The Bug in The Cave

by Skijarama

First published 11th of December, 2019

After being left behind in the badlands after her expedition is attacked by a dangerous monster, Twilight Sparkle must survive a hostile, alien environment. Lucky for her, she has some help from one of the natives: A curious changeling named Thorax.

Twilight Sparkle has been abandoned.

After an expedition into the badlands is torn to tatters by an unprecedented monster attack, Twilight finds herself stranded in a hostile environment with no safe way back home. With no supplies and no survival training, It all seems hopeless for the scholarly unicorn until she is discovered by a type of creature she has never seen before. A changeling named Thorax, a native of the badlands.

With Thorax's knowledge of the environment, he is Twilight's best chance of getting home safely. And by that same token, perhaps Twilight is the best chance the timid, pacifistic drone has of discovering something he has lived his entire life without.

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Set well before the Season 2 Finale.

Cover art was drawn by me.

This is a spiritual successor to The Bug in The Herd, and The Bug in The Basement.

Edited by Mister Hypothetical.

Soggy Expedition

The appropriately named badlands was not a place to be traversed lightly, being a vast, largely unmapped desert. The terrain was wild and hard to navigate on hoof, and every corner was filled with vicious wildlife. There were virtually no standing sources of water above ground, and almost no plant life, except for patches of moss and flowers that were dubious at best that grew in isolated clumps where the sun never managed to shine its light. Add onto that the sweltering heat that burned at the earth and reflected off of the sand and stone, and you had a recipe for a truly dangerous stretch of land.

It was for this reason, and a fair few others, that Twilight’s friends had been less than thrilled when she had told them she was going to be joining an expedition to the badlands as a part of a personal project. The poor unicorn had endured the protests of each of her friends, one after the other, for well over a week leading up to her departure on the Friendship Express to meet up with the team at Dodge Junction.

“Look, I don’t wanna say you’re not awesome, but Twi, even I don’t wanna go there. And Look at me! I’m the most awesome mare in the room!”

“Darling, please. We all know that you’re a curious sort and that you do so love to tackle a new project, but this is a little extreme, even for you.”

“My granny pie used to tell me all about the badlands when I was a little filly! She told me that it was a bad, bad place, and never ever go there. Not even smiling and laughing can make it better! And that’s saying something because smiles and laughs make everything better!”

“But it’s so full of scary, dangerous wild animals! Like Maulworfs and giant scorpions and sandtrap spiders!”

Out of all of her friends, Applejack had been the one to offer to the least complaint. She had been worried, yes, but she had kept quiet more than the rest. Twilight could only assume this amounted to Applejack letting Twilight make her own choices. A mindset the others had all eventually come to align with on the day of her departure. Each of them had given her their own little words of encouragement, hoping that the boost in her confidence would help make sure she came home safe.

And now, here she was, standing at the top of a jagged slope of rock that jutted up from the earth like a broken fang, scanning her eyes across the vast and seemingly endless expanse of serrated earth, winding ravines, and spires of stone that coiled into the air as if to puncture a falling pegasus.

It was made even moodier by the persistent rainfall that had come in from the south, obscuring the sky in a thick layer of dark grey and muting the colors for as far as the eye could see. Not that there were many colors to mute in this wasteland. Mostly browns, reds, and dull oranges.

With a quick spark of magic from her horn, Twilight pulled out a map from her saddlebags, keeping it safe from the downpour with an umbrella-shaped barrier she manifested over her head. If she was reading the map right, which she was confident she was, then she was just at the edge of what was known and explored, around a day’s worth of travel away from Equestria’s southern border.

A small, excited smile crossed her face at the thought of braving unexplored territory. Who knew what kinds of discoveries were lying in wait! Ancient ruins from long-lost civilizations, exciting new creatures never seen by ponies before, rare magic resources, strange geological formations! Maybe, if she was exceedingly lucky, there was even a whole new race of creatures out here, and she could say she had a hoof in discovering them!

“Hey, rookie!” a stallion’s voice shouted at her to be heard over the white noise of the rain. Jumping, Twilight put away her map and looked down to see the rest of the expedition team at the base of her rise of stone. There were at least two dozen of them, and each one had a designated task. Some were in charge of mapping out where they had been and gone, others were in charge of taking note of anything and everything they found, while others still were mostly here to haul along large wagons filled with the provisions they would need for this trip. They were supposed to be out here for several weeks, after all, perhaps even months if they found anything particularly interesting.

Twilight’s eyes eventually landed on the leader of the expedition, a tall and grizzled looking earth pony stallion with an orange coat and a short, silver mane and tail. A wiry beard decorated his face, trimmed into a haphazard goatee. His name was Relic Finder, and in the short time Twilight had known him, she had determined that she had no idea what to make of him.

He jerked his head back in an indication for her to come down. “Come on, kid! Or we’re gonna leave you behind! And be careful, you don’t wanna slip!”

“Coming, Relic!” Twilight shouted back. With a quick surge of energy, she was enveloped in a burst of magic before being deposited right next to the stallion. She smiled at him once the light faded. “Here I am.”

Relic let out a short snort of either amusement or irritation. Twilight wasn’t sure which. “Tch. Show off,” he grumbled ambiguously before nodding ahead. “Rainfall out here’s pretty rare, so we’re gonna find a spot to hunker down and wait out the storm.”

“We could probably take the opportunity to gather water, too,” Twilight suggested, an eager bounce in her step. “The desert’s bound to get hotter the further in we get, so having a surplus of drinking water can’t go wrong.”

Relic nodded. “Yeah, that’s the plan. We’ll also wanna find some way to gather more of the stuff reliably. Maybe we can find an oasis out here, somewhere.”

“Not likely. Not close at least,” Twilight said, wrinkling her nose as she thought back on the view her high perch had afforded her. “From what I could see, it was just rock and rock as far as the horizon. Now, granted, there are a lot of places for water to hide in all of that, but I didn’t see anything that could point to an oasis.”

“Hm…” Relic frowned at that before glancing over at a pair of pegasi that were trotting nearby. “You two, head on up and nab a few of the clouds, would ya? Bring them down and see what you can do to tame them into doing what you want. If we’re lucky, maybe we can use them to make water for ourselves.”

The two pegasi nodded, and both launched into the air. Twilight watched them go for a moment, her brow furrowing. “Hmmm… I might be able to help with that, actually,” she said after a moment of thought. “I’m pretty good with magic. Maybe I can help them tame this wild weather with some-”

“Hey, now,” Relic cut her off with a severe look. There was a hint of appreciation in his eyes, though. “Don’t go stretching yourself too thin, rookie. You got magic, yeah, we all saw that when you made an umbrella outta the stuff, and we all know you’re Celestia’s student. But like it or not, you’re still just one mare, and we need everypony to do their assigned part. And you,” he poked her in the shoulder for emphasis. “Are here to take notes and study things, not help tame the weather. Let the pegasi do their job so you can do yours, yeah?”

Twilight opened her mouth to protest, but after a moment decided that Relic was probably right. This was largely uncharted territory for all of them. Taking on more responsibilities could wait until they were more familiar with their surroundings. She offered up a small nod of understanding. “Alright, will do.”

Relic hummed and looked directly ahead, focusing on the path.

Twilight did the same, scanning the terrain for any signs of shelter, supplies, or something new to catalog. Already she could pick out a few small plants hiding out in little nooks and cracks in the stone, and her scholarly mind was already kicking into gear. Curious, she trotted up to one, pulling out one of several notebooks she had brought with her for this venture, and began to take notes.

There was a range of specimens here that she was already somewhat familiar with. Enough so to know that they were cataloged and known already. Nevertheless, she took down notes anyway. Having a list of all the known types of flora and fauna they found on this little venture would go a long way in making the rest of their journey easier. Thankfully, these particular plants were all safe to eat, albeit they never grew in large quantities, and weren’t exactly the most nutritious.

“Better than nothing, though,” Twilight thought before turning her attention to one plant she did not recognize. It was a small, thin thing that looked as if a gentle breeze could snap it like a twig under a manticore’s weight. A few wrinkly, yellowish-green leaves at the ground surrounded the base of a needly stem that was topped off with a white flower, the petals folded closed.

It didn’t look familiar. Curious and excited to make the first discovery of new plant life, she leaned in closer to examine the thing in finer detail. “Judging from the small size of it, I am going to assume that this is just a sapling…” she thought before tentatively sniffing at the closed pedals. “No particularly identifiable smells. I’ll need to keep my eye out for extra samples as we go…”

Jotting down the find in her notebook, she turned and cantered to catch up with the rest of the team. The natural path they were following began to slope down at a fairly steep angle, with more spires and fangs of raw stone piercing the earth at all kinds of angles up ahead. It was like wandering into the lower jaw of some titanic skull with dozens of rows of uneven, sharp teeth.

A charming mental image, and one that Twilight was quick to put out of her mind. She had to focus on keeping her eyes out for anything worth cataloging, or anything of use to the team. She couldn’t afford any distractions!

“Hey, anypony else feel that?” a mare called out from farther ahead, drawing Twilight’s attention from her resolution. Turning to look, she saw that the speaker was an earth pony mare, and she was staring at the dirt with narrowed eyes.

“Feel what?” Relic asked, glancing down at his own hooves with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t feel any- Wait… hold on, yeah, I feel it, too.”

Confused, Twilight closed her eyes for a second and focused on the mud beneath her hooves. After a few seconds of focusing, there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy as far as she could tell. “Must be their sensitivity and bond with the earth,” she deduced before opening her eyes. “What do you feel?”

“A tremor,” Relic replied, shifting uneasily on his hooves. “Something’s moving. Something big.”

“Something’s movin’?” another stallion, a pegasus, asked in a gruff voice. “What kinda somethin’?”

Relic shook his head, his eyes scanning the ground mistrustfully. “I don’t know… I got a bad feeling about this.”

Twilight opened her mouth to speak up when, finally, she began to feel it, too. It was subtle, at first, little more than a vibration. But it was getting stronger, and fast. The whole team had come to a stop at that point, all of them looking around with varying degrees of growing concern.

“Is it an earthquake?” One of the other unicorns asked. “If so, we should get out from under anything that can fall on us.”

“It’s not an earthquake,” Relic dismissed, shaking his head. “It’s something else… something-”

Relic never got to finish the sentence. Suddenly, the ground behind him erupted upwards in a geyser of dirt and mud and stone, splattering the entire expedition with sticky globs and sending their leader falling forward to the ground. A chorus of alarmed cries and shouts rang out, their echoes lost to the rain and the rumble of the titanic creature that had just torn up from the earth.

Twilight screamed, backpedaling until her back pressed up against a wall of rock. “That’s a big worm!”

An enormous wormlike creature covered in purple scales now loomed over the expedition team, easily thirty feet tall and six feet in girth, and that was just the part above the soil. It’s pink, vaguely cone-shaped head pointed down at them, and Twilight could see small, beady black eyes staring with interest.

“What is that thing?!” One of the mares shrieked, scrambling back and away from it.

The worm followed her with its eyes. For a moment, Twilight found herself desperately hoping that whatever this thing was, it was merely curious about them. They were not prepared for unknown monsters like this. But at the same time, she subconsciously began to draw a rudimentary sketch of the creature in her notebook.

Her hopes of a friendly, or at least passive, local creature were torn to shreds when it opened its mouth. Like a flower opening up to greet the sun, the worm’s face split open, revealing slimy pink insides, sharp barbs that looked quite dangerous, and four wriggling black tongues that reminded her eerily of tentacles.

“RUN!” Relic bellowed, turning on his hooves and sprinting back the way they had come.

Twilight didn’t need to be told twice. In a matter of moments, she had joined the enormous stampede of frightened ponies that were rushing to get away from the towering, angry worm. It continued to watch them for a second before, finally, it made its first move. Twilight’s already pounding heart lurched in her chest when she heard the sound of breaking wood and small objects squelching into the mud. A stallion cried out in terror, and the overall exclamations from the fleeing ponies grew louder.

Sparing a glance over her shoulder, Twilight’s throat tightened when she saw the great worm lifting up one of the supply wagons in its mouth with the pony still hitched. The stallion was kicking and screaming, frantically trying to unclasp himself.

“He’s too high!” Twilight realized with a chill running down her spine. “If he unhitches from there, he’ll be seriously hurt when he hits the ground!”

“Hey! HEY!” The stallion screamed from high in the air, still struggling with the clasp. “COME BACK! SOMEPONY HELP ME!”

Twilight quickly swept her eyes over the rest of the stampede, hoping that some of the pegasi were moving into motion. However, it seemed none of them had even heard the cries from their comrade, and were continuing on regardless.

Some small part of Twilight had to remind herself that not all of them had experienced some of the same harrowing things she had. Facing down Nightmare Moon, an Ursa Minor, running from a Hydra, dealing with a Parasprite invasion, stopping Discord. The most recent catastrophe she had been present for was when Spike had suddenly grown to several times his normal size and started hoarding everything he could get his claws on, breaking a lot of Ponyville in the process.

Dragon greed was scary.

