Faint buzzing could be heard throughout the hive by listening carefully enough, but it was most often ignored. Queen Chrysalis heard a particular set of wings, still far away down one of the many tunnels, which seemed to be drawing closer. Her ears twisted themselves to face the noise coming from behind; as it drew closer, she felt slightly more movement from the foals underneath her rear and hindlegs, and she figured they’d seen something she hadn’t yet; the queen slowly began to smile without realizing it, drool making its way between her fangs to splatter on her slick membrane; her smile was killed intentionally before she rotated her head to look directly behind herself. Her born child finally brought to her a golden chalice filled with liquid love, which she took in her magic and brought to rest at her nose. She inhaled deeply. It was strong love, pony love, the kind of deep love that drives ponies to have their own foals. Now it was nothing more than food for her to make her foals. She kept that thought in mind as she tilted her head back and drank all of it in one gulp. She exhaled loudly, resisted a burp, and closed her eyes. The love made her head warm and fuzzy, causing her to forget the world around her and even her body struggling underneath her. She felt so satisfied. It never lasted. Her frown returned as she felt her stomach quickly process that love and diffuse it into the amniotic fluid sustaining her foals. It was almost painful for her to feel the precious love draining from her body into their bodies within hers, where she couldn’t enjoy it. Her magical grip flickered, dropping the chalice onto her swollen middle; she watched it bounce several times as her born child tried to catch it in his hooves, while her unborn children merely flinched at it, and he dove in front of her but out of her view as it fell further. He wordlessly flew away to collect more, hiding the chalice that was likely even more dented than beforehoof, and then she was alone again, as much as she had been previously.
The queen propped up her head on the bottom of her hoof by twisting her foreleg in a way that would break on a pony, shoving the joint into some unfortunate children who could do nothing but be moved not quite out of the way. Not all of the children around her thorax could she see, she remembered as several of them grouped around her stomach started to kick it tirelessly, reinvigorated by the meal she’d just consumed. Her stomach wasn’t yet empty, she noticed with a burp; a pink cloud shaped like a heart left her throat before breaking and then dissipating into the air around her, before she could suck it back inside. She scowled at the wasted food, but reminded herself that the foals around her stomach were always bigger, and would be worked harder. She was made to burp again, but kept her mouth closed and swallowed her food a second time. Queen Chrysalis sighed. There was no mirror with which she could remind herself of her beauty—none in the hive were big enough—and she could only vaguely see herself in the reflection of her gut, which failed to satisfy her. She wanted to bask in her own enormity, the literal glow of her maternity, and yet was denied this. She could feel her womb’s outline, and across it could begin to make out the hundreds of new body parts shoved against its entire surface, but this failed to give her a detailed sense of her scale; in her deepest depths, she felt absolutely nothing—for while all of the little brains and nerves and body parts belonged to her, they also belonged not to her more, with the evidence being their obscurity to her—leaving only high pressure building up against her thinning membrane, organs, and increasingly her rear to remind her that she was still growing bigger every moment.