//------------------------------//
// The White Shadow 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

SBMS052

The stockade and blockhouse went up quickly on the foundations of the ruined farmstead.  The footprint of a military outpost was vastly more expansive than that of an earth pony farming clan, of course, so Mad Jack had to work with the foundations rather than build on them, strictly speaking.  But the charred beams and stone made a decent start.  The usual palisade and ditch was thrown up in a long rectangle beside the drainage ditches of the Road, encompassing the planned blockhouse and the sweet-water well.   It was half-way to a travelling castra by the time Jack had laid out his guidelines, but he was trained the way he had been trained, and had real difficulty shaking off the habits of a lifetime.   Or doing anything small.

Further sections were displaced into the new forward base, and lent their hooves to getting the sketched-out palisade and blockhouse complex filled in.  Tented temporary barracks and supply shacks grew inside the new perimeter.

By the third day, we were running ground patrols through the district out of the new base.  Revenants were smoked out of woodlots, and ruined homesteads were carefully examined by cautious and careful doubled sections, half-sections of pegasi or griffins maintaining overwatch in the air overhead.  The Rosier farmstead turned out to be empty, but for smashed furniture, old bloodstains, and piles of equine bones in the corners here and there.  A pack of somethings had nested there for a while, but they were gone, whatever the story behind that had been.

The patrols collected more stories of the white ghost, the pale raptor, from other farming families in the district.  The Bollen place was as empty as the Rosier ruins when our ponies went over it, but that nest of ghouls in its neighboring woodlot had been real enough, and not in the least subtle.  They had apparently operated like a timberwolf pack in that neighborhood for the entire winter, sending out groups to pull down isolated ponies who wandered too far from their family walls, too far from other armed relatives, or not armed at all.  Their victims had been dragged back to the nest, and we found an impressive cache of bones in that hole.

The Crow and Otonashi did the interviews on that operation, and took the information on the behavior of the ghoul-pack, and the white ghost that haunted their would-be victims.  On at least a dozen occasions, farmer-ponies and their dependents had reported a terrible pale phantasm swooping over them in the darkness or twilight, screeching like a bird or a bat.  In three cases, ponies insisted that something had dived at them, howling like a demon, driving them from their field-work or orchard-tending.  The snarling and moaning of ghouls soon followed in every case, but the spooked ponies had already started moving, and in the testimony the warlocks had taken, the survivors had made it to walls and arms and safety just ahead of the ravening undead.

"So, the question is," I started, "Was our flyer directing a pack of undead, or warning its victims?"

Otonashi clapped out her reply, using hoof-language to observe that there had been no sign of living ponies inside or nearby the ghoul nest.  If the flyer had been the director, it was either undead itself, or not living with the pack.

"We think we got the whole pack in the sweep," said the Crow, optimistically.

"Do you ever get the whole of an infestation of pests?  These things are acting like living predators.   Unless you can figure out how to make a judas-ghoul, we're going to have difficulty accomplishing total extermination."

The experiments on remotely detecting undead have been inconclusive, hoofed Otonashi.

I rolled my eyes.  "Does inconclusive mean 'worthless', or just not there yet?"

Inconclusive means inconclusive, hoofed Otonashi. No more, no less.

"They seem to show differently according to patterns we've not been able to figure out yet.  One day, our trotters flare in the scans like Roamish candles.  The next, you'll be lucky to find them with the scans if they're right in front of you getting ready to chew on your snoot," said the Crow.

Gibblets and the apprentices are still working the labyrinth, hoofed Otonashi.  Don't like foals being so close to pony-eaters.

"We can't be both in the field here and back there helping with the detection-experiments.  At least Gibblets has Shorthorn to kibbitz and kevetch and gas on about how he'd be all over this if he hadn't burned out his little stub of a horn," sniffed the Crow.

Pinfeather and Longtang dropped down onto our little conference from overhead, in a farmlane outside of the westwood that had harbored the ghoul nest.  Their approach had been obscured by the clouds of black smoke billowing out of the woods from the pyres the sections were using to dispose of the ghoul-remains.  The two pegasi had reports - a white or off-white pegasus had been spotted circling the perimeter while we had been talking - and had spooked when half the flight took into the air and pursued it.  They were currently chasing the maybe-pony, it was running eastwards away from our position.

"Not running fast, though.  And it looked kinda scrawny to me, half-grown maybe?" said Pinfeather.

"Which way eastwards?"  She pointed off to the right and ahead down the lane.  Those of us ground-bound by nature galloped hard in that direction, and the pegasi followed us over head, then guiding forward as they quickly lapped us.  I waved up individual 'pounders as we passed through our perimeter, and they fell into position ahead and behind me and the warlocks as we tried to catch up to the ghost-hunt.

Eventually the circling Company pegasi came into view overhead, above the scraggly trees of an abandoned orchard on the edge of the Rosier place.  One would dip down out of the caracole now and again, dropping out of sight. I stopped at the edge of the orchard, and directed the 'pounders to spread out and establish a new perimeter around whatever the pegasi had run to ground.  The two witches kept to my back, and we waited, eyeing the approaches.  

The shadows were dark and deep under those short apple trees, their once-carefully pruned limbs grown wild and intertwined in the years since the the Rosiers' Apple-clan orchard-tender had left in a huff.  I'd heard all sorts of gossip about the Rosiers, they had had a reputation among their neighbors as being kind of witchy, even before the fall of the city of the caribous.  They had grown rich off of their famously delicious roses, whose tangled bushes could be seen closer to the ruined homestead.  This orchard had been a side-project, tended by a hired hand who specialized in apples.  As I've said before, Apples are everywhere, even here.  Except there weren't Apples here anymore, supposedly something had fallen out between the help and the family.  And now there weren't any Rosiers either.

There was a flash of white in the shadowed darkness to my right.   When I looked, it was gone, but I edged forward straining my vision in the mixture of sunlight and darkened shadow, which was making hash of my attempt to use dark-sight.  The Crow yelped behind me, and I spun about.  The two witches were looking behind us at a clump of rose-bushes with deep shadows underneath, and a little half-grown pony was running out from under those bushes.  Running as hard as her little legs could take her, away from us, from a place she couldn't have been, that I had personally checked as we passed.  

Her wings half-extended as she got ready to catch some air.  Otonashi reached out with her field, and caught the little pegasus by her tail, slamming her into the leaf-mould.  There was a high, reedy squealing as the little pony tried to kick her way out of the witch's telekinetic grip, and the Crow's field joined Otonashi in pinning down the white-and-grey beastie, tying her up in magic.

The squealing shook out into words, and they sounded sort of like, "Non non non pas d'aide de maman, ils me ont les démons me ont obtenu!"  The little green-eyed white thestral wept in terror, her grey bat-wings caught painfully half-extended in the grip of the warlocks, her long tufted ears trembling. "Ah, maman, maman!"