Chapter 19

“So what did you do next?” Twilight asked.

“Well, it’s a bit complicated,” Alan said, standing up from the bed and holding a hoof out. “We decided we needed an intelligence network, and I’ll tell you all about that in a second. First, I think the other changelings want to meet you.”

Twilight took his hoof with a smile.

And with a gentle pull, he brought his lovely wife up, off the bed, and into the cistern room.

Another table, this one having been hinged to the wall, had been pulled out, to make a makeshift bar. A handful of changelings sat at the bar, holding hard cider bottles and dressed in identical purple suits, hats, and blue capes.

“‘Ey! It’s the Boss and his plus one!” one of them said, getting the attention of the gathered changelings. The one that spoke up grabbed another couple bottle from a hidden cooler, and used one of the holes in his leg to pop open the bottlecaps.

“That’s a little hard this early, guys…” Alan said, looking at the bottles.

“It’s been a long night for us.” The changeling said, before downing a bottle.

“Really?” Alan asked.

“Well, we’ve been keeping Big Red out in the countryside, and that’s tough enough as is.”

“Big Red?” Twilight asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Alan said. “Um, so, anyways guys, this is Twilight.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Ma’am,” the first one said, extending a hoof. “Name’s Whittler, head Carpenter of the Exilarchy.”

“Of course, that doesn’t really mean anything…” the changeling next to him said, with a slightly higher voice and slightly longer ears. “I’m Color Pallet,” she said, introducing herself, “and that apparently means that I’m the head painter of the Exilarchy.”

As introductions went around, Twilight began to feel slightly...uncomfortable.

They were just so friendly with her, so happy.

And she had at one time, killed changelings by the score.

It was somewhat surreal.

“So what about you?” Whittler asked. “How does the Purple Terror introduce herself?”

She blinked. “Um...my name is Twilight Sparkle, and...and I’m Ponyville’s librarian…”

“Librarian?” Whittler asked. “I used to be a librarian for a bit. Had to ditch it when I kept messing up the Dewey Decimal system.”

“Wait…” another changeling down the line said. “Our brothers got utterly destroyed by a librarian? Geez, we deserved being wiped out if a librarian can wreck us.” He followed the sentiment with a dose of hard cider.

Alan smiled. “Don’t get too down. I know the story of a gardener that frightened a garrisoned tower.”

“But that was a book,” another changeling said, taking a drink. “We don’t have an excuse.”

Alan chuckled.

“So what are your favorite things, Mrs. Sparkle?” Color Palette asked.

“Um...reading mostly. I also like to study, magic specifically.”

“Really?” she asked. “Well then I think you’ll like Blank Page, he spent some time acting as a writer and he’s trying to write a book now.”

“He was an author?”

“Yeah, Lee Foal or something. I heard that the actual Mr. Foal lost a couple of weeks worth of work because of it too.”

Twilight was not sure how to feel about that.

“Oh!” one of the changelings said. “Moonlight, the changeling that’s filling in for your funeral wanted to let you know that she really wants to talk about alchemy when she gets back. Do you know a lot of alchemy?”

Twilight blinked. “Um...no. My area of expertise is more thaumaturgic. I haven’t really...gotten into...alchemy.”

“Oh. Well, Moonlight’s going to be disappointed.”

“I told her it wasn’t going to work,” Alan said. “But she didn’t listen.”

“I can refer to her to a zebra I know that has a knack for it,” Twilight offered.

“Zecora? Yeah, I told her already, but she wanted to talk to you,” Alan said in a mocking whine, “because surely as a master of the arcane arts, you would know all about Alchemy. And I, your husband, certainly doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he says you don’t, because he knows practically nothing when it comes to magic.”

Twilight meanwhile was staring off to the side. “Maybe I should pick up alchemy as a hobby…” she muttered.

“Alright, guys,” Alan said, turning back to the changelings. “Don’t stay up too late, I need you hunting Mr. Domino tonight.”

“You got it, Boss,” Whittler said, before raising his bottle in a cheer.

“Have a good day,” Alan said, pulling Twilight along with him. “Come on, dear, nine down, thirty-one to go.”

They had gone through almost the entire roster. The only ones left were the changelings out in the field and Chess Piece herself.

She had her own room apparently…

Ever since Twilight had seen the communal sleeping area, complete with honeycomb-like holes carved into the walls, she was beginning to wonder why Chess Piece had her own room at all.

It only got worse when Alan wouldn’t answer her question.

As Alan led her up to Chess’ room and to her large, heavy door, he paused. “Okay, look Twilight,” he said. “When you see her, whatever you do, don’t freak out.”

“Freak out? Why?” she asked, concern growing in her voice.

“Just...don’t freak out.”

“Wh—” And that was all she was able to get out before Alan walked into the room.

