"...Then she had the gall to just assume that I'd be coming back to work for her. Can you believe the unmitigated arrogance of it?" My diatribe against the Queen of the changelings finally reached it's conclusion and I took a long draw from my glass and clanked it noisily back down upon the bar. By the time I looked over, my erstwhile conversational partner had slipped a few bits upon the bar and was beating a hasty retreat towards the exit, a look of dull fear on his face. In his haste he headbutted the door and tripped over his own hooves. I sighed, I couldn't blame him for thinking I was crazy, but it's his fault for asking 'How's it going?' If he didn't want to know, why had he asked?

Chrysalis had a point, though. There was nothing for me here. The bar was the same now as it had been those many years ago when I first met my changeling doppelganger, it even had the same three barflies arguing about the same politicians and clerics as last time.

I'd attempted to track down my colt, but as I'd been told, Connie's family had stolen away without a trace. The university let me stay on staff, but students shied away from my classes and most of them were canceled. Bits were sparse and my landlord was harassing me for what I owed him. Even so, acceding to Chrysalis' demands was too drastic.

Being effectively exiled, I had no bond left with Canterlot either, other than a largely theoretical sense of patriotism. Worst of all was the fact that I had nopony to talk to. I'd gotten so desperate as to have started hanging about with Commander Victory so often that I'd found myself defending him as not being such a lout as everypony seemed to think. That's how hard up and lonely I was. It didn't help that I was constantly looking over my shoulder, warily scouting for changeling imposters. I'd taken to keeping my changeling detecting spell active, but despite my paranoia to the contrary, I rarely got so much as a twinge, and hadn't seen a drone in the flesh since I'd returned.

My manuscript, though partially incomplete, was in a state that I could have it published as is, and it would still be the most complete and authoritative work on the subject ever produced, but I just couldn't do it. Without the backing of either Canterlot or the scholarly set of Tanis, who were shunning me as if they knew I was mired deep in the weeds of the matter, there would be no point in printing it. My work would simply evaporate away as if it had never been. It would be no more credited or believed than the drunkard I'd so recently accosted with my tales of changeling woes.

I was about to leave off for the night when a fresh drink clunked down before me, it's foamy head sloshing and briefly overtopping it's container. I looked to the barmare in confusion. She pointed a hoof to the pony who'd just noisily seated herself on my other side.

"Captain Brass Belle?" I blurted, for that's just who it was. The months had crawled by and I'd forgotten her promise to look me up upon her return from Eagleland.

"Aye, I am at that." She said laconically, "I heard you'd been holing up in this dank cave of a pub most nights, can I take that to mean you've not been holding up to the gales life's tossed your way?"

I shook my head in the negative and shrugged, "No, I...I don't know. I'm alright, I think. I spent so much time away, everything just seems kind of muted now, as if all this were a tinge of dream more than anything." It bothered me that it was so, but in fact I had been so far away and so bereft of hope that my beloved Connie had been dead in my mind for nearly so long as she had been in reality and the more recent revelation's stabs were largely blunted. I wish I could justify my callousness better than that, for I still bore an air of guilt and shame about myself as if it were a cloak.

"Then why are you sitting in here with a line of dead soldiers betwixt you and the barmaid?" She asked, pointing to the line of empty glasses and mugs before me.

Again, I shrugged, "Bored. Frustrated." I looked up to her glimmering azure eyes and spat out one more word. The most fearful and vulnerable word that ponies know, "Lonely."

A grin blossomed on her face and she embraced me. I immediately regretted saying anything so carelessly revealing. Certainly she was a fine pony, a prize to which I couldn't even aspire to be worthy, but I was too fragmented to be worth her romantic interests and I told her as much.

"Ha! You Canterlot ponies! Always throwing away your nows worrying about what's proper ten leagues on." She bent forward and kissed me right on the nose, then just when my blush reached a glowing pinnacle she booped it, "I wasn't asking you to run away with me or nothing, and all respect to the departed, it's just, well, I like you well enough and there's nothing for getting a stallion unlonely like a bit of a romp. Now if that isn't your speed, it's fine, you aren't keeping me from a more enticing offer or something. I came looking for you as a friend, afterall. Now show that you've got manners enough to take the focus off yourself and ask me how Eagleland was."

"How...How was Eagleland?" I stammered. Then she told me.

