relatives, I couldn't help but notice their great kindness, loyalty, generosity, honesty, good humor and gentle magic."
She didn't mention, of course, that these were largely the grandfoals and great-grandfoals of the first group she'd tried to run through this whole project, but, well, Aunt Celestia didn't need to know all the details...
Focus! she told herself urgently, and continued: "So I went looking for other ponies who displayed these same qualities and did what I could to arrange meetings between those I thought would make good partners. Sometimes, it was easy." She moved her light from one pairing to another. "These two grew up on neighboring farms, for instance, and these two lived just a few blocks away from each other in Manehattan. Others took a little more doing."
Unable to stop a grin, she pointed to two of her favorites from the last hundred years. "Flare kept talking about how she wanted to go the Canterlot and become a singer, but that was all she ever did: talk about it! I knew she'd be a perfect match for Minor Seventh, who was here training to be a xylophonist, so I kept popping into Flare's bedroom while she was asleep and whispering to her to follow her dreams. When she finally did, I made sure she saw the flyer Minor had posted in every coffee house in town looking for ponies to join his new band. The spark between them at her audition was unmistakable; I nourished it a bit with my magic, and the two of them were married less than a month later."
"I remember," Aunt Celestia said softly. "Their group was a fixture at the Vine St. Bistro for more than three decades." The slight distress in her voice made Cadance stop, click off her light, and turn, the single wrinkle on her aunt's brow starting a trickle of sweat under the tight braid of Cadance's mane. "I do have to wonder, however," Aunt Celestia went on, "what you would have done had that spark not appeared."
Ears folding—at least it was a question she'd expected—Cadance blew out a breath. "That happens." She powered up her horn again, pointed to some of the branches on the chart that just trailed away. "If two ponies don't hit it off, I step back, sigh, and move on." Most of the time, at least: unwilling to give up on the humor and determination she'd sensed from Azure Skies over two hundred years ago, Cadance had followed that pegasus's bloodline for nine generations now without ever once managing to get any of Azure's descendants to fall in love with the pony she'd thought would be perfect for them! "Still, I'm seeing some promising trends now that I'm following your suggestions about expanding the program."
"Oh, Cadance, this is...it's..." Aunt Celestia's eyes wavered, and Cadance couldn't help staring. In all the nearly two thousand years that she'd known her aunt, this was the second or maybe third time Cadance had seen her speechless. "And that you're doing all this without coercion or restricting anypony's freedom of choice—" She fixed her gaze on Cadance. "I've never been prouder of you, niece."
Cadance had to look away. "I...I've been tempted to force things along more than once..."
"But you've never crossed that line." A lilac-scented breeze brought Cadance's head back up, her aunt smiling beside her: Aunt Celestia had gotten even taller and more regal since that day just over six hundred years ago now when Cadance had held her collapsed and weeping aunt after she'd exiled Aunt Luna. "You've respected the lives of our ponies as completely as you respect their deaths, and through your efforts, for the first time, I..." She shivered, something else Cadance wasn't sure she'd ever seen. "I have every reason to believe I may yet behold dear Luna alive and herself again." Bending her head, Aunt Celestia brushed her cheek against Cadance's, that amazing mane of hers shimmering and flowing all around.
"Thank you," Cadance murmured, muscles loosening that she hadn't even known she'd been holding tensed. "We can't give up hope, Auntie. We...we can't ."
"Nor shall we." Aunt Celestia straightened. "I must ask, however, about the time frame. Wielding the Elements at this point feels more to me like juggling stones than anything else, so I honestly can't say how many more centuries it might be before they cease responding entirely."
Swallowing, Cadance refused to let any panic show. "Twenty to twenty-five generations is what I've been thinking from the start, so, yes, another four hundred years." Turning to the chart, she slipped her magic through Aunt Celestia's and began folding the giant parchment. "By then we should have at least six ponies more perfectly attuned to the Elements than even the three of us ever were."
"Can you imagine it?" Aunt Celestia was looking at the stained glass windows, the afternoon light casting a wash of colors over her. "Mortal ponies truly and solely in control of the most powerful magic in all Equestria. The prospect fills me with both joy and trepidation." She cocked her head, turned those deep eyes of hers onto Cadance. "You were still serving solely in the Groves Beyond when Luna and I were forced to intervene with King Sombra, weren't you? The depth of his sorcery was indeed impressive, but he employed it only toward enslaving others and increasing his own foul influence."
Cadance shrugged, focused on folding her chart into a cube a hoof high on each side. "Well, how 'bout Clover the Clever? She summoned us into this world in the first place and was the original Element of Honesty. And her mentor, Starswirl the Bearded? I've gotten to know them quite well in the Groves Beyond, and I wouldn't hesitate a moment to trust any of the Elements to either of them."
Silence then, and Cadance looked over to see Aunt Celestia smiling, most of the sourness cleared from her scent. "As always, niece, you reassure me." She nodded to the bundled-up chart. "Let me know if you need my help at all on this project, and I'll ask that you pencil me in for another update early in the next century."
"It's a date." Cadance activated her horn, slit the air, and opened the way into the Realm Between. "I'll be back for sundown and supper if I don't get a Call." Stepping through onto the grass of her front yard, she waited till she was sure the gate had closed completely behind her before she did a little dance and kissed the magically-compacted chart floating beside her. Turns out organization had been the key after all! And now that Aunt Celestia had given her approval to phase one, Cadance could start into phase two!
Pushing open the door, Cadance floated inside and around the corner to what had once been her sitting room. She'd kept her big armchair and the sofa, but the bookcases had gone decades ago so she could cover the walls with cork and pin up her working charts—the ones she used every day to track all the couples and single ponies in the program, not the giant presentation chart she'd made especially for today's meeting with Auntie. File cabinets filled with the notebooks she'd been keeping sat snugged against all four walls, and she kept her main ledger on a desk she'd put together especially to hold it—
A desk that Chrysalis was standing in front of, the green magic of her horn flipping through the ledger's pages.
Which was perfectly fine with Cadance: she'd been planning on heading into the hive next to tell her friend the good news. "Chrys!" Bounding into the room, Cadance slid up beside her, pulled open one of the desk drawers, and dropped the chart in with a thump. "Thank you so, so much for covering all the Calls today! 'Cause Aunt Celestia loved everything about the plan, and she thinks it'll work! She really thinks it'll work!" Overcome, she hopped closer to Chrysalis and gave her a hug and a nuzzle. "Isn't it great ??"
As always, Chrysalis seemed more to tolerate the embrace than anything else, wiggling away almost immediately. "In the first place," she said in her buzzing voice, "there no need to always be thanking me for taking your Calls. It's what we changelings do , Cady: end of story. And in the second place, why are you so surprised she approved your plan? When has your aunt ever disapproved of anything you've done?"
With a laugh, Cadance shook her head and settled into her chair. "Fine. I've been panicking all week for no reason: is that what you want me to say?" She grinned and bounced against the cushions. "But this is it , Chrys! I mean, if I can keep on top of all this information and keep helping these ponies help themselves, we'll not only have the Elements back at full strength, but we'll have Aunt Luna back being her old, not-trying-to-shroud-the-world-in-eternal-night-or-whatever self!"
"Well, well, well." Chrysalis flashed the briefest of smiles—this Chrysalis, Cadance had noticed years ago, seemed really self-conscious of her snaggly teeth, so Cadance took it as a personal triumph every time she got the changeling to grin. "Does this mean you'll finally stop underestimating yourself?" Chrysalis asked. "Will you finally realize that you're one of the three most powerful beings currently working their wills in the world and begin comporting yourself accordingly?"
Cadance had to blink. "Well, technically, Aunt Luna isn't in the world right now, the way she's exiled to the moon and all."
Clearing her throat, Chrysalis arched an eye ridge.
"Eep." Cadance's face heated up. "I'm sorry, Chrys. 'Cause you're totally right. Without you and me and Aunt Celestia—"
"Yes, yes." Chrysalis waved a front hoof and turned her attention to the ledger. "You've got too much on your mind these days, I suppose, to remember that we three are the glue that keeps Equestria from spinning off into a morass of madness and horror." Green fire flickered down her horn, and the ledger flipped to the last few blank pages. "But I take it from your outburst that this whole Elements of Harmony business is going well?"
"Oh, better than I had ever dreamed it would!" Cadance couldn't keep sitting, had to leap up to show Chrysalis the latest results. "Just in the last three months, I've managed to—!"
"I'm sure you have." Chrysalis tapped the empty page and gave Cadance a sideways glance. "I can't help wondering, however, if you've thought at all about the endgame."
That got Cadance blinking even more. "These ponies," Chrysalis went on, her green fire scattering out to lick every one of Cadance's file cabinets. "Once you're finished having your way with them— And, yes, I know." She held up a hoof so fast when Cadance opened her mouth to complain that Cadance could hear air whistle through the holes. "For me to use the phrase 'having your way with them' grossly distorts everything good and noble that you're trying to accomplish with this project. I'll stipulate to that, and we'll move on."
Pursing her lips, Cadance didn't bother to keep her ears from dipping. "To your point, I'm hoping?"
"Exactly." Chrysalis more glided across the room than walked, stretching herself out on the sofa like a cat. "A few hundred years from now when your Element bearers are living their quiet and unsuspecting little lives, how exactly are you planning to inform them that they've been chosen by one of Equestria's immortal deities to save the world from another of Equestria's immortal deities?" She cocked her head at Cadance. "Invite them over for tea the afternoon before your aunt returns with her mind set on destroying everything they've ever known?"
"What? No! Of course not!" Though Cadance had to admit that the question hadn't even occurred to her. It ricocheted around in her brain, knocked over other thoughts and ideas, and she found herself speaking them aloud, trying to get them organized. "Because the Elements exist as a relationship: using them by herself is what started them going stagnant on Aunt Celestia. The Element bearers can't be strangers to each other, or the essence of Harmony won't—"
That thought, though, lit up a whole new area of concerns she hadn't thought about before, either, and a sudden burst of nervous energy pushed Cadance to begin pacing back and forth across the carpet. "But they can't know each other all that well before Aunt Luna arrives, can they? The true bonds of Harmony have to be forged in dialectic, in instinctive reaction to a perceived disharmony! Clover and Cookie and Pansy, they couldn't've discovered the Fire of Friendship without the threat of the wendigoes literally freezing them to death, nor could they have created my aunts and me and started with us on the path to discover the Elements without Discord standing right there, breathing that noxious, rotten-banana breath of his down their necks!"
Knees shaking, Cadance collapsed back into her chair. "We can't just...can't just assemble them a few years before Aunt Luna breaks free and start training them to use the Elements against her! That would vitiate the Elements' organic nature...like trying to grow flowers by putting the seeds on a strict exercise regimen! It would be absolutely antithetical to the very nature of Harmony itself!"
Chrys was staring at her with very wide eyes. "I'm guessing that all means something."
Cadance waved her hoof, her mind racing to reconcile the contradiction: how can they be friends but stll not know each other very well? "It's that the six have to be friends, but their friendship can't begin till the very moment Aunt Luna is flexing her wings and shrugging off her restraints! Otherwise, that first spark won't occur in opposition to her, and the Elements...they'll be powerless!" Another surge of nerves pushed her to her hoofs again. "This is terrible! I'll need to change my approach entirely! I've got to tell Aunt Celestia and—!"
"OK, Cady." Green light surrounded her, seemed to solidify the air and hold her in place. "Let's have you just sit down and breathe for a minute."
It took some effort, but Cadance got her head to turn and her eyes to focus on Chrysalis, looking very stern and serious. "Please?" the changeling asked.
Just hearing that word from her normally-brusque friend was enough to make Cadance sink back onto her cushions. "Now." Chrysalis stood, her green fire vanishing and letting Cadance move easily again. "I admit to not understanding these Elements of Harmony, but, well, as we've discussed, I'm not a pony, so I don't feel them the way you do. Nor do I understand this magic of friendship that underlies the Elements: it's not quite the magic of love that we deal with every day, but it's similar in enough ways that I can see its potential." She moved to the desk and tapped the ledger again. "All that aside, I find that your basic approach to this project is sound, and I agree that it's Equestria's best chance to survive your Aunt Luna."
"But—!" Cadance began, her mind still churning.
"All you need," Chrysalis interrupted with a grin, "is to stack the deck."
Forcing her panic away, Cadance blinked. "You...you have an idea?"
"You mentioned some centuries ago that Nightmare Moon was even then becoming more folk tale than history." Chrysalis stepped forward, an eagerness in her face that Cadance didn't often see there. "We need to encourage that trend, need to start tales of our own connecting her return with the Elements of Harmony, and need to make those tales as common as the air. If these tales are a part of the cultural background, when your Element bearers are born four hundred years from now, they'll have an unconscious understanding of the situation, an understanding that has seeped into them from foalhood."
Cadance felt herself quivering on the edge of her seat. "They'll know it without knowing it. So when they meet, the pieces will just...will just slide right into place!" She leaped to her hoofs once more. "It'd be like Hearth's Warming Eve, something foals will take part in year after year! It would center on a fairy-tale version of Nightmare Moon and would give our Element bearers a basis to build on when the real Nightmare Moon comes back!" Laughing, she dashed over and threw her front legs around Chrysalis. "You're a genius!"
"I'm many things," Chrysalis murmured, not pulling away from the hug for the first time that Cadance could remember. "A de facto princess, one might even say."
That got Cadance to pull away, but only enough so she could look into Chrysalis's eyes. "I...I beg your pardon?"
"Aren't I?" The green glow in those eyes reminded Cadance of the sea down at the bottom of the hill on those winter afternoons when she would allow a storm to blow in. "I'm doing the job of a princess when I answer your Calls. I show every sign of living as long as your aunts and you in my own way. And I have a whole hive of followers who look to me for guidance." She gave another of her snaggle-toothed grins, and Cadance had to grin back. "And besides, doesn't 'Princess Chrysalis' have a certain ring to it?"
Flushed with happiness, Cadance poked Chrysalis in the chest with a hoof. "Now who's underestimating herself? I mean, c'mon, Chrys! You're descended from bees! You should be 'Queen Chrysalis' if you're anything!"
