So here I am, flying into the Badlands, using my nifty new dictation tooth to write this remotely. Why am I up in the sky, flying, where ponies can theoretically see me, instead of just cleanly teleporting, you ask? A good question! The answer is, I have no idea where I'm going!

No, seriously. I'm looking for Chrysalis' hive. It's around here someplace, but the thing about Changelings, see, is that they're good at blending in. The Badlands are full of caves, and very, very treacherous to travel in if you don't have wings � the mountains you can see, the ones that stick up above the ground, are only the tips. See, what's actually there is a mountain range that was lowered a quarter of a trot below sea level.

A quarter of a trot may not sound like so much to you � since a trot, as in the distance measurement, was originally defined as the distance the average earth pony could cover in five minutes while trotting, you can probably go a quarter of a trot in less than 2 minutes, on land, even if you're a unicorn or a pegasus. But to put this in perspective... Canterlot is only a trot and a half above sea level. Distances for up and down, even for flying creatures, are very very different than distances on land. Pegasi can't usually fly higher than a gallop, which is approximately 3 trots (yes, I'm aware that Rainbow Dash and other stunt flyers can sometimes get up as high as 2 gallops for brief periods of time; even if I hadn't known, my dear roommate would never let me forget it); dragons can go up to an elevation of 15 gallops; an alicorn can get up to a whopping 300 gallops, which is approaching the edge of our world's thaumosphere (and atmosphere... you need to be an alicorn to get that high because you need to drag your own air bubble with you.) I, of course, can go anywhere I want to. I once hit a bunch of invaders from another reality with the sun. Celestia was so mad at me that day. It was hilarious.

But I'm digressing. A quarter trot below sea level is deep. I'm not going to talk about why the Badlands are so far sunken below sea level, except to say that it's something I don't like to talk about, which is why I'm not going to. The point is, the Badlands are a desert, filled with sand, and most of that sand is tightly compacted enough to take the weight of a pony... most of the time. It's called the Badlands for a reason, though. At any point, a pony might step on a region of more loosely compacted sand, and sink... and keep in mind, ground level for the Badlands range is a quarter trot down. That's a lot of sand. Admittedly, there are so many mountains in the area, almost none of the Badlands is actually as low as a quarter trot... but most of it is deep enough that if the sandstorms have loosened up the sand enough that a pony can sink... unless they're a unicorn with self-levitation spells, that pony is going to die.

So I highly recommend not traveling in the Badlands unless you're a pegasus, and maybe not even then, because seriously. Sand sand sand rocks rocks mountain sand. Could this area be more boring? There's a much more exciting region directly to the southeast of the Badlands, which is actually labeled on some maps as "the Battle of Discord", complete with attractively colorful checkerboards and floating rock islands, but the sad fact is, you probably couldn't visit. It's actually a region where raw chaos spills out of the underverse our universe floats in and the laws of physics break down completely, and Celestia and Luna have it walled off. I just checked. I could break that wall, if I really felt like it, but with the dimensional gates closed I'd really rather not. As fun as it would be for me to bask in the chaos energy and enjoy the sweet feeling of reality itself being warped into tapioca pudding, I'd be concerned that the magic penned up in there might be under a tad more pressure than usual, since it can't get back out of our dimension, and, well, you don't go venting a steam boiler willy-nilly if the steam has the power to melt reality, which it does.

The point is. There are no ponies out here. It's incredibly dangerous for anypony but a pegasus, and with desert conditions (so no weather to manage), nothing fun to explore, and alternate air routes to get anyplace a pegasus might actually want to go, there's no reason for them to be out this way either.

But, as you might have noticed before Anon basically squashed them all � all Changelings can fly.

The mountain range here is riddled with caves and tunnels. Many were dug by Diamond Dogs, because this mountain range is a rich source of iron, copper, and other minerals that Diamond Dogs can sell for gems. Or it was, once, before the Dogs mined it out and sold everything. Many were dug by draconequui, back before I was born � the land wasn't treacherous then, and we used to like to tunnel a lot, apparently. When I found these caves, not long after I began my glorious reign of chaos, I found them filled with the bones of my people, who huddled underground to escape the Second Fimbulwinter, and either froze, starved, or died of thirst. I laid them all to rest in convenient volcanoes in the San Palomino Desert, which has somehow managed to become a legend about Nightmare Moon's dragon skeleton army, which is totally unfair. Firstly, they weren't dragons, and I'm a little tired of my race being forgotten just because I'm the only one left. Secondly, this happened centuries before Luna's little hissy, and thirdly, they were my people and if they belonged to anyone they belonged to me, and fourthly, they weren't an army! It was just easier to animate the skeletons and make them walk and fly to their final resting places than it would have been to levitate the bones. Also, the reactions I got from ponies were vastly more entertaining this way.