“Hey, Chess!” he said.

“Hey, Boss,” came the answer.

Twilight sighed, annoyed that she was not getting her answer, before following her husband in.

And then she had the answer.

“Ah! Good Morning, Mrs. Sparkle!” Chess Piece said.

Twilight blinked.

“Found everything to your liking? For you know, a sewer?”

Twilight nodded, and stayed quiet.

Chess Piece gaven an awkward smile. “Um...Mrs. Sparkle?”

“Y-you’re...tall,” Twilight said eventually.

And she was tall. Not by an impressive amount like Celestia, or even Luna, but truth be told, she was only a few inches shy of Cadence.

Now, while that is, in fact, a perfectly normal height for the ponies of Equestria, it was not for changelings.

Every single changeling Twilight had ever seen was exactly the same height as the other, with the exception of half of an inch in the ear for gender.

In fact, as far as she knew, there were only one type of changeling that was different in anyway from the “Drone Standard” as she was starting to call it, were the Queens.

She really, really, wanted to freak out.

Chess Piece, to her credit, blushed, and gave a nervous laugh. “Um...yeah...funny thing.”

Alan stepped in. “The other changelings have started looking to Chess here for leadership, which means she’s sort of the psuedo-Queen of the Exilarchy.”

Chess visibly winced at the word “Queen.” “Yeah...funny thing about being a strategist...others tend to make you the leader.”

Twilight stared at her. “I...see…”

There was a second of awkward silence.

“W-were you always that tall?”

“Hm? Oh, no. No, this is a relatively recent development. Pheromones, you see…”

“Ah…”

Chess coughed. “So! Anyway, is there anything I can help you with?” She asked, turning to Alan.

“Just the regular report,” Alan answered.

“Well, Alpha and Bravo teams still have nothing to report, Ponyville’s still quiet; Your Trottingham agent is reporting all quiet, no surprise considering our intel; and Charlie team has the usual Mr. Domino and Bad Joke movements.”

“Let’s see,” Alan said, a mana hand open and waiting.

Chess filled it with a dossier.

“So...you’re...becoming a Queen?” Twilight asked.

Chess’ ears splayed across her head. “Um...sort of…I wasn’t exposed to Royal Jelly as a nymph, so I can’t become a true Queen like...the last one.”

“So what are you then?” Twilight asked.

“A...the term is Half-Queen,” Chess said, trying to focus on the table before her.

“What does that entail?” Twilight asked.

Alan coughed. “Twilight,” he said, admonishingly. “She really doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Twilight blinked, and stared at him for a moment. And then it was almost as if he could see the light bulb go off in her head as she suddenly backed away from Chess’ personal space. “Oh! Sorry...didn’t mean to pry.”

Chess knew this was a polite lie, but nonetheless gave Twilight a thankful smile.

“So, yes, Twilight this is Chess Piece, my lead strategist.”

“At least while we’re down here,” Chess Piece added.

Twilight turned to the table. “So, what are we looking at here?”

Chess sent a look over at Alan.

He gave her a nod.

“Well,” she said. “We have our information network.”

“Anything I can do to help?” Twilight asked.

“Of course!” Chess, said. “Here, could you take this letter and this page and decode this for me? It’s from one of the splinter hives in Baltimare.”

“Splinter hives?” Twilight asked.

Chess looked up, giving Alan a look.

“Um...I may not have gotten to that yet…” Alan said.

“Oh, well!” Chess said. “Um...how to put this...We...aren’t the only swarm that was sent into Equestria.”

Twilight blinked.

“We’ve been trying to bring them under, but a few of them need some work—”

Twilight held up a hoof. “I don’t want to know. In the past few hours I learned that my husband was not only alive, but he began working with changelings to fake his death and start a cold war with the draconequus that just tried to kill me last night. I don’t need to know.”

Chess nodded. “Sounds good.”

When Alan began his story again, he started two nights after his “death.”

Alan paced the cistern room as Whittler finished installing a bar that they apparently needed.

“I don’t like sitting here.”

“You’re breathing,” Whittler noted, “That’s better than most dead ponies.”

Alan rolled his eyes. “I need to do something!”

“Chess is setting up a network for you,” Whittler said.

“Lot of good it’ll do me,” Alan answered frustrated. “Now I get to know how Chaos is tearing the city apart.”

Whittler shook his head, before standing, and checking the hinge on his bar. “Alright, pretty sturdy…” he muttered.

Alan shook his head. “What can I do?” he asked.

“Well, unless you can transform, I’d suggest waiting,” Whittler said with a smirk. “The living world’s not ready for the living dead.”

Alan groaned. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It’s the truth of the matter,” Whittler offered. “Until you find a way to hide who you are without question, then you can’t really leave.”

