Haunting Memories [Chapter 4]

 

Love became scarce. Ponies grew wary, shields stronger, hearts guarded. Chrysalis’s drones returned from raids hollow-eyed and weak, their carapaces dull, wings tattered. The old ways—seduction, infiltration, slow draining of affection—no longer sustained them. Many withered in the deeper tunnels, curling into desiccated husks that crumbled at a touch.

 

Chrysalis watched it happen without pity.

 

She had stopped feeding on love entirely.

 

Instead, she fed on spite, and it kept her sleek, tall, radiant with a cold black-green gleam. Her subjects sensed the change in her—the endless reservoir of power that no longer flickered or waned. They came to her throne room in ones and twos at first, then in silent, desperate clusters, begging for the secret.

 

She gave it to them without ceremony.

 

“Remember,” she told them, voice low and steady as winter stone. “Remember, every time they looked through you. Every time they laughed behind their hooves. Every time they chose their perfect little lives over yours.”

 

The first to truly understand was a drone named Thorax—no longer the soft-hearted infiltrator he would one day become, but a starving wretch who had once been rejected by a pony family he had almost believed loved him.

 

He knelt before her, trembling. “It hurts to remember, my queen.”

 

“Good,” she said. “Let it hurt. Hold the hurt. Do not let it fade.”

 

She placed a perforated hoof on his forehead, and poured a thread of her own spite into him—not as a gift, but as a seed. He convulsed, eyes rolling back, chitin cracking along old scars as the memory of rejection flooded him anew: the mother’s horrified scream, the father’s hoof striking him across the face, the children he had played with turning away forever.

 

When the fit passed, Thorax rose.

 

His eyes were no longer the soft blue of a love-feeder. They had darkened to a deep, oily green, the pupils slit with something colder than hunger.

 

He did not smile. He simply bowed, deeper than before.

 

One by one, the others followed.

 

The transformation was never gentle.

 

It began with memory—deliberate, unrelenting recall of every slight, every exclusion, every moment of being deemed unworthy. Chrysalis forced them to sit in circles in the darkest chambers, recounting their failures aloud until their voices cracked and their bodies shook. No comfort was offered. No love allowed to soften the edges.

 

Pain was the crucible.

 

Some broke beneath it. A few fled into the badlands and were never seen again. But those who endured felt the shift: the moment hatred cooled into something purer, harder, self-sustaining.

 

Their bodies changed to match.

 

The soft, iridescent sheen of love-fed chitin dulled to matte black, veined with faint lines of cold emerald that pulsed like frozen lightning. Their wings grew sharper, edges serrated as if honed for cutting rather than flight. Horns lengthened and curved wickedly, no longer tools for delicate illusion but weapons for piercing shields and hearts alike.

 

Their hunger changed, too.

 

Love still registered on their senses—sweet, cloying, almost nauseating now. When they fed on it, it sustained them for a time, but it left them sluggish, bloated, and dissatisfied. Spite was cleaner. Sharper. It rose in them whenever a pony sneered, whenever a door was slammed in their face, whenever the world reminded them they were monsters.

 

And it never ran out.

 

They began to call themselves something new, though never aloud where ponies could hear.

 

Spite-bearers.

 

A hive bound not by love for their queen, but by shared refusal to bow. Each drone carried its own private well of it: the foal who had spat on them, the lover who had betrayed them, the society that had deemed them vermin from birth. They tended these memories the way farmers tend crops, revisiting them nightly, letting them grow thorns.

 

Chrysalis watched the transformation spread through her hive like frost across glass—slow, beautiful, inexorable.

 

Where once there had been desperate hunger, there was now patience.

 

Where once there had been imitation of pony beauty, there was now pride in their monstrous forms.

 

Where once there had been pleading for acceptance, there was now a quiet, collective vow:

 

We will not break.

We will not forgive.

We will outlast you all.

 

On the night the last drone completed the change—a small, once-timid scout whose final memory had been a pony child throwing stones and laughing—Chrysalis gathered them in the great cavern beneath the hive.

 

Thousands of black forms stood in perfect silence, their eyes glowing cold green in the dark.

 

She did not speak of glory. She did not promise love or vengeance.

 

She simply said:

 

“Now we are eternal.”

 

And in the depths, something ancient and unyielding answered—a low, resonant hum that was not quite sound, but the shared pulse of countless hearts that had chosen spite over surrender.

 

The hive had not reformed out of love, as some future tales would falsely claim.

 

It had forged itself anew in the coldest fire there is.

 

And it would never hunger again.