Now, though, thar be Changelings in them thar hills. Hive Chrysalis isn't the only one in Equestria � she's had half a dozen daughter hives spawned, and most of them stayed in this country � but hers is, or was, the biggest. Changelings do need water, for which they generally have brainwashed, adoring pegasus slaves drag a few clouds into the desert, and that's what I'm looking for � not actual clouds, but evidence of water. All the actual bodies of water in the Badlands are so heavily salinated they're almost a more secure footing for a pony than the "land", or rather sand, is. The few living creatures who aren't Changelings who've adapted to live in this environment poop salt crystals. Really, I'm not making this up. There's an entire ecosystem of magical plant creatures that photosynthesize, run around finding overly salinated water, drinking it to fuel their photosynthesis, and then excreting the salt. (Sometimes pegasi do come down this way looking to gather salt crystals and smuggle them into Equestria, because this is the pure stuff, if you know what I mean.) Changelings, however, can't do that. They can survive on a lot less water than ponies can if their supply of love is good, but they do need some fresh water.

This is so boring. This is why I'm talking to myself, rambling on about salt poop and elevations like anypony but Twilight Sparkle could possibly care, attempting to win trivia contests with myself. I'm looking for water. In a desert. To be precise, in the mountains, hills and big protruding rocks, because when water actually falls on the sand here, it is soaked in completely. Most deserts experience occasional flash floods, where so much water falls at once that the packed sand saturates and the entire desert turns into a very shallow lake for a few hours, or a very deep puddle, depending on how you look at it. That never happens here because the water just goes straight down through the sand. Water can only collect on the solid ground, which means the parts of the mountain range that came up high enough that they stick out of the sand. So at least I don't have to look at endless quantities of sand, because I'd rather spork my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon a dragon has been chewing on, but oh dear chaos this is SO BORING.

Now you may be saying to yourself, "But Discord! You have such fantastic magic powers, why don't you scry for the Changelings or something?" Remember that iron I mentioned? Diamond Dogs got most of what could be easily mined, but there's still veins of it running throughout the rock. Iron disrupts harmonic magic almost completely, which is one of the reasons the Changelings hide out here. It doesn't block chaos magic nearly as badly... but if I push energy through iron with the goal "go get me information", when it comes back it is likely to be completely loopy and tell me "la la la flowers are so pretty", or more likely "wisenheimer sixty-seven purpled the from". Remember signal and noise? It's possible for me to get "information" back that's so full of noise even I can't detect signal within it. So I'll be able to use my magic in the hive, and I could even teleport out of it once I'm in... but I can't teleport into it even once I know where it is, and I can't scry from the outside to find it.

On the other hand, I just now realized that I can scry for water without salt in it.

You have no idea how hard I am facepawing right now.

That did the trick. Approximately five minutes after I stopped dictating, I found several bodies of water large enough and fresh enough to support a Changeling population... including one where it was actively raining. That seemed quite promising, so I teleported there, and sure enough, there was a pegasus with glazed eyes managing a nearly depleted cloud, raining it into a fairly large hole that went down into the side of a mountain. The hole was not filling with water; all of it was draining away somewhere else. So of course, being as insatiably curious as I am, I sized myself down and jumped down the hole. The pegasus didn't even notice; Changeling victims are not well known for their powers of observation.

I hit water shortly after the light disappeared, and swam down the rest of the way. I don't recommend that ponies try this, by the way. The tunnel I went down was too small for a pony for most of its length, including a significant part of the portion that was under rock and water with no air to be found anywhere, so unless you're powerful enough to turn yourself into a fish, you're probably not going to survive the trip. Not an issue for me, of course; quite aside from the fact that I can turn myself into pure magic and don't even really need to breathe at all, most of the time, I have gills, so I wouldn't have been discommoded even if I did need oxygen to survive. Also, I'm pretty sure that even at full size I could have squeezed through the entire passage, though I might have needed to remove my antler and horn first.

I came up in an underground lake. Now, unlike my underground lake, which is fed by an underground river, this particular lake was plainly fed only by captured pegasi. And maybe the occasional natural cloud that drifted in from the ocean and smacked into the mountain that the watering hole was built into, but that was likely to happen at best once a year. The water level was significantly lower than it ought to be. The lake basin was about 20 heads deep, but the lake itself went up to 16 or 17. The air quality in the lake was poor � if I had needed to breathe I might have gotten quite dizzy from the low oxygen content � and there was low-light algae growing all over the place, capable of surviving in as little light as came from the magic-powered lamps the Changelings had hung overhead, half of which had gone out.

This was not a well-cared-for hive any longer.

I floated up and out of the water, resizing myself again to Breezy size (I'd say bug size, but given that I was in a Changeling hive, that might have given you the wrong impression.) In the poor lighting conditions, and with my overall dark colors, I was practically invisible as I flew through the cave, looking for Chrysalis. I found ponies sealed in goo � many of them dead. Ponies need real food, and more water than Changelings do. A well-kept hive rotates its captives; they spend part of their time in the goo, metabolic functions depressed so they don't need quite as much food and water, having wonderful dreams about all the ponies they love, and part of the time they're physically free and completely mesmerized by whichever Changeling they're attached to. Either way, they're given food and water until either their magic or their capacity for love completely depletes, at which point their bodies are fed to other captives in goo. It's a process that usually takes a decade or two, if they're cultivated properly. These ponies had simply been left in the goo until they wasted away, because there weren't enough Changelings left to care for them.

