Shining Armor closed her mouth. The main stage for special occasions held only Shining and Cadance, the former of which stood without a disguise. The speech had been simple and similar to what Shining had given to the castle's staff.

A moment of silence dragged on, unbroken by any sound, then one lone pony stepped from the group: a messenger and crystal pony, both. "Your Highness." Priority Delivery bowed her head to Cadance and then Shining. "And Your Highness. Few crystal ponies have had any dealing with changelings outside of the Empire, but I am one that has. I have seen the good side," she gestured towards Shining, "and the bad, and I see none of the latter in you." Priority smiled. "Why did you keep this a secret?"

Murmurs ran around the crowd, and Shining knew she had to answer any and all questions honestly to have a hope of keeping her title. "I was scared at first. I was changing into what I thought was a monster. You have all at least heard of Careful Steps, our adviser; Careful held his own honor so high I was forced to see that being a changeling wasn't as terrible as I thought it might be."

"As things progressed we realized that to stop Chrysalis' latest machinations, we would need to maintain our secrecy longer." Shining felt regret at having hidden so much now. "The time for secrecy is past. Any gains hiding this," she pointed to her chest with a hoof, "are outweighed by the pain in my heart from keeping it a secret from the ponies I love."

Shining stood amazed at the effect of her heartfelt words. Heads bowed before her, and she stared in disbelief as it seemed like the entire plaza lowered themselves. Tears came quickly, and she jumped down from the stage to be among the ponies of the Crystal Empire. Love abounded, enough love to almost compare with that of Cadance.

Soft murmurs came from all around Shining, but she was looking for ponies that weren't bowing. There were some. Brave ponies, none of them crystal, glared at the changeling queen walking among them. Each time she made her way towards one, Shining watched them duck into the crowd and slink away.

At last Shining found one who remained standing. She recognized the former Royal Guarsponies, of course. "Dropper." She sighed, turning to the first. "Say your piece."

"You are a liar and a monster." Dropper felt as if his heart was broken. Shining wasn't some blushing young mare that would break his heart with her looks but the commander he had looked up to for the latter years of his career. "You kicked me out of the Guard. You let me accuse Princess Cadance of being a changeling." His head swung to glare at the stage across the plaza. "And worst of all, you are destroying the Crystal Empire."

Silence reigned across the crowd. Dropper faced Shining in a sea of watching faces.

Dropper continued. "You sabotaged the last year of my life to make me look a fool, and—"

"Shut it, sir." Gleaming Fire stood a little straighter. "Sir, I… I wanted to stick with you so you were safe. I like you, Dropper, you're a great commander. But you are letting your anger blind you."

Dropper stared at Gleaming Fire. The shock of having the only pony to always be at his side to suddenly go against him forced him to back away. "What is this? You're siding with them?"

"I am trying to help a friend." Gleaming ruffled his wings. "But my friend is pushing me away." Tight pain gripped at Gleaming's heart. "Dropper, I love—"

"Don't you dare." Dropper turned and stormed away. He didn't want to see the Crystal Empire or its rulers again, and he definitely wanted to leave his former best friend behind. "I don't need them…" he muttered under his breath.

Shining stared at Dropper as he left. The departing pony was both a stab to her heart and a relief. But pain welled from outside, and she turned to look at Gleaming Fire. "Sergeant Gleaming Fire?" Pain, in the form of emotional despair, lanced at Shining from the pony, and she reached to put a foreleg around them. "Would you like to go somewhere private?"

Gleaming Fire couldn't stop the tears from coming. He stared at the ground and leaned against Shining Armor. No sooner did he nod than green fire pooled around the both of them. For just a moment he looked around, and saw no other ponies but him and Shining in a plushly appointed room. "I can't believe I finally told him…"

More than a little lost, Shining did all she could think of; she hugged Gleaming Fire to her side. "What made him this… angry?"

"You." Gleaming gave a sob at the memory. "When he found out what Queen Chrysalis did to you he swore an oath before our squad that he would never let it happen again. This…" Overwhelmed, Gleaming could only sob as more tears came, and the stallion clung to his former commander.

"Shiny?" Cadance had finally found them. She was teleporting to and poking her head in every room she could think of. When she spotted her husband and the former Royal Guard, she breathed a sigh of relief.

