• Published 26th Feb 2014
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Cartography of War - Daetrin



A tiny slice of the great gryphon-pony war.

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Don't Get Lost

Gérard’s talons caught her hoof. “You need to stop doing that,” he chided her gently. She pulled away from him, planting the hoof she’d raised to scratch at her flank on the ground again.

“I know.” She was trying, but every time her mind wandered, her hooves seemed to move of their own accord to try and rub at the cuts. And it was all she could do not to throw herself down on the ground and roll. “It’s just that Mercy made things like this so much easier.”

“Mercy White was a good healer?” Gérard’s voice held echoes of some emotion that Rose couldn’t begin to guess at.

“Yes!” She glared back at him briefly before returning to picking her way through a boggy patch, her hooves still wet from one of the tiny rills that fed it. “One of the best!”

He sighed. “I am sorry, Rose. That should not have been her death.”

“Nothing should have been!” She was willing to let him treat her physical wounds, but the emotional ones were still too raw. “Apologies just...just aren’t enough!”

“Yes.” He sighed softly. “Her death is my responsibility, so I should know about her. I should know what debts I owe.”

“What?” Rose nearly missed the next dry patch, stumbling and then hopping across the last muddy swath onto solid ground, grimacing as the movement briefly turned the itch into a stabbing jolt. She turned and frowned at him as he followed her steps, attaining the bog’s edge with somewhat more aplomb. “What under the sun are you talking about?”

He clicked his beak at her, and she imagined he was trying to frown back. “Tch. Surely ponies must address the debts of their dead.”

“But they’re dead.” She blinked at him. “How can they owe anything?”

“That’s not right. There has to be some responsibility.” He shook his head in frustration. “Who will pay what is owed? I must offer something to redress their deaths.”

Rose stared at him, trying to puzzle out what he was talking about, absently reaching back to scratch at her wounds. Then she pulled hoof away as understanding bubbled up, and with it, anger. “You think you can just buy off killing them?” She screeched, and his ears flattened. “That’s horrible!”

“I don’t understand,” he protested. “What is so wrong about paying debts?”

“You can’t put a price on lives!” She snorted at him, her ears laid back. “They’re more important than any sort of wealth.”

“But I don’t mean their lives at all.” He snapped his beak at her, more emphatically this time. “It is the deaths I am talking about, and -”

“That’s the same thing!” She shouted at him. “You can’t make up for killing someone. Once they’re dead, they’re gone forever!”

“Yes, but the death matters, as does what they leave behind.” As her voice had gotten louder, his had gotten quieter, and his eyes had narrowed. “I cannot believe that ponies would just abandon their dead.”

“What they leave behind is their friends and family! And there’s nothing you can do to make it up to them. Can you give Golden’s foals back their father? Or - “

“Hush,” he snapped at her suddenly, and she stomped her hoof.

“No! You can’t just shut me up like that. I -”

She caught him moving that time, a blurred leap as he pounced on her, clamping a forepaw over her muzzle, his body pressing hers up against the tree. “Shh,” he breathed in her ear. “Don’t speak. Don’t move. Our lives may depend on it.”

Rose struggled in sudden panic for a moment, then realized he wasn’t looking at her at all, but up at the sky past the trees, his ears perked forward. Slowly the anger leaked out of her as it became clear something other than the argument was amiss; Gérard’s ears kept twitching, his head moving in short jerks as he tried to focus on something.

It was almost a full minute later when she caught a glimpse of a gryphon silhouette framed against the blue sky. A minute later it came again, or maybe there was a second one. The last buzzing dregs of angry adrenaline congealed into leaded anxiety as the two of them crouched against the trunk of the tree, breathing as quietly as they could.

The two minutes stretched to ten, and then twenty. Rose’s left hind leg began to ache but she didn’t dare stretch it, not so long as Gérard was tense and still, moving only his ears and his eyes. Finally he let out a slow breath, letting her go and stepping away from the tree.