The defeat of the Changelings was around two months ago. Two months is more than enough time for a pony to starve to death, and far more than enough to die of dehydration.

I find Changeling methods somewhat wasteful to begin with � they're predators, sure, but they're predators that don't have to kill, so why use up ponies to death? If they'd put more harvesters in the field who claim to have legitimate specializations in illusion magic, who get jobs as body doubles for celebrities or whatnot, they could probably harvest more than they could handle. Of course, the more Changelings are out in the field impersonating ponies, the fewer Changelings the Queen of the hive has direct control over, so I know why they do things the way they do, but one queen's desire to have more 'lings to lord over doesn't seem to me to balance the disadvantages of being seen as murderous predators by ponies. But then, what do I know? I'm only the last member of a species that starved to death because they'd gotten a reputation for eating ponies, and ponies responded accordingly by driving them away from every food source they could find even after they gave the pony-eating up.

This, though... this wasn't just wasteful. This was horrifying. I wondered if Anon had the vaguest idea how many ponies he'd doomed to die by slaughtering so much of the hive. In the cartoon version of events, Changelings had been blasted into the sky by a wave of love, and surely some of them would likely have been killed off-screen, but Changelings can fly. Enough of them would have survived Princess Lovey's attack that their captives wouldn't have died of thirst.

I made a large portion of the cave into a giant cow-like creature, who I connected to the goo via tentacles and tentacle-like udders. The cow-thing would absorb magic from the surviving pony captives through the tentacles, feed on that, and use it to make milk that would feed the ponies. I didn't give it enough of a brain to feel anything but a general sense of vague satisfaction with lying there giving milk to ponies, and its own metabolism was decidedly low-maintenance. That would keep the ponies that were still alive fed and hydrated for a while, at least.

Ponies low on magic wouldn't be able to provide much love to Changelings, but I wasn't going to let them go � firstly, most of them were earth ponies and unicorns, because pegasi were of more use outside of goo prisons, and as I believe I made clear already, earth ponies and unicorns can't escape the Badlands, so where were they going to go? Secondly, releasing them would probably ensure the death by starvation of whatever else was in this hive. I make a point of not interfering with the chaotic processes of nature, such as conflicts between predators and prey, even between sapient beings, unless one side manages to really tick me off like the dragons did. Between Changelings and ponies, I'm not going to take sides. But I was going to do what I could to minimize the death toll on both sides, because death is seriously no fun at all.

Further into the hive I found a pit, where glaze-eyed Diamond Dog slaves, their coats mangy and unkempt but their tails wagging, were tossing limp Changeling bodies, mostly broken, badly injured harvesters and soldiers. There were Bitches down in the pit shucking the chitinous shells and lightly seasoning the meat underneath, then putting approximately equal portions onto plates and passing out to other Dogs, or young Pups. Plainly injured harvesters lay all around the pit, firing off their magic every so often to draw love from one of the Dogs or the Bitches, though they left the Pups alone. I watched for a while, rather amazed at the novelty of it. I so rarely see sapient-eating being openly conducted in front of the species being eaten, especially not when they're plainly the ones in charge.

Eventually I figured out what was going on, as I explored deeper and then ranged back to the pit. Diamond Dogs make tasty but low-calorie meals for Changelings � Changeling nutrition depends on both the strength of the emotion and the amount of the target's magic. (I once had a pet mini-hive of Changelings, a Princess and about 20 worker lings, that I could keep fed at a subsistence level without them ever needing to feed on anypony else, and without noticing any impact to myself, because they were able to convert my mild affection for them as amusing pets into satisfying, if somewhat tasteless, meals due to my godly levels of magic.) Diamond Dogs have little magic, especially when they don't have access to gems, but intensely powerful love. The Changelings had mesmerized an entire pack and were feeding on them, and disposing of the dead bodies of Changelings who'd finally succumbed to their injuries by letting their Dog slaves eat them. It was a lovely example of a symbiotic relationship in action. Might have brought a tear to my eye, although that could have also been the grit and dust in the air. Caves are not delightful places to be when you're the size of a Breezy.

There were injured Changelings everywhere. The only ones I saw that were unhurt were elderly workers, adolescent workers and harvesters, and larvalings (who are positively adorable � imagine a tiny foal, completely covered in green ooze that slimes out of every pore of its body! You just wanna hug them and squeeze them and rub their ooze all over everything! They don't grow the chitinous exoskeletons until first metamorphosis.) Most were heavily bandaged. Many were missing limbs, or eyes, or wings. I saw a de-horned Princess (or possibly a Prince, it's not always so easy to tell them apart), who, to add insult to her (or his) injury, was also missing a forehoof. Morbidly, I wondered if she'd tried to throw up her hoof in front of herself to protect her head from Anon's sword, and he'd cleaved right through it and her horn as well. At that she was probably lucky to be alive; when I broke out the day after the invasion, right before I headed for Zebrica, I could see there were dead bugs all over Canterlot Gardens. Probably took them a week to clean them all up.