As it turned out, Eagleland had been less receptive than she'd hoped to the bulk of her cargo of coffee beans and she'd barely broken even, but she had several dozen bags she'd taken as a whim that she made it all back up on. Originally she'd taken them onboard from the Zebras to be polite and because she knew customs varied greatly from region to region, but she'd never expected that beans eaten and then excreted by small, catlike creatures would be such a hit.

"The profit margin is just unimaginable. I mean, sure, it'll be relatively expensive to buy compared with the other coffees, but the exchange rate being what it is, most of the outlay is in the voyage itself and the actual cost of the product can be exponentially higher before it actually matters. Anyway, I hear that it's only one group of zebras who harvest and sell these beans, and since I already  dealt with them once, I'm in a position to really capitalize on the next deal." She enthusiastically explained.

"Er, excreted?" I asked.

She looked me dead in the eyes, daring me to say something against it and stated flatly, "Excreted."

I made a disgusted face and let my tongue flop out, "That's awful! Do they know that the makings of their invigorating drink have been shat out, or do you just neglect to mention that?"

"That's a very provincial view to take." Mock hurt in her tone, "The peculiar origins do nothing but add to the cache, among the elites, at least. Griffons aren't so different from us, and I'd think there's a few gourmets who appreciate the flavor, surrounded by a crowd of sheep looking for a status symbol. It's nothing to me either way, so long as I can extract some bits from the fad and I can manage to cut and run afore the bubble bursts."

"I suppose that's true enough, the noble classes always do seem to have some deep desire for some pretty appalling things just to prove their own refined tastes." I nodded, though I still had qualms about trading in dolled up offal, "So you're headed back South to pick up another load?"

"Aye, and if you've a mind to, you could come along as crew. I'm lacking a bit for officers and if you'll pardon my presumptuousness, I thought you might be wanting for a change of locale, Locus." Oddly, her voice turned husky as she spoke my name, undisguised longing in her voice.

I couldn't help but assess the situation logically. She was an attractive middle aged mare, older than me by some five or so years, a bit on the heavy side, possessing a passionate charm. She knew my story, in point of fact, even though we'd only known each other for a very short time, she probably knew me better than anypony save Commander Victory. I'm a bit of a coward, but not completely oblivious to her hoof stomp subtle hints. Still...I had misgivings. Something was gnawing at me and she sensed it and interrupted as I tried to sort out the meanings behind the alarm bells in my head.

"If you're against the voyage as a sailor, you could tag along as a passenger just for the trip down and back. It'd only be a month or so and you could disembark on the way back." She groped with an uncharacteristic desperation that instinctively told me to refuse unequivocally and immediately and I was just going to tactfully go about doing so before she continued, "The zebra tribe we'll be dealing with live just a little south of your old town, Janus, was it? We could see what became of it after the changelings left if you want, maybe there'll be something worth salvaging in that library you were telling me about."

That changed my mind, but not for the reasons you may think. I knew that library would be stripped to the bare shelves, and in truth I had no interest in a homecoming to a town I'd lived in as an abductee, a refugee. But my mind cobbled together the facts I knew for certain, filled in some gaps and gave me a cohesive hypothesis.

Brass Belle offered to sail me back home after her jaunt to the south. That would be impractical. The trade winds were such that a journey back northward was unfavorable and would, in fact, add weeks to her itinerary which would decimate her prospective profits, just for me. Now, either her lust for my flabby plot and cartload of emotional baggage were such that she'd go against her businesslike nature, or she had no intention of returning me home. I thought the latter was more likely.

One explanation suggested that she was confident that her mareish charms would win me over, making the return trip unnecessary, the other suggested that the whole endeavor may be a pretext to return me to Janus, and there was only the one reason for that.

I narrowed my eyes, "It turns out you were asking me to run away with you, afterall. But...I'll go. I think I'd like that. We'll have to see about being a part of the crew, though, I'm not sure I rate."

She released a long held breath and started excitedly talking about departure times and favorable tides. Her stay in port had been kept to a bare minimum and she wanted to be under way as swiftly as possible. It concerned me little since, with my dwindling connections, I could send my regards to the lot of them in under an hour and be packed and aboard in two. The landlord could come pound and berate the door of a ghost and the university could gossip about me 'til their little hearts were brimming with the joy of pointing out another's gross impropriety. She nuzzled me and told me she'd be waiting and I headed into the night to bid Tanis goodbye once more and for good.

