Story

Ice. Cold. I’m frozen here in the mountains. Looking at my hooves, they are splintered, sore. I hope they can grow back, though I’m not sure.

I’m Gyle Woolsprint, and I’m a soldier. It’s been two weeks since me and the others were enlisted for our mission. It follows as such: infiltrate and capture a stronghold owned by a notorious rebel group. The stronghold is called Windigo Bastion, in a place known as the Unicorn Range.

Now I’m here with my fellow soldiers. There’s nine of us in total, though there’s only four in the camp right now. I look to Thaler, who joined our group from a different squad. She’s a pegasus, purple furred, near the fire that’s now a smouldering ash in the centre of our mountain camp.

She sharpens a knife gripped in her teeth, across a rod of worn steel held firmly in place with her forehooves. I’d try to talk to her, but she wouldn’t care for idle chatter. Still, she’s the loudest of the four of us here, sharpening away with the sparks of steel on steel.

Polo’s opposite her, another pegasus from Thaler’s squad. A bright mare, she’s the only one in our group that seems to be up for any sort of talk, and I’m fond of her for that. Right now she isn’t doing much, though, glancing at her map now and then and thinking quietly to herself in the background.

I decide to talk to her, and so I do. I walk up to where she’s sitting, and say, “Hey, Polo, when did Honeybag tell us the rest were coming back?”

She turns to me, her fur brown and bristled with snow. “Hmm?” she says. “Oh, um, I think she said she’ll turn back the moment it starts getting dark. Are you hungry?”

“Not really,” I reply. “ It’s just that it’s so damn quiet out here, without anypony talking. Sod us sticking here, maybe Honeybag has planned for us to finally start moving again.”

The other mare I speak of, Honeybag, is the captain. She took the job leading the other four away from camp to scout for supplies. We’re running desperately low on wood, and any food rations we’ve had from the beginning are two weeks old now. As for ‘Sod us sticking here’.... well, we’ve already been stuck here for three days, and I can’t fathom ‘til the next snowstorm.

Polo pushes her hoof on the map she’s holding a couple of times. “Why ‘maybe this and that' with Honeybags plan? Maybe I have a plan for us. Windigo Bastion has to be nearby, I’m sure of it. She said we were lost, but y’see that mountain there? I’m checking over the map, and it looks quite similar to this one five miles from the Bastion… here. We must be on the right track.”

That information is a relief to me. “Only five miles? We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Polo smiles curtly. “Don’t be so sure. We still need to know the right way to get there, and the riverpath below us nary goes that way for another two days’ march or so, and that’s not even counting any guards or folk we meet on the way.”

At that, Thaler’s knife sharpening abruptly stops, and she looks at her as if she thought Polo were a fool. “Polo… we have wings. We can fly over! Let’s get that oaf Fortune over here, fly five miles together and storm the fort by surprise. You know I’m the best shot here, and hell, Fortune can kill anypony with his hooves alone.”

“You must be joking,” Polo says, looking at her with disbelief. “Three ponies can’t take Windigo Bastion.”

“Then why didn’t headquarters send a squad of pegasi?” Thaler says. “No offense to Gyle here, but he has to see that this makes no sense.”

I can’t think of a thing to say, personally, and give her a small shrug as she looks towards me. It’s a good point she brings up; why didn’t they send a pegasus squad, raze the fort and be done with it?

Polo speaks up again. “We can’t carry all the equipment we need on our backs alone, Thaler. If we had a chariot, sure… but where would we land? They’d see us from miles away, even in bad weather. No, the plan I’ve designed makes perfect sense. Moving stealthily through the mountains, keeping a unicorn,” at the mention of ‘unicorn’, Thaler gives a scowl, “With us for the magic capability, and the earth ponies for marksmareship. I’ll agree that you’re a better shot than I, Thaler, but you’d be surprised at the ruthlessness of earth pony training,” she chuckles.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Endurance training’s a drag. I can vouch for that, and I bet Merry could too. Well, I’d wager he could, if the old goat weren’t snoring fast asleep!”

They chuckle at that. Merry is a fellow earth pony here in camp, and while I know it would be rude to question his age while he’s awake, I’m sure that he is the oldest here. It was his turn to do watch duty last night, but I’m not going to let a chance to poke some fun at him pass. We’re cold and grim enough as it is, and we know each other well enough to make a joke now and then, much that I hope.