And even given that there were injured lings all over the place... there were still far, far too few lings. Elderly workers aren't actually supposed to work � they're old and fragile and their chitin gives out if another ling accidentally elbows them. They sit around and tell stories to the larvalings, educating and caring for the youth, and they sleep a lot. And larvalings typically don't do any work at all because without their chitin in place, the ooze that carries Changeling magic gets all over everything, and their actual skin is very soft, sensitive and easy to damage. (Changelings are not actually insects. They're much more like ponies than you'd think. The chitinous armor is really armor, not an exoskeleton, and it exists primarily to hold in the ooze, which is more or less concentrated illusion magic. They've really got skin, muscles and bones in there, under the layer of ooze.) But here I saw fragile old Changelings and fragile young Changelings performing normal hive duties that usually would fall to the workers. The uninjured adolescents were mostly tending to the injured lings... and even counting those who were badly injured enough to be near death, there were maybe about a tenth of the Changelings that should have been in a hive this size.

You know, I'd known that Anon killed a lot of Changelings. I was there. I saw the bodies in Canterlot Gardens. But it wasn't until I was flying around the mostly empty hive that it really sank in how many he slaughtered. Personally. With a sword. As the master of the improbable, I can tell you how ludicrously improbable this is. Most Changeling hives have between 200 � 500 lings, but Chrysalis, as I mentioned earlier, was extraordinarily ambitious. Her hive could easily have housed 3,000 lings, and if she'd had enough field harvesters to support a hive of that size... okay, we are hitting the limits of my ability to do arithmetic here, but my point is, Chrysalis' hive had a lot of Changelings in it, before Anon. And now most of them are dead, and most of the ones that aren't dead are crippled or injured in some way. And Anon, personally, killed or injured most of them. I'm sure the Royal Guard got some, but ponies are rarely this brutal.

Eventually I found Chrysalis.

She wasn't in her throne room; that was empty. She was in the birthing room, which is essentially a secondary throne room for a Queen, but with a bed and supplies for medical emergencies. There were no eggs being laid or babies being born today... none for quite some time, because in order to get there I had to pass the nursery and the clutching chambers, and there were no eggs, and no larvalings younger than a year. Instead, Chrysalis was lying on something like a narrow, padded table exactly the height of the bottom of her barrel, so her hooves could touch the floor, but only barely. It was a lot longer than she was, though, so she could comfortably rest her head on a large pile of pillows in front of her.

Most of her chitin was gone, exposing green ooze and pale white skin underneath it. Her horn was broken off at the tip, and broken again in the middle but not all the way through, so the top half hung at an angle. Her wings were a tattered ruin. Her mane and tail were braided with ribbons and tiny jewels, so obviously someling was trying to take good care of her, but being clean and well-kept didn't change the fact that she looked half-dead. There were a lot more holes in her legs than there ought to be, and one of her forehooves was torn, as if something had caught in one of the holes and ripped its way through. One ear was missing, and one of the tines on her queen antenna, the little bud of vaguely crown-like antennae on her head that allowed her to communicate mentally with her Changelings, had been sliced off.

At the top of her power Chrysalis had beaten down Celestia. Admittedly, part of that was because if Celestia had pulled on the raw power of the sun in the middle of Canterlot Palace, she'd probably have melted it and a significant proportion of the wedding guests to glassy slag, but still, being able to defeat Celestia was a stunt even Starswirl would have found it hard to pull off � he'd have succeeded eventually, but probably by resorting to dirty tricks � and that neither Luna nor Cadance was actually capable of. (Nightmare Moon could, but I believe I've talked about how dark magic functions as an amplifier.) And here she was, two months after her defeat by Anon, looking as if she'd been barely healing in that time. I had to assume that when whatever lings had survived the assault had managed to drag their queen back home, she had looked basically dead.

There were relatively uninjured worker lings bustling about, caring for her and two injured Princesses, probably her direct heirs. One Prince in mint condition stood guard. The main difference between regular Changelings and the lesser royals is that Princes and Princesses have horns � closer to standard unicorn size than the monstrosity Chrysalis sports � and their eyes have pupils. They don't have whites in them, and good for them, because whites in the eyes are highly overrated, and they're the size of normal Changelings, so they don't look like crunchy cheese-legged alicorns with insect wings, but rather like crunchy cheese-legged unicorns with insect wings.

Noling else in the room seemed to have a functioning horn � Changelings who morph into unicorn forms can do basic unicorn spells, but they don't have a lot of power and they can't do anything complex, so I wasn't worried about them. Princes, on the other hand, often train to be full-blown mages, because they can't metamorphose into Queens � their entire purpose is to cement alliances between hives by marrying foreign Queens, though sometimes they work as harvesters and sometimes they provide a second line of defense for the hive. He might actually know some spells complex and powerful enough to give me a moment or two of discomfort.