I dragged a sea chest along behind me, levitating it with some difficulty. It was a third filled with my sturdier clothes and necessities of toilette, while the balance contained my manuscript, notes and a few books I could not live without, including the little black one that I assumed the Captain meant to reclaim.

I was dubious when I boarded, scanning the flurry of activity all around me and not finding a trace of changeling amongst them. For a moment I second guessed my surmise. In the end I figured that this was either the true crew of Brass Belle's ship and the changelings had replaced only her, or whatever magic kept me from seeing the Captain for the imposter she was had been cast on the lot of them. I had assumed that they didn't know of my changeling detection spell and that Chrysalis herself was somehow immune and that she'd replaced the Captain. That's a naive and overly romantic notion, true, but I felt that Brass Belle could be no other.

It wouldn't be fitting, were it otherwise, for I felt her my true adversary. After all I'd been through because of them, my antipathy was still lacking, and yet this little junket had one goal, and that was revenge. Not the bloody coup and heart eating of a dragon's duel, rather the malicious joy of trouncing a worthy opponent at chess, or besting a card sharp. I had to keep my thoughts so placid as that, for if the underlying brutal hostility that threatened to flare up shone forth into the world, Chrysalis (or her substitute) would spot it surely as a beacon, I was certain. I wondered about the real Brass Belle. Knowing the changelings, she was safe, but probably tucked away somewhere until this charade was over. Maybe on the ship. I vowed to search it stem to stern at the earliest opportunity.

"Locus!" Brass Belle greeted me with a hug and a nuzzle with an enthusiasm that belied the fact we'd only been parted for but a few hours, "Come aboard, I'll show you your cabin and get you situated. You can work a shift with Windlass tonight if you'd like and see if you'd like to make your way as crew."

I saluted sloppily and sarcastically, "Aye, Cap'm."

"Oh. That could work out nicely." She said lasciviously, then hollered to her first mate, "Make ready to get underway, I've got what I came for, right Locus?"

Her officer gave a knowing wink, I arched my eyebrows in response which garnered a hearty laugh and a hoof on the back.

Though I expressed interest in a role on the ship as a ploy to stay out from under the Captain's hooves, I found that I was moderately good at the work and enjoyed it in earnest. Windlass was as taciturn as the Captain was boisterous, but she managed to impart a good deal of practical knowledge within a remarkably short period.

On the third day out, when I was certain I knew just what I was doing and was getting good at it, I ran afoul of a whipping rope that caught me up in it's snarl and nearly hung me from the mast. It was only through Brass Belle's fast reaction that I survived. Just as I was dragged towards the cross yard that would certainly have broken me like a bundle of twigs, a short knife severed the line but a few inches above me. I fell a considerable distance, but was saved by bouncing off the ratline's edge and landed in a coil of thick, soft rope that seemed set there for no other purpose.

When I looked up, Brass Belle, who'd thrown the knife, was standing with a prideful grin. I considered that it was quite a shame that she was a changeling. I could easily fall for a mare so bold and certain of herself. There was a great deal in her that reminded me of my poor Connie and I wondered if that might be by design. As soon as I thought that I started to connect the dots that told me that the whole incident had been staged so as to get me off the deck and into the Captain's cabin without hours of labor to weary me so that she might exert her wiles upon me. How could she throw like that without unicorn magic? I didn't think it possible, and if she'd used her changeling magic for that, then why not to set up the whole incident from which I would need to be saved in the first place?

"Are you hurt?" She asked, trotting over to help me to my hooves.

"Only my pride, I expect." I said, though I'd landed hard despite the soft rope and would find myself bruised head to hoof in a short while, "I'll be careful not to let that happen again."

She let her lip curl into a snarl for a split second, barely enough time to notice, "Are you sure? Maybe I shouldn't have assigned you the hazardous tasks before you had a bit more experience. You should rest in the parlor for a bit, I'll bring you some fine brandy that'll take the stiffness right out of those sore muscles."

"I appreciate it, but I'll have to have a rain check. I need to splice that cut line back together and get it rerigged. It's my fault, after all, that it's cut and I don't want to pawn it off on somepony else." Truthfully I would have liked nothing more than a nip and a lie down, but I had to play the part of a gung ho neophyte or I'd be spending too much time near her which exponentially increased the likelihood of slipping up and exposing my true feelings.