But not as scary as this, and definitely not as scary as the prospect of letting that innocent pony get hurt, or worse, when somepony was in a position to help him.

With a grimace, Twilight skidded to a stop and started to sprint back towards the worm, her horn flaring up with magic. The sound of splintering wood filled her ears along with the stallion’s panicked screaming, making her heart skip a beat. It was about to shatter!

With a grunt of effort, Twilight fired off a small, condensed burst of raw magic energy, striking the giant worm in the side of the head. It recoiled from the snipe, an alien roar billowing outward from its open mouth. Twilight’s ears drooped as it occurred to her that she had only succeeded in making it mad.

Nonetheless, the desired result was had. The worm released the wagon from its maw, allowing it, and the attached earth pony, to plummet back down to the ground. Moving fast, Twilight reached out with her magic and grabbed onto the whole wagon, trying to slow its descent.

It was a heavy object, and the pony’s frantic flailing only made it harder to get a firm grip. But, thankfully, she was able to slow it down enough that it touched down without shattering or hurting the stallion.

One more flick of magic undid the hitch, releasing the pony to go running. “Thank you, miss!” he shouted over at her, boundless gratitude in his voice.

Twilight nodded and turned to join him.

A shadow passed over her, and something long, smooth, and wet suddenly wrapped around the center of her barrel. Twilight’s eyes widened, and she screamed out in a panic as the ground dropped away beneath her. She was suddenly in the air, kicking and flailing as the worm lifted her up, clearly not appreciating her earlier attack. Another roar echoed, this time originating from directly behind her head and making her ears ring.

Acting quickly, Twilight lit her horn and released another burst of unfocused magic straight up just as the jaws were closing in to swallow her whole. The worm roared again, nearly deafening Twilight as it released her from its tentacle’s grasp.

Safe from being eaten alive for the moment, Twilight now had to save herself from falling to her demise. Without any time to think of a good place, she let instinct take over. Channeling magic into her horn, she allowed herself to be consumed in the burst of light that was her teleportation spell mere moments before the worm snapped at her again.

When she came back to the world in another flash, her momentum carried her sideways. Twilight cried out in pain as she was sent rolling along the ground uncontrollably, mud and small rocks getting stuck in her fur and mane and battering her on all sides. She finally slid to a stop when her side struck a particularly large stone jutting up from the earth. Red hot pain flared up in that spot, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice lost to the rain.

She flopped onto her back, taking a second to catch her breath and trying not to think about the sudden warm wetness that joined the cold rain along the left side of her barrel. With heavy breaths, she opened her eyes and looked around, trying to discern her location.

She was on higher ground, now. She could still make out the angered roars of the worm, not to mention the rumbling of two dozen hooves pummeling the earth in a mad dash to escape, albeit both sounds were quite muffled by distance.

Groggy, Twilight slowly dragged herself up to her hooves and looked around, trying to nail down where the noise was coming from. “If I can just nail down a direction, I can get back to the others and help them!”

She frowned in frustration when she found that the sound was stupidly hard to pin down. Her anger began to devolve into horror as she realized that, between the rain muffling the noise, and the rockiness of the terrain around her providing plenty of surfaces for it to echo on, the sounds she was hearing could be coming from almost anywhere.

“Oh no, no no no no!” She babbled frantically, starting to trot in place as terror gripped her heart. On the verge of total panic, she turned and broke into a mad dash for the nearest jutting spire of rock she could find, hoping to catch sight of the worm from there.

When she finally reached the high ground, she was able to catch sight of the scene. The worm was still chasing the expedition team, but it had luckily lost some ground, and slithering along above ground seemed to be less effective than one would give such a beast credit for. Its movements were sloppy and inefficient, giving the fleeing ponies the room they needed to get away.

Any further details were impossible to discern due to the distance and the rain. Twilight growled under her breath and looked down the rocky slope she was now at the base of. Climbing down would be difficult, but she could do it if she was careful.

Before she could commit to anything, though, the ground beneath her hooves began to quiver and shake as it had before the worm emerged. With a short inhale, Twilight realized that there must be more than one of them. “Are they drawn to the surface by movement?!” she wondered before quickly looking for even higher ground, preferably something not part of the dirt.

Before she could find such a location, the platform beneath her hooves suddenly lurched, and she knew that another of the worms was about to emerge right beneath her. Throwing caution to the wind, Twilight leaped from her platform, sailing through the air and the rain before dropping for the ground below. Her eyes widened when she realized just how big this drop was, and her horn sparked into life again to slow her descent.

The cliffside she had just been standing on exploded outwards with mud and dirt, another of the giant worms emerging and coming right at her, its mouth already peeling open and tentacles reaching out.

Consumed with panic, Twilight fired off another raw bolt of magic at the worm’s face. The blast hit its mark on the inside of one of its many jaws, erupting in a burst of lavender light. The worm roared in agony, and Twilight’s eyes widened with shock and disgust when she realized she had just blown a small hole open in its mouth. She quickly tore her eyes away from the grizzly scene, unable to focus with the ground- “WHEN DID I GET SO LOW?!”

The ground was mere yards away and coming up fast. Crying out, Twilight pumped more power into her horn in a desperate effort to slow her descent. However, in her panic, her spell didn’t go off quite as she intended, and she instead sent herself into another wild teleport.

If anypony else had been there to watch, it would have looked as if Twilight passed through the ground in a shimmer of light before flying back up out of it at the same velocity around fifteen feet away. Her legs kicked and flailed in the air, one more panicking shriek tearing past her lips before she landed in the mud with a soft plop.

Twilight lay still for a second, trying to catch her breath and determine if she had actually lived through that or not.

Sadly, today seemed to be just one bad thing after another. Perhaps thirty feet behind her, the large worm she had just injured suddenly slammed into the ground after a fall of its own, sending a heavy tremor through the earth.

Twilight shot back to her hooves and backed away, gasping for breath and desperate for a way out. The worm lifted its head up after a second before turning to glare at her, a small trickle of purple liquid dripping out one side. With an ominous, rumbling hiss, it began to slither after her, clearly not finished with her yet.

“Leave me alone!” Twilight cried out, turning and sprinting away as hard and as fast as she could. She felt her panic rising when she realized that she was running away from the expedition and deeper into the badlands. But with this great worm on her tail and the terrain as jagged as it was, any chance at turning around or circling back to link up with them were thrown to the wind for the time being.

“Just stay alive!” Twilight told herself as adrenaline took over, carrying her down a slope and into a collection of narrow, low-walled trenches with jagged walls. The worm gave chase, roaring all the while.

Twilight didn’t know for sure how long she was running before, at last, the slippery sound of the worm slithering after her faded into silence, and its deafening roars came to an end. In spite of that, however, her fear drove her to keep running and running. The narrow walls of the trenches were claustrophobic in the extreme, and thunder had started blasting overhead some time ago, rattling her bones and sending her most primal of instincts into overdrive.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she came out of her mad dash as the trench widened out, the terrain smoothing and lifting up to the base of an enormous, dusty, red mesa that was practically a mountain in its own right. A few long-dead trees were scattered around on the slope, their crooked, mangled branches sending a chill down Twilight’s spine.

Dragging her hooves and gasping for breath, Twilight slowly moved up for the mesa, spying a small, nondescript cave set into its side. The rain was finally starting to lessen up, but that changed nothing. Twilight had seen how dangerous it was to be out in the open here, and she wasn’t going to do anything else until she had some functional shelter.

Lighting up her horn to let her see, she stepped through the mouth of the cave and looked around. The entrance tunnel went on for some twenty feet before turning sharply to the right, but even from the cave mouth, she could tell it didn’t go any further than that. Good. The deeper a cave was, the more likely it would be that something could be hiding deeper inside.

And with what Twilight had already met today, she didn’t want to imagine what could be hiding even deeper in the ground.

As her exhaustion caught up to her, and the adrenaline faded from her system, Twilight finally decided to acknowledge the agonizing burning sensation that had been the left side of her barrel for the last while. Barely containing a whimper, she looked down and shuddered when she saw a long, nasty, and jagged gash marring her coat. It wasn’t bleeding profoundly, thank goodness, but it was nevertheless ugly to look at, and excruciatingly painful.

Biting down on her tongue to keep from screaming, Twilight limped deeper into the cave, tears starting to well up in her eyes. She should have listened to her friends. She never should have come to this Celestia-forsaken wasteland! Now she really understood why it had never been properly explored before. The travelers of the past had the right idea: stay away.

As she rounded the corner at the end of the tunnel, she was met with the sight of a roughly circular chamber with a roof around fifteen or seventeen feet high. The most notable feature was the small pool of water at the very back, which looked surprisingly deep.

“Okay… okay… Think Twilight. You can do this,” she whispered to herself after a moment, slowly settling down onto her haunches. She went to reach for her saddlebags, only then realizing that, somewhere in all of the chaos earlier, she must have lost them. “Oh no… no, no! My bandages!” she exclaimed, feeling herself over as, praying to Celestia that she was simply hallucinating and that the saddlebags would still be there if she looked hard enough. “My paper! My ink, my quill!”

All gone. She was left completely devoid of supplies with a bleeding injury. Struggling to keep her voice down, Twilight pressed her hooves against the injury to try and stem the flow, but the angle was too odd and uncomfortable for her to do much more than irritate it further.

Gasping, on the verge of tears, Twilight was almost completely oblivious as the rain finally came to an end over the course of several minutes, and the red glow of sunset streaming in through the mouth of the cave.

That is, she was oblivious until she heard something, and caught movement out of the corner of her eye.

Going silent, Twilight fearfully looked towards the red light that washed over the floor and walls of the cave. Her heart leaped into her throat at the sight of a shadow creeping along the floor, cast by the low angle of the sun.

Something was in the cave with her.

Author's Notes:

Well, that was dark. In a similar fashion to Bug in The Basement, this story opens dark, but I assure you it gets really sweet and heartwarming as it goes.

I hope you guys enjoy it!

The Weakling

The badlands was many different things. It was treacherous, it was lethal to the unprepared, it was wild, it was difficult to navigate from the ground, and the local wildlife was almost all exceedingly alien in nature when compared to the regions that surrounded it. It was a blazing, desolate place, hostile and borderline uninhabitable for many creatures.

It was made even worse by the torrential downpour that now soaked the land, and the occasional rumble or blast of thunder that rocked the heavens was a most uncommon sight in this nearly rainless corner of the world. Many of the smaller creatures that dwelled among the crags had long ago skittered into crevices and cracks to hide themselves away, not eager to be caught in the storm. Truly, it was a lonely place...

But for Thorax, who was looking down on it all from his place high in the sky, it was home. A very bleak, very depressing home, but nevertheless… home.

Thorax was a changeling, a vaguely pony-shaped creature. However, instead of colorful fur, there was a hard shell of black chitin. In place of a mane, there was merely a fin that ran down the back of the neck. Perfectly round, smooth holes were formed in his forelegs, giving him a broken, almost hollow appearance. Insect wings buzzed from an ocean-blue shell on his back, while a sharp-pointed horn poked up of his forehead. Glowing blue eyes that one might be forgiven for thinking were compound, looked down on the barren wilderness below, a solemn frown decorating his fanged muzzle.

Three more changelings accompanied this one, all of them flying ahead of him in a roughly arrow-shaped formation. The leader had a different coloration to his companions: Purple eyes instead of blue, a crimson shell instead of blue, and his chitin was a shade or so darker than the others.

The other two were identical to the runt in the back, save for their sturdier physique, larger bodies, and severe expressions as their eyes scoured the land below. They had a job to do out here, and they were going to do it.

The one on the left slowly began to drift back, drawing Thorax’s attention. A pit of unease formed in his gut, and he was already beginning to instinctively shrink away from the larger drone. After a few seconds, they were flying side by side, the larger drone glaring down at Thorax from the corner of his eye with contempt.

“Hey, Pharynx!” he suddenly shouted out to the leader. Pharynx’s ear twitched in response, but he otherwise made no indication that he had heard the call. Taking this as permission to continue, the drone turned his eyes fully to Thorax and scowled. “Wanna tell me again why we brought along this pathetic runt?”

Thorax, despite his best efforts, was not able to contain his whimpers. He cowered under the larger drone’s spite-filled eyes, unable to meet his gaze. “I… I didn’t ask to come, Scorpion,” he was eventually able to mumble out under his breath.

Scorpion scoffed and jabbed a hoof at Thorax as if his point had been proven. “For crying out loud, look at him! This whelp isn’t even able to stand up for himself against a drone with the same rank as him! He’s a sniveling coward, and he’s just holding us back-”

“Another word, Scorpion, and I’ll bite out your tongue and gift it to the queen as a tribute,” Pharynx suddenly barked, a sharp edge in his raspy voice that immediately made Scorpion shut up. Pharynx didn’t turn to look at them, his eyes focused on the badlands below. “Thorax is pathetic, yes. But he is my brother, and I plan to see him pull his weight. Now shut up and do your job.”

Scorpion winced, his ears folding back. He mumbled out a wordless apology before drifting forward to join his fellow drone a ways ahead of Thorax. He shot the runt a sneer as he went, making Thorax quiver and look away.

