“It was the smell,” the changeling said, her voice so small Spike had to strain to pick it out from the soft sounds of the hive around them — the distant buzzes and clicks of creatures going about their normal lives. “That’s the only reason we found it. We smelled it, this… rot on the wind, like a corpse sighing in your face. And we’d heard rumors, we knew the Freiherde had driven the changelings out of their land and imprisoned the ones who didn’t leave, but…”
She didn’t stop speaking so much as choke on the words before they could leave her throat. Spike reached out to take hold of her hoof, and she gently pushed him away — steeled herself and pushed on. “We weren’t that far from Bärentatze, maybe ten miles from the outskirts, encamped in a little hamlet the war had barely touched. Maybe we should’ve known the moment we got there, from the looks the civilians gave me and every changeling in my unit, that they knew. They swore they didn’t, said they’d never seen anything, but they knew. They let it happen. They…”
Another pause. The changeling’s hoof trembled, gripped at the air like it was the throat of some invisible creature she meant unconsciously to throttle. “They were at the fence when we arrived,” she continued, soft again, almost ethereally serene. “Hundreds of them, hollow carapaces and sunken eyes, draped against the wire so you couldn’t tell until you got close which ones were alive and which were long dead. We got the whole company to come back, brought supplies and cut through the gate, and inside it was just…”
“You don’t have to repeat it,” Spike assured her. “I’ve seen the photographs. I know what–”
“You don’t,” the changeling snapped, and for a moment Spike wondered whose neck her clenching hoof was really meant for. “You… you mean well. I know. You want to record what happened, what I saw, and I understand that, appreciate it. But you don’t know. You weren’t there.”
Spike nodded and sat back. When she was ready, the changeling went on. “You are right, I suppose. There are other records, other changelings who survived the camps and who liberated them. I saw the same things they did, probably less than some of them.”
“But you saw her,” Spike said. “The Princess.”
“Twilight,” the changeling confirmed. “She flew in from Canterlot. She believed us, the report we sent, but she said she had to see it for herself. Like it was her duty to. And she did see it, all of it. Didn’t look away, hardly blinked the whole time I was inside the camp with her. And I’d…”
The changeling stopped again — but instead of shaking, she sat perfectly still as her eyes darted around the room, and layered a question into the look she finally gave Spike that he answered with a nod: I’m alone, and you can trust me.
“Everyone was shocked, you know?” she murmured. “When… after the war, after Larimar. But I wasn’t. I saw Twilight in that camp, saw the look in her eyes when she saw the bunkhouses and the furnaces, and then how it changed when I told her we’d found the commander who’d run the place, him and a dozen other Sennan guards.”
This was where the official Alliance report on the camp outside Bärentatze stopped. This was one of the last pieces to a puzzle Spike had spent months assembling, the portrait of two Princesses who Spike had once known and who the world had once believed in.
“They told her the same thing they told us,” the changeling said. “That they needed magic to counter Orlovian runes, and extracting it from changelings was the only option left, and they couldn’t be blamed for doing what they had to do to win. Twilight knew it was a lie as much as we did… as much as I think the Sennans did. They could’ve done what they did in that camp to every changeling on the planet, and it wouldn’t have gotten them a week’s worth of two-track fuel.
“They wanted us exterminated, nothing else. And the commander, standing there with his hooves tied together and a dozen rifles trained on him… he was still smiling, leering at me and my unit, telling us with his eyes, ‘Just you wait, I’m too important to go to prison, they’ll let me go and I’ll come get the rest of you.’”
“What happened?” Spike softly asked. “What did Twilight do?”
The changeling gave him a look that told him he already knew, and there was hardly any point in her repeating it. But she said it anyway — in a mournful whisper, desolation laced through her distant gaze.
“She did what she thought was right. With every last one of them. And when she was finished, the smell was still there, and there wasn’t a single soldier in the company who could look her in the eyes.”