Several incidents of this sort occurred in the days it took to get to our destination, though none of them as severe. Each suspect occurrence had the captain as my enthusiastic rescuer and me playing the contrite, but determined rookie, unswayed by her entreaties to join her for less strenuous tasks in her cabin, which I refused with tact and mock obliviousness. She feigned frustration as expertly as if she were a real mare. Modesty was not her forte and by the time we neared Janus she seemed to be getting rather forward about the whole thing, her entendres being only obliquely double.

I nearly gave in. I admitted long ago that I am a weak stallion and even knowing better I very nearly slipped. As often happens, it was when I'd been plied with a deceptively strong liqueur made from hazelnut or somesuch thing.

Windlass fortuitously discovered us as I was gently nipping her delicate neck from shoulder to jawbone and had in mind a considerable amount more, changeling or no.

"Ma'am, I'm um...sorry to interrupt." She stuttered, "But there's a ship approaching of the starboard bow and they're signaling that they urgently want to talk to you. It looks like Neptunia's Delight, which as I recall is..."

"Aye," She waved her officer off impatiently, "Even Keel's ship. Tell them to come alongside and give me..." She looked to me. In my inebriated state I was blinking slowly, drowsily and gave every indication of being about to fall asleep, "Oh, Luna damn it all. I'll be up in a minute, and if it's not bloody important...I'll...I dunno...but it better be, that's all."

She looked at my sprawled out form on the bed, huffed in frustration, tied on her captain's neckerchief, smoothed her mane with a rough hoof and headed out.

When I awoke some time later, a pleasant buzz still addling my senses, she was doing her best imitation of pacing apprehensively across the narrow room. She started as I yawned and immediately began filling me in, "Even Keel says that the changelings have taken over Janus."

"Huh. I'd have thought they'd have left it abandoned. Must have a hive there like I thought." Then I considered an obvious point I'd managed to skip right over, "How does he know they're changelings? If he can tell, they're not very good ones. Are they going around undisguised or something?"

"Apparently they're disguised, but not making any particular effort to deny what they are. The zebras seem to be able to tell what they are either way."

"What do zebras have to do with it? They used to avoid the town when they weren't doing business."

"Aye, Even Keel asked them about that, too. They're supposed to've known the whole time what was going on in Janus, according to him, but not realized that it was...non-consensual, let's say. What with the language barrier, I could see that, I suppose. The zebras seem to have a much more relaxed attitude towards the changelings and they took over the town when it was abandoned. Now they're living alongside a whole colony of those bugs who walk around the town in pony flesh." She related. I weighed my response and wished I wasn't still so woozy from alcohol as I was. I half expected the town to have been taken over by changelings, though I'd have expected it to be less overt, but I couldn't let on that I'd suspected.

I replied how I thought she would expect me to, "I think we should skip the homecoming in Janus and simply meet up with the tribe you'd been trading with."

"They're the ones who've moved into town."

"Right, well that's to be expected, isn't it? I imagine they have the dock completed by now?" It had only been the changeling's desire to keep us isolated that had killed the progress of that particular project time and again. She replied with a nod that they had, "What did Even Keel have to say about it? Did he make contact with them, and how did he find out?"

"He knew the town had been vacated, so he asked where the new ponies came from and the Zebras told him they were changelings as if it were the most natural thing that could be. Whether you know it or not, the story of your town has been passed around quite a bit recently, especially down here. He said he traded with the Zebras and that neither they nor the changelings caused him any problem." She bit her lip.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well, you're the changeling expert, what do you think I should do?"

"I don't know that I see any problem with putting in, really. The changelings might recognize me, though, so I'll have to have a disguise of some sort or they'll probably want to bother me." I yawned and rose from the tangle of blankets to my knees. She pushed me back down with a stern hoof and looked me in the eyes.

"Bother you? They're more likely to want to capture you, lock you away in their library for another few years and bend you to their will." She moved close, nose to muzzle and stroked my mane, "You should stay on the ship where it's safe, or we can skip it altogether and just call this trip a wash. It's bound to happen once in a bit that a lead like this doesn't pan out, it's not a contingency for which I have not been prepared."

