There was more than one road that wound its way to the capital city of Canterlot. The longest of these was the high mountain pass, an unpaved road that meandered its way among the hills and mountains skirting the Everfree to unspool at the foot of Canterlot. Only a handful of hillbilly ponies with more ambitions than common sense took that road, hoping for grand opportunity, fame and fortune in the big city; and more than a few of those who came that way returned the same way, sadder if not wiser, and certainly more bitter about their fellow pony.

Not long after the Royal Palace suffered its rather abrupt relocation, that dusty path was host to a strange procession indeed.  The city guard, standing watch at the gates of the outer wall, bore witness as an elderly unicorn pony came trudging up to the gate. He was well up in years, with an olive green coat and a dust-grey mane and beard, and a tattered grey tail. he wore a prospector's panniers, vest and hat that had seen decades of use and an expression of grim resolve.

Trailing behind him was a house. It was a surprisingly cheery little cottage, painted in dandelion yellow with blue trim, and had obviously been the subject of much tenderloving care... at least before it had been uprooted. It now sat, along with a patch of lawn, a cobblestone sidewalk, and a chunk of picket fence, atop an enormous lump of earth and stone that floated along behind in the old stallion's magical grip.

The stallion plodded along, neither looking left nor right. He refused to answer anypony who spoke to him, ignoring queries and catcalls alike. He didn't even show surprise at the palace's new location in the center of the lake; he simply marched across the newly made bridge, floating house in tow. The watchponies at the gate clattered out in their armor, brandishing their halberds. "HALT!" they shouted, crossing their weapons in his path. Up on the wall, ponies readied crossbows. "Stand down and be recognized," one guard said. "You will proceed no further--"

The old stallion cocked an eyebrow and glared at them and levitated the gigantic house-capped stone up into the air till its shadow fell across the arch of the gate--- and the guardponies gathered there. The guards gulped. Till this point nopony had dared block his path, and with good reason: maybe a dozen unicorns in the world could lift anything close to the weight of the mass of earth and granite hovering over their heads. Twilight Sparkle would have strained to lift what he was effortlessly levitating.... They contemplated the sheer power going into keeping that titanic ball of rock levitated. They contemplated what would happen were they to strike the unicorn responsible down. They contemplated the likelihood of them, collectively, being able to catch that mass themselves before it squashed them flat. Message delivered: This was not a pony to be trifled with. They hastily backed out of his way.

He plodded wearily inside, the floating house barely squeezing through the massive gate behind him. The boulder passed through the sweeping hallways of the palace, sending servants and courtiers alike scurrying to clear a path and leaving a trail of scraped walls, cracked archways and crumbled masonry behind.

Nopony who caught a glimpse of the stallion's expression complained.

The gigantic doors leading to the throne room burst open with a boom. The stallion entered, his floating cottage right behind him. It hovered under the vaulted ceiling like the world's most ominously substantial chandelier.  Celestia rose to her feet, wings outspread. "What is the meaning of this?"

The stallion glared death at her. "You know damned well what the meaning is, you sun-arsed bitch," he said. His voice was like gravel rolling downhill. Ponies scattered around the throne room gasped.

One of the guards bridled in rage. "How dare you speak to the Princess like that!"  He readied his halberd and made as if to charge the old stallion.

The olive-drab pony just looked at him and jerked his head toward the enormous mass of wood, earth and rock hovering overhead. "Care to play catch, boy?" he said. The guard stumbled to a halt, fuming. The old stallion snorted and looked around the throne room. "Din't think so."

"Why are you here?" Celestia said warily. "Why are you doing this? If you think you have been wronged, the doors of the palace are open to any petitioner--"

"Izzat so?" he shouted. "Lemme refresh your memory! My name's Heart Root, Princess. Remember me?  I'm the farmor who spent two months waitin' to petition you last year.

"Ring any bells?"

Celestia winced inwardly. The prior year had been-- tumultuous. She remembered receiving so many letters of complaint because the Court had been closed for some emergency or other...

"Shoulda known I was wastin' my time," he growled. "You made up your mind already, looks like." He reached up with a tendril of magic to his hovering cottage and plucked a piece of government parchment off the door, flinging it at her feet. The legend in bright red letters was clear; a royal eviction notice. "You wanted my farm so bad?" Heart Root said. "Well, y'bitch, here it is!" With that, he brought the floating mass, house, earth, stone and all, in an arc overhead and down on the royal dais with a resounding smash, right at Celestia's hooves.

It would have been a rather dramatic statement all by itself. What happened next was merely icing on the cake. The shattered pile was not evenly balanced; after a moment's pause it slumped over, spilling the precariously balanced load of earth off its top. Before Celestia could do more than gawp in surprise she was completely buried in over a ton of top-grade equestrian topsoil.