Alan shook his head. “And that’s going to be hard, isn’t it?”

“You’re a public figure,” Whittler said, nodding. “Between your face and the fact that you have golden hooves, you’re pretty hard to miss.”

Alan brought his hoof up to stare at it, and grumbled. “Of course I am…”

Whittler shrugged. “I’m sorry, but it’s the simple fact of the matter, we can’t let you out because somepony would recognize you in a heartbeat, and we can’t let your friends know because we need them to act completely and totally natural.”

Alan sighed.

The Pendragon walked to his bed that night, the changelings buzzing happily around him as they went about their business, using their talents to help build up their base of operations.

He just...He felt useless...He couldn’t do anything. He died and had become a spectator of this horrid world.

The thought of respawning entered his head, and he smirked despite himself.

Yeah, he just needed to respawn.

The question was how.

Well, since you’ve got nothing but time now,you might as well see if you can’t get those shouts translated to spells.

Alan sighed. “Yeah...might as well…”

“How is that going, by the way?” Twilight asked, sitting back on the bed in Alan’s small room.

“The Spell translation? Um…well…” he began, “I definitely did something wrong…”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how the basic idea was to simply translate Fastali and Jotum into a force and a sound spell respectively.”

“Yes...and…”

“Well…”

Alan had spent three days focusing on the spells, spending most, if not all of his time on it.

And he had been making no progress whatsoever.

The spell would either fizzle or rush back into himself, leaving him with a headache at best, and complete and crippling fatigue at worst.

Still, he had nothing better to do.

So after another headache passed he stood once more, his horn glowing and at the ready.

He was going to figure this out.

It was all he really could do…

Now, magic was still a weird thing for Alan.

For starters, he was incredibly sensitive to it. He could taste a telekinesis spell at ten feet away, which, if Twilight’s analogy is to be believed, is the equivalent of hearing a clock tick at thirty feet.

Yet, despite his sensitivity to it, he found manipulating magic to be a different matter altogether.

His only two real spells, one of which came naturally to him while the other was gifted by what he would now describe as a demon, both came from a place he didn’t understand, through what he called tunnel 1, past canyon Q, and over river pi, before redirecting to either Terminal 1, or seventeen depending on the spell.

And he really had no idea how the rest of that worked.

What made it worse was that real unicorns didn’t even have names for the hundreds of pathways, they were, simply referred to as ‘this’ or ‘that,’ if at all.

The good news was that he had a framework for the flame spell, that he could work with.

Now all he had to do was figure out what Terminal F14 translated to.

So, trying once more, he began to weave his magical energies through all the little hoops, when something happened. Perhaps it was the fatigue, but Alan suddenly found that he had accidently went down river pi instead of over it.

His eyes went wide as he realized his mistake, and he quickly tried to correct.

And then, before he knew it, he was staring at his own body.

Alan blinked.

There he was, splayed out on the floor as though he had simply fainted.

His chest still rose and fell rhythmically, but he was, quite obviously having a literal out-of-body experience.

Twilight stared at him.

“What?” Alan asked.

“Are you telling me you rediscovered Zebra Soul Magic?”

Alan blinked. “Um...Am I?”

“Well, it’s not an illusion spell!” She said, angrily. “I can’t believe you! You can’t perform telekinesis, the litterally simplest spell in the book! But somehow! Somehow! You can create hard-mana constructs in your sleep, have access to an ancient word magic that isn’t practiced anymore, and now you’ve figured out the secret to the Zebra Arts of Soul Projection!?”

Alan blinked. “Um…”

“No. Just...no. Forget it,” Twilight sighed.

Alan looked at her. She seemed very upset, and, as with every time she got upset, he quickly reverted to his default and apologized. “Sorry?”

Twilight shook her head. “Okay, so your literal soul has been haunting Equestria, and that’s the secret behind the Silver Stallion?”

“Yes,” Alan confirmed.

“And you decided that this was the answer to your cabin fever?”

“Essentially.”

Twilight looked up at him. “I should be far more surprised than I am, I hope you know.”

Alan smirked. “Well, it was a pretty awesome trick, and it gave me a little pull.”

“Pull? Why would you need pull?””

“Well, while we could set up a changeling network with other splinter hives hidden around Equestria, we still needed some boots on the ground. So I needed someone to get in where they couldn’t.”

“What did you do?” Twilight asked, curious.

Alan smiled.

Trottingham was a small city, one that sported an impressive clock tower in the middle of town, almost perfectly equidistant from the fields to the thick forest that Trottingham sat between.

It was quiet, as was expected of the cold midnight. The griffin just wished he had the means to keep warm in it.

The griffon was in bad shape, and that was an understatement. He was missing both of his hind legs, as well as both of his wings. A single arm navigated the one-eyed griffon as he sat on a wheeled plank of wood.