“Speaking of our job,” Mandible, the other drone, suddenly piped up. “Remind me: why are we out here in a rain and lightning storm? Strikes me this would be the perfect time to settle down and take a nap in the Hive.”

“Oh? And how do you figure that?” Pharynx asked in a flat tone, his eyes briefly darting back to Mandible impatiently.

Mandible shrugged. “Well, with all them Tatzlwurms breaking out from the ground, they practically handle everything we need to do for patrol for us, don’t they? When it rains, they come up and attack anything that moves. No intruders, that way.”

“No intruders,” Pharynx agreed with a slow nod before scowling. “And no food.”

“Eh?”

“Tatzlwurms are predators, Mandible,” Pharynx explained as if to a freshly-hatched grub. “And when it rains, they leave their burrows and are sent into a wild frenzy. They will kill anything they can get their tongues on, regardless of whether or not it’s their natural prey. And that means that a lot of the animals we prey on for love out here are being hunted en masse. So, until the rain clears and the Tatzlwurms return to their underground homes, we are out here to cull their numbers and protect our food. Make sense yet?”

Mandible opened his mouth to offer up some form of counter or rebuttal, but a short, quiet hiss from Pharynx was all it took to make it clear that he wasn’t expecting an answer. Mandible sighed and fell back a short distance with a nod. “Yes, sir.”

Thorax didn’t let it show on his face, but he couldn’t help but feel a small amount of satisfaction at seeing these two getting shot down like that. This kind of treatment was nothing new, of course, and it filled him with shame to know that, in a way, they were right. As far as changelings went, he was small, scrawny, weak, and above all, cowardly. Most drones were eager to do their jobs to help the Hive grow and flourish, but Thorax’s knees went weak at the mere thought of engaging in combat, or of lying to other types of creatures so he could harvest love for food.

And yet despite this, Pharynx dragged him along, forcing him to partake in these regular patrols. No matter how much he slowed them down, Pharynx insisted that he be a part of the process.

Thorax’s eyes tilted back down to the ground, his thoughts consuming him. He traced the crags and stones with a solemn frown, hoping that their patrol would get lucky and that they wouldn’t have to deal with any Tatzlwurms. Those things were big, nasty, and they made him feel more than a little uncomfortable. Tentacles in the mouth, there was just something wrong about that.

“Alright, we’re getting close to our next turn,” Pharynx suddenly called back to be heard over the downpour. He spun in the air so he was flying backward, allowing his piercing purple eyes to survey his team. “We turn west at that spike up ahead, then keep moving for another five miles. After that, we cut back hard to the south and return to the Hive. Any questions?”

Mandible and Scorpion gave quick statements of “No, Sir!” Thorax, on the other hoof, merely shook his head.

Pharynx’s eyes narrowed at the puny drone. “What was that, Thorax? I can’t hear you over this rain, and that fact that you didn’t say a word!”

Thorax let out a small, high-pitched yelp of alarm and quickly straightened his posture. “S-sorry, sir! No questions!” he replied, raising his voice to be heard.

“Pay attention next time,” Pharynx snarled before rotating back around and picking up the speed. “Let’s move in.”

Thorax sighed heavily, his morale plummeting from the treatment, but he was quick to shrug it off and carry on. This was nothing new for him. In fact, all things considered, this was a pretty tame day compared to what he often dealt with back within the ever-churning walls of the Hive.

“Tough love… that’s just how things work in my family, I guess,” he thought to himself, his eyes drifting down again. He was silent for a moment, his mind beginning to lose itself in thought when movement caught his attention. Curious, he turned to look, and his eyes widened when he spotted a Tatzlwurm slithering angrily over a collection of low-walled trenches, having just emerged from a practical forest of stone spikes.

Thorax lifted several feet in the air to put some distance between him and the enraged worm before he shouted over to Pharynx. “T-T-Tatzlwurm spotted!” He pointed to it when the rest of the team stopped and looked back at him. “Down there, in the trenches! It looks like it’s looking for something!”

All eyes followed his hoof, and a serious frown marred Pharynx’s face. “Alright. Good spot, brother,” he called before his horn ignited with acid-green flames. “Let’s go do our jobs! Put that worm back in the dirt!”

Mandible and Scorpion called out their agreement with the order, their own horns flaring with magic. With a collective war cry, the trio of changelings dive-bombed for the Tatzlwurm, eager to go into battle.

It was then that Thorax realized he had to join them, and any excitement he felt at having contributed was summarily executed. He stared down, slack-jawed, at the Tatzlwurm, unable to make himself move. “Oh, boy…”

The first blasts of magic exploded across the back of the Tatzlwurm’s head, eliciting a furious roar from its mouth. It reared up, its face splitting open and its tongues lashing out erratically amid a combined splash of saliva and rainwater. Thorax felt a small churn of disgust in his stomach when he saw that a small part of the Tatzlwurm’s inner mouth was missing as if blown away by a small, controlled explosion. “Has another group already fought this one?”

Thorax didn’t get a chance to get a better look before the hole fell out of sight. The Tatzlwurm reached out with its tentacles as Pharynx was making an arcing pass to fire at it from the side. With an otherworldly shriek, it lunged and coiled its tongues around Pharynx in a tight grip, drawing an alarmed gasp out of him.

Thorax’s eyes widened, adrenaline pumping through his veins. “Brother!” he shouted, all previous reservations about going into battle overwhelmed by a surge of protective instincts. Igniting his own horn with magic, he flew down as fast as he could, trying to decide on a course of action. He had the weakest magic out of all of the drones on this team, so rescuing Pharynx by blasting the tongues wasn’t very likely to work. He was physically weak, so prying him away by hoof was sure to end in both of them getting chomped.

But there was one thing Thorax could do with at least a degree of competence, one skill he had managed to get some experience with.

Grunting with effort, Thorax’s entire body was consumed in a rush of green flames. They expanded out rapidly before parting like a curtain, revealing a praying mantis easily ten feet tall free falling through the air. It lifted one of its blades and brought it down on the tongues with all of its might, biting into the slippery, pliant flesh with a sickening squelch.

He didn’t cut through the tongues, but he was at least able to cause enough damage to make the Tatzlwurm release Pharynx and flail back with a howl of pain. It was soon distracted by the continued bombardment from Mandible and Scorpion, giving Thorax the window he needed to fly to his brother.

Switching back to his base form, Thorax reached out and grabbed his elder brother by the shoulders to keep him steady in the air. “Pharynx!” he said, his eyes wandering over the other drone’s body and searching for any signs of damage. “You’re not hurt, are you?!”

“I’m fine,” Pharynx dismissed while shrugging off his hooves. “Focus on the- LOOK OUT!”

Thorax shouted in surprise when Pharynx suddenly shoved him away. The reason why became clear when the maw of the Tatzlwurm snapped shut where they had both been mere seconds earlier. Thorax barely had time to shiver at the realization of how close he had been to getting eaten when the worm’s head lurched to one side and slammed into him hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs.

“THORAX!” Pharynx’s voice was just audible through the rain and the wind as Thorax was sent spiraling to the ground below, having lost all control of his flight. Dazed and confused by the world spinning wildly around him, he was only just able to spread his wings and slow down his fall enough to not be seriously damaging.

It still hurt like crazy, though.

He hit the ground hard, tumbling into a series of painful rolls before falling around ten feet down to land at the bottom of the trench. Groaning, he rolled slowly onto his belly and pushed himself back into a standing position.

A sudden crash right over his head made Thorax scream and bolt into a mad sprint down the length of the trench, his eyes screwing shut. He could still feel the tremors in the earth from the struggle and hear the roars of the Tatzlwurm as it withstood the continued assault of the rest of the team.

Around fifteen minutes later, Thorax staggered out of the trench. He collapsed to the ground in a gasping, shaking heap. Slowly, very slowly, his breath began to calm down, and he was able to wrestle his breathing under control. “That,” he thought as he took in a deep breath. “Was terrifying.”

After a minute or so of catching his breath, he opened his eyes and looked around. The rain had let up a couple of minutes ago, and the first red glows of the sunset were peaking through the clouds and lending an eerily-crimson glow to the world. He was on the side of a slope that gradually ascended to hug the base of a large, red mesa. A small cave was in the side of it, drawing his attention.

Grunting with strain, Thorax figured he could take shelter in there until his squad came to find him. He was already in enough trouble as it was for running away like that, he realized with some dread, he didn’t want to add to it by being out in the open.

Dragging his hooves, Thorax pulled himself to the mouth of the cave when his eyes noticed something odd in the sand. Looking down, he realized that prints were leading up from another side of the slope, and disappearing into the cave he was now walking into. Hoofprints. Fresh ones, at that.

Moving more carefully, Thorax slipped into the cave and opened his mouth to call out to whatever changeling was already in here. However, his words died in his throat when he rounded the corner at the back and came face-to-face with something he had never seen before.

It was a changeling - or, well, it had the general shape of one. A female, to be precise. But instead of chitin, there was mud-caked lavender fur. There were no holes in her legs, there was a distinct lack of wings buzzing at her sides, and her eyes were not glowing like Thorax’s were. Instead, they simply stared back at him in confused shock.

“...Uh,” Thorax began uselessly.

The mystery creature in front of him screamed.

The Pony in The Cave

The strange, chitin-clad creature in front of Twilight let out a low, two-toned drone, its voice distorted in a way that sent shivers crawling up and down her spine like an army of millipedes. Its unnaturally glowing blue eyes pierced her soul, making her recoil in fear. Its shredded body, its sharp teeth, the tattered wings flicking this way and that on its back… all of these things and more proved to be the last straw.

Twilight opened her mouth, primal terror swallowing her whole, and she screamed.

The moment she did, the creature immediately began to back away from her, screaming right back at her.

With the aid of adrenaline, Twilight cast aside any concerns about the water clinging to her coat or the wound in her side. She sprung back up to her hooves, her horn flaring up with magic before she let loose a wild, unfocused beam of raw offensive energy. Sadly, in her frightened and confused state, her shot went flying way off the mark, knocking a few pebbles loose from the ceiling and nothing else.

“Ew, ew, ew! Get away from me!” Twilight shouted as she backpedaled deeper into the cave, firing off bolt after wild bolt of magic at the monster that had somehow snuck up on her. She could already imagine it pouncing on her, snarling and snapping violently as it bit for her throat. The idea of being eaten alive by some pony-looking monster drove her fear to greater heights, and tears began to leak out of the corner of her eyes.

But just as she was absolutely terrified, the bug before her had seemingly been sent into a state of fear itself. It let out a few alarmed yelps before ducking back around the corner to hide from her blasts.

Twilight, emboldened by the beasts retreat, drew up more power and made ready to press the attack. She took a step forward, ready to fire off another blast at a moment’s-

“W-wait!” the two tones voice from before cried out, shaking in fear. “Wait, don’t hurt me! I don’t wanna fight you!”

That gave Twilight pause. She drew back her hoof and took a slow, deep breath, not entirely convinced of what she was hearing. After a moment, she held her head high, though she kept her horn lit up with energy, just in case. “W-who are you? Actually, no, w-what are you?!” she asked shakily.

She could hear movement around the corner before the creature poked its head slowly back around, its ears folded back and its body low to the ground. Now that Twilight was really looking at it, and knew it could talk, it… almost looked kind of pitiful, cowering like that. Her eyes slowly widened, and the spark on her horn began to diminish.

“My name is Thorax,” he said after a few more seconds of silence, bravely poking his head further out. “I, uh… y-you shouldn’t be here.”

Twilight took a step back, still feeling a little unnerved by his appearance. She squinted at him as he slowly but surely revealed himself entirely, taking careful mental note of every layer of his appearance. “Uh… again, what are you?” she repeated after a second, her brain playing catch-up. “Are you a pony? I mean, I’ve never seen a pony like you before…”

Thorax glanced down at himself for a moment before shaking his head. “No, I’m not a pony. Er… I’m a changeling. And, uh...” he scuffed the floor awkwardly before looking back up at her with an indecisive frown. “L-look, you’re really not supposed to be here. You’re trespassing in changeling territory, and you need to leave. If any of the others find you, they’ll-”

“Changelings?” Twilight asked, her fear starting to dwindle at the unfamiliar name. Slowly but surely, a gigantic grin began to appear on her face, and she took a few excited steps forward. “Wow! I’ve never heard of changelings before! Why are you called that? Can you shapeshift? Why do you look so much like a pony? Can you do magic? What’s with the holes? Why are you- GHUH!”

Twilight’s words died in her throat when her side suddenly flared with pain, her injury rudely reminding her that it was there and still untreated. With a gasp, she crumpled to the dirty ground and curled into a ball, her breath heavy and shaky.

Thorax took a step back, clearly surprised. “What the? Hey, are you alright?” he asked, any and all of the intensity from his warning gone just like that. He came up to Twilight’s side and looked her over, his eyes soon landing on her injury. “Oh… oh, that doesn’t look good.”