Chrysalis froze, her ragged wings sticking straight up into the air. "Oh, I like that," she whispered, poking a hoof of her own into Cadance's chest. "I like that very much."
"Oh, Atalanta!" Haralson clasped his hoofs to his chest, the evening breeze whispering through the boughs of the apple trees above and around him. "You've made me the happiest pony in Equestria!"
"No, I haven't!" The honey-gold mare wrapped her front legs around him and hugged him tight. "Because right now, I'm the happiest pony in Equestria!"
Covered in shadows several yards away, Cadance almost leaped out to tell them they were both wrong, but she contented herself with a quick and silent little dance. Giving the couple one last look, she wafted a few waves of concentrated love toward them as a wedding present and slipped into the spaces between space. After all this time, all the ponies she'd nudged toward each other in the hopes that they would click together, it still gave her the sweetest sort of thrill when they actually did. And this time especially: for three generations, she'd been trying to unite these two unrelated Apple families, and now that she had, it opened up so many possibilities, she was going to need another notebook or two just to track them!
The grass of her front yard soft beneath her hoofs, she stood and stretched a few kinks from her legs—it had taken Haralson forever to pop the question, Cadance sweating there in the earth pony's orchard and hoping he wouldn't lose his nerve like he had the last five times he'd invited Atalanta out for an evening stroll! Bending her neck, then, Cadance found herself gazing upward at the moon, and her throat tightened, Aunt Luna's profile still as crisp and distinct there as when Aunt Celestia had put it in place that first evening just over seven hundred years ago now.
"Soon," she whispered, swallowing against the tightness. "But not too soon, I hope..."
Still, getting Haralson and Atalanta married was such a wonderful step in the right direction that Cadance couldn't keep anything even remotely melancholy in her thoughts. With a skip, she trotted down the front path and pushed the door open, her mind already composing the entries she would spend the evening putting into her ledger—
And stopped at the sight of two changelings standing on either side of the closed door that led into her workroom.
They stared straight ahead like the ones who guarded the passageway back into the hive, but this was the first time she'd ever seen any up in the front of the house like this. Hoping everything was OK—she'd sent some Calls to Chrysalis while waiting for Haralson to get his nerve up, but she hadn't felt anything other than Chrys's usual acknowledgement—Cadance put on her gentlest smile, stepped up to them, and asked, "Is there anything I can help you with?"
The one on the right blinked once. "Have you an audience?" he asked—at least, the baritone tones behind the buzzing made her think the changeling was a stallion.
Feeling the corners of her smile sagging, Cadance managed to repeat, "Audience?"
A sigh from the changeling on the left. "Audience," this one said, her voice definitely a mare's. "With her Majesty."
Before Cadance could do more than blink, the doorknob glowed green, the door swinging open, and Chrysalis stood there, a mildly annoyed look on her face. "What did I tell you?" she asked.
Cadance opened her mouth to let Chrys know in no uncertain terms that she hadn't told her anything , but Chrys held up a front hoof, pointed it first at the changeling on the left, then at the changeling on the right. "Either of you?"
Both changelings did some blinking of their own for another moment, then the mare said slowly, "You told us to ask any changeling who came along if they had an audience."
"Very good!" Chrysalis aimed her hoof at Cadance. "Now, does this look like a changeling?"
"It could." The stallion squinted, green fire rippling over his shiny black carapace, and as Cadance stared, he shifted into a version of her: not quite three-quarter size, bright orange, and grinning widely. "See?"
The mare changeling giggled, and Chrysalis rolled her eyes. "All right," she said. "I'd say we've had just about enough fun for one evening."
"But Mom!" the pint-sized Cadance blurted out, then dropped to the carpet and burst back to his regular shape, clamping both front hoofs over his snout. "I'm sorry! Your Majesty, I mean!"
It struck Cadance all at once, then: she wasn't talking to a mare and a stallion. "These are hatchlings !" she couldn't keep from exclaiming.
Chrysalis smiled, and while this Chrysalis had never been shy about using that expression—she could be positively jolly, in fact, especially when compared to some of her predecessors—none of the changelings ever looked quite right to Cadance while they were smiling. The smiles were usually warm, of course, and seemed to convey a certain amount of fondness or friendliness, but even now, watching Chrysalis smile at these two young changelings, Cadance felt no love there. It was more than a little disconcerting.
"Yes," Chrysalis was saying. "Just two weeks out of the egg, the both of them."
The little changelings gave sweet but loveless grins. "But!" Chrysalis wagged a hoof at them. "That's no excuse for them to be forgetting their lessons! What have I told you to do if you ever meet Princess Cadance?"
"Princess Cadance??" they both gasped at the same time, and the filly went on: "You mean this is Princess Cadance??"
Cadance couldn't help laughing. "Yes, I am, and I'm very pleased to meet the two of you."
She wasn't sure she'd ever seen a changeling blush before, but they quickly pulled themselves together, bowed, and said in unison, "Thank you, Princess Cadance, for making us."
It caught her more off-guard than seeing the miniature orange version of herself had. Chrysalis gave a crisp little nod, then gestured down the hallway toward the hive entrance. "Now, that's enough for today. We'll have more practice later in the week."
"Yes, your Majesty!" the little filly chirped. She and the colt bowed, turned, and scampered for the back of the house.
A sigh beside her pulled Cadance's gaze to Chrysalis again. "I have high hopes for those two," the changeling said quietly. "The female may in fact be good enough to become me in another few decades."
Cadance was still stuck on one particular phrase. "Two weeks out of the egg??" She waved a hoof at the end of the hall. "You weren't as big as that filly when I took you on your first Call, and you were twenty years old at that point!"
Chrysalis shrugged. "Evolution in action. I mean, look." She drew herself up to her full height, and Cadance noticed for the first time that she had to tilt her head back just a bit to meet the changeling's eyes. "One of the perks of serial immortality: you get to trade up physically every twenty-five or thirty years." She winced. "I'm sorry. That probably still makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it?"
Sighing, Cadance couldn't do anything else but return her friend's shrug. "Yeah, but, well, like you always say, you're not ponies." She nodded to the room behind Chrysalis. "So, can I get an audience with my ledgers? Or are they otherwise occupied?"
That got a laugh out of Chrysalis, and her black horn glowed, green fire shimmering over the door and pulling it the rest of the way open. "They await you with bated breath."
Remembering what she had to record in those ledgers brought the smile back to Cadance's face, and she bowed to Chrysalis with the sort of hoof-waving flourish she'd seen from some of the more sycophantic members of her aunt's court. "I thank your excellency."
"Don't remind me." Chrysalis blew out a breath, Cadance gliding past her into the workroom. "You might not believe it, but ever since you anointed me queen, my subjects have started whining about the need for more pomp and protocol in the hive." A familiar thump and squish told Cadance that Chrys had flopped onto the sofa. "Audiences and titles and rubrics and who knows what else! That's why I had the kids here playing doorkeeper: I mean, a royal court doesn't just spring up on its own! Not without some practice first."
Her horn flaring, Cadance flipped open her ledger and took up a quill. "I'm sure you'll do fine. If there's one thing you changelings are, it's adaptable."
Another laugh behind her. "From your good mood, I take it tonight's matchmaking went well."
"Oh, Chrys!" Cadance whirled, her whole body as light as a soap bubble. "It was so romantic! The moonlight, the lightest little breeze in the apple blossoms, the two of them just being absolutely cute together: they're gonna be the start of a dynasty like Equestria's never seen!"
Chrysalis's smile was quirked and sideways. "Sixth time the charm for our stalwart Haralson, then, was it?"
"Cynic." Cadance stuck her tongue out. "I'll have you know that Atalanta enjoys the strong, silent type."
"Which you know because you've been reading her diary."
"What? No!" Being pink, Cadance didn't show blushes as strongly as some ponies, but she could always feel the heat of them in her face. "I...just overheard her talking about him to some of her friends..."
"Ah." Chrysalis nodded. "Eavesdropping. Much better."
With as delicate a snort as she could manage, Cadance turned back to her books. "After the solid mass of problems I've had the last eight decades with these unicorns, I'll take one thing going right on the earth pony front quite happily, thank you." Not to mention her continued attempts to work with Azure Skies' descendants, several of whom, despite their stubborn ability to turn away from the ponies Cadance thought would be perfect for them, displayed even more strongly the characteristics she'd found so appealing in their ancestress.
"Cady, Cady, Cady." Cadance could hear the swish of Chrysalis's mane as the changeling shook her head. "I still don't see why you insist on making this process so difficult. I mean, we are talking about saving the world from the wrath of your insane aunt. Surely you could devote a little more of your personal energy toward getting these ponies to see things your way when it comes to whoever it is they marry!"
Dipping her quill into the inkwell, Cadance tapped the excess ink from the nib. "True love can't be rushed," she said.
"Love." Chrysalis's tone—not quite disdainful, but something awfully close—made Cadance look over her shoulder at the sofa, the changeling's smile gone, her eyes narrow. "The more I hear you talk about it, the more I think you don't know what the word actually means."
That brought Cadance all the way around. "Excuse me?"
"Love!" Chrysalis waved a front hoof. "It's not some mystical commodity that needs shepherding and nurturing! It's as common as air, Cady, and with a little thought and effort, it's pretty easy to control: like building a dam to control a river."
"Ah." Cadance turned back to her books. This again. "I know it seems that way to you since you only deal with one of love's aspects, but while the love ponies feel at the end of their lives is vitally important, there's so much more to the—"
"Yes, yes, yes." The haughtiness in Chrys's voice nearly got Cadance to turn around and call her 'your excellency' again. "We've been having this discussion for something like half a millennium, you know."
"Really?" Cadance deployed a little archness of her own. "Why, it seems like only yesterday."
"But!" The word snapped out like the single, martial note of a trumpet, the shock of it upsetting Cadance's concentration and almost jerking her pen to smear ink across the ledger. "I have further proof for my position this time."
Carefully, Cadance directed the quill back into its stand and turned, Chrysalis on her hoofs, her smile wide. "If it please the court," the changeling added.
Cadance heaved a theatrical sigh. "This is gonna be something I should sit down for, isn't it?"
"You might want to, yes."
Moving to her chair, Cadance settled into it and arched an eye ridge at Chrysalis.
Chrys gave as over-the-top a bow as Cadance had earlier and straightened again with half her seaweed-green mane cascading around her horn and across her face. "For it was not long after we first had this discussion that you took me with you to your aunt Celestia's wedding. Do you recall that?"
"Of course." Though with all the excitement of the Element Bearers program the past few centuries, she had to admit—to herself, at least—that she hadn't thought about that day in quite a while.
"At that time," Chrysalis was going on, "you said it was important for me to understand how love worked among mortal ponies before their deaths in order for me to truly understand how it worked at their deaths." She waved a hoof. "Or words to that effect. This ringing a bell?"
"Yes..." Again, it was the vaguest sort of memory. "I had thought that you and I should go out into Equestria so you could see how ponies live." With the heat she was feeling from her face, she was fairly sure her blushes were plainly visible. "I'm so sorry, Chrysalis! We never did anything like that again, did we?"
"It's quite all right." Chrys gave a crisp nod. "Because I've been doing it myself."
Every bit of heat in Cadance's body went cold. "What?" she asked.
"I started small." Chrysalis shimmered and flowed into a bright-eyed pink unicorn with a pale-yellow mane and tail, her cutie mark a single, lit candle. "For more than two hundred years, whenever I had a chance after a Call, I would venture forth into the streets of whatever city or town was nearest the recently departed's home, and would simply allow myself to move through the patterns created by the vast sea of living ponies all around. And I must hereby admit—" She shivered, green sparks washing over her and changing her back to herself. "You were right, Cady. Ponies create an absolutely profligate amount of love as they go about, living their lives."
Cadance's first, dagger-sharp stab of panic slowly began easing, and she started feeling the more familiar prodding of guilt—of course Chrysalis wouldn't have gone running amok in the mortal world! She wasn't a pony, yes, but as Cadance had been telling herself over and over again for centuries, she wasn't a monster! It made perfect sense that, after Cadance had given her a taste of regular pony life, Chrysalis would have found a way to quietly and discreetly observe more of it.
Chrysalis was still talking, her eyes positively glowing: "So, over the past three hundred years, I've developed quite an interesting system to investigate these matters. I and one of my lieutenants wander in disguise together through a crowded place—a park or a seashore or a carnival or some such—until we spot a couple of ponies so deeply in love, the air around them practically curdles with it. We cloud their minds just a bit so they don't notice us, then we follow and observe them, watch how they behave toward one another, try to discern what it is in their actions, large or small, that conveys the love they feel."
The part about clouding minds made Cadance's shoulders tighten, but trying to be supportive—and having finally regained control of her voice—she nodded. "You're trying to learn how love affects ponies and how ponies reflect that love in what they do, is...is that it?"
"In part." A snake-flick of her tongue. "And that's the part, by the way, that proves my side of our argument. Because what we do next, you see, is nudge our two pony lovers into separate paths. In a crowd and usually so besotted, they hardly know where they are to begin with, this isn't much of a task, and we really only need them out of each other's sight for a moment so we can transform ourselves into their partners, occupy their attentions, and draw them further apart for our own experiments in—"
"What ??" Cadance had no memory of crossing the room, but suddenly she was hovering in the air above Chrysalis and no longer seemed to be having any trouble with her voice. "You change yourselves into the couple??"
Chrysalis blinked up at her. "Well, yes. I take the part of the mare and draw the stallion away while whichever of my lieutenants has proven himself worthy recently will become the stallion and draw the mare away. We will then—"
"No! You will not !" Cadance could hardly see, she was quivering so hard, her wings buzzing behind her at least as fast as any changeling's. "Are you out of your mind ?? You can't go around impersonating ponies and kidnapping their spouses or significant others or whatever! It's completely unacceptable!"
With a puff of breath, Chrysalis rolled her eyes. "We don't hurt them, Cady." That odd smile danced across her muzzle. "In fact, judging by their reactions, they seem to enjoy what we do with them as much as we do."
Images flashed through Cadance's mind faster than she could push them out. "You don't mean that you—!"