So I took his horn. Yes, a trifle repetitive, I admit it, but I'd never done that one with Changelings before, and I wasn't here for fun and entertainment, sadly enough.

As the Prince, predictably, gasped, "My horn!", I sized myself up, twirling the horn on one talon.

"Oh, relax, Your Royal Unhorniness, I'm just borrowing it for a bit so you don't make trouble," I said. "I need to have a conversation with your mom. Or is she your wife? Maybe your wife and your mom?"

"Discord," Chrysalis hissed. "I'd heard you escaped. Come to finish the job that wretched creature started?"

All of the Changelings in the room clustered around their queen, most of them between her and me, the rest in a ragged V formation flanking her sides while still facing me. I was almost tempted to provoke them into a fight, because I really wanted to see what a handful of Changelings thought they could do to stop me, but I was here for a reason and I wanted my Element of Deception a lot more than I wanted to play with Changelings. So I snapped my talon, and all of them dropped onto conveniently placed pillows and started ostentatiously snoring. I didn't want Chryssie to think I'd killed her little lings, after all.

"Chryssie! Long time no see!" I said.

"We've never met, you oaf," she snapped... after glancing at her fallen Changelings, presumably checking to make sure I hadn't just turned them into animatronics or something.

"And yet you still recognize me. The curse of being so beautiful, I suppose; I can never escape my fans." I snapped up a snazzy ensemble in purple, red and green, with sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat, and created paparazzi to range around me snapping photos. "I'd say you're looking good as well, but we both know that's a lie."

"Why are you here, chaos creature?" she snarled. "Wasn't the chaos of our deaths enough for you? We died to free you; you could at least show us the courtesy of leaving us be in our misery."

"Oh, come now. You didn't die to free me; that was simply a bonus, and one you most likely never intended." I sat down in front of her on an intangible floating chair. It wasn't really a chair, of course, it was just gravity shaped like a chair. "You died because a murderous monster from another universe showed up with an improbable shiny crystal sword and proceeded to murderize you. Am I right?"

"And so you've come to torment me with memories of that day?" she said bitterly, turning her head away from me as much as she could, considering that it was supported by a pile of pillows and I was getting the impression that she probably had a neck injury of some sort.

"Not at all!" I leaned down into her face. "But I thought you might be in the market for a little revenge."

Her eyes widened. "I'm listening."

I manifested a trench coat and opened it up to show her a collection of my best fantasies about Anon � Anon being strangled to death by me, Anon being strangled to death by my vines that never bothered to wake up and grow, Anon being strangled to death by all of the bearers of the Elements... hey, I don't like blood. If someone absolutely has to die, I kind of like the whole strangling thing. But I'm not a one-trick draconequus; there were also images of Anon being sliced to pieces by his own sword, Anon being zapped to death by Celestia and Luna, Anon drowning in a giant mug of hot cocoa, Anon falling to his death from a bookcase the size of a tower in Canterlot Palace...

I admit it, I spend a lot of time fantasizing about killing Anon. I mean, I'm only going to actually do it if it turns out that I can and it's the only thing that will work � I'd honestly prefer to stop him without bloodshed if possible. (This is a filthy lie and I should wash my mouth out with apple cider, which I'm doing right now. But there's a difference between what I want, in my gloriously chaotic and impulsive heart, and what I feel is the best thing for me to do. Admittedly, most of the time the difference is pretty much invisible, but in this case... death is still not chaotic, and I'd much prefer to have Anon alive, humiliated, hated by everypony he manipulated, broken, despairing, and forced to go back to Earth to work as a grocery bagger for a psychotic manager who makes him work unpaid overtime. And then I could go visit him for the rest of his life and taunt him about how he used to be a god and now he bags groceries and all of his marefriends hate him and ritually burn pictures of him on the anniversary of his ignominious defeat. Hey, a draconequus can dream. Either that or throw him into a dimension of madness where his mind will be fed on by a horde of eldritch things from beyond the veil for the next thousand years as he gibbers and screams for mercy in forgotten languages even he no longer understands. One or the other.)

"Take a look at the possibilities," I invited. "Any of them speak to you?"

"All of them. Though I'd prefer ones where I'm healthy, and restored to my former strength, avenging my children on him in blood while wearing the form of whoever he most loves. But I doubt even you're capable of granting that to me." She rested her head on the pillows, gazing up at me only with her eyes. "What do you want?"

"Well, I thought that was obvious. Revenge. Just like you."

"Why do you want revenge on him? He didn't murder your children. Do you even have any?"

"I'm really more of a free and independent spirit, if you must know," I said. "Changing diapers and giving up the nightlife for nursery rhymes and bedtime stories? Not really my thing."