“It hurts,” Twilight hissed through clenched teeth, her eyes screwing shut. “It didn’t hurt this bad earlier… ow, ow, ow! Make it stop…”

Thorax leaned back, his ears drooping. “Uh, uh, um… I, uh…” he mumbled uselessly, his hoof reaching up to rub at the side of his head. After a few seconds, though, he seemed to get an idea. He leaned down and placed his hooves on Twilight’s shoulder and near her hip. “Could you flatten out a bit?”

Twilight tensed involuntarily under his touch. The cold, hard surface of his chitin pressing on her body was a foreign and deeply unsettling feeling for her. For a moment, primal instinct kicked in again, and she curled up more to protect herself.

“Please, I’m trying to help,” Thorax pleaded carefully, gently pulling to coax her to open up.

After a few seconds, Twilight managed to calm her fear down enough to think properly. “If he really wanted to hurt me, chances are he would have done it by now,” she reasoned to herself. “And besides, it’s not like I have any other options. If he can help me, I just have to trust him…”

Still nervous, Twilight swallowed heavily before slowly uncurling her body and laying flat on her side, presenting her open injury for the world to see.

Thorax looked it over for a few seconds, working his jaw as if he were chewing on something, or thinking really heavily. Then, without any warning, he opened his mouth and leaned down. Twilight lost sight of his face, and for a moment, she locked up with fear at the idea that he was about to chomp down on her.

Her fear was replaced with disgust when something warm, sticky, and moist spread over her injury. The torn flesh burned from the contact, making her hiss through tightly clenched teeth, her ears pinning back against her skull and her legs twitching against her will. However, just as quickly as the pain started, it began to fade, as did all feeling in flesh around it.

“There, that should keep it sealed for a while,” Thorax said with a self-satisfied voice, pulling back and leaving Twilight to her own devices.

Blinking open her eyes, Twilight looked down to see a thick patch of sticky, slimy, green… er, stuff covering her injury. It was somewhat transparent and adhered to her fur remarkably well, covering her wound and allowing her to look at it without losing much detail.

“...What… is this stuff?” she asked, moving a hoof down to poke at the substance.

Thorax smiled innocently. “Changeling mucus.”

“WHAT?!” Twilight shrieked, springing back up to stand on the very tips of her hooves, her back hunched up while her ears folded back in revulsion. “Eeeeueue, ew, ew, ew! I’m covered in it!”

Thorax blinked, tilting his head to one side. “Er, no, just your injury- Don’t pull it off!” he suddenly protested when Twilight began to pull at the edge with one of her hooves. “It’s super adherent! If you pull that off, you’re gonna be ripping out a lot of fur.”

Twilight shuddered in disgust, walking to one side as if that would somehow get the disgusting resin off of her. “Guh. It’s disgusting!”

Thorax’s ears lowered, and he looked away as if in shame. “I’m sorry… I couldn’t think of anything else,” he mumbled, his voice low and pathetic.

Twilight poked at the resin for a few more seconds before looking away and taking several deep breaths. Slowly but surely, as the initial shock and disgust at realizing she was covered in mucus wore off, she was able to see the merit in the unorthodox application. The flesh around her injury had gone numb, so she wasn’t feeling any pain right now aside from the general ache all through her body. But more than that, it was covering the wound and keeping it from bleeding.

“Uh… will this stuff keep infections out?” she eventually asked with an uneasy cringe.

Thorax lifted his head and nodded, his wings buzzing on his back for a second. “Uh-huh. It’s usually used to cocoon our prey and preserve them for a long time so that we can keep it fresh. It’s also really good for keeping any prisoners and subduing them, and- why are you looking at me like that?”

Twilight’s eyes had locked onto Thorax the moment he had said the word ‘prey.’ Swallowing a lump in her throat, she took an uneasy step back. “Prey… what kind of prey?” she asked after a moment of tense silence.

Thorax’s eyes widened as he realized what he had just implied. “Oh. OH! Oh, no, no, not you! I’m not going to eat you! Changelings don’t eat meat. Well, not unless we really, really need to! We eat love from our prey.”

Twilight was quiet for a moment, trying to wrap her head around that. Then she let out a little snort of amusement, her hoof flying up to cover her muzzle to kill her oncoming snickers.

Thorax’s cheeks puffed up. “Hey! What’s so funny?” he asked indignantly, his wings twitching in agitation on his back.

Twilight giggled at the face, before shaking her head. “S-sorry, just - heh, - I just wasn’t expecting you to say that,” she said between her chortles.

Thorax huffed. “Oh, come on! You don’t see me laughing at you for your diet!”

Twilight was quick to get her laughs under control after that. Once she calmed down, she took a deep breath and gave Thorax an understanding look. “Right, sorry. I don’t really have much reason to laugh at you for that anyway. I mean, I saved my home with the magic of friendship. Twice.”

Thorax blinked. “...Whuh?”

“Anyways, enough about me,” Twilight was quick to press on, the scholarly part of her mind kicking into gear. “Tell me more about you! You eat love? How does that work? And what’s with all of the holes in your legs? And again, can you shapeshift? What kind of magic do you have? Are you...”

Twilight’s barrage of questions died in her throat when she noticed Thorax slowly lowering himself down to the ground and leaning back, overwhelmed by the barrage of questions. She chuckled sheepishly and scratched the back of her head. “S-sorry, I’ve just never met a changeling before. I don’t think anypony has. I’ve never heard of you, and I’m just so curious!”

Thorax gave her a stiff nod, slowly starting to lift himself back up. “No, no, it’s alright… uh… for what it’s worth, I’ve never actually met a, ah… what did you call me earlier? A pony?” he asked timidly.

“You’ve never heard of ponies?”

“Well, I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen them before… they’re supposed to live really far away from here, in Equestria,” Thorax replied before seemingly remembering something. He straightened himself out and looked at her with a degree of caution. “Actually… what are you doing here?”

Twilight’s excitement and good mood were swiftly shattered by the reminder of her situation. Her ears drooped, and a tired sigh slid past her lips. “I was part of an expedition into the badlands to explore and map things out. Right now, Equestria only has the first few miles and the rough outline charted. I wanted to be a part of that kind of research, and so I signed up when I heard about the expedition. But we were attacked by some kind of giant angry worm, and I got separated from the others.”

Thorax glanced back towards the mouth of the cave. “Ah, that would probably be a Tatzlwurm. They get pretty feisty when rain falls, and can be very dangerous. I had to deal with one earlier myself… I’m actually probably in a lot of trouble for running away.”

Twilight took a few steps forward, a small spark of hope in her chest. “So, you’re a native? I mean, changelings live in the badlands? You mentioned I was trespassing earlier. Are you organized into some kind of kingdom?”

Before Thorax could answer, his ears suddenly stood bolt upright. Twilight, confused, perked her own ears up to listen for whatever had caught the odd creature’s attention.

It was a voice, low, gruff, and similarly distorted like Thorax’s.

“Thorax, where are you?!”

If it were possible for an exoskeleton to turn pale, Thorax managed it expertly. He suddenly went totally stiff, his eyes going wide and his jaw clamping shut. “...Pharynx,” he choked out.

Twilight tilted her head. “Pharynx? As in the membrane-lined cavity behind the nose and mouth-”

“He’s my brother,” Thorax suddenly hissed at her in a whisper, his wings snapping into life and carrying him forward. He pressed a hole-riddled hoof against Twilight’s lips, pushing her back and totally out of sight of the cave mouth. “Look, I’m already in trouble with him, but if he sees you, who knows what will happen!”

Twilight tried to speak and pry Thorax’s hoof away, but he held firm.

“Look, just stay down and out of sight until we’re gone, okay? It…” he pulled his hoof away, and a small smile formed on his face. “It was nice meeting you. Goodbye.”

Twilight watched as Thorax then turned and galloped out of the cave, his hoof-falls becoming muffled before the sound of buzzing wings reached her ears. Slowly, she snuck up to the corner and peered around to observe what was happening. She saw three more changelings, one of which with a different color scheme, flying down to meet Thorax.

“That one in the front is colored differently… and they all have an insect-like appearance. Do they have a social structure based on castes like an ant hill or beehive?” she wondered curiously while listening in.

“Thorax, where have you been, you idiot?!” The purple-eyed changeling, Pharynx, if Twilight had to guess, snapped upon getting close to Thorax.

Twilight strained her ears to make out the response, but Thorax’s voice was too low and quiet to be discerned.

“I told you he was a coward,” one of the others jeered once he was finished with an almost predatory look on his face. “Couldn’t even stand to do his job for more than a minute!”

Pharynx turned back to that one with an angry scowl. “Shut up, Scorpion. In case you forgot, he saved my life and pointed out the worm long before either of you did!”

Scorpion cowered back from the shout, his ears drooping and an inaudible apology tumbling out of his lips.

Pharynx sighed and turned back to Thorax, carefully checking him over for any injuries. After a few seconds, he seemed satisfied and nodded back towards the south. “The rain’s cleared up, and the Tatzlwurms are returning to the dirt. We need to report in.”

“And Thorax needs some disciplinary action for running off in the middle of a fight,” the last changeling remarked with a more respectful tone. “Saved your life or not, boss, he still ran away, and that’s not acceptable.”

“I know that, Mandible,” Pharynx growled, disappointment evident in his voice. He then shared a few hushed sentences with Thorax. After a few seconds of back and forth, Pharynx smacked Thorax on the shoulder and turned to the group at large. “Well? What are you buffoons loitering around for?! We’re moving out!”

And with that, the four changelings began to fly away into the distance, the rapidly-fading light of the sunset allowing Twilight to watch them for a time. She extracted herself from her hiding place and trotted up to the mouth of the cave to watch them go, her eyes glued onto Thorax until he disappeared into the distance.

A dusty breeze blew by, and the sun finally settled beneath the horizon, and dusk settled over the land.

After a few minutes of silence, Twilight nodded to herself before withdrawing back into the cave. “It’s too dangerous to travel at night, especially in this place,” she told herself as she made her way back around the bend. “Besides, I need the rest. I’ll look for the expedition team in the morning.”

With that sentiment ringing in her mind, Twilight settled down on the cool, hard floor of the cave, closed her eyes, and tried to get some much-needed sleep.

Left Behind

Twilight Sparkle winced when she peered out of her cave the following morning, the stark contrast between the badlands in the rain and the badlands in the sun was shocking, to say the least. What had once been a dreary and largely-depressing landscape, had become hostile and threatening. The muted greys and dusty browns had become deep crimsons and fiery oranges, all of which rippled under the heat of the sun’s light.

Even from the shelter of her cave, she could feel the heatwaves rolling over her stiff, sore body, and she knew that stepping out into the light would be exceedingly unpleasant… but what choice did she have? “The expedition team hasn’t come back to find me, yet. Or if they have, they haven’t been looking in the right places…”

All through the night, Twilight’s sleep had been routinely disturbed by distant sounds. Every time, she had perked up her ears and hoped with all of her heart that it was the team sending out search parties to find her. Every time, she had been met with disappointment when the sounds came into focus and proved to be nocturnal animals calling to one another.

As she watched the sun slowly rising, Twilight’s mind was struggling with the options presented to her. “This cave is safe, or at least a lot more safe than anywhere outside. But it’s pretty out of the way from where the team was, and it’s not easy to spot. If I want to link up with the others and get out of here, I might have to leave the safety of the cave… but then I’ll be out in the open, and who knows what kinds of creatures I could bump into?”

Her mind wandered back to that odd creature she had encountered the previous night, and her eyes turned to stare at the resin that still clung to her injury. Thorax had been kind to her, even tended to her injuries, but he made it sound like the rest of his kind were not so hospitable. At least not the ones that had been traveling with him. “I’d want to avoid them if I bumped into any, then.”

She returned her attention to the desert and took a deep breath. Eventually, she made up her mind on her course of action and gingerly set off from the cave. The moment she was out of the shade, the hot air began to nip at the fur on her back, and the ground beneath her hooves burned with every step. She let out a few quiet hisses and squeaks, before eventually getting used to the pain.

She made her way back into the trenches that had sheltered her from the giant worm the previous afternoon — a Tatzlwurm, if she was remembering Thorax’s name for it right — and began to navigate them. Every so often, she would leap up to poke her head out and get an idea of her surroundings. The effort was proving tiring, especially under the searing sun. She was already sweating profusely and panting after only ten minutes of this.

All the while, she kept her ears perked up and attentive while her eyes focused on the path ahead of her, trying to retrace her steps. Every so often, a small desert lizard would skitter in her path before disappearing into some crack or cranny in the trench’s walls, or the sound of some unfamiliar scavenger bird shrieking in the distance would reach her and make her squat down out of primal instinct. A dusty breeze washed over her every so often, howling and whistling ominously between the stones and long-dead trees.

Eventually, she came out of the trenches and found herself back where she had landed when she had fallen. The impact marks left behind had blended back into the ground from the rainfall before solidifying under the scorching heat of the day, making it look almost like an ancient battleground. In a way, it kind of was. Except instead of a battle, it was a frantic chase of a predator after its prey.

“But this is good,” Twilight reminded herself shortly after a shiver ran over her at the memory. “I know where this is. I just need to get to high ground, and I can find where the first Tatzlwurm attacked the team! Then I can go after them!”