“Ah, you were saying that you had a plan, Polo,” I say. “Do tell, if you’re willing.” As I speak these words, Thaler decides to go back and sharpen her knife some more, leaving myself and Polo to chat.

Jovial at the request, Polo responds. “I’m thinking to ask Honey if we can scout that mountain I pointed out on the map. It’s called Trough Peak.”

I smirk as I tell her, “Trough Peak? A silly name. Who’d have thought it would be a good idea to name anything ‘trough’, eh?”

Polo doesn’t care much for that, and she frowns for a bit. “They named a lot of these things hundreds of years ago, probably with good reason at the time. Anyway, I’m thinking that we could find a passway or tunnel through it, since it’s the closest mountain to where we’re headed. If not, there’s a few other places on the map that look like good candidates. While I don’t think attacking the fort is a good idea, us three could certainly do the scouting. By Tartarus, we could be besieging the Bastion in a couple of days or so!”

I like the sound of that. Camping out for far too long all throughout these two arduous weeks has been taxing on me, and by the looks of it on everyone else, too. It wasn’t Honey’s fault, or not that I know of. She’d been complaining about the maps we were given for days, and only now it seems we’ve come across the right path. The range is large, that much we know, and much of it is undiscovered.

After my chat with Polo, she says she’ll take a nap to wait for the captain. Well, try to have a nap. It’s cold enough to keep anyone awake, even when the cold saps your energy clean. I don’t think I would be able to, even with all my woollen gear on.

This winter has been the worst. I remember when somepony back home was raging about all her sheep being sheared clean for the second time. As unfortunate as it must be for those poor sheep, I’d say it was worth it. Well, they say that after the siege of Canterlot, the rivers of Equestria froze, and snow even poured itself down in the San Palomino, of all places! We won the siege, of course, and what a good thing too. Now we have Canterlot, and they have the snow to deal with.

I’m not sure how long it took before Honeybag and the others came back... it’s hard to track hours, when you don’t have a working timepiece! Merry boasted that he was a mechanic before the draft, so maybe I’ll ask him if he knows how to fix it later.

While I waited, I was thinking about home, mostly, how once I was done with this I’d be back at the pub, drinking and telling tales like I’d seen the veterans do. Maybe I could write about it as well. I’ve heard many stories from older wars where the soldiers hadn't the foggiest about their plans, and laid out on epic adventures across the wilderness with massive battles, saving thousands. That hasn’t happened as of late, so folly on all the could-have-been stories. The emperor wants to reunite the land under one banner, and he’s close enough to make those wants a reality within a year or so. We'll be out of this soon enough, and I’ll be back in the sheep farms.

As I think about this and that, I hear hoofsteps coming from down on the riverpath. Strange, I recall, as it only started turning dark a short while ago, and I’d have thought the others were still quite a ways away.

I climb up the rocks to see. Well, that’s even stranger. First of all is that the group coming back are going quite the wrong way down the riverpath, from the way that Polo said would lead us nowhere quickly. They aren’t travelling to Windigo bastion nor our encampment. Usually they would split off up a great deal of rockfall to their left a mile back or so, which they would climb to get on the path up to here. This time they haven’t. They’re still far away right now, but there’s no way they can get back to camp the way they’re going, not that I can tell.

Secondly, there’s two more of them. I’m squinting, but I’m sure of it. Five went out and seven come back? I can’t tell who they are from this distance, but I’m sure my eyes don’t deceive me.

I’ve rested my hooves on the rocky outcrop around our camp, a wall that protects us from a fierce fall down to the depths of the riverpath. I turn my head around, and I say, “I see them coming back, but something isn’t right.”

“What isn’t right?” Merry says, looking at me uncertainly. He’s awake now, but Polo’s fast asleep. Thaler’s passed out too, from the look of her. “Go on, spit it.”

“There’s two more of them, and they’re still going down the path. It’s as if they’ve forgotten the way.”

Merry steps up from the ash-laden ground near the fire. “And you’re sure it’s them?”

“Who else has come through the riverpath in the last three days? It must be.”

He doesn’t seem entirely convinced, and steps up to where I am to see for himself. “Huh. Ah, I see them. That’s no good, that is. A good chance they’ve been captured.”

At the word, a pang of fear runs through me. “What? No! How could they be captured by a mere two ponies? They brought their guns with them!”

He looks at me curiously. “What d’you think, then?”

“Well, um… I’m not sure. Maybe they found some stragglers, and brought them along to help.”