All bedlam broke loose. Nobles and petitioners stampeded in panic; Guards galloped from every corner to exhume their buried matriarch. In all the mayhem nopony saw the irate farmer turn and leave. No one would stop him; despite the old stallion's slow, weary pace, somehow he would stay one step ahead of the mayhem all the way to the city gates. It was a bad day for the Royal Guard.

"Zounds, what is this uproar?" Luna, roused from her sleep early by the ruckus, came soaring in through an open window. She regarded with some surprise the small mountain of dirt, rock, and shattered building material sitting in the middle of the throne room. Several guards were digging away with their spears and hooves, shouting for someone to fetch shovels. As she landed, a familiar horn and muzzle poked free of the earth. "Pfui," Celestia said.

There was a long pause as Luna regarded the mound of dirt that concealed her sister. "Methinks, Sister," she said finally, "Thou shouldst clarify that if thy little ponies wish to bring a land dispute before thee, they do not need to bring the actual land..."

"Oh shut up and fetch a shovel," Celestia said.

It was nearing sunset the next day when Heart Root returned to what had once been his home. He had walked the entire way to Canterlot, then walked the entire way back. The return journey had been quicker, though he had been in no condition to appreciate it. The moment he set hoof on the land he seemed to age another twenty years. He plodded  as slowly and methodically as he had the entire journey thus far,  skirting the open pit where his house and the last acre of his land had been, and followed the trickling stream up into the holler till he came to a small gravestone. It was only then that he let his weariness show. He drank thirstily from the stream, then staggered up to the grave where his wife's ashes were buried and sank to his knees. He rested his forehead against the gravestone.  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, Arrow Root." He bit his lip. "I promised I'd save our home. I promised t' keep fighting. I broke that promise.... I'm sorry...

"They took it all. we ain't got nuthin' left to fight for, and I ain't got nuthin' to fight with. It's all gone."

"Is it, then?"

Heart Root started and looked over his shoulder. He recognized the mare standing behind him almost immediately. He took in the green mane, the crooked horn, the holed legs. He couldn't even muster the energy to be surprised. He was beyond scaring, though. Hell, he was almost amused. "Figgers," he muttered. "One royal nag sucks me dry, an' along comes another to finish the job." He looked at her. "Well? You hear to drain the last of my love out of me?"

The deposed Changeling queen cocked her head. "And if I was?" she said smoothly.

Heart Root returned his gaze to the gravestone in front of him. "I think I'd let ya," he said. "Maybe it'd stop hurting, then."

Chrysalis scoffed and tossed a bottle to him with a flip of her head. It landed in front of him with a thump. "Drink," she said.

Heart Root picked the bottle up. the liquid inside was an unsettling shade of green, but he uncorked it and drank it anyway. Not like he had anything to lose. Almost immediately, he felt energized and refreshed; his aches and pains vanished. "Changeling nectar," Chrysalis said to him. "One mixture of it, anyway. Your old bones won't hurt you in the morning now."

Heart Root nodded in thanks, cautiously.

Chrysalis looked over her shoulder at the remains of Heart Root's homestead. "It seems to me you have a story to tell," she said. From her tone it was obviously a command, not a request.

"Seems to me you know it," Heart Root guessed.

Chrysalis smiled, faintly. "Tell me anyway."

Heart Root shrugged. "Not much to it," he said. He gave her a humorless smirk, before letting his face drop back into a scowl. "Nigh on sixty years ago, after years of scrimpin' and savin', my wife and I bought us a little patch of land.  I was an excavator and a ditch digger--" he indicated his cutie mark; a runic symbol for the element of Earth. "Spent years workin' in the mines. She was a earth pony with a knack f'r roots and tubers. Taters, turnips, arrowroot... this was our dream homestead. Had it all planned out; me to till the earth, her to plant it. " He smiled briefly, wistfully, before letting his mask of indifference fall over it. "But it seems like God or Fate or somepony was dead set against it.

"It weren't never easy. But these past ten years..." He shook his head. "It was like Celestia herself had it in for us." He clenched his teeth. "Every year a new tax: a property tax, a road tax, a school tax. School tax-- HAH." He snorted. "They never laid so much as a single schoolhouse brick nor paved a single foot of road in those hills in all those years, but we was still payin' through the nose for it. My wife an' I half froze and half starved, tryin' to pay all the taxes. And every year they got steeper. But somehow we held on.

"That wasn't enough for her though, was it? After the taxes came the fees, and the licenses, and the regulations. Every other year there was some new law; some new rule or regulation or fee.  Made our back forty into a nature preserve for Crumple-horned Snorlaxes and made us pay fines to fund some 'feasibility study.'  Then she sent out ponies to do an "en-viro-mental impact report," and fined us for pollutin' the river with runoff from our land. Then she declared another twenty farmable acres a wetland! And... and still we held on.