She turned her eyes up, searching the cliffside for a suitably sturdy place to pop up to. She found one soon enough and disappeared in a flash of lavender light. When she emerged, now tendering a slight headache, she was at the top of the cliff, a few dozen yards away from where she had first taken the leap. She could even see the tree that had stopped her initial rolling, and the rock that had given her the gash.

She cringed when she saw that the tip of the rock was still painted a deep, almost black, shade of red. “Oh… ugh,” she mumbled uncomfortably at the sight. Tearing her eyes away from the spot of her own dried blood, she focused her eyes to look into the distance. She squinted hard against the glare and ambient light. After a moment, she spotted her target.

“Alright… there we go,” she said with a small smile before looking down from her cliffside and grimacing. “I need to save power…”

With a sigh, she realized that she was going to have to get there on hoof. If she wanted to keep her magic reserves intact enough for self-defense, then the only teleport she could afford now was to the bottom of the cliff. Swallowing hard and worrying about letting the trail get cold, she closed her eyes and teleported back to the bottom of the cliff.

Stifling a pained groan, she set off back into the crags. Her breath came in increasingly labored pants as she went, and soon she became acutely aware of just how dry her throat was becoming. In the back of her head, she prayed that the wreckage of that one wagon was still where it had fallen and that it had been carrying some water bottles. She had to keep herself hydrated. She was in no mood to become a dried, shriveled-up corpse, after all.

She briefly thought back on that pool she had spotted in the back of the cave, but soon dismissed it from her mind. Without any means of boiling it, she had no way of being sure that the water there was safe to drink.

It must have been at least half an hour of stumbling blindly through spikes of rocks, coming up to dead ends and yawning chasms before, at long last, she leaped down a small ledge and came upon the scene of the attack. Much like the damage left behind before, the copious hoofprints had softened under the rain, and much of them had already been filled in by dust and sand that had blown in after the fact.

No ponies, though, and no sign that they had come back.

“...Oh, no…” Twilight whispered, her ears drooping as she studied the tracks in more detail. To her horror, the prints that were running away were the most recent ones. The expedition team hadn’t come back. Not this way, at least.

Another wave of heat and burning wind washed over her, and Twilight suddenly broke down into a series of coughs, her hoof flying up to cover her muzzle. The coughs were dry and raspy, stinging her throat and reinforcing her growing need for water. Shaking her head and wiping a hoof over her brow to dispel her sweat, Twilight looked around and caught sight of the wagon’s wreckage.

“Please let there be water, please let there be water, please let there be water…”

Heading to the back, she looked inside to examine the wagon’s contents. To her dismay, it did not seem to be a water wagon. The vast majority of the cargo inside was comprised of camping supplies. Lengths of rope, thick sheets of canvas for tents, rods, and spikes made out of wood for holding said tents together, and not much else.

Twilight’s ears fell flat against her head, a horrible feeling building up in the pits of her stomach. “No, no, no!” she thought desperately before hopping up and lighting up her horn. Growing frantic, the dryness in her throat feeling as if it were starting to choke the life out of her, she began to throw anything and everything that wasn’t water out of the wagon. A sizable cloud of dust was kicked up outside with every new item she added to the pile, the heavy thumps and cracks echoing all around her in the desolate landscape.

Soon, her search had rendered the wagon was all but empty. She was about to give up hope of finding some drinking water when, finally, she spotted a single, lone waterskin pressed up to the back wall, near the driver’s seat.

Praising the stallion who had left it behind, Twilight quickly snatched it up, tore off the lid, and greedily guzzled down the contents. Boundless relief flooded her system as, finally, finally, the drought in her throat began to fade, and the relatively-cool water brought down her temperature enough to be at least acceptable.

Unfortunately, the water was gone much too soon. Twilight shook the cannister a few times to get the last few drops out before slumping to the floor and letting off a quiet sigh. “...They left me, didn’t they?” she wondered to herself in a whisper.

She shouldn’t have been surprised. They had no reason to suspect she had survived, given the nature of the enemy they had faced, and the fact that she had never come back. If Thorax’s assessment had been correct, then it was likely that the team had been harassed by even more of those Tatzlwurms as they attempted to flee. If enough ponies were hurt or enough supplies destroyed, it would only make sense to call the whole operation off and head home.

With her ears drooping, Twilight screwed her eyes shut and took several deep breaths in a bid to calm down her swelling emotions. “I’m all alone out here…”

She briefly toyed with the idea of trying to follow the team, but soon discarded it as unwise. The team had a big enough head start that she had no chance of catching up, and the edge of the Badlands was too far away for her to get there without running the risk of severe dehydration.

Her only hope of getting back home, then, was to survive long enough for the team to make it back and report her as missing. Princess Celestia and her friends would come running as soon as they found out what had happened, and they would find her, and she’d be fine. Heck, maybe Spike could send her a letter, and they could establish a line of communication to make finding her easier.

But there was no telling for sure how long that would take. For now, Twilight had to focus on just staying alive.

Taking one last breath, she forced herself to her hooves and sluggishly leaped down from the back of the wagon. “Well, I just hope they all made it out alright,” she thought to herself before scanning the debris left in her wake for anything of use. If she was going to be stuck here for the time being, she needed to prepare herself accordingly.

In short order, she had picked up the empty waterskin, enough wood and stone for a campfire for the night, and a bedroll to ease her muscles when next she slept. Resting, uncovered on the hard rock in the strikingly cold night of the desert, was a recipe for incredibly sore muscles.

Satisfied with her haul, Twilight turned to stare up the hill to where the expedition team had fled. “...Good luck,” she whispered before looking back in the direction of the cave that she had decided would serve as her home in this blasted desert. A lump formed in her throat. “...We’ll both need it.”

With those words ringing in her ears, Twilight set off at a brisk trot, the blazing sun bearing down on her.

Loneliness

Twilight Sparkle was annoyed. Not at her dire situation, or the perpetual soreness in her muscles, or the agitating dryness in her throat that left her constantly coughing and scratching at it. She was not annoyed at the rocky floor of the cave that had been her home for the last few days, nor was she annoyed by the unflinchingly hostile heat that beat down on the desert every time she had the audacity to peak outside.

All of that was bad, yes. But no, the source of her ire was something far more personal.

“Why do all of the survival books make it look so easy?!” she groaned from the back of her cave before devolving into a series of coughs.

Twilight had always been a studious sort, delving into whatever tomes she could get her literarily greedy hooves on. A fair few of them had been about ponies surviving in dangerous environments for prolonged periods of time. As such, with her main bulk of survival experience coming from family camping trips in the woods, she had called on what she remembered of those to act as her guiding compass.

There were a few problems, though. First off, the ponies in those books were physically much stronger than she was. Secondly, the authors had often seen fit to cover their mistakes in greater detail than their triumphs, to up the drama on every page. Narratively, it was a sound move to keep a reader hooked, but utterly useless for a pony actually trying to get some life-saving information from them, especially when pulled up from the dregs of one’s memory and not the page itself.

Third, most of the survival stories she had read had taken place on islands, or in forests, or frozen tundras. The general principles still applied, of course. Find food, safe drinking water, and shelter. The minutia of those principles was radically different in the blazing desert of the badlands.

For example, Twilight had put it together exceedingly quickly after her first foray to bring supplies back from the shattered wagon that going out while the sun was out was a terrible, terrible idea. She had only done so one other time since then before it occurred to her that it would be far safer to move at night. The heat of the daytime sun sapped her strength like a leech on the jugular, and left her dehydrated and sweating profusely.

Another mistake she had made was leaving the cave door completely uncovered. Sunlight still seeped through, especially in the evenings, and the way it reflected around inside heated up the rocks to the point that Twilight had been forced to retreat into the very back of the cave and huddle up in the corner by the pool.

If nothing else, she had water, and a lot of it. She had sent a few small orbs of magic light into the pool to check its depth, and had discovered that it was at least six feet deep. But more than that, she had discovered a hole in the back wall of the pool that she could only assume led into some kind of large, underground pond or lake. So as far as water was concerned, she was set in terms of quantity. Enough to last for weeks, if not months.

The question then became whether or not it was safe to drink from.

The pool was far from clear, a surefire sign that less-than-desirable things dwelled within. But without something to boil it in to purify it, she was left with few other options. The water flask she had salvaged from the wreckage had proven less than workable in this situation, being a flimsy and, more importantly, flammable container. Putting it over an open flame to try and boil the water would simply leave her without a container.

So, she had resorted to drinking from the pool. She did so sparingly and only took as much water as she felt she needed, hoping to minimize her risk of contracting anything dangerous. A flimsy hope, she acknowledged, but it gave her some small comfort all the same.

She let out a snort of breath and went over her situation in her head, conjuring up a makeshift checklist in her mind’s eye to help her visualize what she had to do.

“Shelter, check. Water… eeh, let’s put an asterisk next to it. Food… not checked.”

Her stomach audibly grumbled at the reminder that she had failed to put anything substantial inside of it for several days. Her hoof lifted up to rub at her tummy while an uncomfortable groan slid past her dry lips.

“I need food.”

Stifling another groan and trying to ignore the riot of her stomach, she turned her eyes up to look at the cave mouth, gauging the time. The sun was starting to set, painting the world in shades of deep, deep crimson. A small amount of relief came over Twilight, and she slowly rose to her hooves. “Finally!”

With traveling during the day no longer being the preferred option, she had to scrounge for food at night. She hadn’t ventured out of her cave yet, though, if only out of fear of the unknown. But, over the days since she raided the busted wagon, she had observed the Badlands from the relative safety of her cave, trying to get an idea of what kinds of wildlife called the desert their home at night.

Birds and small rodents had been all that stood out to her. Owls, night buzzards, and a family of mice whose ghostly squeaks staked claim to the sands for miles around.

For such small lungs, their voices flew remarkably far.

Twilight took a deep breath as the last light of the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, plunging the world into her namesake. “Okay… no more stalling…”

She briefly stalled to take one more sip of water from her pool, praying to Luna that it was safe, and then set out from the cave to search the badlands for any sign of food.

“The ponies in the survival novels always seemed to find what they needed,” Twilight thought irritably to herself almost an hour later, her eyes searching the open expanse of cold dirt ahead of her for any sign of edible plant matter. She would go for moss at this point! “Maybe I’m just not desperate enough yet?”

A nice thought, but no. She knew this wasn’t some survival novel where she would, at the last minute of desperate need, find exactly the thing she needed. This was real life. Either she found what she needed and lived, or she didn’t, and she died. There was no hoof guiding her to keep her alive. She was alone…

Alone. Truly alone. Not even Spike was with her.

Twilight’s eyes fell at that thought. She had never truly been totally and completely alone before, she now realized. Her heart fell heavy with the realization, and her hoof wandered up to her heart while her mind drifted back to her friends.

What were they thinking right now? Did they even know what had happened, yet? Had the expedition team made good on their return? It was hard to tell, but she figured the answer was no. If her friends knew her fate, Spike would have sent her a letter by now, a frantically scribbled note demanding that she let him know she was fine and how he could find her.

But what about the others? What would Rainbow Dash, or Pinkie Pie, or Fluttershy think? What of Rarity, or Applejack?

Twilight’s eyes began to mist over as she predicted their responses to the news that she was missing and possibly dead in her head, one at a time. “Heh… Rainbow would p-probably be the most eager to come after me, right along with Pinkie and Applejack. Although, she wouldn’t have their patience about it. Fluttershy and Rarity would be worried sick…”

She closed her eyes and wiped a hoof over her face, sniffling and fighting to regain a hold of herself.

“The survival novels never really talked about the emotional part of this, either…”

Sighing wearily, Twilight slowly dragged herself down the slope and into the pit below, her eyes wandering over the terrain.

Dead dirt. There was no plant life to be had anywhere in sight.

A single tear that fell from Twilight’s cheek was the first moisture this soil had soaked up in days.

Twilight spent several hours scrounging around for food, and all she was able to find was a scraping of thin moss under a loose stone in one of those trenches. She brought it back to the cave when she found nothing else, stopping on the way to pick up a large sheet of fabric from the wreckage of the wagon. It had a few holes in it, but it would serve her purposes for now.

Upon her return, she started up a small flame with a few of the pieces of wood she harvested from the wagon, and held the stone over the fire in her magic. The moss she wound up peeling off and eating was dry, crunchy, and beyond disgusting on her tongue. It flaked and powdered in her mouth like crystal sprinkles on an old cupcake, reminding her almost of sandpaper, while the taste was that of poorly cooked seaweed dipped in a jar of pickle juice. Edible, but unenjoyable.

Feeling defeated, Twilight dragged herself over to the mouth of the cave again, her eyes staring up at the moon. The pristine white surface, marred by only a few small craters, still felt alien to her, even with how long it had been since the pattern of the Mare in The Moon ceased to exist.

In a way, some small part of her wished those craters would return, that the haunting, exaggerated silhouette of Nightmare Moon herself was there to look back down at her in contempt and resentment.