"And when we're all sated and exhausted, my lieutenant and I reunite the happy couple and slip away under cover of another bit of a brain cloud. The two ponies then go on their way, and the experience they think they've just shared with each other seems to aid them in rebuilding their stores of love." She shivered again, her smile so self-satisfied, Cadance could hardly keep from slapping her. "These excursions have proven quite popular with my lieutenants, and we've taken to going out in much larger groups lately, splitting up into couples, and—"
"No! You can't ! This is the worst abuse of the abilities I gave you that I can even begin to imagine! Forcing yourselves on ponies that way, it's—"
"Forcing?" Chrysalis's ears folded. "Not at all! And that's exactly my point!" She poked a hoof into the center of Cadance's chest. "If this love you keep harping on about is so all-powerful and all-encompassing, why can I milk gallons of it out of any pony I want to with a little shape-shifting and a little play-acting? If love is what you say it is, why is it so easily fooled?"
Cadance smacked the other's hoof away. "We're not discussing this, Chrysalis! This is me telling you! You and all your changelings will stop doing this right now and forever! And that is final !"
In the silence that followed, Cadance tried to slow her panting while she watched Chrysalis's eyes narrow. "I see," the changeling leader said. "So what you're doing—manipulating ponies for some vast purpose that you're going out of you way to conceal from them—that's fine. But what I'm doing—giving a few ponies an experience they will remember only with warm fuzziness for the rest of their lives in exchange for a substance they're literally spraying out almost unnoticed over the ground behind them—that's wrong? Your silent conspiracy is better than my spreading a little fun?"
Teeth clenching, Cadance settled to the floor. "You know that's not what this is."
"Do I?" Chrysalis rose, suddenly seeming even taller than she had just a few moments before. "Well, I guess I don't know as much as you think I do. Because I know for a fact that you don't know as much as you think you do." She turned, her jagged horn glowing to pull the door open, and marched out into the hall.
Every part of Cadance felt both frozen and melting at the same time. "What have I done?" she murmured, dragging her gaze away from the doorway to stare in horror at the file cabinets surrounding her.
The sky darkened quickly outside the open doors of Aunt Celestia's balcony—too quickly, Cadance thought, running through her notes one last time before leaving them on her aunt's desk and heading back out into the hallway. After all, Auntie would doubtless be winging down from the tower after getting the day wrapped up and the night begun, and Cadance had no desire to meet her here and now.
In fact, as much as Cadance didn't like to think about it, she'd been avoiding Aunt Celestia for most of the last eighty years. She did everything Auntie asked of her, of course, met with her when she couldn't find a way not to, but she kept herself so busy with her Calls—
Though even that had been giving her second thoughts the past century. Should she let Chrysalis and her changelings take more of the Calls to keep them away from living ponies? Or might it be worse if they only had the dying and the bereaved to focus their attentions on?
Not that whatever the changelings were doing was actually harming the delicate web of love that encompassed all ponies living and dead: Cadance had worked herself into a near frenzy proving that to her own satisfaction not long after her confrontation with Chrys a century ago. Yes, the web was a little more gossamer than she would've liked, but with the population of ponies now greater than it had ever been, of course the nature of the web was going to change. A little thinner, a little wispier, but it was still all love and still the strongest thing Cadance knew of.
So was she worrying too much? She didn't like Chrysalis and her lieutenants going around impersonating living ponies and inserting themselves into already existing relationships, something Cadance was pretty sure they were still doing even though she'd forbade it. But again, they weren't hurting anything as far as Cadance could tell, and they were still doing a fine job with the Calls.
Maybe she'd been too hard on them. Maybe she needed to—
"Princess?"
In the hall outside her aunt's room, Cadance started back, blinked at the graying blue unicorn smiling up at her from behind little square glasses. "Seneschal! Good...good evening!"
"And to you as well." The old pony gave a flowing bow, her voice calm and gentle and just what Cadance's ears needed right then. Dear, unflappable Seneschal had shown herself to be so good at her job over the past fifty or sixty years that Cadance had come to rely on her even more than she had most of the unicorn's predecessors in the post. She just made it much easier for Cadance to keep up with her duties in the living world without having to meet Aunt Celestia's difficult gaze. "A pleasure to see you again, your highness," Seneschal was going on. "Your rooms are, as always, prepared, and I will be happy to send word to the cooks if you're staying for supper."
Staring down at the unicorn, Cadance felt her stomach rumble. She couldn't think the last time she'd sat down for something as simple as a cooked meal, her recent life nothing but mouthfuls of whatever was handy snatched in haste as she rushed between realms. "I...yes, thank you, Seneschal. If it wouldn't be any trouble."
"None at all, your highness." She squinted over the tops of her glasses. "You of course always look as fresh as dewdrops on daisies, but if I might be so bold as to ask, are any of your current troubles something I could help with?"
A shiver crackled along Cadance's back, and she very nearly blurted that Seneschal had already helped Cadance sixty years ago by marrying the pony that Cadance had nudged in her direction and having a son and a daughter, both of whom had also married the ponies Cadance had selected for them thereby strengthening the magic inherent in their bloodline and bringing Equestria two steps closer toward possible redemption.
But she didn't say that, her cheeks burning at the concern on Seneschal's face, the face of an actual living pony and not, she had to remind herself, just some name in a ledger. "Thank you," Cadance managed to get out, "but I...I don't think...I doubt that there's..." She trailed off, the thought echoing through her that she was beyond help at this point.
"Ah." Seneschal bowed. "Then perhaps your aunt."
A lilac scent drifted across Cadance's nose, and her ears fell. "Niece!" Aunt Celestia's sweet, cheerful voice said from somewhere behind her. "So lovely to see you!"
It took some effort not to tear the air apart and leap through to the safety of the Realm Between, but then Cadance hadn't been feeling very comfortable there lately, either. So she turned, forced a smile, looked up to meet her aunt's bright eyes. "Are you able to stay a while?" Aunt Celestia asked, and the eagerness in her words, the sparkle that filled the air around her, the way the light both brightened and softened all up and down the hallway, it brushed away every last bit of Cadance's reluctance, the tension draining from her body as if she'd slipped into a warm bath after too hard a day.
Unable to hold herself back, Cadance leaped forward and pressed her face into Aunt Celestia's neck, the cooling waver of that incredible mane washing over her forehead. "Oh, Auntie! I just—! I don't—! I can't—!"
"Shhhh, now, niece." A touch of vanilla came into the lilac scent all around Cadance. "Thank you, Seneschal," Aunt Celestia said softly. "Could you please have supper sent up here for us? Something light, I should think, and we'll hopefully be able to get to the bottom of all this."
"Of course, your highness." Cadance felt a feathery touch of magic tickle through her braided mane. "Everything will be all right, princess. Your aunt shall see to it."
With an effort, Cadance pulled away from Aunt Celestia's warmth to smile at the old unicorn. "Thank you," she whispered.
Seneschal bowed, turned, and trotted past the guards stationed at the top of the stairs, and all Cadance's self-consciousness crashed back into place. "So," Aunt Celestia murmured, "shall we go inside and talk?"
In Cadance's mind, the list of things she didn't want to do—burst into tears; stand here in the hallway where everypony could see her burst into tears; keep Aunt Celestia in the dark; tell Aunt Celestia the truth about everything—just kept growing. But she didn't think she had the strength to leave now, not after being away from her aunt for so long; with a nod, she moved alongside Aunt Celestia through the doorway and back into her room.
The quiet in Auntie's room had always seemed a palpable thing to Cadance, more the presence of peacefulness than the absence of sound. This time, though, when the door slid shut behind her, even the feather-soft stroke of that peacefulness couldn't calm the swirling in Cadance's head. "Shall we sit?" Aunt Celestia asked.
"I—" Cadance began, but then her wings burst out, unfurling from her sides and flinging her into a hover in the middle of the room, the carpeting beneath her as thick and white as a snow bank. "I can't do this anymore!" she said instead of any of the things she'd thought she was going to say. "I don't have the right to interfere with these ponies' lives! I mean, yes, it'll possibly save us all from Nightmare Moon, but how am I not a monster for forcing these ponies to take on roles that I've decided they should have?? How can I take what they are and shape it to my own purposes and not be destroying them just as thoroughly as Aunt Luna might??"
The air through her pinions vibrated so quickly, she almost thought she was back home with the constant buzzing of the changelings, and a wave of exhaustion swept through her. Muscles bunched like rocks all along her back, and she dropped to the carpet with a squish. "This— It's just— It isn't—" She closed her eyes, let her head droop. "It isn't right ...."
The silence in the room wasn't accusing or uncomfortable, and that surprised Cadance a little. "May I ask you, niece," Aunt Celestia's voice came drifting over her as softly as her scent, "if you remember Prince Golden?"
"Uncle Goldie?" Looking up, Cadance blinked at her aunt standing beside her dressing table in the evening twilight, that prismatic mane flowing around her like a willow tree in a summer breeze. "Of...of course I remember him!" Cadance even saw him now and again in the Groves Beyond, though she hadn't had time to stop and chat with him—or with anypony else there, she realized—in centuries...
"Then you recall the day he died."
Again, nothing accusatory, but Cadance couldn't help swallowing a bit. "Of course," she said again.
Aunt Celestia stepped forward, her every movement controlled and perfect. "That was the first time I saw your skills at work, did you know that? The first time, really, that I ever let myself contemplate your role here in Equestria and the invaluable service you provide to our little ponies."
Not knowing what to say, Cadance said nothing. Aunt Celestia folded her long, long legs and settled onto the carpet, her horn glowing briefly to pull a table to her side, her crown floating from between her ears to rest on the polished wooden surface. "To tell you honestly, I very nearly convinced myself not to attend that day. I expected the final moments of my beloved's life to be horrible, grotesque, and unbearable. And while it was indeed incredibly sad, it was also...it was beautiful, niece."
Her eyes shone, and Cadance had to blink a bit of dampness away herself. "Everything you did, Cadance, you did with such love, it was more than moving and more than special. It was empowering, invigorating in a way I'd never imagined such a moment could be."
With a nod, Aunt Celestia gestured to the spot of floor on the other side of the table, and Cadance shook herself, shuffled forward, slid into place there. "Never before," Aunt Celestia went on, "had I felt so connected to the ponies of Equestria. Yes, we are quite literally manifestations of their collective spirit, their hearts, their minds, and their souls, but...just being in that room when he passed, when you Called him over into the Groves Beyond, and seeing the figures of so many ponies waiting for him there, ponies he'd known and...and ponies I'd known going back to the very beginning of our time here..."
Cadance could hardly breathe, the deep, flawless beauty of her aunt's face seeming both fragile and strong as steel. "In that one, brief moment," Aunt Celestia said, "I understood more about the gift we three have been given, more about the joyful responsibility we bear, more about what it means to be a princess than I ever had."
She reached a hoof across the table and rested it on Cadance's shoulder. "So, no, Cadance, you are not a monster; you're a princess, and you carry out the duties of your post with admirable skill. The love you nurture is as important to life in Equestria as the turning of the sun and stars, and I trust you completely when it comes to our program for finally getting the power of the Elements properly into the hoofs of mortal ponies."
Should you trust me? Cadance almost asked, the words pushing hot and bitter against the back of her teeth. But at the same time, Aunt Celestia's praise slipped warm and wonderful across her back and into her chest, sparked a thought and a feeling that maybe she could still fix this. Maybe, if what Aunt Celestia had said was true, maybe Cadance could...could talk to Chrysalis again, get her to see how important their job was, get her to understand how important it was that they—
A tapping at the door. "Come in," Auntie called, and the aroma that wafted in with the palace staff made Cadance even gladder than before that she'd decided to stay: piping hot pumpkin soup; potato and onion pancakes; tomatoes so fresh and flavorful, Cadance could've kept popping them into her mouth all night long. She brought Aunt Celestia up-to-date on the latest few generations of pre-Element Bearers and shunted the several Calls that came to her directly to Chrysalis, the changeling silently acknowledging receipt as she always did. And as evening rolled gently on into full night, Cadance felt better and better, laughing and chatting with Aunt Celestia as if she'd never had a self-conscious thought in her life.
Finally, though, the dishes cleared away, the last few drops of tea cooling in the bottom of her cup, Cadance felt ready to carry on. "Thank you so much for this, Aunt Celestia." She leaned across the table and gave her aunt a kiss on the cheek. "You've always been here for me, and I need to remember that." She stood. "And if you ever want to visit the Groves Beyond, I know that Uncle Goldie and Clover the Clever and Princess Platinum and all our friends would love to see you."
Aunt Celestia's smile went a little bit sideways, the eye not covered by her flowing mane going unfocused. "Thank you, niece, but right now, I am the living world, the anchorstone about which all things mortal revolve. I would pass through the realm boundaries like lava through rice paper, leaving nothing but jagged, burning holes everywhere I went." She shook her head. "When Luna returns and is herself again, able to take creation's reins from my shoulders each evening, then I will gladly accept your kind offer." She stood as well, Cadance looking up to match her smile. "I've missed you these last thirty thousand dawns; will you be here for tomorrow's?"
"I will." Cadance activated her horn, her magic sweet as syrup with this wonderful infusion of love, and slipped through the crackling air into the darkness of her front yard in the Realm Between, the humming of the changeling hive that spread up the hill and into the woods somehow not as ominous to her ears as it had been recently. She gave a nod to Aunt Luna's profile on the moon—"Two hundred years, Auntie," she told it—and pushed the door to her little house open.
Darkness filled the place, but light flooded from the open door to her workroom. Peering inside, she found Chrysalis there as she'd expected, the changeling leader stretched out long, dark, and languid on the sofa, a book floating in her horn's green glow. Swallowing—she needed to do this!—Cadance stepped into the room. "Hi, Chrys."
Chrysalis shot her a narrow glance, then her eyes went wide, and she let the book drift to the floor. "Well, now. You're suffused with an incandescent glow. Finally get up the nerve to apologize to your aunt again?"
It took some effort not to grind her teeth: she could almost admire the way Chrysalis knew exactly where and how to push those needling remarks of hers in. "I did," Cadance said, forcing her voice to stay steady. "And now I'd like to apologize to you if you wouldn't mind."
That got Chrys's eyes to go even wider, and Cadance pressed on. "You have to do what you think is best for your changelings the same way I have to do what I think is best for my ponies. That's what being a princess—or a queen—is all about, right?"
