//------------------------------//
// The Guildmaster 
// Story: Children of Darkness and Light 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//

“It was a shitshow,” the earth pony said, tossing his dirtied sweat rag aside and eyeing Spike across the engine block between them. “Write that down: shitshow. S-H-I…”

“I know how to spell it,” Spike replied, scribbling something on his notepad that could’ve been an expletive, for all his fellow Guildmember would know. “The whole operation was?”

“The whole world was. But I guess to the Guild, it’s all the same.”

Spike made a note of that, and the pony whose workshop he was visiting snorted and ducked back beneath the engine, fiddling around in the guts of the pony-sized machine heart with something ejected from the bandolier of tools around his forehoof. The dragon had met Masters of all shapes and sizes in his time within the Artificer’s Guild, and this one seemed like all of them rolled together into a pot-bellied, gruff-talking whole.

“This isn’t a formal interview or anything,” Spike said once it became clear the other pony wouldn’t speak first.

“Could’ve fooled me,” came the Guildmaster’s reply, echoing through pistonless holes in the engine block. “Toss me a five-sixteenths, would ya?”

Spike found the requested socket wrench on a nearby tray and passed it under the block. With a grunt of acknowledgement, the Guildmaster slotted the tool into a free spot in his bracer and continued his work. “I’m just trying to get the whole picture,” Spike continued. “How we got to where we ended up.”

“For the Guild?”

“If they want to hear it, sure.”

The stallion paused, and when he straightened to meet Spike’s eyes overtop of the engine block, something flickered inside his gaze that hadn’t been there before. After a pause long enough to be noteworthy, he retracted all his tools and emitted another grunt which could’ve been a sigh. 

“After the First War, Equestria was fine,” he said. “Did well for itself, relatively speaking, even once the post-war bubble popped and the whole world economy went to Tartarus. But everywhere else was beat to shit, and far as I saw, Senna got it the worst of everyone. They sent more soldiers to the front than any other part of Aero-Lipizzia, y’know? Lost more of ‘em too, and the ones that did come back were all but dead already and just hadn’t been buried yet. Missing legs, eyes… stuff between the ears. You couldn’t spot those ones as easily, but once you saw ‘em, you knew.”

The stallion heaved himself off the engine block and made for a workbench strewn with disassembled motor parts. Spike followed two steps behind, and took a stool next to the Guildmaster when silently invited to do so.

“So the operation, the big equinitarian cause Twilight talked the Guild into sponsoring. Wasn’t a backwater shithole in the world I didn’t see at some point or another, dodging old landmines and dud shells so we could toss boxes of freeze-dried veggies around and act like we did something good. But Senna… stars, you’ve never seen poor like Senna back then. Hope to Heart you never do, kid.

“Pferdorf wasn’t even the worst place, just the one I remember most. We show up, bumping along in gas-powered wagons loaded up with food, and it’s like we’re alicorns and rock stars put together. Just swarmed by everyone in town, shouting so fast they run outta breath and just end up wheezing, scrabbling for each box before we can even get it out of the cart. Some of the boxes break, and before a single corn kernel can hit the dirt, there’s little kids, skeletons in pastel wrapping paper, squeezing through the grownups’ legs to catch ‘em.

“And in the back of the crowd, I can see this family of changelings: mom and dad, I guess, buncha hatchlings, all bright-colored, not black like they used to be. And every time one of the parents tries to get in line… get in fuckin’ line, polite as can be, like they’re not skinnier than every other creature there, some pony or griffon or whoever shoves ‘em out of the way, and glares at ‘em like they’re waiting for an excuse to hit ‘em again. And so they just stand there, the whole time, ‘til we’ve unloaded everything and we gotta head for the next town in just as deep shit as this one.

“I wasn’t the only one to see ‘em. This initiate, Coral-something, so short her horn barely got up to my neck, she’s just a wreck, sayin’ we gotta go back, make sure the changelings get something, didn’t I see how hungry those little hatchlings were? And I tell her of course I fuckin’ see, and why don’t we turn around and open another cart, and start a whole damn riot in Pferdorf so the next five towns get nothing and the changelings probably still don’t eat? You can’t save everybody, I told her. I get it, but you… you just can’t. And it ain’t our job anyway.”

The stallion paused, eyes far away and lips pursed behind a filthy hoof he’d pressed against them. “It was so stupid,” he eventually muttered into his frog, before lowering it and turning back to Spike. “The whole changeling thing. Even back then, creatures hated ‘em, and for what? ‘Cause one hive was run by a lunatic way back when? ‘Cause there were maybe a half-dozen spies that even got to the places Twilight wanted ‘em, let alone did anything for that half-cocked First War peace scheme? They were changelings who were bastards, sure. There are ponies who are bastards, griffons, crystallions, fuckin’ kirins, even! But they were the bugs. The ones who didn’t belong.”

There was a grimace on his face now, growing into a scowl. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right? But we should’ve known. With where Senna started, with everything how it was, we should’ve known right then and there how it was all gonna end. And all we did was feed ‘em.”