“Stragglers, and a cart, it seems. Hope you’re right.”

It was true. Giving them a second stare, I see the cart, a big wooden thing pulled by two of them. I’m a bit surprised I didn’t see it before. It makes sense, too. If they found stragglers, or even prisoners, they wouldn’t be able to take the cart up the rockfall. It doesn’t seem like they’ve seen us at all, and there isn’t much chance of them doing so, seeing how high up we are.

“Well,” I start, “I hope so. If they’re, say, prisoners, there’s no telling what Honey will do to them once they’re up here.”

Merry nods, still looking in their direction. The ice walls of the riverpath make the party distinct and clear compared to their surroundings.

We wait, anxious for an answer, and both of us are dead silent. Who are these ponies? Are they friend, or foe? As I look, I begin to notice a faint sound of hoofsteps behind us.

Before I can turn, I hear her voice. “I hope you aren’t talking about me behind my back, Gyle Woolsprint.”

The voice surprises me, and of course it should. It’s Honeybag!

She and her party come up the steep incline into the camp, worn and weary, guns strapped to their sides. Fortune and Raven, the strongest two, carry a load of timber on their sides. With luck it isn’t all rotten, and the others, aside from Honey, have tins that I hope are full to the brim with berries.

More importantly, there are no ponies driving a cart, and no cart. I’m starting to feel that fear again.

She trots to me. “You’re not looking right. Are you coming down in fever? Merry, what is the matter here?”

“Well, ma’am, the lad has a reason to fret. It appears that we’re not alone out here.”

I say that, “There’s another group of ponies out there, ma’am, seven of them,” and she looks back sternly. It's difficult for me to decide whether to be relieved, or horrified at this turn of events, and though I mask the fear out of my voice, I’m not sure she buys it.

We’re told to clean our rifles as soon as possible, find our shot pouches, and all the rest. The timber is set down quickly, but not a piece placed on the fire.

Our group groundscout, the orange-furred Fairlee, went to scout them out at a close distance as soon as she could. A groundscout becomes most useful when you want a scout who doesn’t flap about, and can sneak around with as little movement as possible.

“They’re not well armed,” she says when she comes back. “A couple of old muskets, and maybe a lance or two. They are pegasi, though I’m not positive they’re part of any army. No insignia on the fur cloaks they're wearing, not that I saw.”

She doesn’t mean pony-fur, of course. Some of the pegasi in the colder areas here kill animals, like beavers, to get their furs.

“Ponies wearing furs? I always knew they were savages up here,” Thaler scoffs. Though I don't condone the killing in this instance, she'll never show affection for anypony on the other side regardless of the matter.

“Chances are they’re merchants, ma’am, but I s’pose you can never be sure,” Fairlee says.

Polo makes an effort to speak, but Honeybag does so first. “Either one could be a threat to us, directly or otherwise.” She has a different accent from most of us, similar to mine when I was younger. We were both raised near Fillydelphia, but she’s from the city, so her ‘fancy-twinge’ as I’ve heard it been called has kept strong.

Having waited patiently, Polo speaks up. “...I was going to say, they have to be merchants, or, well, are most likely to be so. The riverpath looks like a merchant road between a few neighbouring towns to me. Just look at the map.”

Honeybag looks away, as if hardly acknowledging her. “Remember what Fairlee said. You can never be sure.”

“On your order ma’am,” Fortune says, swiping his ramrod out the barrel of his gun. “You can count on me to follow.” He continues to clean the barrel out after. His gun is picked clean, but it never hurts to make sure.

Those few that have plans debate what cause of action we should commit to for a short while amongst themselves. I don't feel like my word would be valued, so I stay shut throughout the discussion.

I like to think I’m not biased, and even so, I feel that Polo’s in the right. She speaks of trade with the Riverpathers, the locals who inhabit the mountains. “Seeing as they don’t know much about the outside world,” she says, “there’s bound to be something we can give for food and service. Merry could fix a few things here and there, Fortune and Raven could help with heavy loads, anything to get them on our side.”

I struggle with my own rifle. It's not that the thing's badly made— in fact, I hear tell we have some of the best around. The truth is that I've barely used mine since training, and it's since then frosted up nastily. I listen on.

“The captain has a point though, you must understand,” says Fairlee, vying for the other side. “I don’t think these ponies could ha' never experienced a touch of influence from the surrounding country. The coalition has some kind of force in each village without a doubt. With that, we could be found and honour-duelled before midnight, or even worse, hanged.