 

===

 

The badlands night was moonless, the sky a vast black shell over the hive. No drums beat, no war cries echoed. The spite-bearers simply rose from the resin tunnels in perfect silence—thousands of matte-black forms with eyes like cold emerald coals—and took to the air.

 

Their target was not Canterlot. Not yet. Chrysalis had chosen something smaller, softer, more symbolic: Appleloosa.

 

A frontier town built on earth pony grit and stubborn optimism. A place where ponies sang about friendship while plowing fields, where strangers were welcomed with pie and a hoedown, where love flowed freely because no one had ever taught them to fear. It was the kind of settlement that prided itself on open hearts and open doors.

 

Perfect kindling.

 

They descended just before dawn, a living shadow that blotted out the first pale light on the horizon. No disguises this time. No infiltration. The spite-bearers came as themselves—jagged horns glowing, serrated wings slicing the air, carapaces absorbing what little starlight remained.

 

The first sentry—a lanky earth pony stallion on night watch—never had time to shout. A drone landed on the watchtower roof, eyes meeting his for a single frozen second. The pony’s mouth opened in confusion, not yet fear. Then the changeling’s horn touched his chest, not to drain love, but to pour memory into him: every rejection the drone had ever endured, every door slammed, every sneer of “monster.” The stallion’s eyes widened as the foreign spite flooded him, and he crumpled without a sound, overwhelmed by pain that was not his own.

 

That was the signal.

 

The swarm poured into the streets.

 

Ponies stumbled from their homes in nightshirts and curlers, blinking at the nightmare that had replaced their quiet morning. Some reached for pitchforks or lassos out of habit. Most simply froze.

 

The spite-bearers did not cocoon them immediately. That would come later.

 

First, they let the ponies feel it.

 

Every changeling carried their personal well of spite, honed and polished over years. Now they opened the floodgates. The air thickened with it—an invisible, choking miasma of remembered rejection. Ponies clutched their heads as alien memories assaulted them: the changeling runt mocked by siblings, the infiltrator spat upon by a lover, the drone stoned by foals who laughed afterward. It was not illusion. It was shared truth, cold and sharp as broken glass.

 

Earth ponies, used to straightforward threats, found themselves weeping for reasons they could not name. Tough ranchers dropped to their knees, whispering apologies to shadows. The sheriff—a mare renowned for her unshakeable calm—stood in the middle of the street screaming at no one, tears carving tracks through dust on her cheeks.

 

Chrysalis walked through it all at a leisurely pace, hooves silent on the dirt road. She watched a young couple who had been planning their wedding clutch each other in terror—not of the changelings, but of sudden, inexplicable certainty that they were unworthy of love. She watched Braeburn, the town’s cheerful ambassador of friendship, curl into a ball beside his apple cart, muttering, “I don’t deserve it… I never did…”

 

None of the spite-bearers laughed. Laughter required joy, and joy had been burned out of them long ago.

 

They simply worked.

 

Resin sprayed in precise arcs, cocooning ponies mid-sob, mid-plea, mid-realization. The streets filled with green pods swaying gently in the morning breeze that finally arrived, indifferent to the devastation below.

 

When the sun fully cleared the horizon, Appleloosa was silent again. Every pony encased. Every building sealed. The only movement was the slow, methodical patrol of black forms harvesting the ambient despair that now soaked the town like dew.

 

Chrysalis stood in the central square, beside the flagpole where a bright friendship banner still fluttered. She reached up with her magic and tore it down, letting it fall into the dust.

 

One of her lieutenants—an ancient drone whose transformation had taken longest—approached and bowed low.

 

“It is done, my queen. They felt it. All of it.”

 

Chrysalis gazed at the rows of cocoons glinting in the sunlight.

 

“They felt a fraction,” she corrected softly. “A whisper.”

 

The lieutenant waited.

 

“This was not conquest,” Chrysalis continued, voice carrying to every drone within earshot. “This was proof. Proof that we no longer need their love to survive. Proof that we can make them taste what we tasted, and they have no defense against it.”

 

She turned in a slow circle, taking in her silent, perfect army.

 

“Today, Appleloosa learned that friendship is fragile. That open hearts break easiest. That love cannot shield them from the truth: some of us were never invited to their table.”

 

A pause. The wind stirred the dust at her hooves.

 

“Let them tell the tale, when we release the few we choose to release. Let Equestria hear how an entire town was brought low not by force, but by memory. By honesty.”

 

She lifted her wings, and the swarm rose with her as one.

 

“This was only the first.”

 

As they flew east, leaving the cocooned town baking beneath the indifferent sun, not a single spite-bearer looked back.

 

They had no need to.

 

The raid had not been about food or territory.

 

It had been about making the world acknowledge, for one undeniable morning, that some wounds do not heal with friendship.