"I'll be fine. They've had every opportunity to capture me and not done it. They knew I would try to escape and pretty much let me because Chrysalis expects me to come crawling back on my own, she doesn't see a need to use duress." I'd never told Brass Belle about the queen's letter to me, and since she was playing an oblivious role I had to go along. It gave me an opportunity to put my own spin on things, to make it appear as if I had no suspicions of Brass Belle's true nature and was blithe to the changeling threat.

"But you won't be able to get into that library now, what purpose do you even have left for walking those streets except to put yourself in danger?"

"I don't know," I shrugged her off and climbed off the bed, "Closure, maybe. But it's something I feel I need to do." With that, the discussion ended.

When we got closer to port, the buzz in my head that indicated changelings got so strong that I had to dispel it to get a moment of peace. It was irrelevant, anyway. It could simply be assumed that any pony I saw was a changeling anyway. I was sailing right into the belly of the beast, playing my part as predictably as I could. One might question, at this point, if I had a plan. In fact I did, to a degree.

When I'd gotten back to Tanis, those many months ago, and into the university I'd hoofed over the quartz charm that the changelings had worn to ward off my revealing spell to the head of practical magics.

Spellsong had scoffed at it when I told her how it was being employed, "That's ignorant. Whoever enchanted these doesn't know the first thing about higher magic theory."

"But they worked..." I protested, only to be rebuffed harshly.

"Well clearly you don't either." She knocked the bit of quartz on the scarred and scorched blonde lab table appraisingly, "This is such a backward way to go about making a charm, real equiolithic type of cave pony stuff. It's what they did centuries ago, but there's some real problems with it or you'd see ponies wearing all sorts of enchanted gems, wouldn't you? First, if you enchant a gem that's not flawless, it's imperfections manifest in the spell matrix, and quartz is never flawless. Very few gems are of a high enough quality to hold a strong enchantment. Now they can be extraordinarily powerful if they are, especially if you have more than one."

With a flourish she stuck the stone in my face, "If you had a bunch of crummy stones like this one their flaws would mount up, and so long as you knew what any first year student knew, you could cascade a spell through them."

"Cascade?" I asked in confusion.

"You really don't know anything, do you? All you do is focus on one stone, rather than all of them, and direct your spell towards it. Overcome the magic of that one stone and the release of energy from it's collapse will power the spell when the emanations find the next one, and what's great is that it's an exponential chain reaction. Each stone's collapse adds it's excess energy to the equation so you can start with a pretty weak spell and end up with something earth shattering."

I wrote out a the spell I'd used in my attempt reveal the changelings, "This was the counterspell I tried to cast, what would it take to cascade something of it's type?"

"Not much, it should work as long as you have enough power." She frowned at it and swapped a couple words and one number, "Now if you did it that way, you should be able to keep it's wearer in their current form for hours." She wrinkled up her nose and squinted, wrote in another sentence and added an equation, "This isn't new magic, it's all stuff you should have learned pretty far back. Now, like this it should revert them to their original form, but at your level of power, you might need a couple dozen of those bugs wearing stones for it to be effective."

"What if there were something more like a few thousand within a mile radius or so?"

Her eyes got wide, "I expect you'd have enough to bind their power to transform permanently, maybe intergenerationally. That would be the grandaddy of revealing spells is what that'd be, and all you'd have to do is overpower the one as a catalyst to get it to work."

In the end it was established that I couldn't overpower the spell myself, so Spellsong weakened and enchanted the pendant for me so that I'd have one that I could overwhelm if I ever got the chance. She was excited, but this was back when I thought I was shut of the changelings, so I'd used it as a bookmark and forgotten about it. Now, however, I could use it to put an end to the changeling threat.

Make no mistake, it's genocide I'm talking about. A changeling who cannot disguise their dire and corrupt form will undoubtedly starve. It might sound a bit extreme, but I'd hardened my heart. I was interested in the changelings, I sympathized with them, I wanted to know everything about them. More than anything I wanted to complete my definitive history of that dread race, maybe it seemed fitting that I should also draw their reign to an end. I was a pony, after all, and they were predating my own race. Logically, no matter what sympathies I might have, there was only the one choice. With Brass Belle nearby, her deceptively warm and caring form by my side, muttering assurances as we slid into port, my resolve began to slip again.

I had to remind myself that the real Brass Belle was out there somewhere and the way to save her was to let the changeling's plan play out as if I knew no better.