Five Star Service and Rise of Firefly · 12:28pm Oct 23rd, 2016
Surprise, folks! I've just released a new Five Star Service chapter for your reading pleasure, showcasing Five Stars' remaining time with John, her first human lover. In it, reference is made to the following scene from my growing war epic Before the Storm: The Rise of Firefly. I'm excerpting it here to show exactly what Five Stars was referring to in the opening section when she said she had to play the part of an interrogator, told not from her perspective, but from that of the gryphon she was interrogating:
Greetings, my Equestrian friends. And know that my part in this tale begins an hour after that fateful parley, when a single unicorn mare entered a secret passage deep beneath the command bunker of Outpost Gamma.
Though she wore the hood and cloak of an Equestrian Army unicorn soldier, and in fact she was one, I had come to learn she had another, far more covert role and position few knew of. Reaching her destination, she opened the locked door with a special spell and then stepped inside where there was little more than a single weakly lit table and a pair of chairs on either side.
In one sat a single trembling young sky gryphon. Said gryphon was lanky and barely past puberty, his wings bound and legs manacled, struggling desperately to stay awake. He was just fifteen, the youngest of the captured raiders having joined them but two weeks earlier, having no parents, no home… and now, no hope.
His name was Gavian Ravenoff, and he was me. An impressionable teenager seduced into joining the raider group by promises of eaglesses, gems and glory, only to be thrown into a meat grinder he was in no way ready for, leaving him not just orphaned but alone, cut off completely from his kind and country.
“So, Gavian…” the unicorn mare asked me in perfect Aeric, magically removing her cloak and longbow as she entered, putting them aside before taking a seat opposite me in the holding cell, located in the most secure sublevel of the base. “I assume you saw everything?” she nodded at the back wall, where her telepathic feed had fed a special projection gem and displayed the events of the parley before me.
The quivering of my beak told her I had—but then again, how could I not have seen it? It was seared into my memory given she’d only replayed the execution of the mage a dozen times! “Wh-what do you want from me?” I asked, my voice shrill and breaking. They’d told me ponies were weak and had no stomach for bloodshed; I’d learned the hard way the lie of that statement two days earlier as they fought like demons and their reinforcements all but slaughtered us like so many swine. “I-I told you I don’t know anything! I just d-did what I was told!” I answered the mare in my native tongue, not knowing any Equestrian. “W-we were just trying to take a few more ponies, th-then everything w-went to the crows…” I offered again, my eyes squeezing shut in pain, the memories of that night still haunting me. I knew then I wouldst never be free of them, wouldst never be free of the sheer terror and fear for my life I’d felt that night…
A fear I still felt then, knowing my life was now in the hooves of the unicorn mare before me. “You know, I wouldst almost believe you, Gavian…” the orange-eyed, green-maned pony told me as she got up, circling me like a predator… and appropriately, her cutie mark was a series of stars arranged in the pattern of a longbow. “I wouldst think you too young to know much. Except that we found exact copies of our communications gems on you. Except that according to your compatriots, Mistress Hildyra had a taste for younger tiercels and you were her favorite toy… meaning you might have been privy to more than most,” she added with a salacious grin, causing me to shudder and look away. She was correct, and the memories were far from pleasant ones for me. “And except that you said something very odd when we initially spoke… something about ‘a place where ponies are taken’?” she reminded me, causing my drooping and very bloodshot eyes to go wide. “Methinks I’ll leave the first two questions to my fellow mares in the Equestrian Intelligence Service, but me? I’d very much like to know more about that place.”
“Wh-what about it?” I struggled to remain focused and not giving anything more away to the cunning and clever mare before me. I had not slept since the failed raid, for whenever I closed his eyes I saw enraged white-furred pegasi mares diving on me with bloodstained blades, cutting down my comrades one by one… and coming for me as well; ’twas only the shouted order of the commanding guardsmare that spared my life. And my waking hours were little better; I could still clearly see the murderous looks on the pegasi mares’ faces as they captured and held me and the endless fear for my life I felt until other ponies arrived to take me for interrogation…
An interrogation that was now in its third day, leaving me ever closer to my breaking point. “It-it was just some old building! I-I mean th-there was barely anything there except for…” Too late, my beak clacked shut.