She shivered all over in pent-up reaction, stretching her legs and moving as quietly as she could. All she could think about was that she had barely seen them, never heard them, and yet Gérard noticed them coming from miles away. When he had said the other gryphons had been careless to have been killed by ponies, he hadn’t been simply dismissing them.

Rose counted herself fortunate that she’d never seen battle. She’d never even seen the aftermath until she’d stumbled into the nightmare of her camp, so her concept of combat was distant, blurry and half-imagined. But she knew without a doubt that those silent-winged gryphons, with Gérard leading them, could have passed by their camp or killed them all and spent the same amount of effort. For the first time she found herself wondering how terribly wrong things must have gone for there to be any gryphon bodies at all.

“The graves were a good idea,” Gérard said softly. “They’ll probably think ponies came by. I hope they’ll look in the wrong direction, but they may be back soon.”

“That’s not why we dug them,” she hissed, keeping her voice just as low. It was petty, but she was still shaken.

“Yes. My apologies, Rose, I did not intend it that way. I am merely concerned about their actions.”

She nodded grudgingly. “Besides, ponies would have buried the gryphons, too.”

He snorted, a soft exhalation of air. “Let us hope they do not know that.”

Her hoof went to Sharp Eye’s pendant, now around her neck, and she hoped the gryphons would leave her friends be. “Who were they?”

“Ganon and Kree,” Gérard answered, flexing his talons. “They must have come straight back. Do you think you could find us a course that keeps us under the most cover?”

“Why, yes, but...they went all the way there and back in three days?”

Gérard laughed. Quietly. “I’m sure they didn’t even sleep. It serves them right.”

“Are they the ones that...hurt you?”

“This is Kree’s talonwork, yes. But Ganon has always followed his lead.” He waved her forward and she glanced around, picking out a path that sacrificed ease and speed for cover and quiet.

She was still on edge as she crept along the gnarled trunks of ancient willows, so when his voice came again it made her start. “I think we have been talking past each other.”

“Hmm?” Her ears twitched, but she refused to look back. “We haven’t been talking much at all.”

“Earlier, when you became angry,” he clarified. “I was talking about paying off their deaths, but I realize now you could only talk about their lives. I think we might be meaning entirely different things.”

“I hope so.” There was a flash of indignation, a resurgence from an argument that seemed hours old now, but it was quickly buried under more constructive emotions. She would much rather find that Gérard was not as callous as he seemed.

“When I was young, I duelled the promising young apprentice of a steelsmith.” His voice was contemplative, reflective. “I killed him.” The word was free of the flinch or regret that any pony would give it, admitting such a thing. It was simply what had happened. “And spent the next half year helping the steelsmith hammer iron until I found a replacement.”

She found he was looking at her expectantly. “Ponies don’t duel. And they don’t kill each other.”

“No?”

“Well, it might happen sometimes but it’s not normal. It’s always a terrible thing.”

“Then...how do you resolve affronts to your honor, your family, your clan, or conflicts where neither side will back down? What do you do when there is no other recourse?”

“That doesn’t happen.” She shook her head at him, faintly horrified. “We don’t do those sorts of things.”

He clicked at her, his beak snapping shut. “But that is how people are. There are always those who will push until they are stopped, or take everything they can and leave nothing left. And there are always those who must be in charge and must not be in charge.”

“Maybe that’s how gryphons are,” she said in a level tone. “But not us. We’re a community. We help each each other and work together on problems.”

“So do we! But there must be more than simply cooperating.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to kill anyone!” She found herself raising her voice again. “It is never acceptable,” she said firmly, rubbing at her throat with a hoof. But she could see, faintly, where he was coming from when he had asked about Mercy.

“I do not see how it can be avoided.” He shook his head slowly. “But I suppose I must take your word that it is.”

“Yes,” she said, but she was having just as much difficulty accepting Gérard’s view of life. The thought that fighting someone to the death was simply part of life was more than a little nauseating. She still felt bad about hurting Gérard, and he hadn’t even minded it.