She looked to Chrysalis for a nod or something, anything to show that Chrys knew what she meant, but all the changeling said was, "Go on."
Cadance barely kept herself from scowling. "I don't like what you're doing, taking ponies' places and fiddling around with the love they and their partners feel. But as near as I can tell, you're not hurting the ponies in any way; in fact, my investigations showed that the way you open each partner up to what they truly feel for the other, when you've finished and bring them back together again, the spark you've ignited in them seems to make their love burn even brighter afterwards." She sighed. "So, while I don't like it, don't understand it, and will ask you again please to stop doing it, as long as no harm continues to come to my ponies, I...I don't see that this has to interfere with our working arrangements."
"What?" Chrysalis sat forward on the sofa. "Bottom line this for me, Cady."
Heaving another sigh, Cadance moved to her chair and climbed into it. "The work we do for all ponies everywhere is too important for my personal feelings on this to get in the way. So I'm asking you to stop one last time, then letting the matter drop."
The silence that followed wasn't nearly as restful as the quiet in Aunt Celestia's room, Cadance's uncertainty turning the muscles in her back to stones again. If this didn't work, she wasn't sure what she was going to do....
After another moment, Chrysalis stirred on the sofa. "That wasn't at all what I've been expecting you to say since last we spoke on this subject." This Chrysalis was the most elegant of any Cadance had ever known, almost as regal in her own tattered way as Aunt Celestia. "It's really quite vexing, you know."
Unable to stifle a laugh, Cadance shrugged. "I'm annoying like that."
Snorting a laugh of her own, Chrysalis nodded. "I've noticed, yes. But as you're being so confoundedly fair-minded about all this, I'll make you a promise: we will be as careful as we can with the ponies we visit and do our absolute utmost to make sure our practices continue to be beneficial for all involved." She straightened her neck and raised her head. "So swears Queen Chrysalis."
Cadance rolled her eyes and exaggerated her sigh. "I s'ppose that's the best I'm gonna get, isn't it?"
"Yep." Chrysalis rubbed her hoofs together, green fire sparking at her horn. "Now, how 'bout we have an update session, huh? I've had some really amazing Calls lately."
"So have I, Chrys." Cadance powered up her own horn, reached out to touch the familiar tingle of Chrysalis's magic. "So have I."
"More tea, Cadance?"
"Yes, thank you." Scrawling notes onto the last pages of her most recent ledger, Cadance hadn't even noticed that her cup had run dry; she smiled at her aunt, dabbed the period at the end of the final sentence with a bit of a flourish, and let her magic flip the notebook closed. "I can't believe it's all really coming together!"
"I can." Aunt Celestia sipped from her own cup, the teapot drifting over in the golden flex of her power. "You've done a remarkable job on this."
Muscles twitching, Cadance let her wings unfurl, let them flap her slowly a few inches up from Auntie's plush white carpet, stretched her legs out in front and behind: an evening meeting to bring her aunt up-to-date on the project had turned into another all-nighter, Cadance eagerly brainstorming with Aunt Celestia and jotting down all her suggestions till dawn was less than an hour away. "The one thing I really wish I could figure out—" She stopped, shook her head, settled back into place. "But no. It can't be done."
"Oh?" Aunt Celestia arched an eyebrow.
With a laugh, Cadance wrapped her magic around several of the books and set them on the table. "OK, you tell me how we can get these particular families to intermarry over the next generation or two without completely taking away their freedom of choice."
Aunt Celestia's horn glowed, her eyes half-closed as she turned a few pages. "Is it necessary for the project's success?"
Cadance shrugged. "Not really. I mean, whomever they marry at this point, their foals and their foals' foals are going to be incredible. And that generation or the one after that ..." Cadance took a breath and blew it out. "Those ponies will be our Element Bearers."
"But—" Aunt Celestia tapped a hoof against the books in front of her. "If these families merged?"
Just the thought of it made Cadance shiver. "Combining their qualities and concentrating them would be...oh, it would be a dream come true."
"Goodness." Smiling over the rim of her teacup, Aunt Celestia looked even more inscrutable than usual. "Well, dreams fall more under your aunt Luna's purview than mine, but still—" She slid the open ledgers around to Cadance's side of the table. "In your notes, you describe these families as sharing a trait you call 'a spirit of adventure,' and I've recently been thinking about letting homesteaders settle in a part of Equestria that I've been reluctant to open." A map popped into the air behind Aunt Celestia, an area not far from Canterlot beginning to glow. "Travelers call it the Everfree Forest, I hear, since the land, the sky, and the animals there respond to nopony's will."
"That's—" Cadance swallowed. "That's where you and Aunt Luna had your castle, isn't it?"
"Long ago," her aunt murmured. She cleared her throat. "The place has become quite wild in our absence and will need ponies of character, heart, and determination to coax it back to any semblance of civilization." The map rolled up and floated down to rest on Cadance's open ledgers. "Might that be a challenge to which these families you've been working with would respond?"
Cadance couldn't keep from leaping to her hoofs. "Oh, Auntie, it'd be perfect ! A new frontier right in the center of Equestria! They wouldn't be able to resist!" She reopened the map, anticipation quivering up and down her spine. "If the families choose to move there in order to found a new town, they'll all end up living together and bonding while working toward a common goal! They'll become friends and their colts and fillies will grow up and get closer as they get older and will fall in love and—" She sprang across the table and threw her front legs around her aunt's neck. "Thank you, Auntie! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
Aunt Celestia's chuckle stroked Cadance's ears. "It hasn't happened yet, niece."
"But it will." Cadance stepped back, her mind spinning. "That'll take care of our two earth pony candidates and probably one of our unicorns." She spun back to the table, flipped several ledgers open. "All the pegasus families are already in Cloudsdale, so we'll just have to make sure they have reasons to stay! Most of them work in the Weather Bureau now, and if their foals follow in their hoofsteps, I'll just need to do my usual nudging and hoping." Shivering again, Cadance looked up. "And that'll be five of the six right there. Just like that..."
The whole weird reality of the situation flooded Cadance, the end of the project practically in view, and she almost didn't notice Aunt Celestia asking, "Something wrong, niece?"
Not anything she could explain, of course, not without talking about Chrysalis and her little needling jabs. "The sixth candidate will likely be born here in Canterlot, and I—" She'd been thinking about this on and off for nearly nine decades, but hadn't decided to do it till that very moment. "I'd like to get more closely involved with that family's last generation somehow. I need to make sure that I...that I know them, make sure that I see them as ponies and not as...as..." She felt her face heating up. "As names in a ledger or pieces on a game board or anything like that, especially before we send them out to face Nightmare Moon." She forced her gaze up to meet her aunt's. "If that makes sense?"
"It most certainly does." The smile on Aunt Celestia's face shone like the first sliver of a summer dawn, and the glow of her magic opened several of Cadance's notebooks. "I noticed earlier that most of the unicorn families you're following are palace staff in one way or another, and we have a regular roster of professionals to help our employees with foal care. When the time comes, I'll see to it that you're on the list of governesses we maintain and will personally recommend you to the family in question."
"Thank you. I—" The base of her horn began that familiar tingling, and with her heart so full of love for...well, for everypony everywhere, really, Cadance stood. "May I leave these books here, Aunt Celestia? I'm getting a Call right now, but I'll try to be back for sun-up."
"Of course, niece." Aunt Celestia wasn't shining any more than usual, but Cadance could feel her warmth. "I'll start drawing up the homesteading announcement for the region around the Everfree Forest."
Clapping her hoofs, Cadance fired up her magic, sliced the air open, and sprang into the void, waves of joy radiating out from her to fill the usually neutral spaces between space. She couldn't keep from dancing, skating, whirling like a filly: they were so close to their goal, so close to reigniting the Elements of Harmony and assigning them to their perfect Bearers, so close to having the magic they would need to break Aunt Luna free from the grip of Nightmare Moon! Another hundred years, and—
Cadance slid back into the Mortal Realm then, the force of the Call drawing her to a small house on a quiet, tree-lined street in one of Fillydelphia's suburbs: Pink Peony's house, Cadance knew as she always did, an earth pony who'd spent decades as a city park commissioner, doing her best to make sure the ponies here had open, green spaces among the steel and glass towers of the expanding metropolis. Surrounded now by her loving family, she was very close to—
The house suddenly erupted like a volcano in front of Cadance, flames bursting from the walls and roof, an explosion of red and pink shooting into the pre-dawn sky higher than any of the neighborhood's trees. The force of the blast slammed over Cadance, singed her hide with the sheer energy of—
Of the love being generated?
Cadance blinked, realized she wasn't seeing the fiery bubble encasing the house with her eyes, the street around her just as dark as before. No, she was sensing it with her magic, a storm of love and grief, of devotion and sorrow so huge and violent, she'd never even dreamed such a thing might be possible. And it was punching through the delicate lacework that usually wove itself around all ponies both alive and in the Groves Beyond like multiple bricks hurtling through a stained glass window.
In a flash, Cadance leaped through to Peony's bedroom—and froze at the sight of herself already there, six mortal ponies stretched out prostrate and weeping on the carpet beside the bed. Peony quivered under the covers, the love she felt for her family swirling around her and sucking in the love her family felt for her, the cyclone of it all ripping the fabric of space to shreds and showing glimpses of the Groves, ponies swaying there, the storm wrapping around them as well.
But the ponies on that side all had doubles on this side, the dissonance of two sets of identical ponies adding to the awful majesty of the careening tornado, its widening gyre being directed by the other Cadance, her eyes half-closed and a smile twitching her muzzle. And for all the love that flowed into this other Cadance and the duplicate ponies around her, none of them gave back a single flicker of that feeling.
"Chrysalis!" Cadance screamed, and the riotous churn of emotions jittered to a halt, the funnel cloud crackling into place like some horrible ice sculpture.
The other Cadance's eyes went wide, her ears flattening, indignation spreading over her face. All she said, though, into the sudden silence, was: "Pink Peony? It's time."
Peony gasped and popped from her body like a cork from a bottle, her spirit sailing across the room to one of the jagged gashes that showed the Groves Beyond and flopping through onto the ground beside her equally exhausted friends and relations. Chrysalis's horn flared green, and the storm vanished along with all the changelings; blinking, Cadance found only the six mortal ponies still in the room with her, their tears continuing to flow wild and unrestrained.
***
Dawn had come and gone by the time Cadance got Peony's relatives settled enough to sleep, their links to the eternal mosaic of love not severed but severely frayed. Cadance whispered gentle words, coaxed them to remember the good times with Peony, and watched their dangling strands of love start to weave themselves back toward full strength. She then stepped quietly out onto the street and walked, waiting till she was half a block away before she allowed her rage to take her.
Tearing through the air, she burst into her sitting room, her every thought, feeling and sense telling her that that was where she would find—
"Chrysalis!" Cadance didn't bother keeping her voice down, didn't bother trying to keep her anger from crashing like a flash flood over the changeling leader, sitting up on the sofa with her front legs crossed. "Just what in the black bowels of Tartarus was all that ??"
As calm as always, Chrysalis didn't bat an eye. "I was on a Call," she said.
"A Call ?? No!" Flinging out a hoof to point behind her, Cadance could barely stop shivering. "That was a disaster! That was a travesty! That was a...a nightmare!"
"Well?" Chrysalis gave the tiniest bit of a shrug. "You interrupted me before I could wrap things up, didn't you?"
"Really??" Choking, Cadance had to fight to get the words out. "And what were you gonna do for an encore, huh?? Suck the blood out of 'em the way you were sucking out their love??" Chrysalis opened her mouth, but Cadance stomped a hoof with a thunderclap that shook the house. "You were purposefully pumping up their emotions, purposefully twisting their feelings into that...that obscene whatever-it-was just so you could feed off the excess! And not just Pink Peony and her family's emotions! You were draining love from the ponies in the Groves Beyond! You were deliberately weakening the web that binds all ponies together and...and eating it!"
Chrysalis's black brow remained smooth. "I would instead characterize it as extending the moment of catharsis in order to allow the expression of every last drop of necessary emotion."
Cadance could only stare open-mouthed, and Chrysalis finally blinked, her eyelids twitching several times. "All right," the changeling said. "I'll admit to running things a little close to the edge there, but—"
"A little??" Cadance wanted to stomp again, but she suddenly became aware of the stillness in the air, a silence she hadn't heard in the Realm Between in close to a thousand years.
However many hundreds of changelings now lived in the hive up the hill, every single one of them had stopped buzzing: Cadance could just imagine all their wings clamped as tightly to their sides as Chrysalis's were. And the dry, sour scent she'd been breathing in without noticing it till now?
Fear, she realized, plain and simple.
Pulling in a breath, she physically took a step back, closed her eyes, lowered her head. "All right," she said, a little surprised at how close to normal the words came out. "Then I'll admit that I panicked when I saw what was happening. I might've even freaked out a little."
The silence went on another couple heartbeats, then with a slight rustle of wings, Chrysalis asked, "A little?"
"Don't push it, Chrys." Cadance had never growled before in her life.
Chrysalis's wings stuttered, then started up again. "So, we're both admitting that mistakes were made. Can we agree that we'll both try to do better in the future and move on to more pleasant subjects?"
And as much as Cadance wanted to do just that, the questions filling her head wouldn't let her. "How did you know there was a Call at Pink Peony's, Chrys? I didn't send you a message about it."
"Oh, well, I, uhh—" Chrysalis cleared her throat, her eyes dancing away when Cadance looked up to meet her gaze. "I figured out a century or two ago how to detect the upsurges in love energy that meant a pony was dying somewhere, so I've been dispatching the teams on my own." Chrysalis cocked her head, the pale green glow of those eyes darting back. "Odd you haven't noticed."
That almost got another growl from Cadance, but she swallowed it down. "And what exactly was supposed to happen after the part that I saw?"
"Ah. Yes." Chrysalis's ears fell, and for the first time, Cadance noticed that Chrysalis was wearing an odd little spiky hat. "As long as you understand that the process wasn't supposed to get as wild as that and that I take full responsibility for not quite keeping a damper on the energy generated by the six mourners there at the—"
"Wait." Cadance couldn't look away from the object perched on Chrysalis's head. "Are you...are you wearing a crown ?"
