//------------------------------// // A Little Touch Of Nightmare In The Night // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS075 The Spirit danced with herself upon the grand ravelin to the sound of the mandolin and the accordion, stepping out in a long-legged swing half-alight that was far too wild for the two-step that was being played, their wings spread wide as they floated upon their hooves. Shadows stood faceless watch upon the fighting-platform as our Mistress danced, their sightless gazes directed across darkened fields of fire. Back-lit figures in the distance could be seen swaying back and forth, two and two, along the ramparts stretching off beyond the great ditch. She dreamed her own dreams these nights, and although she staged them upon my memories, she peopled them with figments that often I had no idea from where or whence they came. Strange figures in strange bardings, pale creatures with features I could never get down on the page after waking, tall two-horned monstrosities with single staring eyes, haunted-looking thin cattle in spiked chamfrons. All danced to the tunes she called forth from my remembrance, and some looked lost in delight, and some infuriated by the dance, and some just lost. The Spirit stepped away from herself, and promenaded down and across the draw-bridge, her demonic self leading her alicornic self as a beau leading his belle from a ball dance-floor to her seat at the table for dinner. I followed, baffled, to find her treating herself in this fashion, more used to the two of them at each others' throats, but unwilling to interfere with this strange self-amity. We passed through the crowd swaying to the endless zydeco, shades spinning in the tight quarters of the firing platforms and walkways under the charred bones on their palisaded display-racks. The music followed us, as we dance-walked our way out along the simple wall thrown up between the southern guard-tower and Trollbridge, where more shades danced to the omni-present bouncing beat, which never faded although we were then miles from the imaginary Mondovan musicians. And out across the increasingly-fortified bridge, every night finding another improvement added to the complex which had once been a simple guard-blockhouse. The dream-trollbridge aped Mad Jack's organic sprawl exactly, built in spurts and spasms as materials and ponies and inspiration provided. Nothing was said by the two aspects until we reached the thrall-pens, around which they began to circle, and the music shifted radically, not to something recalled from Dance Hall, but rather some ancient chamber-orchestra playing a sombre pavane. Within the pens, the thralls rose from their stasis, and, still rotting and dead-eyed under the light of the moon, turned to each other, and began to shuffle and shamble in a sickening parody of an allemande left within the tight quarters of their confinement. The alicornic aspect faded into the mists of the dream, and her Nightmare self stepped forward over me, now fully engaged in the spectacle, and glaring furiously down upon my small self. "Is this what we are now, Acolyte? A purveyor of flesh? A procurer? These are abominations, which we had been so pleased to find our ponies extinguishing in noble battle. Their enslavement and sale to dealers with death are not in the least pleasing to us, not in the least. Our weaker self turns away, sickened, to see this foulness suppurating outside our new gates. The slavery of the dead by the living? What horrors would you parade forth beneath our banner?" I fumed, trapped, and more than a hair guilty at the accusation by the great black Spirit. And I turned on her. "What, the great foal-eater would cavail at the controlling of a dangerous pest, and its sale and use as a military resource? What right do you have? You've bragged of destroying cities, countries, worlds! We're purging a dangerous monstrosity from a province that nearly died of the infection, and this limited sale will protect our gains and our work so that it is not dismantled by the savages who created the infection in the first place! Because they are coming, those liches who obliterated the first city of the province, left it to rot out like a gangrenous limb, to poison the whole with the dying of the part! All intelligence and evidence points to a visitation by one or both of the legates in the early winter, possibly with an army, to take what is in their minds, theirs, the yearly fruit of their plantation. These horrors, these monstrosities - selling them to the Imperials is the best - best! - way to undercut those greater horribles. To make friends among their peers, most of all, with their own great mistress!" "You dareā€¦" she loomed over me, and her jagged white fangs blotted out the moon and the stars above. "I dare, Mistress, because I am your Acolyte. And this is necessary, and necessity knows no master, no mistress. Your Company could be extinguished like a candle in a downpour, or even by the hoof of a foal. There are great beasts in this worlds' night, and you are a dream, a visitation. Could you stand for us when the last of us are hunted down in the dark by these great beasts?" She turned, and looked out beyond the pens and their malignant dancers. There were no slopes, no forest, nothing but an imaginary plain stretching out beyond what in the world was a long expanse of gorges and ridges extending for a hundred miles in that direction. The spirit's imagination swept away the bones of the world and envisioned the distant tartarus which was the endless war of the White Rose and the legates. Fire and fury, great massive fortresses weighing heavily upon the fabric of the