The Bug in The Cave

Chapter 6: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!”