"Ah. Yes." More clearing of throat, and Chrysalis cringed, almost seemed to shrink a little there on the sofa. "You did annoint me queen, after all, and, well, my subjects presented this to me a couple decades ago."
Four thin, black stumps curving up from a ring tangled in the moldy seaweed of her mane, little blue-green balls jammed onto the tips like bits of cheese gone bad: the laugh had burst from her throat before Cadance even knew it was there.
Chrysalis narrowed her eyes. "Something funny?"
The tug-of-war inside Cadance—tell Chrys how stupid her crown looked or let the whole thing go—went back and forth, but Cadance finally shook her head. "No, Chrys, it's not," she said. "Not after what I saw at Peony's."
"It won't happen again, all right?" More than a little peevishness sulked behind Chrysalis's words. "This method I've developed for dispersing and distributing pent-up love works best on a one-to-one basis, but if I'd had time to run those mortals through a proper cool-down session, I would've easily regained control and—"
"Regained?" Every part of Cadance that had been overheated a few moments ago now seemed cool and smooth, and she did her best to nurture the feeling. "So you were out-of-control?"
"I wasn't, Cady." Chrysalis sat up straighter. "The situation was. I just need more practice with—"
"No." Cadance fixed her gaze on Chrysalis's. "If your experiments with living ponies have led to this, then I can't let you do those experiments anymore."
Another twitch of her eyelids, and Chrysalis's lips tightened. "You said it was all right as long as we didn't hurt any ponies."
"Those ponies at Peony's—"
"I said I was sorry, didn't I?? And if you would've let me finish there, I would've fixed everything just fine!"
"Fixed?" A quick thought flashed through Cadance's mind, and she reached out with her magic, found a book she'd shown to Chrysalis nearly three-quarters of a millennium ago, popped it into the air between them with it open to the photograph of the Obsidian Shard standing beside her statue First Flight . "So if I took a hammer and smashed this sculpture to pieces, that would be all right as long as I promised to glue it back together again?"
Ears flicking up and down, Chrysalis nodded. "If you were sufficiently skillful to repair it completely, I don't see why that would be a problem."
A shiver iced down Cadance's back. "And if you weren't sufficiently skillful?"
Chrysalis leaped to her hoofs. "You want us to stop, Cady?? Fine! Maybe you'd enjoy doing your actual job for once if we stopped taking your Calls!" A nasty little smile curled over Chrysalis's muzzle. "Or maybe my changelings and I should pay a visit to your beloved auntie. Introduce her to the horrible monsters her sweet and wonderful niece creates in her spare time."
Struggling to keep hold of the cool, collected feeling inside her—she couldn't afford to take any more attention away from the Elements project, not when they were so close to fruition!—Cadance shrugged. "You do whatever you think's right, Chrys. But I won't call you monsters in front of Aunt Celestia or anypony else. Because you're not monsters. You and your changelings have kept Equestria safe, happy, and united for nine hundred years, working long and hard without ever getting the recognition you deserve."
Her jaw dropping slightly, Chrysalis stared. "And maybe you're right," Cadance went on. "Maybe what I saw today at Pink Peony's house was an aberration. Maybe I was wrong in thinking that you were completely in control of that storm the whole time, the way you shut it down with barely a blink as soon as I entered the room. And maybe you can quit doing Calls. Maybe you can find a way to support however many hundreds of changelings you've got looking to you for leadership without drawing strength from the love I allow you to access."
Again Chrysalis opened her mouth, but Cadance held up a hoof. "Either way, we're at an impasse here." Unable to keep up the pretense, she had to stop and clear her throat. "But you...you're my friend, Chrys. I love you like a sister, and—" She couldn't keep the pleading out of her voice, and she didn't really want to. "There's got to be a way we can work this out."
Another twitch rattled across Chrysalis's face, and for the first time ever, Cadance felt the tiniest tremor of something that might almost have been love from the changeling queen. It was gone immediately, the merest taste on the tip of Cadance's tongue, but it made her heart surge, made her want to do a little dance.
"All right," Chrysalis said slowly. "I'll think about it."
Cadance forced her enthusiasm back down. "About what exactly?"
"About how we can resolve this." Chrysalis brushed one front hoof back and forth along the carpet. "We'll go back to doing Calls the old-fashioned way for now, but you're right. This has to be worked out between us." Her eyes narrowed, and she gave a smile that Cadance didn't find at all reassuring. "Give me seven or eight decades, and I'll have a proposal for you. If your Aunt Luna doesn't return and destroy the world in the meantime, of course."
Cadance forced a smile of her own. "Of course."
Standing on Aunt Celestia's balcony and watching the chariot carrying Twilight and Spike dwindle away till it was just a spot in the sky, Cadance wasn't quite sure how she felt.
Nervous? Of course! Twilight was hardly more than a filly, had only ever left Canterlot on field trips Cadance had put together for her! Just sending her to organize the Summer Sun Celebration in Ponyville would've been a big enough test of her abilities, but knowing what they were actually sending her into, Cadance found it took most of her self-control not to spring over the railing and speed after the now-vanished chariot.
But no. After all, pride also bubbled in Cadance's chest. All her hundreds of years of planning had paid off in ways she could never have imagined, and gazing toward Ponyville far off there in the misty distance, she knew without a single doubt that Twilight Sparkle was exactly the pony to pull everything together, organize the Elements, and save both Aunt Luna and Equestria.
A lilac-scented rustle behind her. "Is she gone?" Aunt Celestia asked, and Cadance could hear that same mixture of worry and confidence behind her words.
Turning, Cadance smiled up at her. "I imagine she'll arrive just in time for brunch at Sweet Apple Acres."
Aunt Celestia nodded and gazed into the mirror above her dressing table, but Cadance could read volumes of emotion in the droop of her neck, the slight shiver of her ears. "Tomorrow at dawn," Auntie said quietly, "either the world will plunge into eternal night, or a thousand years of a different sort of darkness will come to an end."
She looked back over her shoulder, the primal fire of the sun itself guttering in her eyes. "But I'll not fight Luna this time, Cadance, whatever else happens. She may kill me before Twilight and the Bearers can reach the Elements and learn of their connection to them, so I...I'll ask that you return to the Realm Between tonight and stay there till this all resolves. That way, when the Element Bearers do return Luna to herself, Equestria will still have two princesses..."
Leaping across the room, Cadance tucked her head under Aunt Celestia's chin. "Don't say that, Auntie! We've got to trust the plan!" Flaring her horn, Cadance summoned her checklist, the nervous part of her wanting the reassurance of looking it over once more. "I put the Elements' stone spheres in the old castle myself, and the clues we've been sprinkling into Equestrian folklore and literature for the past six hundred years will send Twilight and the others straight there. That's also the first place Aunt Luna will go—"
"After she's had her way with me."
"No!" It came out harsher than Cadance had meant, and she winced. "I mean, there's plenty of actual variables to worry about in all this, Auntie. We can't start driving ourselves crazy with pure speculation."
"But it's not." Aunt Celestia's voice was as matter-of-fact as if she was discussing the weather. "From the instant my last connection to the Elements evaporates at the final second before dawn tomorrow, I will be completely in Luna's power." Her sigh seemed to rise up all the way from her fetlocks. "The best I can hope for is that the Nightmare Moon part of her will want to keep me alive so she can gloat."
"The best? No." Cadance refused to give in to the gloom filling the room. Taking a very deliberate step back, she spread her wings, let her list dissolve, and waved at the open balcony doors. "The best we can hope for just flew off in that chariot muttering that the fate of Equestria doesn't depend on her making friends."
As she knew it would, that got a smile from Aunt Celestia. "Ah, Twilight. She is magnificent, isn't she?" Cadance couldn't help arching an eyebrow, and Aunt Celestia wrinkled her muzzle at her. "You know what I mean, niece."
And for all that Cadance wanted to keep needling her aunt, she decided against it: she wasn't Chrysalis, after all. "Yes, I do," she said instead. "It's been a long, tangled journey, but the six ponies who've come out at the end of it are simply incredible."
Aunt Celestia raised an eyebrow of her own. "And let's not forget Twilight's brother, shall we?"
Heat burst across Cadance's face, and Aunt Celestia's chuckle told her once and for all that her aunt could tell when she was blushing. It was just...ever since she'd first laid eyes on Shining Armor spinning his laughing little sister inside a bubble of purple magic, the merest thought of him had become enough for Cadance to get as giggly and stumbly and starry-eyed as any of the ponies she'd watched fall in love over the centuries. And it was even more wonderful than she'd always dreamed it might be, whether they were having supper with his family or sitting in one of the palace parks to watch the lights of Canterlot glowing below. He made her feel special and loved and...and complete.
"Pleasant and handsome," her aunt was going on, a twinkle in her eyes. "The youngest captain in the history of the Equestrian guard, and let's not forget his distinguished lineage. Why, one could almost say he was born for you!"
"Please don't." Cadance tried to keep her ears up, but she'd heard enough snarky comments on this particular subject from Chrys the last year or so: You couldn't've found a better coltfriend if you'd set out to design one yourself! Oh, wait! That's exactly what you did, isn't it? "I've almost stopped wallowing in guilt over interfering with the love lives of all those thousands of ponies over the centuries." She forced a smile. "So any talk about how I also managed to build my dream stallion in the process might just send me over the edge."
"You're right, Cadance, and I apologize." Aunt Celestia moved up to give her a nuzzle. "It's just so amazing to find myself in a joking mood mere hours before Luna's return, a time and date I've dreaded for—"
A knock from the door, and Aunt Celestia's horn glowed, pulling it open. "Come in!" she called.
The most recent Seneschal, as sober and serious a young pegasus mare as Cadance had ever met, stepped in, her saddlebags full of papers. "Your Highness." Seneschal bowed to Aunt Celestia, then stepped past her and bowed to Cadance. "Princess Cadance, I have the forms here that you wanted to review."
Blinking at her, Cadance opened her mouth to say that she hadn't asked to review any forms, but the sudden green flash deep within Seneschal's eyes froze the words in her throat.
In the doorway, Aunt Celestia shook her head with a gentle chuckle. "Always so conscientious, niece. I could almost give you the same friend-finding assignment I just gave to Twilight Sparkle, couldn't I?"
Somehow, Cadance managed to point a grin at her. "Still," Aunt Celestia went on, "I've some business I need to take care of as well before the Summer Sun Celebration tomorrow, so I—" Her voice caught, and she cleared her throat. "I suppose I'll see you later, Cadance." Nodding, she turned and left the room.
Letting her grin crumble into a gaping stare, Cadance hissed, "Chrys! This—! You—! What in the wide, wide world of Equestria are you doing here??"
"Visiting." And for all that it was Seneschal's voice, the toothy smile and lazy drawl would've told Cadance it wasn't her even if the green flash hadn't. "After all, this is likely to be the last chance I'll ever have to see Canterlot under the full light of day, isn't it?"
Cadance managed to do a little more sputtering, but Chrysalis waved a pale blue hoof and laughed. "But never mind me, Cady. You and your aunt go right ahead and idiotically risk all Equestria on six ponies who don't have half a clue between them. It's no skin off my nose." She rubbed her snout. "Of course, it's not really my nose...."
"Are you insane??" Cadance finally got out. "What if Aunt Celestia runs into Seneschal downstairs?? Or—??"
"You worry too much." A flap of her wings, and Chrysalis shrugged off her saddlebags, papers spilling everywhere. "Take it easy. It's not like it's the end of the world or anything."
"That's right." Slowly, Cadance felt her brain starting to bubble and think again. "It's not . Or haven't you noticed all that stuff I've been doing the past five or six hundred years? The stuff that's going to save the world?"
"Yeah, yeah." Green fire crackled over the false Seneschal's body, darkening her blue hide to brown, her face narrowing and aging, changing her into some anonymous pegasus. "No offense, Cady, but I've gotta tell you: soon as the sun stops coming up, I'm popping in here to offer my services to your Aunt Nightmare. I mean, can you imagine how the Calls'll flood in once she starts tearing this place apart?" A laugh, and Chrysalis spread her wings, trotted out onto the balcony, and flew off into the mid-morning sunlight.
Staring after her, Cadance was a little alarmed to find that she couldn't tell if Chrysalis was joking or not.
***
The smile on Aunt Celestia's face was absolutely sublime, her eyes shimmering with joy; not even trying to clear the lump from her throat, Cadance smoothed reality back into place and settled them into the front room of her suite in Canterlot Tower, the one lamp still burning low on the table where she'd left it.
"Oh, Cadance," Aunt Celestia murmured, her voice as gentle as the drift of her mane. "Thank you! That was...was...was—"
A shuffling at the open doors of the balcony, and Aunt Luna peered in, the starlight nebula of her mane gleaming silvery-blue against the darkness outside. "Forgive my intrusion," she said, "but I sensed your return and wished to inform you of—"
"Oh, Luna!" Aunt Celestia positively flowed across the room to Aunt Luna and embraced her with her wings. "It was the most wonderful experience! The next time you and Cadance have a free morning, you must visit the Groves Beyond with her!"
Aunt Luna leaned into the hug, her eyes closed and a smile on her lips. "Thank you, sister." Aunt Luna stepped back, her smile fading. "I, however, still have fence-mending I must do here in the Mortal Realm before I dare venture into the Groves again." She glanced at Cadance. "You have maintained the mosaic of love quite splendidly, niece, and while I have made some progress toward reweaving myself into its fabric, I have not yet arrived at the point where I would feel comfortable leaning upon it for support."
Cadance had to nod. "It just takes time, Auntie."
"Indeed." Aunt Luna had always been the more serious of her two relatives, but in the aftermath of all that Nightmare Moon business, she'd seemed positively dour. Still, she'd begun loosening up somewhat since visiting Ponyville for her first Nightmare Night—and just the thought that Twilight had blossomed enough in her new home to offer friendship advice to other ponies made Cadance grin every time Aunt Celestia shared the letters the Element Bearers sent her. Cadance only regretted that she hadn't yet had a chance to meet most of the ponies who'd occupied so much of her time the past half millennium, but she knew that once she and Armie announced their engagement, Twilight and all her friends would—
"However," Aunt Luna went on, and the intensity in her voice snapped Cadance's attention back to the here and now. "While tending the dreams of our little ponies this night, I have been feeling most uneasy, and I would consult with you both."