And somewhere among her scattered thoughts another one came to the fore, one that should have occurred to her before. “If they can fly that far in a few days, is anyone going to be waiting at the camp by the time we get there?”

He made a noise that only a gryphon could, something both feline and avian, but it wasn’t a happy sound. She had hit something. “I hope so. They are supposed to stay until recalled, regardless of what success we found. But without me, Kree might convince them otherwise.”

“So we could go all that way and nobody would be there?” That seemed almost worse than having to endure a full camp of gryphons. Gérard had made it clear that he intended to send her back to Equestria, eventually, so if the camp were intact she only needed to wait for that. But if it were abandoned, she had no idea what they would do.

“I hope not,” Gérard sighed. “I do not like sailing.”

Rose looked back, unable to tell if he was joking. His face was no help, since for once he wasn’t watching her, his eyes lifted to the sky and his ears twitching.

“Are they coming back?” She kept her voice quiet, even though she knew he would stop her long before even shouting would give them away.

“Not yet. Ganon is a tracker, but even if he notices our path they’d simply cover the area in flight.” He waved it away, focusing on her again. “Your mane and tail are my largest worry. Red and orange like that stand out in our surroundings.”

It was true enough. The colors around them were mostly green and brown, with the occasional splash of white or blue. But there were flowers here and there so she wasn’t entirely out of place. “They aren’t going to be looking for me, though. Unless you think they’d investigate anything that might be a pony.”

“Kree might. Ganon is more careful.” He clicked his beak. “It should not matter. So long as we stay under cover I should be able to hear them before they can hear us.”

“I can’t believe you can actually hear them flying from that far away.”

“Compared to me you are deaf and blind.” She rolled her eyes, and he laughed. “But your eyes see things mine do not.” He waved a talon at the path she was picking out, winding clean and smooth through the willows. So far she’d even managed to avoid burrs in her coat, though Gérard hadn’t been quite so lucky. “And you have your horn, so perhaps I am not giving you enough credit. You need to stop that.” He interrupted himself to catch her hoof as she tried to rub at her flank again.

“You don’t think much of me, do you?” She pulled away from him, frowning and focusing on the path ahead.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s just the way you act. There’s no…” Rose struggled with it a moment, trying to put a vague and nebulous feeling into words. “Trust, I guess.”

“You are my prisoner,” Gérard pointed out. “Trust is a scarce commodity. And I do trust that you can find us a path.”

“It’s not that. You...don’t trust that I’ll do anything without being told to do it, or how to do it.”

“I do not know what you mean. I have tried to be as polite as I can.” His voice held a bit of snap.

Rose was silent for a while, thinking. “Yes,” she said finally. “I think you have. It’s just that it’s not like being with another pony.”

“And you are not a gryphon.” He made a soft crooning noise and then clicked his beak at her. “Tch. Rose, I have tremendous respect for you. And your kick.” The last was delivered with a short laugh. “Would that we had gryphons of your talent.”

“But gryphons don’t have cutie marks,” Rose interrupted. “So you couldn’t have anyone with my special talent.”

“I suppose not.” He sounded surprised. “But what I mean is that any disrespect I may seem to have is simply because the situation we are in, you and I. We are enemies. Captor and captive. It cannot be comfortable for you.”

“No, it’s not.” But Gérard was uncommonly conscientious for an enemy. At times she could almost forget the slaughter of her friends. Almost. But then, Gérard hadn’t done it.

“Kree,” she said suddenly. “He killed them, didn’t he?”

He didn’t respond immediately, and when he did his voice was cautious. “After I fell, Kree would have led the rest of the squad. But it was my responsibility to keep him tamed, so what followed was my fault.”

“No,” she disagreed. “It was his.” Her anger, which had turned into a sort of vague background haze, suddenly came into razor focus on a target that really deserved it. Even if he was far, far out of her reach. “Why did he do it?”

“Likely because he thought it best,” Gérard sighed. “We are both loyal to what we think is right, but we disagree on what that is.”

She turned around and looked at him. “You don’t think killing ponies is right?”

“The war changed my mind.”