"Is it always going to be like this, Cady?" Shining was getting ready for bed. Her body felt natural now—right. "I can't believe Dropper got so out of hoof." She folded back the covers and slipped into the warm bed beside Cadance.

"Pride!" Cadance blew a huff out of her nose. "It is perfectly fine in little amounts, but some stallions seem to want to carry bucket loads of it." With a warm body in the bed, Cadance's attention shifted to snuggling up to Shining.

"So what are we going to do next?" Shining pressed her snout in against Cadance's and stole a kiss before Cadance knew it was coming. "Coronation, Equestria Games…" She nuzzled along Cadance's neck. "And then, I think it is time we dealt with Chrysalis."

Chrysalis felt tiny. The ponies of Ponyville had continually been nice to her, feeding her comfortably, but there was no food to be had right now. All the ponies of the town were slumped and almost colorless, and the reason for that was in a field outside town.

"Get them to safety." Her drones didn't recognize her as the queen of the hive, of course, but when a fellow 'ling gave a command it meant they knew what they were talking about. When there is a huge magic-sucking creature as big as a mountain doing battle with an alicorn, you either run or do what someone says. She directed her drones to guide or carry ponies away from the town.

A beam of pure destructive force swung over the rooftops, and Chrysalis knew real terror. If the beam—she didn't know which of the two it had originated from—had lowered just a little, it could have wiped Ponyville off the map.

A glance back showed her Twilight's friends, and Discord, all in floating bubbles. Buzzing her wings in distress, all Chrysalis could think to do was get all the ponies away from the fight, but those trapped in the bubbles were on their own.

"They're just food. They're just food." Despite how much Chrysalis was saying the words, they still didn't feel completely right. It was nice to have ponies to feed on who actually didn't mind it, and she had grown connected with some of them, despite their strange habits.

Galloping away from what she thought was a doomed town, Chrysalis saw her drones herding the ponies ahead of them. Of course her changelings hadn't dropped their disguises, not like Chrysalis had, which made it look odd that some of the "ponies" weren't washed out. "This should be far enough."

Tirek, in the distance, looked to be taking out his aggression on the Everfree Forest. Huge groves of trees were ripped up and destroyed by his blasts. Chrysalis had a sense that he was searching for something. "Princess Twilight…"

Turning from the terrifying sight, she studied the huddled masses, and saw just as much terror in her changelings' eyes as in the ponies'. A dawning realization came to her, and Chrysalis gave a deep sigh. "Wait here."

"Wait? What do you mean, 'wait'?"

Chrysalis didn't have time to answer her drone. They might not recognize her as their queen, but it didn't mean she wasn't. "If the area around Ponyville isn't clear of fighting in ten minutes, start running again."

Striding back towards the town, Chrysalis called her fire and donned the most dangerous disguise she had worn in her life. The fire swirling around her faded, leaving a familiar purple coat, a dark mane with two stripes through it, wings, and a horn.

With an exact disguise, Chrysalis could draw some measure of Twilight's competency into herself. Flashing power to her horn, she teleported back towards the monster. "Hey!" She looked up at Tirek, feeling stupid beyond belief. "Hey, stupid? I bet you can't catch me."

"What?!" Tirek swung his head and spotted "Twilight Sparkle." The ball of power between his horns energized. "I don't know how you got your magic back, pony, but I will take it again!" Suddenly, lightning lashed out from the ball of power.

"Oh shoo—" Chrysalis' reactions wouldn't have been quick enough to save her, but combined with Twilight's smarts, she was teleporting away again. Where she had been standing was now a gouge in the ground nearly as deep as she was tall, and twice as wide. "I bet you totally can't hit me."

Fast reactions saved Chrysalis again and again, but with each teleport she was quickly burning through her changeling magic reserves by recreating the powerful pony magic. Minutes passed, and despite blasting at her over and over, Tirek seemed to always have more ready to go.

"Stop that! What do you think you are doing? You are just tiring yourself out." Tirek's mind started to catch on that something wasn't right. "You're just distracting me from something, but what?" He started to look around, only to see a rainbow shooting out of the ground itself.

"That, you big dummy." Chrysalis let her disguise fade and slumped to the ground. Revealed as a changeling queen, she was spent of magic. Tilting her head up at the rising ponies in the bright light, she wavered a little. "Stupid bug, trying to save your food. And for what? Princess Twilight and her friends are going to stomp him like…" Her tirade was interrupted as Tirek, now focused on the real Twilight, started blasting them as hard as he could.