 

Some wounds become the blade.

 

===

 

Weeks passed before Equestria dared approach Appleloosa again.

 

A joint expedition—Royal Guard pegasi, unicorn scholars from Canterlot, and a small contingent of the Mane Six—flew in under heavy magical wards. They expected a ghost town: empty streets, withered orchards, perhaps a few lingering changelings picking at the bones.

 

What they found was worse.

 

The cocoons still hung from every rooftop, lamppost, and apple tree, glinting dully in the harsh desert sun. No changelings remained. The spite-bearers had taken what they needed and vanished as silently as they had come.

 

Twilight Sparkle arrived first, horn glowing with diagnostic spells. The resin pods pulsed faintly—alive. Inside each one, the ponies of Appleloosa were preserved in perfect stasis, hearts beating slow, dreams suspended.

 

But the dreams were not peaceful.

 

As the rescuers carefully dissolved the resin with counter-spells developed from captured changeling secretions, the freed ponies did not wake with relief or gratitude. They woke screaming.

 

Braeburn—usually the first to offer a cheerful “howdy”—thrashed against his rescuers, eyes wild, babbling about doors slamming in his face, about never being good enough for the big cities, about apple pies thrown in the trash because he was “just a hick.” It took three guards to hold him down until Fluttershy could soothe him into exhausted silence.

 

The sheriff, strong and stoic, curled into a ball on the ground and wept without sound, whispering apologies to faces only she could see. Children clung to their parents not with joy, but with desperate terror, as though expecting to be rejected again at any moment. Lovers stared at each other across the street, uncertain if the warmth they once felt had ever been real or just another lie they told themselves.

 

The worst were the ones who woke silent.

 

They sat in the dust, staring at nothing. When asked what they remembered, they spoke in flat, hollow voices of memories that were not theirs: a changeling child mocked for weakness, an infiltrator unmasked and beaten, a queen cradling a dying filly in an alley while the world above celebrated.

 

The spite had not been drained from them. It had been planted.

 

Appleloosa’s survivors did not throw a celebration. There was no pie, no hoedown, no tearful reunions under the restored friendship banner. The town bakery reopened eventually, but the pies tasted like ash to those who baked them. Songs died in throats halfway through the first verse.

 

Twilight’s reports back to Celestia were clinical at first, then increasingly desperate.

 

“The emotional trauma is unlike anything we’ve seen. It isn’t fear of changelings. It’s… self-doubt weaponized. They question every friendship, every kindness they ever gave or received. Some refuse to leave their homes. Others have left Appleloosa entirely, saying they can no longer bear the weight of everypony pretending to be happy.”

 

Rarity tried to organize a relief effort—new clothes, fabrics, a chance to feel beautiful again. The mares accepted the gifts politely, then folded them away untouched. “What’s the point?” one whispered. “Beauty didn’t save us. It just made them hate us more when they saw what was underneath.”

 

Applejack stayed longest, working the orchards beside her extended family. But even she came home one evening with hollow eyes. “They don’t trust the land anymore,” she told her friends quietly. “Say the apples grew while we suffered inside those pods. Like the trees were mocking us for thinking hard work and honesty were enough.”

 

Rainbow Dash patrolled the skies for weeks, searching for any sign of the black swarm. She found nothing. The spite-bearers did not return to gloat. They did not need to.

 

The damage was self-sustaining.

 

Months later, travelers passing through Appleloosa spoke of a town that functioned, but did not live. Ponies went through the motions—tending crops, mending fences, greeting visitors with mechanical politeness—but laughter was rare and brief, as though they no longer believed they deserved it.

 

A few left to seek help in Canterlot or Ponyville, hoping distance would dull the memories. Most stayed, bound by a strange, stubborn refusal to let the changelings win completely. Yet even that refusal carried the bitter flavor of spite—not the changelings’ cold, refined version, but a pony echo: weary, wounded, human in its imperfection.

 

Twilight’s final report to the princesses contained a single line that haunted Celestia for years:

 

“They are free of the cocoons, but not of what was put inside them. We saved their bodies. I’m not sure we saved their hearts.”

 

Far away in the badlands, Chrysalis received scattered reports from scouts who observed from a distance. She read them without expression.

 

Then she folded the parchment, placed it aside, and returned to training the next wave of spite-bearers.

 

The raid had not been about destruction.

 

It had been about truth.

 

And the truth, once seen, could not be unseen—even by those who had spent their lives believing friendship was magic enough to heal anything.

 

In Appleloosa, the sun still rose over silent orchards, and the wind still carried the faint scent of apples.

 

But the sweetness was gone.