“At least then, I would have somepony to look at…”

With a heavy sigh, Twilight began the final part of her chores for the night before she would head inside to sleep through the first half of the day. She knew that the search parties wouldn’t be coming for her yet, but she still had to do it. To feel like she was doing something if nothing else.

With the world as still and as quiet as it was, and with the sky shrouded in the darkness of the night, the spell stood out incredibly. With her eyes closed, Twilight gathered power on her horn, then pointed it up to the sky. With a grimace and a quiet grunt of strain, she fired off a lone, flickering sphere of magic high into the air.

She opened her eyes and watched as it arced up and up, flickering and fading just slightly as if it were about to wink out. Then, with a muffled and barely audible pop and boom, the sphere exploded out like a firework, sending several smaller sparks of lavender light flying in all directions. They hovered there for a moment and then began to drift back down to earth, leaving thin trails of quickly dissipating smoke in their wake.

The light soon faded, and Twilight’s heart plummeted. The empty moon stared back at her as the smoke blew away, and Twilight’s rapidly-mounting loneliness began to swallow her whole. Shuddering, she screwed her eyes shut and fired off the spell a second time.

“Please, somepony see me,” she thought to herself when the pop reached her ears. “Somepony… anypony… Help me.”

She fired off the spell one more time before she was spent. And despite her efforts, her silent plea went unanswered…

It did not, however, go unseen.

Several miles away, Thorax trotted sluggishly through the halls of the Hive with his eyes downturned, and his lips pulled tightly into an exhausted grimace. As punishment for fleeing from combat without the orders of his commander, Thorax had been sentenced with three days without food, and a whole week of night patrol added on top of his regular duties in the Hive. Had he not saved Pharynx, odds are his punishment would have been infinitely worse.

The Hive shifted and warped around him, permitting him to pass between chamber without having to look up from his hooves. He knew exactly where he was going at all times. He had his destination, and the walls and the floors twisted to guide him there effortlessly.

“Interior clear,” he thought to himself in a monotone. “Better check the outside. Don’t wanna come off as lazy.”

Turning on his hooves, he marched for the nearest wall. A perfectly circular hole opened before him, spreading out with the sound of stone grinding on stone. He stepped through and into a tall, vertical chamber. To his left was a circular wall, while to his right was open air, with numerous open tunnels burrowed into the distant wall, each one glowing a soft green from the organic lights his kind made extensive use of. Directly in front of him was a sheer drop that would take him down dozens, if not hundreds, of meters.

He stepped forward.

More stone emerged from the wall to his left, pushing forth like a hoof through a thin sheen of mucus, providing him a walkway. He kept moving without slowing down, and soon enough, his path brought him to the far wall of the chamber. Again, the wall in front of him opened, and the comparatively chilly air of the Badlands at night washed over him.

Stepping out onto a jagged, natural balcony, Thorax swept his eyes from left to right, taking in the terrain and scanning for intruders. Nothing stood out to him. Just the emptiness of the badlands. The constant, yawning emptiness… and the loneliness that came with it.

He briefly mused over the paradoxical nature of that notion but was quick to dismiss it. He wasn’t like the other changelings. Or rather, they weren’t like him. And so he did not belong with them. He was always going to be the cowardly, sniveling wimp that the rest of the drones would relentlessly mock and torture and bully. Even his own brother, who protected him from others, treated him like garbage.

He didn’t belong here… but where else could he go? Out there into the world?

He snorted at himself. What a hilariously stupid idea. Leaving the Hive was certain death. As much of an outcast as he was here, he would be shunned as a freakish monster out there. Not to mention what the queen would do to him if she ever caught him after running away…

Thorax sighed, setting his chin on the rail that conveniently rose up from the edge of the balcony.

And then something caught his eye. Curious, Thorax shifted to his left.

His eyes widened. There, far in the distance, he could see a sphere of tiny lavender stars shimmering in the sky. They were tiny, and so far away that he was honestly amazed he had seen them at all. They hung there for a moment, then drifted back down and faded from view. Then, another burst came, and another.

The color of that light looked familiar, and slowly, his mind wandered back to a strange creature he had stumbled on in a cave a few days ago… that ‘pony.’

“...Is she still out there?” he thought to himself. “Am I… really alone?”

As if hoping for an answer, he continued to watch the horizon, desperate for one more repeat of the magical light.

It did not come again.

Author's Notes:

Fun fact: This chapter was originally going to be called 'Survival is Harder Than it Sounds,' and was going to be a bit more light-hearted with the narration and overall tone. Then I got to writing and that entire notion very quickly fell apart.

Stomach Rot

Over the remaining nights of his punishment, Thorax made it a point to travel to the balcony during the night and watch out for the flares of magic in the distance. It was a strange compulsion, one that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around. He didn’t understand why, but for some reason, seeing those bursts of light out there in the distance, barely visible unless you were actively searching for them, gave him some small comfort.

Maybe it was because of who he believed was casting the spell. That purple pony he had met in that cave. The fact that she was, as far as he could recall, the only one to treat him with an ounce of kindness — barring his brother, of course — in all his life had really made an impression. He had been expecting her to disappear and vanish after he left her behind, but now that he knew she was still around…

It was something of a relief, in an admittedly selfish way. It meant that he wasn’t alone, not really. Somewhere out there was another creature, one that had been nice to him, if a bit skittish, and who was probably feeling just as lost and confused as him.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, as the old saying went. On the final night of his punishment, he had wrapped up his patrol and took his place on the balcony, his eyes probing the horizon where he knew the spell would go off. Any minute now… any minute. But it never came. Thorax strained his eyes and dared to look around, hoping in vain that maybe he was just looking in the wrong spot.

No such luck. The sky remained dark.

An anxious chittering noise came from the bottom of Thorax’s voice, and he shuffled uneasily on his haunches. “She’s probably fine,” he thought to himself, lifting up one hoof to rub at his shoulder. “She probably went home. She did say she had come here with others, so she must have found them and left…”

But somehow, he just knew that wasn’t true. Or at the very least, he dearly feared that it wasn’t.

Was she in some kind of trouble? Was she hurt? Did she get lost out there? There were so many possible threats out in the Badlands that could leap on and destroy the unprepared, and that pony had seemed about as unprepared as one could get. Each one he thought of made his heart drop lower and lower in his chitin-clad chest.

“I need to go to her,” he finally determined to himself, his wings wavering on his back. The question then became, how would he go about it? He didn’t want to get in trouble again, after all…

The following morning, Thorax stepped out of a hole in the wall and into a large chamber tunneled into the shape of a towering cylinder. Hundreds of small caves and rooms were burrowed into the walls at even intervals that served as the bunks for the Hive’s many warriors. A single one could house up to twelve drones at once with room for personal space, and almost twenty if they clustered tightly together.

Most of those drones were out of their rooms, now, many of them gathered on the spacious floors below to perform training exercises. Others were performing aerial routines to wake themselves up or improve their agility. The rest had probably received orders and fluttered off to carry them out without question long before Thorax arrived.

His eyes swept over the room, hunting for one changeling in particular. Luckily, the unusual colors of his brother stood out like a sore thumb amidst his peers. Pharynx was down at the bottom level, barking out instructions to an assembled team of twelve drones who were all in the process of doing copious amounts of push-ups.

Taking a deep breath, Thorax snapped out his wings and descended. He passed by a few other drones on the way, but none of them even gave him the time of day to harass him. A small blessing, albeit a hurtful one.

As soon as Thorax’s hooves touched down on the cold stone floor, Pharynx turned to glance at him with a puzzled frown. “Thorax? What are you doing here?” he asked before glaring back at the drones before him. “I’m watching you lot! If I spot any slackers, I’ll crack all of your shells!”

As the thoroughly-motivated drones continued their workout, Pharynx gave his undivided attention to his little brother. “You look like garbage,” he noted callously.

“I slept like garbage,” Thorax replied quietly, lowering his eyes to look at his brother’s hooves.

“And? Are you here to whine that the floor’s too cold or something?” Pharynx asked impatiently. “I’m trying to do my job here, Thorax. So unless this is important, buzz off and leave me be.”

Thorax winced under Pharynx’s harsh tone. A moment later, though, he pulled himself together and spoke up. “I… I was wondering if I could…” he tried, but the words caught in his throat.

“You’re off punishment now, you know,” Pharynx pointed out, starting to tap his hoof. “So just spit it out! And remember your rank! Address me properly!”

Thorax snapped to attention without a moment’s hesitation. “S-sorry, sir! I want to request to go on lone wolf patrols, sir!” he finally explained, his fear of reprimand driving him to blurt the words without even thinking about it.

A few of the drones doing push-ups glanced up at him in surprise.

Pharynx, as if sensing this, glared back at them. “What did I say about slackers?!” he snapped, his horn sparking to life with green magic.

The listening drones were quick to get back to work.

Satisfied that they would not be interrupted again, Pharynx returned his attention to Thorax, a puzzled frown on his face. “Lone wolf patrol?”

Thorax nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

Thorax hesitated, his eyes lowering again. “...I let you all down with that Tatzelwurm when the rain was coming down,” he began, his ears drooping. “I ran off… Scorpion and Mandible are right. I’m weak, and I’m a coward.”

“Which is why this request makes absolutely no sense,” Pharynx pointed out, his brow furrowing. “You do know what you’re signing up for, right?”

Thorax met his brother’s eyes, his heart beating just a little faster as he really thought about it. “Y-yes, sir,” he eventually confirmed.

“Explain it to me, then. Prove that you understand.”

“Lone wolf patrol is when a single drone patrols the wastes around the Hive on their own with the intention of locating intruders and detaining them,” Thorax recited without memory. “They are on their own for the duration of their rounds to minimize visibility. They are the silent eyes of the Hive all over the badlands.”

“Correct. It’s a tough job, and it can get exceedingly dangerous,” Pharynx started slowly, taking a few steps closer. He lowered his voice, dropping his professionalism for a moment to let something far gentler seep through. “And you are weak. Incredibly so. You are not strong enough to perform such a task on your own, and given your habit of running away from anything that scares you-”

“This will make me stronger,” Thorax argued back, his brow furrowing. “Please, Pharynx. I… I don’t like letting you down like that. I want to pull my own weight and do my part, for your sake, if nothing else, but I can’t do that if you don’t let me improve.”

“So run the training exercises,” Pharynx argued back. “Do your rounds, come to practice, train for Hive’s sake. Don’t go running out into the wilds on your own.”

“But Pharynx…” Thorax pleaded, lowering his head slightly to make himself look small and pitiful. “You know that the other drones won’t let me.”

“They follow my orders,” Pharynx snarled quietly, his eyes darting back to oversee the soldiers around them. “Any hoof they lay on you, I will personally break.”

Thorax winced at that unpleasant mental image. This sort of overprotectiveness was nothing new, but it never became any less unsettling. As averse as he was to actual violence, Thorax always found it deeply disquieting when his only brother, his own flesh and blood, threatened to harm others of their own kind on his behalf. As much as he appreciated the protection, the aggression that it came with was less pleasing.

“Then what if I go out as a scout instead?” Thorax suggested meekly. “Not to engage or detain enemies, but to spot problems and report them to the drones that can do something?”

Pharynx hesitated at that before turning back to his younger brother, one eyebrow quirked.

“Think about it,” Thorax went on, trying to build up some confidence. “We already know I’m good at running away, so why don’t we give me a job where running away is useful? If I find a threat, I run right back to the Hive and tell you about it. And all that time on my own should help me learn to pull my own weight.”

Pharynx was quiet for several seconds, considering Thorax with a thoughtful frown. He lifted a hoof to stroke at his chin for a few seconds before giving a slow nod. “Alright… okay, fine, I’ll tell you what. I will let you go out on lone wolf scouting runs for the next month. But I expect you to be back on time, and I expect you to be extremely detailed in your reports. And I had best see a pretty massive improvement in your physique and confidence at the end of it. And if I suspect that it’s not a good fit or too much for you to handle, I will cut you off from that job without a second thought. Do I make myself clear, soldier?”

Thorax snapped back to attention. “Sir, yes sir!” he confirmed, relief flooding his heart.

Pharynx jerked his head up. “Then hop to it. I’m expecting you back when the sun touches the horizon. Any later than that and you’re in trouble.”

Thorax nodded his head before turning and flying back up for the wall. As the stone parted before him, he couldn’t help but grin with joy, and he was barely able to contain an overly ecstatic laugh. He had done it! He had his way out! Now he just had to wait for the time to depart, and he could make his way for the pony!

“Thank you, brother,” he thought to himself as he disappeared amid the ever-shifting crags of the Hive.

Thorax’s patrol began not long after, and he soon found himself soaring through the air over the badlands. He had assumed the shape of a rust-red hawk for this leg of the journey, to not draw any undue attention. If there were any other ponies out here with that purple one, he couldn’t risk drawing their attention to him. Every so often, he swept his eyes across the terrain below him to check for any noteworthy issues he would need to report back. As true as it was that he was exploiting these solo patrols to check on that pony, he had to keep up appearances if he wanted to keep doing this.