All the relaxation drained from Aunt Celestia, and she seemed to grow even larger, her neck straightening and her mane expanding. "What have you sensed, sister?"
"It is frustratingly nebulous." Aunt Luna's mouth went sideways. "But that it is a threat to Canterlot, I have no doubt whatsoever."
Aunt Celestia nodded once. "See what else the night will tell you, Luna, then meet me atop the Tower in three-quarters of an hour. I shall in the meantime awaken Shining Armor and set the guard on full alert." She turned, and Cadance just managed to pull her mouth closed, the energy flowing from her two aunts like nothing she'd ever seen before. "Thank you again for an enjoyable evening, niece. Keep your ears open in the Realm Between, and let us know if you hear anything." Aunt Celestia stepped past Aunt Luna, her wings reflecting white-gold in the lamp light as she leaped from Cadance's balcony.
Aunt Luna watched her go, and the love radiating from her soothed Cadance's fluttering stomach. "I had prepared proofs of my observations," Aunt Luna said, turning her dark but dazzling smile to Cadance, "should my word no longer be sufficient. But now I see in truth that I have regained my sister's trust."
Cadance smiled back. "You never lost her trust, Aunt Luna. And you never lost mine, either."
The shiver that shook Aunt Luna's mane made the stars in it dance, and Aunt Luna reached out, touched her horn to Cadance's, then turned and vanished into the night outside the balcony door.
Puffing a breath, Cadance considered. Her aunts obviously had the situation well covered, but it wouldn't hurt to stick close just in case. She couldn't stop a grin at the thought of her poor Armie getting rousted out of bed with dawn still a couple hours away, and she began heading for the door, thinking she might take word to the kitchen staff that preparing several gallons of tea and coffee would be a good idea.
A throat cleared behind her. Turning, then, looking over her shoulder, she saw—
She saw herself looking back from the door into her office. "Well!" her double said, the voice just about perfect. "Fancy meeting you here!"
It took Cadance a couple blinks before she could get her mouth to work. "Chrysalis? Is something wrong?" A thought made her mane bristle. "Aunt Luna was just talking about a threat to Canterlot! Have you heard something?"
"Not as such." Chrysalis sashayed into the front room, Cadance staring to see her own body moving so...so slinkily. "Though I do find your aunt Luna—what was her phrase?" Chrysalis cocked her head. "'Frustratingly nebulous.' In a good way, though: I'll have to cultivate her, I think, when this all shakes out."
"Shakes out?" Cadance gave a couple more blinks. "Not quite sure what you're getting at, Chrys."
"Understandable." Chrysalis nodded. "I haven't told you yet, after all."
The fevered glint in those eyes, eyes that Cadance normally only saw in the mirror, convinced her that smiling would not be the correct response here. So she just nodded back. "Is this something I should sit down for?"
"Couldn't hurt." Clearing her throat, Chrysalis touched one front hoof to her pink chest. "For I have come to make good on the promise I made some decades ago. I hereby present to you my proposal for settling the dispute between us."
Cadance swallowed. "And what would that proposal be?"
"A contest, let's call it." Chrysalis moved her front hoof back and forth between herself and Cadance. "To see who's right about love and who's wrong."
Unable to stop her mouth from going sideways, Cadance gave Chrysalis is half-lidded look. "Is that what our dispute was about? 'Cause I thought it had something to do with the way you and your changelings were disguising yourselves as ponies to suck love out of their significant others."
Chrysalis shrugged. "Mere details. At its core, however, our dispute comes down to the following: you see love as some mystical, all-powerful, all-knowing force that pervades the universe, binds all ponies together, and makes us all live happily ever after, while I see love as a natural resource like flowers or sunlight, something that's useful, renewable, and quite tasty when you get right down to it."
Tapping a hoof, Cadance did her best to bury the chill that squiggled down her back beneath a mask of annoyance. "We coming to a point here anytime soon?" she asked.
"We are." Chrysalis took a breath. "The challenge will pit my definition of love against yours, and the winner—" Another of those slow smiles. "The winner will take all."
"Remember those 'mere details,' Chrys?" Cadance was starting to feel a little actual annoyance now. "I'll be needing a few of those right about now."
Her eyes narrowing, Chrysalis gave as insincere a bow as Cadance thought she'd ever seen. "Four simple words, Cady: I take your place."
The three o'clock in the morning silence filled the room, Cadance breathing it in and feeling it fill her as well. "Just hear me out." Chrysalis gestured to the office door, her golden shoes catching the lantern light. "And maybe do some of that sitting down you mentioned earlier?"
Her neck feeling rusty, Cadance nodded and somehow forced her hoofs to carry her into the next room to one of the lounging sofas she kept there. Chrysalis came in behind her, the green glow of her magic pushing the door closed. "The rules would be simple, too. You would go somewhere nearby and sit: from my research, I would recommend the mining caverns beneath Canterlot. Are you familiar with them?"
It struck a tiny bell in Cadance's memory, images from her first few centuries. "But they've been abandoned for— Well, since before Aunt Luna's exile, certainly."
"Exactly." Chrysalis spoke quietly, Cadance for a brief instant not sure that she wasn't hearing her own thoughts. "The caverns aren't a place anypony will just be wandering through by accident, so if you're there and somepony finds you, it'll be because they're looking for you. And if they're looking for you, it'll mean they discovered I wasn't you, and you'll have won." Her eyes gleamed like glass marbles. "Get it?"
Cadance could hardly form the words. "You...you want to impersonate me while I sit in a cave somewhere? And when Armie or Aunt Celestia or somepony realizes you're not me—"
"If they realize it."
"Well, of course they'll realize it!" Cadance found that she'd leaped to her hoofs, had flashed across the room, was standing nearly muzzle to muzzle with the very image of herself. "Chrys, this is insane! You can't possibly believe you'd get away with something like that!"
Only Chrysalis's lips moved, curling into a slight smile. "Then you have nothing to worry about, do you? You'll spend an hour or two examining the fascinating mineral formations below the city, then they'll come for you. What could possibly go wrong?"
Taking a couple steps back, Cadance tried to follow the logic, but— "It doesn't add up, Chrys. I mean, what do you hope to get out of all this?"
Her ears folded, her eyes narrowing. "Equestria's changed the last few years, Cady. To put it bluntly, your aunt Luna notices things you and your aunt Celestia never did, and she's more than willing to go poking around in dark and dusty corners investigating the things that she's noticed. So I want this ended between you and me, because—" Her ears rose, that little smile coming back. "Because if they don't discover it's me and don't come to rescue you..."
Her words trailed off, and for several heartbeats, Cadance could only stare at her. "You'd take over."
Slowly, Chrysalis nodded. "And you'd retire to the Realm Between, contemplate the true meaning of love, and take care of any Calls I and my changelings might need you to deal with."
The implications scattered through Cadance's thoughts. "Chrys, you don't have to do this. We can—"
"We can what ??" She slashed the air with a front hoof. "My hive is barely subsisting on the thin gruel of dead ponies' love when there's a vast and limitless banquet of living love out here we could be feasting upon!"
"No!" Cadance couldn't hold back any longer. "End-of-life love is a love beyond any other, love at its most refined, concentrated and exquisite! It should be much more nourishing for you changelings than any other sort of love! And besides, the only way you've been getting living ponies' love is through deceit and treachery!" She forced herself to stop, take a breath, moderate her voice. "Lying your way to love is never the answer, Chrys! Love is a gift, precious and—"
"Love is an electro-chemical particle wave!" Green fire crackled up and down her horn. "Your bodies create it and radiate it in a process as easy and automatic as metabolizing oxygen or digesting food! I mean, as near as I can tell, most ponies don't even know they're doing it! It's more like exhaling or sweating to them than anything else!"
"That's not true at all!"
"Then prove it!" Chrysalis stomped both front hoofs into the carpet and glared, Cadance's breath catching at the ferocious look on her own face. "Prove me wrong!" She smiled, but everything about her somehow got even more ferocious. "Or just admit that I'm right and get outta my way."
In the silence that followed, Cadance felt both frozen and melting at the same time. "I...I don't want you to get hurt, Chrys," she finally managed to say.
"Don't worry about me ." That smile faded. "Now, do we have a deal, or don't we?"
"Insane...," Cadance muttered again, but she nodded. "So where's this cave, then?"
"Who's a good boy??" Cadance ruffled her magic along Cerberus's chest, the massive three-headed dog rolling onto his back and lolling all his tongues out. "You're a good boy! Yes, you are! Yes, you are!"
The waves of love that flowed from the guardian of Tartarus were completely unlike any Cadance had ever come across, and strolling past his thumping tail into the underground prison's entrance tunnel, she almost made a mental note to ask Aunt Celestia where she'd found the creature.
But no. That would inevitably lead to questions about what Cadance had been doing in Tartarus. And those were questions Cadance wouldn't feel entirely comfortable answering...
The tunnel sloped downward, dark and roughly hewn. Her horn glowing, Cadance took careful steps, the magic-dampening properties of the place making her feel like she was wrapped in cotton and reminding her of Clover the Clever's grinning words when Cadance had visited the sorceress in the Groves Beyond a few weeks back: "Your aunts and I agreed that it wouldn't do much good if the monsters could just teleport out...."
Long minutes trudged by, the air getting warm and stale, the metallic click of her shoes the only sound. But eventually, the walls pulled away, and she found herself moving out into a vast cavern, the ceiling lost in darkness. She almost increased the power of her light just to make sure there weren't things crawling around up there, but she quickly decided that if there were , she really didn't want to know about it.
Taking a breath, then, she cast the location spell she'd put together using the treasure trove of information in the Crystal Empire's Royal Library. The pink glowing bubble of it puffed up at the end of her horn, then with the 'ping' of a tiny crystal bell, it broke free to bob in the darkness before her. Of course, magic worked so weirdly down here, Cadance could only hope that—
The bubble gave another 'ping' and began drifting to her left. Cadance almost gave a squeal of glee, but remembering where she was, she stifled it and hurried after the bubble.
It led her along the wall of the cavern for quite a while, and just when Cadance was thinking maybe something had gone wrong with the spell, one of the shadows among the rocks ahead stayed a shadow even when the edge of Cadance's light reached it: the opening of another tunnel, she realized. The little pink bubble pulled into a hover for a few seconds before it darted in, and Cadance, steeling herself, followed.
The tunnel roof was just high enough for her to enter without having to stoop, and she dimmed the light from her horn, still not sure how she wanted to do this. That she would be taking them by surprise was a given, but stomping in all ablaze with power and indignation—no matter how righteous that indignation would be—Cadance didn't think she had the stomach for that...
Several steps into the tunnel, the rocky surface changed into something softer, brownish-green, and lumpy. The slightest humming sound perked her ears, and she shuddered to remember her first time back in the Realm Between after the wedding: leaving a happily-snoozing Armie, Cadance had slipped from their honeymoon bed, the joy in her heart nearly overwhelmed by the worry and fear and anger that she'd managed to shove aside for a few wonderful hours with her beloved. Slicing the air, she'd pushed through only to be met by darkness and silence for the first time in more than a thousand years, not a single quivering buzz nor flash of green fire reaching her from the entire gigantic hive covering the hillside above her little house.
Not that she'd expected Chrysalis and the changelings to be there. And not that she'd had any sort of a plan in the unlikely event that she had found them there. But staring at the cold and lifeless hive, she'd felt fire burst into her gut. What Chrysalis had done, the sheer, unadulterated betrayal she'd committed, just the thought of it had made Cadance plant her front hoofs, fire up her horn, and very nearly blast the hive with as much heat as she could muster: it had always looked like it was made of wax, so how 'bout seeing if the whole thing would melt?
Instead, though, she'd just stood there panting till her rage had melted away. Turning then, halfway determined never to come here again, she'd returned to snuggle into Armie's strong embrace with the hope that she could forget the whole horrible millennium just past and get on with the much more pleasant life lying ahead of her.
But the Calls hadn't stopped, and she'd run herself ragged trying to take care of them while smiling and pretending that she'd been working this hard the whole thousand years. Then had come the Crystal Empire, and so worn out from the flood of Calls, Cadance had come within a hair's breadth of letting that parasite Sombra back into the world. In the end, she'd only succeeded with the help of Armie, Spike, Twilight and the other Element Bearers, and even basking in the glow of the Crystal Ponies acclaiming her their new Empress, she'd shivered, knowing what she would have to do.
Some late nights in the Empire's Royal Library had gotten her half the information she needed, a few carefully worded questions to her aunts and Clover the Clever had gotten her the rest, and now Cadance was following a pink bubble into a cavern about the size of Aunt Celestia's throne room back in Canterlot Tower. Sporadic green lightning twitched and writhed along the walls, and Cadance almost gasped to see the hundreds and hundreds of changelings slumped everywhere, their eyes barely glowing, their wings barely fluttering. And in the center, just raising her head from where it had been resting between her outstretched front legs, her ears folding back and her scent as sour to Cadance's nose as a puff of swamp gas—
She'd told herself that she was ready, and she'd put together five or six different plans for handling this situation. But seeing Chrysalis struggling to her hoofs there among her fallen legions, the dark, sticky air of Tartarus more like a liquid around them, Cadance couldn't remember a single one of those plans, couldn't push so much as a word past the solid lump of hatred that jammed itself into her throat.
"So." Chrysalis drew herself shakily to her full height. "I suppose you've come to gloat."
"Gloat?" Cadance coughed up a laugh, an explosive sort of sound like she'd been hit in the stomach. "Because that's what you'd be doing to me if your plan had worked, right? Oh, no, wait: you wouldn't be standing over me gloating!" The more she tried to control her voice, the more anger poured into it. "Because if your plan had worked, it'd be dead right now, wouldn't I??"
Wings bursting from her sides, Cadance shot across the darkness toward her, Chrysalis staring wide-eyed and stumbling back half a step. "That's why you kept goading Twilight every chance you got, isn't it??" she shouted into the face of the changeling queen. "You worked her into a frenzy against you, then sent her down into the cave where I was waiting! You figured she'd see me, think I was you, and attack me! Because you knew how sensitive she is, knew how powerful she is, and you wanted her to...to—!" Her throat squeezed shut again, and all she could do was glare.