"And plainly, he didn't murder you, and from the stories we have carried down through the generations, I know of no evidence that you're even capable of loving anything aside from yourself."

"It wasn't for lack of trying." I stretched out, floating more longways than seated now. "I'm guessing, from the numerous spots where your physicians' best attempts to graft dead Changeling armor onto the big holes in yours have obviously failed miserably, that you had a taste of the Element of, bleah, Protection yourself?"

"Yes." She closed her eyes and spoke bitterly. "Everything we knew about the Elements of Harmony said that they shouldn't be able to harm us. We treasure harmony within our ranks even more than ponies do. There is no more perfect harmony than a well-run hive. It should have been no more possible to use them against me and my Changelings as to use them against Celestia."

If she hadn't been using the Element of Deception, then her hypothesis would probably have been correct, for the original six elements anyway. The Elements of Harmony would have worked on her because she was using an Element of Disharmony, but wouldn't have done anything to her Changelings. But the existence of the Seventh Element changed matters. "They shouldn't have," I agreed. "But the Element of Protection isn't really a Seventh Element of Harmony."

"Then what is it?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, yet. But I intend to find out. And then I intend to destroy it, or its wielder, or both. You're not the only one he used that oversized Ginsu on."

"That what?"

"Never mind. His oversized bread slicer. He's chopped me with it, more than once."

"It can harm you?"

"It's not an Element of Harmony, but it's close enough to one that it does very bad things to chaos, yes. Obviously, seeing that I am in possession of all my parts and you are not, I'm still a gazillion times more impervious than you are, but that doesn't mean I like losing my tail, even if it grows back a few days later as good as new."

"So he can harm you." She smiled thinly. "That would be useful news, if my hive and I weren't already dead."

I tilted my head sideways. "You're looking like something the cat dragged in, certainly, but most days I'm fairly certain the dead don't hold conversations. Or at least they don't do so while lounging on silk pillows. I mean, after a thousand years maybe I'm a bit behind the times, but I'm fairly sure I'd have noted a change like that."

Chrysalis laughed harshly. "Oh, I live still, now. But I can predict the future as well as any soothsayer could. I made the mistake of bringing my strongest daughters with me to what should have been my triumph, and instead, those that the monster didn't outright murder lie as broken and weak as I do. All the Changelings I didn't bring with me into the battle that day, all the ones still whole and hearty, I sent with the daughters too young for metamorphosis. I begged another hive to take them in, traded them treasures beyond reckoning, so that some other queen will raise my daughters until they're old enough to start their own hives."

"Didn't think it was a good idea to keep them around the old family manse, hmmm?" I knew exactly why she'd done it. Changeling Princesses get along as well as any other sisters as long as their mother is alive. When the Queen dies, all of the ones still living in the same hive as their mother fall into a bloodlust frenzy, murdering each other for the right to be Queen. And then the survivor metamorphoses, whether she's old enough and strong enough to bear the transformation or not. Queens are very tough and hard to kill � almost as bad as alicorns, if they're properly fed, though they age like any other pony � and usually a Queen stops producing new ones a few decades before she dies of old age. So she has plenty of time to choose a successor and make sure that the other ones have all gone out into the world to found their own hives. If Chrysalis was dying of the injuries Anon inflicted, she wouldn't have that kind of time.

Whichever of her badly injured daughters was unhurt enough to bear metamorphosis would probably become the new Queen of the hive, and if her sisters were in bad enough shape that one might even be able to control her murderous impulses, since none of them would be viable rivals. But if there'd been healthy ones around, there'd have been a bloodbath as soon as Chrysalis kicked it.

"I don't know what you know of healthy hives, chaos creature," Chrysalis said, "but mine will not survive. More die of their injuries every day; there isn't enough love to sustain us, let alone heal us. By the time enough have died that the love supply we have now could heal the rest... most of our provisions will have gone bad as well." In case you're wondering, she meant that the ponies in the cocoons would be dead. Just so you know. "Few of my larvalings will be ready for first metamorphosis by the time the adults of the hive are dead... and only the love we adults feel for them is sustaining them. I'd have sent them away as well, but at the time I thought the hive had some hope for survival, even if I didn't."

"I was getting that impression, yes," I said. "Healthy hives don't generally feed their dead to Diamond Dogs."

She laughed weakly. "True, but that simple strategy has probably kept us going longer than we would otherwise have. Dead Changelings bring disease to the hive, and there are so many and we are so few, I'm not sure we could carry them all to the outside and give them to the sand. The Dogs give us love, at least."

"It's too bad you can't make use of love from entirely non-magical creatures."

"Nothing in Equestria is entirely without magic," she said softly. "We could make use of creatures without magic, if there were enough. But you perhaps may have noticed how very, very few creatures live out here. We chose the spot for its isolation, and now it will be our grave."

"Well, that's morbid."

�Chrysalis closed her eyes. "If you have not noticed, I am very busy dying. Get to the point of your visit soon, or it may be rendered moot."