Nothing caught his attention, though, and soon enough, the cave came into view. Thorax looked down at the slope of sand in front of the entrance, taking note of the several sets of partially-faded hoofprints that came and went. If he had to guess, the oldest set was no more than twenty-four hours old.

Thorax folded his fake wings up at his side and aimed himself for the ground in a nosedive. The sands rose to meet him quickly, filling his field of view. At the last second, he snapped out his wings as wide as he could to slow his fall. With a few quick flaps, a small cloud of dust was kicked up around him before his talons touched down lightly on the sand.

Thorax took a quick look around to ensure he wasn’t being followed, and then made his way for the cave entrance. He strained his ears as he approached, trying to pick out any discernable noises that might clue him in about what awaited him inside.

Several seconds passed before he heard something. A low, queasy groan from a decidedly feminine voice reverberated from around the bend, followed by the shifting of fabric. Thorax frowned and took a step back. That was the pony’s voice, alright. She didn’t sound too good, though, was she sick?

Backing out of the cave and putting some distance between it and himself, Thorax allowed himself to revert back to his true form in a swirl of fire. He took a deep breath to steady his quaking nerves, then stepped into the cave again. His hoof scraped against the stone floor the moment he stepped inside, the sound echoing loudly in the quiet cave.

Up ahead, he heard the pony inhale sharply before falling completely silent. Thorax paused, listening in. The mare had obviously heard him. “...H-hello?” he called out after a moment, not wanting her to freak out and attack him the way she had the first time they had met. “It’s me, Thorax. Are you still in here?”

A shuddering exhale was the response. It sounded like she was relieved to hear the familiar voice, but… there was something else. Something wrong. Growing more concerned by the second, Thorax strode slowly forward into the cave. “Why isn’t she saying anything?”

He got his answer when he rounded the corner. His eyes fell on the mare lying down in a cobbled-together bedroll. Her coat was drenched in a cold sweat that had soaked into her blankets, staining them. She was visibly a few shades paler than Thorax remembered, shaking and shivering uncontrollably. Her eyes were wide and darted around frantically, and the muscles in her jaw worked themselves repeatedly as if she were trying to open her mouth, but couldn’t.

Horrified, Thorax stepped closer and lt up his horn to get a better look. “Woah… oh my goodness, are you alright?!” he asked, reaching down with his hoof to feel at her forehead.

“She’s burning up,” he realized the second his cold chitin made contact with her blazing flesh. He withdrew with wide eyes, racking his brain for any idea of what was happening.

“C-c-c-c…” The mare choked out, trying to form words. She opened her mouth barely even an inch, groaning with strain as her muscles rebelled. “C-c-can’t… t-t-t-talk… s-s-sick.”

Bit by bit, she forced herself to form the broken sounds into words that Thorax could understand.

“W-w-water… th-th-thir-irsty.”

Thorax looked past her, his eyes settling on the pool of water in the back of the cave. All at once, it clicked into place, and his heart dropped into the pits of his stomach. “Oh, no… I think you have stomach rot,” he realized, taking a step back.

If the mare could get any paler, she surely did at that moment. The air began to reek of her fear and confusion, while her body locked up. “R-r-rot?” she rasped out.

Thorax nodded slowly. “Y-yeah, it’s uh… d-do you have this disease where you’re from?”

A shake of the head.

“Oh, dear… kay, uh…” Thorax stood awkwardly in place for several seconds, trying to think of what he could do. Stomach Rot was a nasty disease, to put it mildly. He was no expert on its finer points, but he did know the symptoms. Waterborne, Stomach Rot would cause the victim’s body to enter into a state of partial paralysis after it took effect, causing a ridiculously high fever, along with upsetting the bowels. The worst part was the queasiness, where the disease had gotten its name. For victims, it felt as if their entire gut was decomposing at a rapid rate, leading to frequent bouts of vomiting and other, far less pleasant forms of waste disposal.

Most alarming of all, however, was the fact that, if it went untreated for too long, Stomach Rot could be fatal.

Struggling to keep himself from flying into a panic of his own, Thorax knelt down and stared imploringly into the mare’s eyes. “How long have you been like this?” he asked urgently, leaving no room for debate.

The pony blinked, swallowed heavily, and managed a crooked response. “L-last… n-night.”

Thorax relaxed, albeit only slightly. She had yet to hit the worst of it. If he moved fast, there was a chance he could help her. “Alright, uh… just stay there, try not to move!” he instructed before turning and flying out of the cave as fast as his buzzing wings could carry him.

Fear, confusion, and curiosity. Those were the three emotions that had filled Twilight’s entire being ever since she had started shaking in the back of her cave the previous night. Her strength had left her very rapidly, leaving her in her bed and incapable of getting up to hunt for food or supplies. As the night dragged on, her symptoms had only gotten worse and worse, leaving her incapable of even a moment of sleep. Her muscles had gradually begun to grow stiff inside her body, making it difficult to move or act in any meaningful way, and her stomach had never felt so revolting in all the years she had owned it.

In her fever-induced delirium, she had honestly considered buying a replacement when she got back to Ponyville, completely discounting the fact that, typically speaking, ponies didn’t sell stomachs.

“I’ll just write a letter to the Princess,” she had thought when she had a brief moment of clarity to remember that detail. “Get her to legalize the sale of stomachs. Just need to talk to Spike. Where is he?”

And then she had remembered she was all alone out here.

“Crud.”

Hours had passed like this; before, finally, the light of the dawn began to seep in through the cave mouth, just out of sight. She had tried to pull herself over there, but her worsening symptoms had made that basically impossible. She was stranded on her bedroll, feeling almost suffocated by her own blankets, frequently devolving into dry heaving fits and feeling incredibly thankful that she had eaten very little over the last few days. She was not in the mood for that sort of mess.

It was pretty obvious what had happened. She had gotten too greedy in her consumption of the cave’s water without having any means of cleaning it. No reliable or long-term means, at least. She must have gotten some kind of disease. Dysentery, perhaps, or some far-off cousin to the infamous disease that had ruined the journeys of so many in the past.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of sweat, fever, and unbearable feelings of decay inside her own body, Thorax came. Twilight now watched the changeling flying in and out of her cave, bringing supplies in, exploding in fire to chisel at a block of rock he found somewhere, changing back, and then flying outside again. All the while, he was rambling to himself. Or maybe he was talking to her. It was hard to tell through the sound of her own heart beating wildly in her ears like the drums of war for some ancient, isolated tribe of warriors.

That was an interesting mental image. She was going to think about that for a while.

She was just getting to the part where she was watching them perform the ritual sacrifice of an already-dead chicken when she felt herself being lifted up off the ground by the head. “Wait, no, put me back! I need to take notes! This is too culturally significant!”

All that came out of her lips was a quiet murmur, followed shortly after by the gurgling of her stomach.

“Okay, drink this,” Thorax’s voice echoed in her ears as something hard and hot was pressed against her lips. She felt liquid lapping at her mouth, and instinct kicked in. With what little strength she had, she opened her mouth and allowed the fluid to swim down her throat. It was hot, and it burned, and the taste was far from what she would call pleasant, but at this point, she wasn’t going to complain.

Thorax pulled it away every few seconds to avoid accidentally drowning her, then brought it back so she could sip some more. With every sip she took, her mind gradually began to clear up, her eyes refocusing on the real world as the delusional fever dream began to subside. She still felt absolutely horrible, but at least now she could see and think with a moderate degree of clarity.

And so came the curiosity. “What did he just feed me?”

Thorax set aside the bowl made out of chiseled stone that he had held up to her lips, before smiling down at her. “How are you feeling, now?” he asked, his two-toned voice making her ears hurt and her heart sing. Oh, how good it felt to have another creature talking at her again!

Groaning, Twilight slowly sat up. She immediately regretted that decision, her hooves clutching themselves to her stomach as she experiences another wave of nausea. She slowly lay back down and glanced sideways at Thorax in confusion. “W-what… I… I f-f-feel a li-little better,” she stumbled over her words, realizing that she was still shivering horribly.

Thorax grimaced with sympathy. “Yeah, I bet. You contracted stomach rot. It’s pretty rough… Honestly, you’re lucky I decided to come back and find you. Any longer, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to help.”

Twilight swallowed heavily, deeply unsettled by the implication. “R-right… w-well, uh, th-thank y-you,” she stammered, forcing herself to smile. Her eyes then fell on the bowl, and she frowned. “W-where did y-you g-get that?”

Thorax looked down at the bowl. “Oh, this? I made it,” he explained, lifting it up and showing it to her.

Twilight blinked. “How?”

Thorax exploded again, swallowed in a sudden rush of green flames. Twilight shrieked, her eyes screwing shut in anticipation of a wave of scorching heat and charred body parts pummeling her.

“I turned into this,” Thorax’s voice spoke, causing Twilight to open up her eyes again.

Where once there had been a creature that vaguely resembled an insect-like pony, there was now an enormous woodpecker bird with a particularly rugged beak. It was tall enough that its head would come up to Twilight’s chin, were she standing. The bird then turned and jabbed its beak into the wall of the cave, chipping away a few sizable pieces with ear-splitting cracks.

The bird exploded, and when the flames faded, there was Thorax yet again, grinning ear to ear. “Stonedrillers aren’t all that common this far into the badlands, but I’ve run into a few on patrol. I needed some way of making something that could safely hold water, and some of the rocks around the outside are more than perfect for the bill.”

Twilight blinked a few times, trying to wrap her head around what she had just witnessed. She lifted a hoof up to the side of her head, frowning. “Uh… Okay, y-you’re throwing a lot at m-me here. And what did you feed me?”

Thorax chuckled before lifting up the bowl in his magic. “I used some local mosses and small flowers to make a tea. It won’t cure stomach rot, but it’ll help soothe your symptoms a little, and it should help your body fight back against it.”

Twilight shuddered, pulling her blankets closer in a vain attempt to stifle her uncontrollable shivering. “How? I l-looked all over the place, a-and I couldn’t find any p-plants. Just d-dry moss…”

“Well, you just need to know where to look,” Thorax replied with a shrug. “We use a lot of the local plant life back in the Hive for medicinal purposes, and all of us who go on patrol are given training in how to find the best herbs for treating illness and injury. That was, ah…” he drifted the bowl over to the pool as he spoke, his expression turning sheepish. “That was probably the only training course I did any good in…”

Twilight watched as best as she could as Thorax dipped the bowl into the pool, gathering up a decent amount of water, before bringing it back over to her fireplace. She only now noticed that it was lit, albeit with only a small flame, and more stones had been assembled to create a makeshift stove over the open flame. Thorax set the bowl on top, and the air briefly sizzled as the moisture that had clung to the outside met the freakishly-hot surface of the stove.

Twilight swallowed heavily. She had contemplated using the local rocks to try and make something like that, but the drain on her magic had made her extraordinarily hesitant to try it. Besides, she had no idea whether or not these rocks were safe to place near a fire or eat out of, anyway. Poisonous minerals were a very real risk, and she had enough to worry about.

And now here came Thorax, doing all of that in as many minutes as she had spent days in this sun-scorched wasteland.

Twilight felt almost annoyed. She certainly felt one-upped. But Thorax was a native, and he was helping her, so who was she to complain?

The two were silent for a second, with Thorax idly observing the bowl and waiting for the contents within to heat up to a satisfactory point, and Twilight watching him with wrapt attention. It wasn’t like there was much else she could do right now.

“Hey, uh,” Thorax suddenly spoke up, making Twilight jump as she came out of her thoughts. She looked to see him staring back at her with confusion. He tilted his head at her, a curious chittering noise coming out of him. “I don’t think I ever caught your name.”

Twilight was quiet for a second before putting on a small smile. “I’m T-Twilight Sparkle… thank you for helping me, Thorax.”

He smiled. “Nice to meet you, Twilight Sparkle. It’s my pleasure.”

Author's Notes:

I feel I should point out: This story is not meant to focus on the survival aspects. They are meant merely to serve as a framing device and set up for the meat of the story, which is the developing friendship between Twilight and Thorax. As such, I am not aiming for hardcore realism with the survival aspects. I point this out now because I've seen some people in the comments ruminating on various ways Twilight could be doing better irl, such as with the water situation. I am taking those points on board, of course, but if I feel they might throw off the story I aim to tell, then realism will be discarded. I hope that makes sense.

Delivery Bug

Thorax spent some more time in the cave with Twilight, periodically stepping out to gather more of the materials needed for his tea. Twilight found herself fading in and out of consciousness during those times, her body eager for some actual sleep now that the symptoms were decreased. She still felt like absolute garbage, but at least now she could think clearly and had a modest amount of control over her own body and its waste disposal functions.

In the interim, Thorax answered a few basic questions Twilight had; how he made his tea, where she could find food, if there were other reliable sources of water nearby. Pretty much anything her foggy mind could think of that would be of help to her in surviving this blasted wasteland. Thorax had not disappointed her, answering each of her questions in remarkable detail.

It was still strange to Twilight, thinking about just how much the changeling was helping her. What did he stand to gain? What was his end goal? Was he just being friendly, or was there some ulterior motive she hadn’t yet been able to decipher? More than once had she tried to form words to ask these questions, but her own weakness had, more often than not, left her unable to finish her questions in any way Thorax could understand.