The mare grinned and leaned forward, causing a fresh pit to form in my empty stomach. “Ah… so you do know something. ’Tis good. Because you see… methinks there was more to these raids than a simple kidnap-for-ransom plan. And methinks you can lead me to the truth.” she told me with the surety born of long experience in her craft.
“Y-you can’t protect me…” I shook my feathered head hard, now struggling to stay awake, my head lolling repeatedly, knowing what she was suggesting was tantamount to treason… and an instant death sentence in the empire. “If I say anything, they’ll kill me!” I was trying hard not to cry.
“Come now, Gavian,” the mare said, only too aware of my predicament. I didn’t know her name; I only knew that she held the power of life and death over me at that moment. “Only if they know you’re here. And ’tis certain they don’t, else they wouldst have demanded your return at the parley or sent an assassin for you. We’ll hide you. We’ll treat you well despite your crimes. But if you still don’t want to talk… then well, I guess I can’t force you,” she shrugged.
“The Princess does have certain rules against coercive interrogation, after all. In that case, we’ll simply release you back to your own kind, explaining that we found you wounded and hiding in the canyon. We’ll even break your wing and a few ribs to keep up the ruse,” she suggested with a sly smile, causing me to whimper. They had barely patched up what wounds I did have, leaving me in pain as well as insomniac; clearly whatever rules there were against ‘coercive interrogation’ didn’t preclude sleep deprivation or letting me languish in pain.
A pain that only deepened as she continued. “Of course, even after all that they won’t believe us. They’ll assume—correctly—that we were holding you, and then they’ll interrogate you far less gently than me. In the end you’ll break, admit you talked to us, and then they’ll charge you with treason and kill you exactly as they did your mage,” she grinned again as my eyes began welling up. Much as I wanted to believe I was a brave warrior, much as I’d wanted to believe the sword and old armor they’d given me made me invincible, I was now being forced to face the truth: that I was still but a helpless cub, lost in an alien realm and at the mercy of those I’d thought inferior to my race.
“In fairness, I suppose we could just let you go without telling them,” she mused idly, causing me to look up hopefully. “But sadly, there’s nowhere in Equestria a gryphon can go, and should you try to return to the Empire… they’ll be alerted by their own intrusion detection spells the instant you cross the border. They’ll find you… realize you were here… interrogate you… and it all ends up the same,” she noted in mock sadness as she sat before me and pursed her hooves, her look triumphant as she sensed she had me. “You now have no future, Gavian Ravenoff… except for what I may grant you.”
With that, I buried my head in my own manacled talons and began to cry. I was a gryphon. A predator. Ponies were supposed to be weak and little more than meat to us. And yet here I was, reduced to a mewling cub by them, trapped and dependent on their good graces for my very life.
And even worse, I was ready to give them what they wanted to keep it. At that moment I cared not for honor. I cared not for patriotism or pride. I was just a fifteen year-old tiercel, and all I wanted to do was live.
“There, there…” she told me, reaching across the table to raise my beak with her hoof. “It’ll be alright. We’ll hide you. We’ll feed you. We’ll keep you safe. We’ll even give you relief from the nightmares so you can sleep. You can keep your life. You can live comfortably. And all you have to do is help us. All you have to do… is talk…” she cooed softly in my ear.
So is Artemis Arrow the ancestor of Five Stars, or an actual past life? I'll leave that question an open one. But if you're interested in reading more, including her mentioned battle scene, you are more than welcome to read Rise of Firefly, which I'm trying to make canon to not one but two AU verses--the Gentlemanverse, and the growing Phoenixverse where Turnabout Storm and The Lawyer and The Unicorn (the last links to my story page because it's adult) are based.
Yes, I'm shameless. But seriously, folks... the story IS very good, rated Must-Read gaining an 8/10 rating from the Pleasant Commentators and Review Group, and is honestly my favorite work right now. People have even been asking me to turn it into a book, and I will once I have enough readers for it. Fans of Feathered Heart should certainly enjoy it, as I draw heavily on Demon Eyes Laharl's vision of the gryphon military and society for it. It's medieval warfare between the ponies and griffins, basically, with my usual heaping helping of worldbuilding and character development.
Indeed it is.
Did you ever read one of Steven Erikson's works?
4267776
I have not. But looking him up now, I note how he says of his signature book series that people "either hate it or love it" with no middle ground. Seems to be the way with some of my stuff, too.