She was exaggerating � she wasn't going to die in the next hour. I gave her at least a week. Maybe a month or two � as I said, Changeling Queens are tough. She'd be in agony the whole time, though, because her wounds weren't healing. The Element of Protection hadn't disintegrated her the way it had tried to do to me, but it had disrupted her magic, so she was healing at the pace of an unmagical creature � a donkey, a cow, a sheep � and given that half her chitin was missing, and was probably never going to grow back without magical assistance that she wasn't going to get, her exposed skin would be in pain just from exposure to the air. Bandages could only do so much. The ichor that supported her magic would slowly ooze out of her, leaving her body through the large wounds in her armor too fast for her disrupted magic to replenish it, and finally her magic would fail completely, leaving her to starve to death because without magic Changelings have no way to feed. But she might die of her injuries before that happened.

"Oh, very well, if you insist," I said. "I can be blunt and straightforward if I have to." I teleported behind her and murmured directly in her ear as I floated above her. "You have my Element of Deception. I want it back."

Chrysalis laughed. It sounded like it wanted to turn into hysteria, but her ribs probably hurt her too much to laugh that much. "I don't," she said.

"Oh really?" I coiled up in front of her and glared into her eyes. "Don't lie to me, Chryssy, I can make your death a lot more painful and prolonged than it was going to be otherwise."

"I'm not," she said, laughing again, bitterly. "If it's what I think it is... the amulet I was using to amplify my powers so that neither Celestia nor any other who knew Cadance well could notice if I slipped from character?"

"Nice to see you at least acknowledge that you know what I'm talking about," I said coldly. "Where is it, then, if you don't have it? Since you admit you did have it."

"I'll tell you if you promise me something."

"It's funny, I could have sworn that you're helpless on your deathbed in front of me, that your only protectors are asleep and hornless anyway, and that I'm the god of chaos. You know, when I went to business school, they told me to negotiate from a position of strength. I guess you never went to university?"

"As if you'd have lasted a day in a university, any university," Chrysalis said. "Too much order and control." She closed her eyes again. "You want something from me. I may be helpless... but I have nothing to lose. Torture us? Drive us to madness? We're dying. You can help us, and perhaps we'd have a chance... or you can torment us as much as you like, but it will do you no good. I'll tell you nothing unless you help us."

I glared at her. "Do you really think you're tough enough to take what I can dish out?" I hissed.

"On the contrary, I think I'll die five minutes into whatever you're planning to do," Chrysalis said, chuckling sardonically. "Perhaps ten, if I'm unlucky. I am much too weak for you to torture me for information, Discord. And the longer you delay, the greater the odds that I'll simply expire before I have a chance to give you what you want."

"Oh, fine." I stopped trying to be intimidating and stood on the ground, arms folded. "What sort of help do you want?"

"Let my hive live," she whispered. "I don't expect you to save me, and after I brought us to such an end I am not even sure I'd want you to. But give one of my daughters back her health and strength, so she can lead the rest to safety. Give us food to help us regain our health, if that's within your power. I realize you don't love anything but yourself and we can't feed on reflection, but give us ponies, or some other creature that loves. Let there be a new Queen who is healthy and strong, and a good supply of food, and they can live on without me."

"How do you guys feel about winter sports?"

She blinked at me. "What?"

With a thought, I removed the entire cave structure and displaced it into the mountains around the Crystal Empire. If Anon and pals did anything even remotely like what had happened in the cartoon, there was going to be a food bomb going off within the next couple of days. Actual insects hate the cold, but Changelings aren't actually insects, and are in fact warm-blooded creatures who can tolerate the cold well, their magical ichor forming an excellent layer of insulation. Plus, now that the Empire was back, the magical warmth generated by its crystals would heat the entire region.

"What did you do?" Chrysalis asked, gasping, her magical sensitivities strong enough to detect exactly how many ley lines I'd just dragged her entire hive across, cave structure and all.

"I don't really want to put a new puppet queen on the throne," I said. "Quite aside from the fact that it would be much more fun to watch your daughters fight it out, I can count on you to hate Anon as much as I do and not lock up with PTSD or something. So rather than wait for one of your daughters to get queened and lead you all to the Promised Land, I decided to dump you there myself."

"Where are we?"

"That would be telling." I grinned. "You'll find out soon enough. As for food�"

Ordinary dogs, small d, aren't magical creatures, but according to Chrysalis, Changelings can feed on them anyway. When I was a child, ponies weren't great at taking good care of their animals � cats and dogs bred and ran wild, and the "pounds" that they were collected in often had miserable conditions, and sometimes were forced to kill animals due to overcrowding. Now ponies have swung much, much too far in the opposite direction; they take such good care of their animals that animals are often virtually helpless without pony assistance. Animal shelters in the big cities of Equestria are stuffed to the gills with animals that can't survive without pony care, where the ponies they would have relied on have died, moved, given up on animal care, or have just become overwhelmed. Ponies like Fluttershy step in to adopt as many as they can, but because ponies have crippled animals' natural abilities to take care of themselves, the level of pony care needed by Equestria's animals is more than ponies can possibly give.

