Hoot and Holler and Grunt as the Walls Start to Crumble, For, Deep Down, Are We Not Merely Animals? · 7:56am Aug 12th, 2013
With much love to you patient people, I give a tidbit.
“Do you know what we need here, Wing Commander?”
“N-No, My Lord.”
“Music.” Claws snapped in the night, and Wing Commander Sho’ani suddenly found herself on her hind legs, gripping a violin between her dark, perforated hooves. “Play for your soldiers, Commander.”
“B-Bu, My Lo—”
The breath in her lungs was stolen from her, and Sho’ani cowered as forest erupted in flickering, angry light. The beautiful moon, her only familiar comfort from home, began to bleed where it hung in the sky, dousing the night with the life-blood of ponies and gryphons. Twin spotlights—the insane eyes of a god—appeared before her, glaring hilarious death into her own blue, compound eyes.
“Play.”
“Yes, Sir.” Holding the instrument as best she could, Sho’ani began to quickly rub bow against strings, screeching out a horrible, perverted melody of searing noise: the sound of a dying grub crying its last. Her brethren whimpered, their pain and fear nipping at the back of the Commander’s consciousness. Their Queen was dead; they could feel it.
And now they were bound to the will of a mad god—Mother’s last order.
The Wing Commander played, and her brothers and sisters cringed. Claws ran along her carapace, and she shivered, trying not to listen to the contented sigh of the Spirit of Chaos as he curled next to her.
“Lovely. Truly lovely, my dear.” He paused stroking his goatee with a lion’s paw—a normally neutral gesture made sinister beneath the stream of moonlight leaking through the canopy above. Beyond them, past the edge of their unnerving hiding place, lay a small village. It was getting rather late, and few windows remained lit in the darkness.
Though, half the town looked deserted anyway: visiting the capitol for their “Royal Wedding.”
How many weren’t coming back?
How many were drained dry? So much love for her people, and none of it went to her battalion: none but the residual feeling, felt through the all-mind. How many lay dead in the streets? Victimized and beaten and forced to love them until they breathed no more? How many?
How many would die tonight?
Sho’ani didn’t know, and as she finished raping the soft night with her violin, she couldn’t help but be afraid.
“Go. Take them all, and bring them back to me… alive.”
The battalion moved as one, wings buzzing quietly as changeling after changeling lifted into the night air. Sho’ani moved to follow, but was stopped: frozen by a claw lightly tickling between her wings.
“Ah-ah-ah!” the mad one tutted. “Not so fast.” She could feel the smile on his muzzle as it hovered beside her ear, just out of her field of vision. It didn’t matter, though. She was too scared to look, anyway. “Do you know what we need, here?”
Terrified, pleading futilely for help from her siblings, Wing Commander Sho’ani shook her head.
The beast snorted, caressing her flank with his dancing, brushing claws:
“Music.”
Back to work.