"That weren't the final straw. No, the final straw was she up an' told us our land wasn't our own." Heart Root snarled. "We'd just paid the last few bits in our pockets to the tax collector when he up and hands us a letter proclaimin' 'Their Royal Highnesses, Celestia and Luna' were claiming the mineral rights to the land under our farm 'in the name of the crown." He seemed to seize up in a fit, then got hold of himself. "A twenty year mortgage, a lifetime of taxes, and fines, and fees, and regulations, and we didn't even own the dirt we'd been payin' for."

"Then..." he swallowed. "Then Arrow Root took sick. Doctor bills et us up. I... I went to Canterlot to beg the Princess f'r help, for leniency.

"Two months on th' waitin' list. Two months standin' in line in that damned palace. Two months gettin' pushed back in line so some Duke or Baron or other useless sack o' noble inbred horse turds could see her precious royal highness first, about some "urgent matter" or other. Two months gettin' halfway to the throne, only to have her or her moony sister slam the door in my face before I got there. Two months before I finally gave up, went home to my wife to tell her they were gonna take our farm.

"I had to stand there at my wife's sick bed... her death bed... telling her th' stinkin' Princess Celestia didn't give a rat's rear about neither of us." He swallowed. " I couldn't do it. I lied, told her I'd found a way to save our dream home. She died thinkin' I'd saved the day." His voice shook and his eyes were wet. "So yesterday I took that house and that land that Sun-arsed bitch wanted so bad, and delivered it right to her front door." He wiped his nose on his hock. "Gods rot her soul with it."

"I know. our agents saw your little... performance." Chrysalis said in amusement. Her eyes narrowed and she turned the screws a bit more. "You should know not five minutes after you left, she teleported the entire heap to a landfill outside the city." He looked at her. She paused to let the words sink in. "That's right. Your Princess took your symbolic gesture and tossed it on a midden heap, as casually as you or I would dump out a chamber pot, and went merrily on her way--- as if you had never existed."

The barb struck home. He made no sound, but tears of rage spilled down his face.

"And so we see," Chrysalis said, coloring her voice with contempt, "just how little her little ponies mean to her when they're out of her sight."

Heart Root rolled that bitter pill around in his mouth. He glared at her with his face streaked wet. "What d'you want with me?" he said. "Can't imagine a dried up old stick has much love to drain for your hive."

"Don't be so sure," Chrysalis said. "It's how I found you. I could hear and taste your broken heart from a mile away. Ponies forget that loving something you lost is a kind of love too. Love doesn't always feel good or make you happy." She shifted her stance. "But no, I'm not going to drain you of love for my 'hive.' If I had one. " At his puzzled expression a corner of her mouth quirked up. "Circumstances have... changed. You're not the only one who's fallen on hard times.

"Be that as it may-- I serve a new master. One who has use for you and your gifts."

"A ninety year old geezer with a dirt diggin' cutie mark?" Heart Root said scornfully.

"A ninety year old stallion who carried several hundred tons of rock and earth on a two day journey," Chrysalis said. "Even the legendary Twilight Sparkle would have been prostrated trying to duplicate that. Besides, ninety years old is not all that old for a unicorn. You have many years ahead of you, and you are far more powerful than you think."

Heart Root got a shrewd look in his eye. "And what does this 'new master' got to offer me?" he said.

"Allow me to present our opening offer." Chrysalis' horn flared green. behind her the treeline shimmered as an illusion fell away. Heart Root let out a yawp of astonishment; standing behind her was his cottage--- right down to the picket fence and the cobblestone walk to the door. Cursing his old knees, he got to his hooves and staggered over to it. He ran his hoof over the wooden door, marveling.

"It's real," he said. "But how--?"

"My master had his agents fetch it from the quarry, every last board, timber, stone and brick," Chrysalis said. "For his magic, reassembling it was little challenge."

Heart Root couldn't tear his eyes away from it "Amazing. It's perfect," he chuckled. Then his face fell to a scowl. "Till the Sun-arsed bitch's miners come and tear it all down again."

"We need not leave it here," she said. "This is what my master, Darth Vulcan, offers. When he rises to claim what is his, you will rise with him. You will be given a portion of his domain as your own, to rebuild your homestead---the finest portion of land, with a mansion or castle or even this very cottage sitting upon it. And noone, not a government, not an army, not even Celestia and Luna themselves, will dare try and take it from you. And it will be wrested from the grasp of those same arrogant dukes and nobles and Princesses who bled your own life away."

Chrysalis saw--- tasted--- the hope flaring within him. She smiled to herself. Hooked. He stepped away from the magically reassembled cottage and over to his wife's grave. His horn lit; the earth parted and a dirt-clod covered burial urn rose up out of the ground and into his hooves. He turned to the former changeling queen, the precious urn cradled in his foreleg and his eyes hard as flint.

"Where do ah sign up?" he said.