Of all of that, however, the most notable feature of the poor mongrel was the sign he wore around his neck.

It read, in big bold letters, “My name is Coward. I murdered and maimed several ponies during the war, including the pony named Thundersight, so I have been maimed in kind. Do with me what you wish.”

It had been tough on the griffon, but he managed, scrounging on rats and leftovers thrown out by various shops.

He shook his head as he bit into a slightly burnt loaf of bread. It was still quite edible. Eighty three percent, if he had to guess. He wondered if the baker had just burnt it just enough for it to be unsellable. The baker would do that.

Pulling himself forward, he wheeled up to the alley that had been his home for so long now, and moved to a small corner to start up his small fire.

His one claw worked quickly, and he coaxed a flame to life.

Once he had secured his warmth, he wheeled himself over to the cardboard box that had become his shelter.

“Hello, Coward.”

The griffon froze at the voice. He knew that voice. He had heard that voice in his nightmares.

The griffon turned, and stared at the ghost that filled the alley way.

A sword hovered next to him, and the griffon knew that sword.

“Ah-ah....H-hail, Pendragon…” the griffon said, as he pulled himself into ball.

The Silver Stallion walked forward, naked sword brandished.

The griffon winced, hoping that the ghost would make it quick. “Please, sir...I’m sorry. The ponies here are kind, and they’ve shown me the gravity of my sins. Please, sir…”

The blade came close. “Look at my sword, Coward,” Alan said.

The griffon looked up, and he saw his own eye in the flat of the blade.

“What does it say?” Alan asked.

“J-justice,” the griffon answered, fearing for his life.

The blade spun. “And now?”

“M-mercy?” The griffon asked, hopefully.

“Now, Coward, I will offer you Mercy, but you must do as I say.”

“Anything, sir!”

“You hired the griffon that killed Thundersight?” Twilight asked bewildered.

Alan nodded. “I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but beggars can’t be choosers,” he said. “Besides, he’s done a good job. He’s given me the names and homes of the three different corrupted police members.”

“Chaos has gotten to Trottingham?”

Alan nodded. “He’s gotten everywhere, and I don’t know how. It’s annoyed me to no end.”

Twilight opened her mouth to speak, when a commotion sounded from behind the door.

“That must be Moonlight,” Alan said.

“Who?” Twilight asked.

“Your shadow, and your funeral double,” Alan said as he made his way to the cistern.

Twilight followed.

A small crowd gathered around as a changeling walked into room, a pair of star-shaped stickers draped on her back. “The fun has arrived!” she said in a sing-song voice.

“Took you long enough,” Alan said.

“Well,” Moonlight said, tossing the cutie mark stickers off to the side of the room, “if Grim and Ghastly were better at digging up corpses, I would have been back sooner.”

“Oh, sure,” Grim said, coming in behind her. “Blame us, why don’tcha?”

“But, now you don’t need to worry anymore, I’m...Mrs. Sparkle!”

“Um...hi?”

Moonlight crossed the distance in almost no time, and she quickly hooked her leg around the unicorn. “How did I do? What did you think? Was I dead enough? What about the Milkmare? Was that a good role? In your opinion does bloodpoppy or lichbalm make a better nausea reliever?”

“Um...huh?”

“Tell me how I did!” Moonlight whined.

Twilight blinked, bewildered.

Alan smiled. “Twilight, this is Moonlight, your shadow and number one changeling fan. She volunteered for the shadow job, seeks your approval, and wants to know everything about you. Have fun!”

“Wait, what? Alan! Alan, wait!”

He just laughed.

Chaos stared into the abyss.

His master stared back.

“You wanted to speak to me, my Lord?”

“Yesssss…” Sombra’s voice echoed. “I did. The time has come for our plans to move forward.”

“M-move forward?! But my Lord, Celestia is not yet ready for—”

“Then you failed,” Sombra said simply.

“But-but, I’m so close!”

“And in the time it has taken you to do this, I have already chosen a new vessel. I need you no longer, slave.”

Chaos felt his center go cold.

If...if he had no use for him, then he would be tossed aside.

“A-as you wish, Master…”

He...he needed…

“If I may, though…”

“Whaaaaaaaaaaat?”

“I have another vessel for you, for later use.”

“I need it not.”

“Not the body of the Pendragon’s son?”

There was silence between the two.

“I see...well done, servant. Bring the young one to me.”

“Of course, Master.”

Yet another chapter down.

“Wait stuff’s happening?”

Of course, Alan’s just getting her up to speed now. But stuff has to happen.

“So things are going to go down?”

Indeed. Just not yet.

“Sounds fun!”

Oh so much fun.

“Whelp, we’ll see you all next time, guys!”

Be sure to comment!

“Bye!”