Queen Chrysalis is already a bloated mess. She has been for weeks. She’s temporarily adopted the body of a true hive-queen, and has been pumping out eggs to expand her brood. She’s far to big to move, not that she needs to with how many drones she has to dote on her. She’s grown so large that she has to be suspended from the hive walls to keep her comfortable. From all over her body, anchoring strands of changeling resin knit together to form a webwork that dangles her egg factory of a body comfortably in the middle of the wide chamber at the core of the hive.

Everything from Chrysalis’s waist up is mostly normal, but below her thorax her abdomen has become an enormous green mass of flesh. Her lower legs are still there, but are all but buried in her bulk. Above her black chitinous rear is her elongated and egg-bloated belly, and below is a bulky ovipositor every bit as girthy as her egg sack of a stomach. It trails below her winding gently through the resin webwork as it tapers down to a point that hovers just inches above the ground. She almost looks like the front half of a changeling replacing the head of a colossal green grub. Once or twice a minute Chrysalis’s whole body ripples and ungulates as it deposits another egg on the slimy ground below her, only for it to be quickly carried away by a worker changeling.

The changeling queen has been like this for weeks, birthing thousands of eggs a day, and would continue for weeks more. Not all the eggs would survive but that’s fine with her. Chrysalis only wants the strong ones anyway. She would have carried on like this in boredom for a long while if there wasn’t an accident elsewhere in the hive. The hive had been preparing to feed the new army Chrysalis is birthing, and gathered a massive reserve of love to be stored between the hatchery and nursery only two chambers away from the birthing chamber. After a distant crash raw love floods in like a crashing tidal wave of glowing pink honey. Her changeling attendants are swept off their hooves and the current carries them into the cavern wall with extreme force.

Chrysalis now finds herself alone, suspended above a rising lake of frothy pink love. Already over a yard of her ovipositor is below the surface. The queen can feel her body following millennia of instinct to absorb it all. As a queen, Chrysalis is hardier than most changelings and her current body can certainly store even more love than her normal one, but the lake of love is vast and still slowly rising. Everyone has limits. Several muffled pops are followed by tall splashes suddenly cresting out of the pool below, her worker drones clearly having already reached their limits after being submerged.

The Changeling Queen’s body ripples again. There is nothing she can do to fight her own physiology right now, and when the ripple completes Chrysalis deposits a green egg below the pink surface. It immediately floats up and bobs for a single second before it explodes with a sharp and forceful PLAP. It splatters into a splash of glowing green slime that rapidly mixes with the pink lake. No changeling egg could possibly hope to survive such a love-rich environment. This is when Chrysalis really starts to worry. The rising tide of love has halted, but she’s still got a length of her own body submerged. She already feels the changeling equivalent of sick to her stomach from how much she’s absorbed, and her fleshy bits are starting to bloat even further than they already are.

Her webwork of a hammock is a blessing and a curse. She’s secured in place, unable to avoid what’s below, but it also prevents more of her massive bulk from contacting the dangerous pool than if she were simply cut loose. If she could she’d order a drone to simply cut loose her ovipositor, as painful as it would be she could always grow a new one. But that isn’t an option. She’s in no state to do it herself, and overlying who could has already popped in the love soup below. It is when she’s mulling over how to escape this predicament that she feels something strange. She’s used to the sensation of overfeeding, but this feels like a different kind of bloat. Deep in her core Chrysalis feels something shift. She can’t quite put her hoof on it until she pops out another egg. She watches it balloon and pop  in the pool before realizing what she’s feeling inside. Her eggs are being overfed.

They may not be in contact with the love, but Chrysalis is. The more love she draws in, the more diffuses its way into her clutch. Its slow at first, but the gradual building pressure in her egg sack and ovipositor both can be explained by a gradual swelling of her unborn eggs. Chrysalis doesn’t know what that is going to do to her, but she does know it won’t be pleasant. She struggles against her anchored restraints in a vain attempt to extract herself from the pool, but in the end she only causes a few ripples to spread in the love. All the while pressure is building. It’s a strange sensation for her. The bloating she’s expecting from soaking so much love is coming much slower than she’d expected it to, but that’s because she’s transmitting it into her eggs almost as fast as she’s absorbing it. Her grunts of struggle eventually start to shift towards a fearful moaning. She has no way out.

Minutes pass and she swells unevenly. Tens of thousands of baseball sized eggs pack her guts, each one swelling by millimeters every second. The queen’s soft flesh begins to visibly show outlines of the countless eggs within her. The tightness of being wedged apart from within is unlike anything she’s ever felt in her long life. The kinky fiend that she is, Chrysalis can’t help but note that in a different situation she’d be getting some real pleasure from the sensation. Those thoughts are interrupted and filed away for later as soon as they arrive by a brief stab of pain shooting across her middle. She’s swelling faster than even her exceptionally pliable membranes can keep up with. Chrysalis takes a deep breath to center herself and try to think of an escape when she feels the first egg burst.