world until one almost could see the fabric sag under the weight. She frowned under her helm, pensive. "You would be surprised what might be possible, in the depths of this well you are digging here. I am more myself than I have been in many centuries. Already I feel myself walking with my children, flying beside them in the night. There are four aerial patrols sweeping the valleys and ridges, right now. One will pass within two miles of where our dream-selves stand, in ten minutes. There are a dozen hoof-patrols sweeping the lowlands to the west and north, from the third cohort. The ponies of the night shift of the second cohort are probing the fringes of the Deep Mines district, looking for your ghoul enemies. Here!" A blur, and we were suddenly standing in the moonlit darkness of a distant slope, surrounded on all sides by the caribou and earth ponies of a Company section, their eyes glowing thestral in darksight, and most of them were fixated upon a trio of shambling dead, approaching their position. Only one pony, to the side and rear of the section, had turned to spot the two ghouls flanking them all. I recognized the new recruit, somehow already out on night patrol?! My chamfron was over his head, and it gave him the darksight necessary to spot the unseen threat to his unit. He took a pioneer's axe in his orange hooves, and charged, bellowing like an ox. The Nightmare strode forward, danced with him, guided his stroke. She pulled him back before the third, unseen ghoul could blindside him as the first two had flanked his section. She pushed him forward as his axe slipped out of the cloven skull of a former threat. He never blinked, nor even seemed to notice that he was not alone. And while the actual veterans surrounding him took belated notice of the threat they had overlooked, Carrot Cake was already spinning around with the weight of his axe, and on his own, took out the legs beneath the third ghoul. The Nightmare stepped away from the sudden, swift fight, beaming. "Such a wonderful colt Asparagus found for my Company! He will be a delight, if he doesn't die first. He takes my guidance like a lightning-rod grounds the thunder-bolt." A dozen flickers in a dozen heart-beats, and we skipped from patrol to patrol to patrol, until we stopped with a section, walking along a forest trail on a distant slope. The Nightmare and I blinked, and we were ahead of them, among a large herd of undead, laying in wait in a clearing just around a great boulder blocking the view of the on-coming armsponies. We blinked again, and the Nightmare leaned over to whisper in the ears of the pony on point. The pony stopped, eyes wide, and raised her hoof to stop the column. She used hoof-speech to wave her fellows up and over the boulder, and both up and down the slope. The enemy, which she could not have seen, and probably did not smell, was taken in a perfect, textbook pincer-movement, in a one-sided slaughter, as if she had known they were there. Which, in a way, she had. With another flicker, we were back on the grand ravelin, and the dance-band was playing something sad and mournful, and the softer Aspect was leaning against the curtain-wall, gazing out over the glacis and her stars in the west, as the moon made for its rendezvous with the distant horizon. Luna spoke for her Nightmare-self, who perhaps was a bit manic with the blood and gore we had witnessed. "We are increasingly with our ponies, these days. Thou art close to us, and yet, thy path might take thee even closer ere we are finished with this world. We find ourselves oft, as it were, over thine shoulders. Sometimes she can whisper in your ears, and some of you harken. Usually to the good, although not all of her suggestions are for the best, in our opinion." The Nightmare had regained her self-possession, and rejoined the conversation, "I wish I could claim that this is all to plan, or this is merely the beneficent gift of your Queen of the Night to you her worthy subjects, but truthfully I have no idea what drives this. Was it something intended by the mages of the Third, your ancestors? How could they possibly have known that the Company which was to come would stumble into a world of death and death-magic?" Luna continued, "Or that their magics would interact thus, with destructive fury, upon the petty necromancies of this fallen half-world? With every spell broken, every half-life torn from every animate lump of over-aged clay, the grand bargain which is the Black Company's own pact with Us is empowered. It fills our reservoirs like a sparkling black tide. We worry what will happen when the reservoir walls are over-topped." "What's to worry, self?" laughed the Nightmare. "Perhaps we can instantiate again in the waking world! Wouldn't that be something, Acolyte - you could call, and perhaps we could come! Oh, to feel the parting of flesh beneath our hoof-blades again, to have a skull cave in under our frogs once again!" "Blood-thirster! Next you would be drinking the blood of our enemies from their cracked skulls! Yes, we remember that abomination into which you led our thestrals. Madmare! You-" And the aspects fell into their usual pattern of recrimination and fury. Unedifying, somewhat shameful, and best to hide under a cut for the dignity of our Mistress. One would almost suspect that she fights with herself to avoid remembering similar arguments with her sister, her betrayer. Because they certainly resembled the squabbles between siblings from my point of view. I awoke while they were still squabbling about ancient thestral blood-rites that I really wish I hadn't heard about. And the Nightmare complained about our new line in wholesaling thralls!