Nothing for a long, long moment, then Chrysalis said, "Ah," her gaze dropping and her neck seeming to wilt. "So instead of coming to gloat, you...you've come to kill me."
And, oh, how Cadance wanted to. She knew just how to do it, too, had pondered various ways and knew it would be the simplest thing in the world. But— "Maybe I just wanna leave you here to waste away."
A ghostly chuckle rose from Chrysalis. "Oh, no. After what I did, you'd want to see to me personally ." Her head came up, something crazy and desperate in her eyes. "Besides, with me here, you haven't any choice but to handle things yourself, do you? Or are you training that pretty little husband of yours to perform your sacred duties for you now?"
The needling jab made Cadance's wings bristle; she flared power from her horn, let it wrap like a silken scarf around the changeling's neck. "Tell me you want it, Chrys," she forced out between clenched teeth. "A quick, clean snap instead of a long, slow extinction."
Eyes rolling closed, Chrysalis swallowed so hard, Cadance could feel it through the touch of her magic. "I deserve both," Chrysalis whispered.
Just about every part of Cadance screamed in agreement. But at the same time, a small, quiet place deep inside her couldn't deny how much she'd missed the cut of Chrysalis's wit, the give-and-take of their conversations, the feel of sparring with a good-natured opponent who pulled no punches and expected no punches pulled in return. And after what had nearly happened with Sombra—
Sighing, Cadance let her power evaporate. "One problem, Chrys. You didn't actually lose the bet."
Posed like a statue, Chrysalis didn't move for a whole bucketful of heartbeats. Finally, though, her eyes squinted open, puzzlement filling her face. "I what now?"
Cadance didn't want to say it, didn't want to think about it, but looking at Chrysalis partially cringing in front of her, she knew she couldn't lie about this anymore, not to Chrysalis and not to herself. "Our contest," she said, stepping back and settling onto the wax-covered rock. "You do remember the last conversation we had, don't you?"
Chrysalis blinked. "If I recall correctly, I managed to trick you into sitting quietly in a hole in the ground while I stole your life."
"Ah." Cadance raised a hoof. "So it would surprise you, then, to learn that it wasn't a trick?"
"Uhh, pretty sure it was, Cady..."
Cadance shook her head. "You set up a perfectly legitimate choice between my view of love and yours. Turns out, though—" She had to swallow. "Turns out we were both wrong."
Even the pale, quiet buzzing that had filled the cavern earlier had stopped, all those hundreds of flickering green eyes fixed on her and Chrysalis. "OK," Chrysalis said. "Maybe it's just that I've been locked away with nothing to eat but grubs and stalactite droppings the past however long it's been, but I'm not quite catching what you're pitching here."
Taking a breath, blowing it out, taking another, Cadance began: "Because I didn't just think love would save me; I knew it would. Love was all-powerful, all-knowing, all I or anypony else would ever need, and when I settled into that cave under Canterlot Tower, I figured Armie's love for me would see right through you no matter what sort of spell you tried casting on him." She couldn't keep from closing her eyes. "Of course, that was before I sat there in the dark all alone for twenty-four hours. Another twenty-four hours, and I started thinking it would be Aunt Celestia's love for me that would be too strong for you to corrupt, or maybe Aunt Luna's. And twenty-four hours after that ..."
She forced herself to focus back on Chrysalis. "It happened just like you said it would, Chrys. Love didn't come to save me. I lost the bet just as much as you did."
"Ummm..." Dumbfounded was the only word Cadance could think of for the look on Chrysalis's face. "Might be you didn't notice, Cady, but Twilight Sparkle loved you so much, she wouldn't hurt you even after I'd made her see you as nothing but a heartless monster."
More breathing, and Cadance shook her head again. "I kept trying to tell myself that. But it wasn't love that saved me down there. It was friendship."
The silence in the cavern became even more silent. "There's a difference?" Chrysalis asked.
Cadance gave a little shrug. "It surprised me, too. I mean, if I thought at all about how love related to friendship, it was that friendship was the seed from which the tree of love grew, that friendship was little and cute while love was huge and powerful. But now..." She stopped, tried to distill the thoughts she'd been having ever since the wedding. "Love is a drop of rain, and friendship is an ocean. Love is plain and simple while friendship is the most complicated and beautiful thing in the world."
"I..." Chrysalis had never looked so lost and confused. "I don't understand."
"Exactly." Cadance stood, took a step toward Chrysalis. "Love, you can understand; I mean, you eat the stuff! It's as common as air and just as straightforward—didn't you say something like that once? Love's like the gag reflex, or like the dawn and the dusk: it happens whether anypony wants it to or not. But friendship, friendship is a choice , and that's the most powerful magic there is." And knowing she was making a mistake, knowing it would snap back and smack her in the face when she least expected it, but knowing just as strongly that she had to do this, absolutely had to, Cadance reached out a front hoof. "So whaddaya say, Chrys? Can we try this again?"
If Cadance had thought the cavern was silent before, it was only because she hadn't yet heard the silence that filled the place now, Chrysalis looking like a figure carved from pure obsidian, the other changelings just darker patches in the darkness around her. "What?" Chrysalis asked after a moment.
"I need you, Chrys. And not just to help me with the Calls like you used to—though I need that more than ever, too." All the contradictions that had been slamming back and forth in Cadance's head for more than half a year came swirling out of her. "It's just...I'm the Empress of the Crystal Ponies now as well as the guardian of the Groves Beyond and the wife of the most wonderful stallion in the world, and I...I need you there with me, a pony—or not a pony, but... You! Since you know me and I can trust you to—"
"Trust me??" Chrysalis exploded from the floor, her wings and legs flailing. "Are you insane ??" She jabbed a shaking front hoof into Cadance's face. "I tried to kill you and take your place! You can't trust me after that! You can't !"
"I know." It took some effort, but Cadance remained in place. "And to be honest, I did figure out a way I could manage my duties with the Crystal Ponies doing what you and your changelings used to. But—" She had to blink to clear her vision. "But I don't want to manage it without you."
Chrysalis's head was shaking so quickly, Cadance thought it was more a nervous twitch than her actually disagreeing. At least, Cadance hoped that's what it was. "I used to wonder," she went on, pushing out her final point, "why I never felt love from you even when you were looking at your hatchlings. I realize now, though, that love is much too narrow a word. But I've thought of you as my friend for centuries, Chrysalis, and I...I'd like to give our friendship another try."
For an instant, nothing. Then— An emotion flickered up from Chrysalis, an emotion that barely licked at the edges of Cadance's perceptions, an emotion she doubted she would have noticed even five years ago: not love, of course, but now that she'd begun training herself using Twilight's notes, Cadance could sense an unmistakable quiver of friendship filling the cave's dark air like a mist rising from all the changelings, the thickest concentration of it surrounding the queen herself.
"You're insane." Chrysalis whispered it this time. "But you...you really mean it, don't you?"
Cadance wiggled her still-extended hoof. "Don't leave me hanging here."
The laugh that bubbled from Chrysalis's snout was as joyous a sound as Cadance had heard in months, and when she clicked a front hoof against Cadance's, the whole cavern erupted with cheers, the changelings leaping up and down. "Of course," Chrysalis said, moving close and murmuring it into Cadance's ear, "all this warm fuzziness doesn't actually change anything. Unless you've come around to the right way of thinking completely and won't oppose us cultivating the love of living ponies any longer."
"Ah." Cadance gestured back toward the tunnel. "Come with me, and I'll gladly show you just how wrong you are."
Arching an eye ridge, Chrysalis cocked her head. "Might I remind you, Cady, that the last time you tried to prove me wrong, we both ended up sitting around in caves for varying lengths of time?"
"Trust me," Cadance said, and she gave Chrysalis as toothy a grin as she could manage.
For an instant, Chrysalis's mouth and ears a little tight, Cadance thought she might refuse. But— "And the troops?" she asked, gesturing with her head to the changelings still hopping and flipping around the cave.
Nodding, Cadance raised her voice. "We all go out together."
A smile curled big and slow across Chrysalis's muzzle. "Then by all means, my princess." She bowed. "After you."
With a laugh of her own, Cadance started for the tunnel, Chrysalis falling in beside her, and for the whole long walk back to the entrance, Cadance brought her friend up-to-date with her own adventures in the Crystal Empire and the Groves Beyond as well as everything that Twilight Sparkle and the Elements of Harmony had done to make Equestria a better place. Chrysalis made a few noises here and there, all of them nearly lost in the soft shuffle of hundreds of wings behind them, until they reached the hole in the wall that Cadance knew led to the exit. "So," Chrysalis said then, interrupting Cadance's story about all the excitement surrounding Armie's official coronation as prince, "what're we gonna do about Cerberus?"
"Good question," Cadance said with a grin.
Chrysalis didn't grin back. "Not in the mood, Cady."
"All right, it's simple." With a flap of her wings, Cadance reached the entrance to the tunnel. "I'll go first, then you. We'll stand on either side of the cave mouth, and the changelings will walk between us one by one, pass Cerberus, and fly up to the north ridge of the canyon." She looked over her shoulder. "Any more questions?"
Behind her, Chrysalis looked back with her eyes half closed, an absolute sea of changelings filling the cavern, their eyes wide and glowing green. "Just one," Chrysalis said. "Have you really gone insane?"
"Trust me." If it had just been Chrysalis, Cadance would've left it at that. But worry wafted so thickly from the other changelings, Cadance went on: "My sources tell me that since I'm the Crystal Empress and you're all with me, Cerberus will let you by. And if not, well..." She added a little luster to the light from her horn and nodded to Chrysalis, the glow of her own horn a little greener but just as strong. "Between the two of us, I'm sure we can come up with something."
A tiny smile tugged Chrysalis's snout. "I'd say being an empress agrees with you." She waved to the tunnel. "But let's go find out, shall we?"
Head erect, horn glowing, steps firm and sure, Cadance did her best to project confidence during the long climb up. She had every reason to believe this would work: Clover had been one of the architects of Tartarus, after all, so if she didn't know the ins and outs of it...
A point of light appeared in the darkness ahead, got larger and brighter and closer till Cadance came out into the late afternoon sunlight, Cerberus swinging his one awake head over to her from where he lay. She gave him her gentlest and most serene smile and moved to one side as Chrysalis scooted out, her eyes squinting and her ears down.
All Cerberus's noses twitched, his other two heads popping their eyes open, but Chrysalis took her place on the other side of the tunnel entrance so calmly, Cadance could barely smell her fear.
One changeling crept forth, and Cerberus sat up, one of his heads peeling its lips back in a silent growl. The changeling froze, only his eyes moving, bugging out and glancing back. Cadance signaled with her head that he should keep going, saw Chrysalis doing the same, and the changeling took another tentative step. Another, then another, Cerberus watching with obvious distaste, but the monster dog didn't lunge, didn't bark, didn't snap any of those formidable jaws. The changeling's ears shot up, his wings buzzed, and he took off north for the ridge of the canyon.
Very carefully not heaving a sigh of relief, Cadance looked across at Chrysalis. Something that could have been a grin twitched the other's snout, then she was gesturing to the cave mouth, a second changeling inching into the light.
One by one by one, they slid from the hole and flew north, and even though the pace increased a bit, afternoon still drifted on into evening while Cadance stood, her shoulders never quite relaxing. Finally, though, the changeling coming out said quietly, "There are no more behind me, my princess and my queen." He bowed to her, then to Chrysalis, then jumped into the darkening sky.
Cerberus had remained alert the whole time, his six eyes focused quite intently on the parade. His ears at half-mast, he cocked all three heads at Cadance as if asking her a question, and for half an instant, Cadance considered sending her magic out to rub his belly. But no. This was a more solemn moment than that. So she bowed to him instead.
One of his heads looked a little gruff, but the others nodded in return, and spreading her wings, Cadance turned to Chrysalis. "Shall we?"
The changeling queen was already hovering in place. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble," she said.
Her heart feeling lighter than it had in months, Cadance leaped upward, Chrysalis swooping right beside her, the dark mouth of Tartarus and its guardian quickly lost in the jagged shadows the setting sun threw all around the walls of the red rock canyon. To the north, though, hundreds of black dots stood out all along the top of the bluff, and as they got closer, Cadance saw they were changelings all settled among the crags, their smiling faces turned north, their eyes slitted shut and their buzz more of a hum. And there, at the far northern horizon as night came on, the Aurora flickered ever more strongly.
"What—?" Chrysalis's wings faltered before picking up even faster than before, and Cadance wanted to cheer at the expression on her friend's face, the Northern Lights reflecting in her eyes. "Cady? What am I feeling here?"
"The Heart of the Crystal Empire," Cadance said quietly, the concentrated power of the Heart stroking through her own pinions even from this distance. "See, Chrys? Things have changed."
"It's...it's..." Chrysalis shook her head, gulping the air like a pony at a pond after a long desert crossing. "I don't know what it is!"
"Really?" Cadance folded her front legs and gave a phony look of annoyance. "Maybe you're heard of a little thing called love?"
"Love?" Chrysalis shook her head again. "I've known love my whole life, Cady. This stuff here—" Her frantic panting was slowing, and she looked more like herself than she had in decades, Cadance thought. "We're gonna need another word for what this stuff is." She snapped a wide-eyed look over at Cadance. "Wait! That's the Crystal Empire?? That's the place you're in charge of now??"
Cadance nodded. "And your new home." She shrugged. "I mean, we'll still use the Realm Between as our HQ, but from now on, anytime you folks need a dose of love, you can just take a walk through the Empire's Central Plaza." Folding her front legs again, she put as stern a look on her face as she could manage. "Which means no more craziness on the Calls, got it? No fraying the mosaic and putting the webwork of love in jeopardy, right?"
Chrysalis blew a breath though her lips. "Who needs that when we can get—" She tipped back her head and spread her front legs. "This?"
Relief cascading over Cadance, she couldn't help herself; she swooped over and wrapped a hug around Chrysalis. And for the first time ever, Chrysalis hugged Cadance back, Cadance's throat closing and her eyes misting up. "You done good, Cady," she heard Chrysalis say, then more quietly: "Thank you."