“The killing of these ponies is unjust, too. I say we disarm them, take their food and any other valuable supplies, and leave them with enough to survive back to their towns. Then we have enough food to move on, and a viable distraction in the, ‘Recurrence of bandits through the riverpath', perhaps enough of one to reposition some vital troops.”

I’m not saying my part. I don’t think I will, either, seeing as it just wastes time. Fortune has the idea I should stick to, really, short and simple.

Honeybag departs from the conversation, going silent while the other two keep discussing. She’s ultimately the leader, right? Her word is the one we march on. But, say, if Polo doesn’t agree with the robbing, what would she do if she commanded us? I have no idea what the food situation is, as I never checked their tins.

Hmm, what would I do if I were leading... is it foolhardy to think we can let this party on the riverpath go without a whisper? What if they shoot back when we meet them? Why do we have to interact with them at all?

Fairlee makes me jump when she raises her voice above the rest. “Hold the discussion, they’re getting close. If you so desire, we could meet them on the ridge further up road. Your orders from there, captain.”

“Meeting them is the plan, groundscout. Everyone, move out.”

Having crept down the mountainside, we huddle up behind some rocks like birds in a nest. The cart sounds much closer now, rocking and tumbling audibly like the ones back home. It sounds like there’s something metallic inside, maybe pots and pans.

Honey peers through cracks in the rocks. She’s standing while the rest of us are crouched behind them, rifles out, covered in snow. We were told to load our rifles, so we do as we’re asked. Defence procedure as usual, as you never want to get fired at when you have an unloaded rifle. Tearing the top off the tiny shot-bags tastes horrible.

I look around. Thaler’s scowling as she always does. I’m not sure if she’s ever liked service, truthfully. Polo, on the other hoof, looks rather indifferent. She looks back at me, and then she shows me a face that tells me, ‘I don’t like this, not at all’. She’s still a bit flustered from the discussion with Fairlee. The groundscout’s by herself.

I don’t think any of us truly understand what’s going to happen. The waiting is killing me.
Honey starts taking her golden hoof, discolored by snowfall, slowly off the rock, and lowers it to about our head level. I don’t think everyone notices it at first glance, but they do when she taps it soundly on the rock I’m resting my head on. There’s a quick scuffle as ponies grasp their rifle correctly. It’s quite difficult to position, and I remind myself, left hoof under the barrel, right around the stock, press ‘mobile’ with the right. Try not to poke my eye out with the trigger.

Our crystal-powered rifles, from what I’ve heard, are the most useful mass-produced rifles around. With ‘mobile’, a blue-coloured crystal that I press (molded for comfortable use, of course), the gun hovers for a short while, and it can be pushed around to the right position.

Honey raises her hoof. She stops at her head, and we follow. I watch as the rest stand up, their rifles all emitting a faint blue glow with the sound like a choir of little chimes all ringing together.

I turn my head in order to set the rifle in place. While doing so, I see the other group coming down the riverpath. Now close by, I see a group of seven adult ponies in big fur coats, a couple with meaty, frozen trowels stuffed into their belts, and the other two with muskets. The five in front are pegasi, while the two driving the cart seem to be driving mules.

It takes them a while to spot us. Before they do, I have plenty of time to click ‘stase’ on our rifles, the red crystal, as I was told before so many times to do so. My hoof is shaking a little, so it’s damn useful that the crystal is big. The stase crystal changes the glow, cancels out the blue crystal effect, and stiffens the rifle so that no force can alter it aside from a swing left or right, like the old muskets in blockhouses. My hoof goes into firing position, just in case.

When the first of them see us, the pony in front hesitates, and then starts talking. The others stay silent in the background, some stunned, one looking to another. The mules rear. “An Emperor’s squad? Oh, alicorns bless! We were stranded in this civilisation-saken wasteland for weeks, and-”
.
Silence from the squad but a single voice, blasting my right eardrum. “FIRE.”
.

The dread of those icy cold words. Why did she call it? A second after Honeybag shouts, I hear the snap-explosion of the force of a thousand bucks firing into their group, frightening me to death. Without a moment to think, my eyes widen, terrified in the shock of my actions, my ears deceiving me with nothing but disaster. I pull the trigger towards me, and so the fates are sealed.

May the alicorns of Everfree, and all the rest, have mercy on our souls...

Author's Note:

(A brief sketch of what one of these rifles look like)