Her eyes go wide in response. It hurt, like she’d been punched in the gut from the inside. She looks down at her lower half in horror, just in time to feel another pop near where she was looking. Then another. With every muffled THUMP her belly pulses just a little larger. Just a little tighter. Overtaken by fear and instinct, Chrysalis presses her hooves down on her lower half and struggles madly to separate herself from herself. She isn’t sure if she can even regenerate her entire lower body, but in the blind panic that was overcoming her she is willing to try anything. More pops and splorts from inside her draw a grunt and a whimper from her lips. Its getting bad. The frequent undulations that accompany laying stops, even the parts of her body that she can’t control knows something is wrong.

The span of time between pops has begun to shrink. When it started it was ten or twenty seconds between them, now it’s a scarce five seconds. One pops particularly high in her stomach, causing the Changeling queen to lurch forward while releasing a choked hiccup. When she opens her mouth she coughs out a mouthful of bioluminescent green slime. Chrysalis takes a hard breath as she wipes away a trail of the ruptured egg’s innards that was left clinging to her chin. Despite her wishes Chrysalis gets no chance to recover. Two more eggs forcefully erupt inside her, this time pulsing a fountain of glowing green ooze out of her nose and mouth. She tries to stifle it as it comes out, splashing green on and around her hooves and down her front. It’s getting worse.

Another minute passes, and the eggs are going off constantly. Once or twice a second another one bursts inside. Chrysalis’s belly and ovipositor is visibly quaking with every pop, quickly swelling out in sections as the eggs run rampant inside her. Winded, in pain, and exhausted, the top half of Queen Chrysalis slowly goes limp. She’s tired of fighting it, and no matter what she does it only gets worse. She’s given up. Her eyes close and a flow of glowing green egg goo begins to stream out of her slackened jaw. The only thing She can hear is the constant pop pop pop pop reverberating from inside her own colossal body. There’s five or six going off every second now, and her fleshy bits are constant a gurgling din of bursting eggs.

The slow crescendo keeps rising, and Chrysalis’s ragged breathing hastens with it. She may have given up but she’s still conscious. Her membranes continue to tighten as her fleshy parts expand far beyond what they’re meant to. Her insides are so flooded with the luminescent content of the eggs that she’s softly glowing. All the light does is serve to highlight the shadows of unpopped eggs within her as they continue to swell and burst. The eggs start to burst by the dozen, the end of one pop obscuring the start of the next, blurring the sounds into a cacophony Finally something breaks inside Chrysalis and her eyes snap open. Her breath comes in short halting fits, and she begins to once again claw at her lower half. There’s nothing left in her but raw animalistic survival. And eggs. Ten thousand eggs. She lets out a wild scream and beats at what exposed sections of her bloated body that she can reach, spewing gouts of glowing green froth with every shout or blow.

Chrysalis’s unfocused rage accomplishes nothing. She continues to loudly swell until she finally begins to reach her limits. The sound inside is deafening, and her membranes begin to split and tear from their impossible loads. Fissures split open along her seams, and her body springs first dozens, then hundreds of leaks. Thin jets of glowing green fluids spray out of her, showering down into the deadly lake of love below. Her long tubular body is nearing three times the girth she started at. While it had mostly swollen evenly before, now sections dome out haphazardly into lopsided bulges.

The mad Changeling queen is still raging and thrashing atop her bloated body when it finally happens. The great suspended bulk forcefully ruptures from end to end, the tear starting just where her belly meets her sternum. Chrysalis releases a full-throated scream as her body unzips right down the middle. Her glowing green contents scatter down in an arcing shower as she violently unravels. The queen slumps over unconscious from the shock. The webwork above begins to fail in some sections, effected by the sudden jolt. Slowly at first, the resin anchors fail until a critical threshold is passed, and the shredded remains can no longer be held aloft. The bulk falls from the middle first, starting a slow collapse into the green-mixed pink below. The supports fail higher and higher on Chrysalis’s long destroyed body until only one final anchor remains.

By luck, providence, or the fact it’s the only resin tether mounted to her chiton, the anchor proves itself stronger than flesh. Instead of tearing off of her, the heavy weight of the fallen egg sack tears itself free from Chrysalis and splashes into the lake of love. Chrysalis is a grim sight. What is left of the limp queen dangles from a swaying tether of changeling resin stretching from her back to the ceiling. The last few drips of green slip out the bottom of her chest cavity, briefly breaking the silence in the chamber.

Her breath is shallow, but somehow still present. A benefit of the insect influences to Changeling physiology. It would be another few hours before the next shift change came through to discover the scene and cut her down. While wandering the border between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, Chrysalis hazily wondered how long it takes for a Changeling to grow back their everything.