Squealing, Cadance spun away into a half dozen pirouettes before doing a back flip in the gathering twilight and coming to hover once more in front of Chrysalis. "Y'know? I'd call this the beginning of a beautiful friendship!"
"Yeah, well..." Chrysalis gave her that oh-so-familiar sideways smile. "We'll see."
Moonlight stroked silvery light over every leaf in the orchard, the summer evening breeze perfect and gentle and rustling. Cadance held her breath, her magic already wrapping her in shadows and silence, and kept her attention focused on the two pegasi settled among the roots of the big cypress tree several yards away.
"Please, Azure," the stallion was saying, a tremble in his voice—Nimbus was his name, Cadance was fairly sure. "Will you...will you marry me?"
The suspense made Cadance clench her teeth, but when Azure Skies gave a delicate little sigh instead of a joyous squeak and turned her head away instead of throwing her hoofs around Nimbus's neck, a chill ruffled Cadance's feathers. "Oh, Jetty," Azure said, and Cadance had to wince. This was Jet Stream, of course, not Nimbus; she really needed to keep better records!
But even worse than that— "You know I like you," Azure went on. "Just not that way."
It took a fair amount of self-control for Cadance not to let fly with the power of her horn, grab the weft of the love weaving through the air around the two, and give it a yank in the proper direction. How could Azure do this! Didn't she realize that Jet Stream was perfect for her??
Unless Cadance was still thinking of Nimbus...
Azure's voice had gotten all quiet and sad and understanding, but that just made Cadance want to trot over and give her an injudicious kick: "You're a great guy, Jetty, and any girl'd be happy to have you propose to her."
That got a snort from Jet Stream. "Any girl but you ."
"Jetty..." She reached out a hoof to touch his front leg. "I'm sorry. Really. But we can still be friends, can't we?"
Jet Stream blew out a breath and nodded, and Cadance vented her frustration on the air, tearing an invisible hole in it and shoving through into the Realm Between, Aunt Luna's silhouette looking down at her the same way it did every night everywhere. It was only during this past century that she'd become really conscious of it, though, and with the sting of her latest failure still needling her, she could almost see the smug little smirk on the Mare in the Moon's face. "Just you wait," she told it. "I'll figure this out yet. I will !"
Giving her hoof a useless but satisfying stomp, she flared her magic against the front door of her house and stepped inside, only then thinking to wonder why the lights were on in the front room. She had left in something of a hurry earlier, not wanting to miss the culmination of her efforts these past eighty or so years when Azure accepted Nimbus's proposal—except, she reminded herself, that stallion had been Jet Stream, not Nimbus. So maybe...maybe it really was Nimbus she'd wanted to pair with Azure Skies. Which might mean this whole thing was still salvageable...
Lost in her thoughts again, she forgot all about the lights being on till she rounded the corner into the front room and saw Chrysalis stretched out on the sofa, one of Cadance's big illustrated history books propped open in front of her, a half-eaten apple floating in the green glow of her horn. Which was something else she'd been noticing lately: all her changelings—especially the last few to hold the post of Chrysalis—actually had holes in their horns and legs now. The pockmarks that had been there since the beginning had deepened with each generation till Cadance found she could see clear through to the other side in some of them. It didn't seem to bother them at all, so Cadance had never asked if—
Chrysalis's ears twitched, and she looked over, her eyes going wide. "Cady!" She leaped to her hoofs, the apple vanishing in a puff of smoke. "I...I was waiting for you to come back, but when you didn't, I just—!"
"Don't worry about it, Chrys." Cadance waved a hoof and settled onto her own big easy chair. "Everything I have is yours: you know that."
"You mean it?" This Chrysalis had pointier teeth than the previous ones, too, her smile big and crooked around them. "So we're domestic partners now? But this is so sudden! I don't know what to say! Except that you've made me the happiest changeling in the margins between the living world and the dead!"
Cadance wanted to join Chrysalis's buzzing laughter, but she couldn't keep from scowling and waving her hoof again. "There! That's the sort of answer I was looking for from Azure Skies! Not a droopy little 'Let's be friends'!"
"Azure Skies?" Chrysalis did some blinking. "There something I should know about, Cady? Or more to the point, some pony I should know about?"
For half a second, Cadance hesitated. After all, she hadn't even told Aunt Celestia the details of her plan yet. But the way the thing had been crumbling to pieces around her so far... She gestured to the book Chrysalis was reading. "A lot of those newer histories are starting to treat her like she's a myth or something, but maybe you came across a mention or two of Nightmare Moon in there?"
Still looking confused, Chrysalis nodded.
"Well," Cadance said with a sigh, "Nightmare Moon is really my Aunt Luna." And she told Chrysalis all about Aunt Luna trying to take over the world four hundred years ago, all about Aunt Celestia having to banish her to the moon, and all about the way her aunts' actions had upset the relationship the three alicorns had once had with the Elements of Harmony.
This, of course, meant that she had to explain about the Elements of Harmony, too, and that got her into Discord and how she and her aunts had first been summoned to Equestria. So it was some time later, night fully fallen outside, when she finally got back to her starting point: "Aunt Celestia thinks—and I find myself agreeing with her—that the power she used to bind Aunt Luna is weakening." She shrugged. "Another six hundred years or so, she'll work her way free, return to establish eternal night, and neither Aunt Celestia nor I will be able to use the Elements to stop her."
The only sound for a moment was the continual soft hum of the hive next door. "Wow," Chrysalis said, stretched out on the sofa once more. "So you can't feel the Elements of Harmony at all anymore?"
Curled in her chair, her chin propped on the armrest, Cadance managed to shrug. "Not really, and even Aunt Celestia's had a hard time sparking them up the last couple times we looked at them. It's like—" She thought back to her most recent visit with Aunt Celestia to Canterlot Tower's vault room. "Like there's a stone cocoon forming around each one." She shook her head. "By the time Aunt Luna comes back, they'll likely look like nothing but big round rocks..."
The silence this time went on longer than before. "OK," Chrysalis said, "but what does this have to do with somepony named Azure Skies just wanting to be friends with you?"
"Not with me ." Cadance let her eyes pull shut. "With Nimbus. Or Jet Stream. Or whoever..."
She heard a rustling sigh from across the room. "Imagine that this is me asking my question a third time."
"It's simple, Chrys!" Leaping to her hoofs, Cadance started pacing along the carpet. "The Elements aren't designed to by wielded by a single pony, y'see? I mean, how can you have harmony when all you've got is one note? So when Aunt Celestia had to use all six of the Elements without anypony else to help her, that stretched our connection to them all out of tune! And turning them against one of the previous bearers snapped that connection completely!"
Spinning, she faced Chrysalis. "But I'm betting that the Elements themselves are fine! It's just—" She swallowed, made herself say out loud what she'd been mulling over for a hundred years. "It's just that my aunts and I have changed too much for them to respond to us the way they once did."
Chrysalis was leaning forward, her eyes wide. "And you think...you think me and my changelings can work them?"
Cadance blinked at her. "Uhhh, no, actually. I'm pretty sure they'd just sit there if you tried. The Elements get their power from the same place me and my aunts do: the hearts and minds of all ponies everywhere. And while you guys are great, you...you're not ponies ..."
A little snort, and Chrysalis sat back. "Fine. So what ponies did you have in mind to take over the Elements?"
"The perfect ponies." Never having talked about her plan before, Cadance found suddenly that she wasn't sure how to describe it. "Six ponies, one for each Element like it's supposed to be, and each one embodying the traits of their particular Element. And I mean literally embodying them, those traits embedded in them from birth in ways they never were even in my aunts and me. When those six ponies take over the Elements, the power of Harmony they'll generate will be greater than anything Equestria has ever known. They'll be able to cleanse the hatred and jealousy from Aunt Luna and bring her back to herself and to us." Taking a breath, she shrugged. "It's just that those six ponies won't exist for another twenty or twenty-five generations."
The changeling's shiny blue-green eyes went wide again. "You're using your love magic," Chrysalis whispered. "It's like when we were still just magic bees. You're breeding Element bearers."
"No!" Cadance stomped a hoof in the carpet. "I wouldn't do that! Not the way you mean it, at least!"
"Oh?" She gave that toothy grin of hers again and folded her front hoofs demurely. "And how exactly do I mean it?"
"You mean it all—" Still struggling for words, Cadance fanned her wings with a shiver. "All manipulative and weird! But ponies aren't animals, and I'd never do that to them!"
Chrysalis had gone completely still on the sofa, even her wings no longer buzzing. "So you only do your breeding tricks on animals. Is that what you're saying?"
"Chrys..." Cadance slumped in her chair and pressed a hoof to her forehead. "You changelings haven't been animals since you learned to talk and think and feel, and I haven't done anything to influence your development since before your first leader told me her name was Chrysalis." She waved at the changeling. "I mean, those holes you've been developing on your legs and horn. I'm not sure what that's all about, but I don't have to know 'cause you're your own people now. It's nothing to do with me anymore."
Cocking her head, Chrysalis ran a hoof over her front leg. "I've been selecting for them as far as mates go, actually. I've found the holes quite handy for manipulating the strands of love when we're out on a Call." She gestured, her legs whistling slightly. "You should try it sometime yourself."
"No, I shouldn't . That's my point." Cadance rolled her eyes. "I can't go around forcing ponies—or changelings, either—to fall in love!"
"You can't?" Chrysalis's brow wrinkled. "'Cause I pretty much thought that was exactly what you did."
Cadance sighed. "Let me rephrase. It's not right for me to make ponies fall in love with whoever I think they should fall in love with. No matter how much good I think it'll do, it's an improper use of the power I was given by all ponies everywhere when they summoned me into existence."
"Huh." The look on Chrysalis's face told Cadance that she wasn't convinced. "So, even though you're Equestria's foremost expert on how love flows and works and binds us all together, it's not right for you to use that expertise? You're not supposed to make life better for each individual pony in the world by matching them to their most suitable mate? Is that what you're saying?"
A tickle of doubt tried to start up in the back of Cadance's mind, but she shook her head and pushed it down again. "What I'm talking about here is a part of love that you don't see, dealing with death so often. It's the wild, flowering part when ponies are young and carefree, when life is a flood sweeping them along, laughing and dancing the whole time." She sighed again. "The most I can do at that point—the most I ever should do, I mean—is to set things up so that a couple ponies I think'll be good together will meet. If sparks go off, I feel free to encourage them, but if they just nod and pass each other by, then that's it: I abandon that branch of possibilities and move on to another."
Chrysalis was staring open-mouthed at her. "That's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"
Ears burning, Cadance scowled. "Chrys—"
"I mean, they're your little ponies, aren't they?? You're their princess! How can you let them just stumble into a decision that might very well end up being vital to the chain that keeps your Aunt Luna from throwing the whole world into eternal night??"
"Because I don't really know, all right??" The words came bursting out, some dam inside her giving way and letting her deepest fears pour over her tongue. "Sure, maybe I can mold love like warm wax and make it do whatever I want, but I've never been in love, have I?? So who am I to tell ponies who they should love and marry and have foals with?? If I can help two ponies find each other, that's great! But I'm not about to put my judgment higher than anypony else's when they know what they're doing and I don't!"
"Ah." Chrysalis's whole demeanor changed, her face clearing like a morning fog before the sun. "If this has something to do with that whole marriage thing, then yes, I can see why it's causing you such confusion." She shook her head. "Your Aunt Celestia's wedding was the oddest thing I've ever seen. I mean, the love generated by all the ponies involved in the ceremony was intense, but—"
"Wait." Chills shook every pinion in Cadance's wings. "Aunt Celestia's wedding was more than two hundred years ago. You weren't there."
"Ah." Chrysalis's whole demeanor changed again, fear coming all sour into her scent. "I, uhhh, read about it? In...in one of your books?"
Something else Chrysalis had said earlier popped like a click beetle through Cadance's memory. "And weren't you talking about selecting your mates so you and the other changelings would develop those holes in your legs? That's a multi-generational project. So how can you be...be...?" Unsure how to finish the question, Cadance just let it trickle away.
Chrysalis had gone completely still again. "OK, now, Cady, just—" He thin black tongue darted out to touch her lips in a couple different places. "Promise me you won't freak out."
"You're not immortal." Cadance focused on that fact. "I knew your predecessor, saw her lay your egg, saw you hatch from it. I...I watched you grow up, gave you presents every year on your hatch day, and when the previous Chrysalis got so sick, I was there when you took over running the hive!"
"You're freaking out."
"I am not freaking out!" Though she had to admit she was just a little: Cadance breathed in, breathed out, breathed in, breathed out. "The previous Chrysalis must've...must've told you everything that had happened to her and all the others the same way her predecessor had told her and so on and so on back...back four hundred years to...to..." Which didn't make sense: how would an elderly, sick, and/or dying changeling be able to tell so much history in anything like enough detail? And looking at Chrysalis, Cadance recognized something in those eyes, something that wasn't just twenty-five or thirty years old, something that was... "What do you do?" Cadance asked, her voice so quiet, she wasn't sure she'd spoken out loud.
"It's not just me." Fear still dominated Chrysalis's scent, but for all that her ears lay flat and tight against her head, she was keeping her gaze steadily on Cadance's. "Every changeling picks a successor from the next generation. And when we reach the end of our days, we go to our successors, and they...they take us, kill us, and devour our eyes and brains. We then become our successor, and our successor becomes us." She spread her front legs. "It's our way."
"You..." Cadance wasn't sitting anymore though she didn't remember leaping to her hoofs. "You killed Chrysalis and ate her brain?"
"I am Chrysalis. Just as the Chrysalis before me was Chrysalis and the Chrysalis before her and the Chrysalis before her all the way back to that very first day when I stood beside you with my eleven lieutenants, gave you my name, and heard you call us changelings for the first time." Chrysalis—or whoever she was—slid from the sofa, slowly rose onto all fours, and looking across the room at her, Cadance realized for the first time that she and the changeling leader were the same height. "We are what you made us to be, princess: always and forever, your assistants."
Choking off a cry, Cadance turned and bolted from the room.