Dogs, in particular, are well-known for being loving, loyal pets � which is part of how carnivorous animals got to be such popular pets for herbivorous ponies. So I just pulled dogs out of shelters all over Equestria and dumped them all over the caves, along with big piles of yummy raw meat made from chaos. I gave them some meat trees growing outside, with branches high enough that the dogs wouldn't be able to get to them, but Changelings can all fly. Let the Changelings collect meat from meat trees to feed their pups, and the supply of love would be endless. The fact that ordinary dogs have very little magic meant that there wouldn't be a lot of nutrition coming from any one dog, but I provided them with a lot of dogs.

"What is that noise? What did you do?"

"Fixed your food problem. You now have a very large quantity of loving canines who are even stupider than your Diamond Dogs. Take care of them, feed them from the meat trees I gave you outside the caves�"

"Meat trees?"

"Don't interrupt. You should be doing reasonably well for food for a while. And for my final trick�" I snapped my talon and sheared away the edges of Chrysalis' chitin, where the Element of Protection had slashed through. She screamed.

"What are you doing? Stop!"

"Sorry." I wasn't actually that sorry. "I know from personal experience that if Anon slices you up with his cheese dicer, the parts of you that his sword touched while he was cutting off other parts of you are contaminated, their magic disrupted. I'm removing the parts he disrupted, which should allow the rest of it to start healing. You might still die � I'm not in the business of handing out miracle cures � but I've given you a fighting chance." I grinned down at her. "I find that chance is so much more fun and exciting than inevitability, don't you?"

She moved, slightly, as if trying to pull herself off of her supporting bed, and collapsed back onto it. "I'm in agony. Are you sure this isn't the part where you try to torture me for information?"

"No, you're going to freely give me that information, now that I've helped you. Your hive has a good chance of survival, now, and I expect you to make good on your promise."

"And if I don't, you'll torture me."

"If you don't, I take back the gifts I've given you, and you can die in torment knowing that you won a second chance for your hive, and then lost it by double-crossing me."

Chrysalis took a deep breath. "I traded it to the hive of Forgotten Sky, where I sent my daughters, as payment for taking them in."

"Which is where, exactly?"

"In Hayre. In the old lands. Near Underhill."

Very interesting. I whistled. "Moving up in the world, your girls, aren't they."

"Equestria was supposed to be the New World. They know us, in Hayre. They know how to ward us away. The lands are old and full of heritage and tradition, and you know as well as I do that those are other names for stagnation. This was the land of progress, the land where Changelings would finally make their mark." She was plainly exhausted, eyes closed, voice starting to slur. "I didn't want to send them there, but no other hive would take them."

Changelings originate from a subdimension called Underhill, or sometimes called the Fey Lands, which is very similar to Tartarus except for the fact that it is nice, and you would want to live there, if it weren't for the fact that if you're a magical pony the inhabitants will probably suck you dry. The only natural gate to Underhill in Equestria is Breezy Land, and that's actually sealed off from the rest of Underhill so you can only get there via the Equestria side and only during the time window that the gates are open. Most of the Underhill gates are in Neighropa or the islands around it. What Chrysalis was talking about was a hive near, or possibly within, the Sidhe Gates, the ones that can be accessed via caves in Hayre. There's also the Low Gates in Agland, the Avalon Gate in Albion, the Fae Gate in Prance... no shortage of ways to get there, if you cross an ocean first.

The thing is, of course, that because Changelings came up first in those regions, the creatures that reside there � ponies in Albion and Prance, sheep and goats in Agland, cows, ponies and sheep in Hayre � are very, very well aware of how to properly detect, fight and protect themselves from Changelings. Equestria knows very little about Changelings, so the ponies over here were easy pickings. Normally, hives do not take in Princesses from other hives � the risk to their own Princesses is far too great. But a hive in Hayre, where the inhabitants know what herbs repel Changelings and what potions force them to transform to their true selves, would have a lot of use for the Element of Deception, simply in order to thrive and grow.

Which meant I might have a serious fight on my hands, if I couldn't negotiate with them to give them something they wanted even more. Well, I doubted they could possibly be as tough as Winnie was.

"Thank you, my dear, you've been an enormous help," I said, and gave Chrysalis a big fat smooch on her cheek, which woke her up enough to try to bat me away. She had a disgusted expression but you know, I bet she secretly enjoyed it. "Ta-ta!"

If Chrysalis survives � and with the help I gave her, she might, now � she's on my short list for allies to potentially give Elements to. I'm not giving her Deception, obviously � she handled that so badly, I doubt she's capable of properly bonding to it now. But one of the others, maybe.

And now, I'm off to lovely green Hayre, land of the Eohippos, Breezies, Changelings, and various other creatures from Underhill, to negotiate with the Changeling hive that got my Element of Deception.

Oh, except Gilda says I have to spar with her first. Like I have time for this.