Eventually, though, what little strength she had began to fade, and she fell into a light, restless slumber. She wasn’t sure how long she was out for, but when she awoke, she found that the fire had long since burned down to little more than smoldering lumps of charred wood, and the glow coming from beyond the cave mouth had darkened considerably. The various supplies that Thorax had brought were leaned up against the far wall from Twilight, neatly arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Slowly, and still struggling with the putrid feelings in her gut, Twilight sat up on her haunches and looked around some more, searching for Thorax. But there was no sign of him in the cave. Twilight swallowed heavily, a bead of anxiety forming in her heart. “T-thorax?” she called out before falling into a coughing fit. Her throat was dry. She needed water.

Moving quickly, she dropped a few planks of wood from her stockpile onto the fire pit and lit it ablaze with a spark of magic from her horn. As the warmth and light of the rapidly swelling blaze filled the cavern, Twilight staggered over to the pool in the back, bringing along the chiseled bowl.

In short order, she had some water set to boil, giving her some time to look around and figure out what was happening. Cautiously, she dragged herself over to the edge of the cave and peered outside. The sun had set some time ago, and the moon had risen to bathe the world in its pale glow.

Twilight licked her lips. “Thorax? Are you out there?” she called out again, putting as much power into her voice as she could manage.

Nothing answered her, though, save for the distant hooting of a desert owl.

Twilight stood still for several moments before deciding to head back inside, her stomach gurgling in protest. She was still sick, after all. Sighing, she set herself down in front of the fire, her eyes locked onto the blaze.

Had Thorax left her? She supposed it made sense. He wasn’t going to be around all the time. He had a home, after all. A ‘Hive’ as he had called it if she was remembering correctly. Considering those other changelings she had seen him with the first time they had met, it seemed likely that he was their subordinate. If so, then him heading back home was probably for the best.

Though that still left the question of why he had bothered to help her in the first place. She didn’t exactly have anything to offer him in turn, save for boundless gratitude at having saved her life. He may have done it twice, actually, helping tend to her injury and keep it from getting infected.

Her hoof drifted to hover over where the gash in her barrel had been, and she winced as phantom pains tingled along her side. She still remembered with an odd mixture of disgust and fascination how the resin had felt against her fur. She had eventually pulled it off like a bandage when her injury had healed, not wanting the extra weight while trudging through the desert.

With a sigh, Twilight took the bowl of now-boiling water and set it down on the cave floor until it cooled. When she was sure it wouldn’t burn her mouth, she drank it down with greedy gulps. Her whole body came alive as the life-giving liquid swam down her throat, and she felt a palpable wave of disappointment when she swallowed the last drop.

“Back on my own,” she thought with her ears drooping. She could already feel the loneliness scratching away at the back of her head, but she was quick to shake it off. She couldn’t afford to count on Thorax coming back. She had to fend for herself, at least for now.

But for the moment, with her symptoms still less than pleasant, Twilight eventually settled down under her blankets and closed her eyes, hoping to get a good night’s rest. When she woke up, she’d try her hoof at making some of that tea. It didn’t seem too hard…

A few days passed, with very little progress being made. Twilight’s stomach rot persisted, proving itself quite a formidable disease. Luckily, she was able to make enough of the soothing tea to ease her symptoms enough to use her time productively.

Namely, she managed to purify plenty of water and fill up not only her canteen but also make the equivalent of filled water pots. The process had been as simple as wandering just far enough from her cave to bring back some large stones before hollowing them out with her magic and filling them, bit by bit, with boiled water from Thorax’s bowl. She also made a bigger bowl to help speed things along.

Now, three full pots, each enough to hold roughly a gallon of water, sat lined up against the back wall of the cave. The process of making them and filling them had been long, tedious, and tiring, but at least now she had a reliable means of storing safe-to-drink water, and an easy place to quickly fill her waterskin for whenever she was healthy enough to resume her forays into the desert.

But all the while, she couldn’t stop thinking about Thorax. She was more curious than anything about the changeling, but she was also exceedingly grateful for his aid. She owed all of the progress she had just made to his efforts to help her. Every time she drank down some of his tea, she silently thanked him, and every time she lay down to try and sleep through her now mild fever, she hoped he was doing well.

After a few days, Twilight was pulled out of her slumber by the sound of hooves scraping along the stone floor of the cave she had called home since coming to the badlands. She peeled open one eye, able to tell from the lighting that it was mid to late morning. What caught her attention more, though, was the changeling that walked into sight from around the corner. Something resembling saddlebags made out of the same mucus he had used to bind her wounds hung off of his sides, and Twilight’s eyes bulged at the sight of plants through the transparent green sides of the pouches.

Thorax turned to her and jumped in surprise when he saw she was awake. “Oh! Uh, good morning,” he greeted timidly, lifting a hoof to wave. “How are you feeling?”

Twilight blinked in surprise and slowly sat up. She groaned when her stomach gurgled and churned in protest from the movement, and her body shivered somewhat. She still had a fever, albeit much reduced. Rubbing at her eye to dispel the sand that had clumped there, she gave Thorax a relieved and questioning glance. “Thorax? Is that you?” she asked dryly.

Thorax grinned and nodded. “Uh-hu!” he said before pulling off his saddlebags and setting them down not far away. “You’re looking a little better, but I bet you’re pretty hungry, aren’t you?”

Twilight’s eyes again fell on the bags, and her stomach let out a much different type of growl. She instinctively licked her lips and leaned forward like an eager dog when showed its favorite treat. “Is that food?” she asked.

Thorax pulled open the pouches and levitated out a collection of mosses, leaves, and plant stems that, to Twilight’s partially-starved stomach, looked like a royal banquet. He turned to face her with a sheepish grin. “I kinda figured you were an herbivore when I saw your flat teeth, so I thought I’d bring you some of the older plants from the Hive’s storage.”

Twilight’s eyes went wide, her mouth starting to water in anticipation. It all looked so good! Another eager growl from her stomach prevented Twilight from giving voice to any questions. Thorax levitated over the plant matter, and in short order, Twilight snatched them out of the air and began to greedily wolf down everything she could. She might have blushed from the frantic, almost savage sounds she was making as she ate, but right then, she just didn’t care. She was eating food. Actual food.

When there was none left to consume, she leaned back against the cave wall and let out a long, relieved sigh. She absently took a swig from her waterskin before turning to Thorax, who was currently sitting on his haunches, staring at her with a small, shy smile. She smiled back. “Thank you, Thorax. I owe you.”

Thorax chuckled sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. “Y-yeah, you’re uh, you’re welcome.”

Twilight’s smile slowly shrank as the immediate need for sustenance faded away. Carefully, she adjusted herself before speaking up. “So… why are you helping me?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow.

Thorax seemed genuinely surprised by the question. He blinked at her in confusion. “Huh?”

She gestured vaguely at him. “It’s just that, the first time we met, I got the impression we’d never see each other again, and we only met for a short time. I thought I was all on my own out here…” she looked down, her ears folding back. “It’s been pretty hard for me to get by each day… and if it weren’t for you coming to help me a few days ago, I… I probably would have died by now. I’m really grateful, I want to make that clear. I just…”

She lifted her eyes to look at him again, her expression pleading. “I just don’t understand… why are you helping me so much? What made you decide to come back?”

Thorax was quiet for several seconds. He shifted on his haunches before letting out a tired sigh of his own. “Honestly? ...It’s because you’re the first creature aside from my brother to ever be nice to me,” he eventually said in a quiet, despondent voice.

Twilight’s eyes widened. “What? Really? But you seem so nice.”

“Yeah, that’s kinda the problem,” Thorax replied with a sad shake of his head. “The other drones pick on me all the time. They have since I was a grub. I’ve always been friendly, and that makes me easy to bully and push around. Even my own brother isn’t all that nice to me...”

He looked up at Twilight and pointed at her. “But then I bumped into you, and after you calmed down enough to stop attacking me, you were… actually really nice. Scared, sure, but nice. You didn’t insult me, you didn’t call me names, you didn’t push me around...” his lips curled up into a small smile. “I’d never had someone treat me like that before, and… it felt really good. And then I saw those lights you were making in the sky at night, and I thought you might need help. And, well… here I am.”

Twilight stared at him for a few seconds, her mind reeling. Then, slowly but surely, her smile returned with gusto. “Well… thank you very much, Thorax. I appreciate it more than I can describe.”

Thorax’s wings buzzed briefly on his back, his lips peeling back into a happy grin that put his sharp teeth on display. Twilight briefly cringed, and the drone was quick to close his mouth so she didn’t have to see them. Thorax then rose to his hooves and trotted closer. “So, uh… where are you from?” he asked.

Twilight paused for a second, briefly caught off guard. “Oh, uh… do you know about Equestria?” she asked after a second.

Thorax nodded. “Only by name. The Queen talked about it from time to time, but I was never told anything significant. All I know is it’s north of here, and it’s where ponies live,” he explained before settling down on his haunches on the other side of the darkened fireplace from her. “So, uh, what’s it like?”

Twilight was still for a second before an enormous grin slowly began to spread on her face. She was not able to restrain the excited squeal that slid past her lips as she clapped her hooves in front of her face.

Thorax got a bewildered look on his face. “Uh… wha? What’s so funny?”

“I’m making first contact with another race!” Twilight squealed, cursing her sickness for hindering her energy. “Oh, wow, I can write so many essays on this! And my letter to Princess Celestia! I’m going to need, like, uh, twelve pages, at least, to talk about all of this! Oh, I’m so excited!”

“Yeah, I can tell,” Thorax noted, nodding slowly at the air above the vibrating unicorn. “I mean, I can see your excitement. It’s very… yellow.”

“And I have so many questions!” Twilight enthused ecstatically. “I wish I had a notebook! There’s so much for me to learn!”

Thorax chuckled in amusement before gesturing at her with a hoof. “Well, I asked you about your home first.”

Twilight took a deep breath in a bid to quiet her scholarly excitement for the moment. It worked, albeit only somewhat. She nodded and leaned back before beginning. “Well, Equestria is a vast land, and very diverse. There are forests, mountains, open grasslands, deserts, jungles, and even an open tundra at the northern border.”

“I’ve never seen a forest before,” Thorax noted, settling down and looking almost like an enthralled foal listening to a bedtime story. “Or a grassland, or a jungle, and I’ve only ever seen mountains from far away.”

Twilight’s smile grew.

For the next several hours, Twilight regaled Thorax with everything she knew about the geography and the culture of Equestria, although she did keep a few things close to her chest, such as the nation’s defenses. Shining Armor would roast her alive if she let that kind of information slip.

Thorax listened to every word with rapt attention, his eyes wide with awe, and Twilight occasionally giggled. She could practically see the gears turning in his head as he struggled to imagine what she was describing. He seemed to have a particularly hard time wrapping his head around the ideas of the jungle and the ocean. Water for as far as the eye could see in every direction? It seemed all but impossible to him.

When she began talking about the culture, Thorax seemed disbelieving at first. He just didn’t seem to grasp that yes, it was possible for a land as peaceful as Equestria to exist. It was honestly somewhat sad to see. The more Twilight talked about Equestria, and of Ponyville, and the more she saw Thorax’s growing wonder and disbelief, the more she realized that the life of a changeling drone must have been horrible in comparison.

Eventually, though, the conversation had to come to an end. Thorax glanced over towards the light streaming in through the mouth of the cave. His eyes widened, and he abruptly shot up to his hooves. “Oh. Hives! Is it this late already?!” he exclaimed, galloping over to look outside.

Twilight rose to follow him, although her pace was significantly slower than his. “Is something wrong?” she asked, glancing outside as well. If she had to crack a guess, she’d say it was maybe an hour before noon.

Thorax nodded. “Yeah, I’m supposed to be back at the Hive and reporting to my brother before noon,” he said, cantering for the entrance. “I’m sorry, I wish I could stay and talk more, but I need to get back.”

Twilight’s ears drooped, but she nodded in understanding. “Oh… I see,” she muttered in disappointment. After a second, she leaned forward to call after him. “Can you come back sometime soon? I’d love to keep talking with you!”

Thorax looked back at her as he went, flashing her a friendly grin. “I was already planning on it!” he called out. “I’ll see you then!”

“Yeah!” Twilight lifted a hoof to wave. “Take care, Thorax!”

“You, too!” he replied, waving in response. Then, with a quick buzz of his wings, Thorax rose into the air and out of sight.

Twilight lowered her hoof to the ground, the silence creeping in on her. But in spite of the quiet, she was able to smile.

Even in this barren wasteland, it seemed the magic of friendship had plenty of room to grow. And as long as she was here, she would do her best to make sure it did.

With a mild spring in her step, Twilight turned around and made her way back to the fireplace, eager to make some more of Thorax’s fantastic tea.

Author's Notes:

Heads up: This story will be going on the back burner for a little bit. My other big story, Scarlet, is currently in one of its more major plot moments that I have been building up to for a long time, and I am eager to see that section done. Once I am past the sequence in question this story will resume as normal. The delay will, at most, a week or two.