Turning her head from the intense light, Chrysalis shielded her face with a foreleg and looked through the holes to see what was going on. Princess Twilight and her friends weren't dodging at all. She stared in shock as the deadly magic dispersed on the bubble around the six mares.

Then it happened. A beam of light lanced back, hitting Tirek squarely. Then more, until all six beams—a rainbow—slammed into the monstrous centaur. Staring in wonder, Chrysalis watched as Tirek shrank away, and with a final puff of the rainbow he was gone completely. Energy poured off the ponies, some of which Chrysalis could glean for her own. In moments, while Chrysalis was slumped on the ground, she found enough energy to survive; the stress of her "fight" slowly dragged her into unconsciousness.

"I thought that was Cinnamon Stick?" Twilight was done with the fight. She and her friends had triumphed over Tirek, but something struck her as odd. Wandering closer to the changeling in a shallow crater, she gasped. "That's not—"

"That's Queen Chrysalis!" Rarity, still pumped with the power from the Tree of Harmony, braced her hooves.

"Wait!" Trixie's voice in the distance stole some of the thunder of Rarity's revelation. "Trixie has… Trixie needs to learn that teleportation…" Pumping her legs, Trixie galloped as fast as she could to where the fight had finished.

Twilight had her horn lowered at Chrysalis' unconscious form when Trixie reached the group. Puffing, Trixie took a few moments to recover from her mad dash.

"The Observant and Surprised Trixie saw it all." Trixie pointed to the downed changeling queen. "Chrysalis ordered her drones, the farmers, to move all the ponies away from your fight. But when the monster came after you in the forest, she… she came back to distract him."

So shocked that she turned her attention completely away from Chrysalis, Twilight gaped at Trixie open-mouthed. "But… why would she do that?"

"Trixie has no clue, but there are two possible outcomes of this: we stay here and when she wakes have to fight her or capture her, or we leave and pretend we didn't see her like this so we can keep an eye on her actions." Looking directly at Twilight, it was clear who she considered the decision maker in this.

On a personal level, Twilight Sparkle wanted to capture Chrysalis, to have the changeling punished for what happened to her brother. She had to fight the urge to just summon a gallon of water over Chrysalis' head. But if the Queen of the Changelings escaped them, she would go to ground somewhere and be harder to find later. "Come on, girls."

"But Twilight!" Rainbow Dash looked between Twilight's retreating form and Chrysalis. "She's a baddie! We aren't supposed to let them get away!"

"It's more complicated than that, sugar-cube." Applejack looked at the black chitin of Chrysalis' body. "Twilight has to think of what'd be best for Equestria."

"Besides," Pinkie Pie giggled and turned to start bouncing off after Twilight, "she makes really good brownies. I want to learn that recipe before we get all 'accussy' with her."

"And… and now we know who she is…" Fluttershy hovered up with Rainbow Dash, her wings working to keep a perfect hover that Rainbow made look effortless. "And knowing who she is means we know where she is."

When Chrysalis finally woke, the first thing she realized was she had a headache. The second was that her disguise, all of it, was gone. Looking around, she quickly rebuilt Cinnamon Stick the changeling back up. Oddly, she felt more exposed as a changeling queen than being disguised as a regular changeling drone. "This place is messed up." She started walking back towards Ponyville, only to see a castle risen from its skyline.

Author's Notes:

Rarity: Do you have a plan to make dress for 'Emperor' Shining Armor? And do you even know her new 'measurements'?

"Darling, when Princess Cadance came for her own fitting, she brought all the measurements I could hope for. I was so looking forward to a bit more time in the Crystal Empire before the Games, but such is the life of a busy designer." Rarity sighed wistfully. "Their outfits were simply divine!"

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A time skip, and quite a big one. I am sorry, but I was fracturing this story too much in focusing on the world and not the story. Time to get things moving, and pushing forward into Season Five territory certainly does that.

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So I do this "Ask x" thing, x can be any pony within the story. You can ask them anything and I they will definitely hopefully reply. Keep the questions appropriate to the age-rating of the stories and of course, I they will answer the best question(s) in the author notes of the next chapter. The more votes a comment has the more likely I will get it to the right pony to answer, try and keep it to one answer per post! I They will pick one question per chapter.

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