SBMS109
I was meditating in my whiteout dream, letting the tension between the discordant buzz and the swirling grey mists become the ikon of my unfocus. I wanted to consider the baker and her allegories without emotion or pride, without ego. It felt like I was allowing my ego and my broken pride to blind me to far too much since…
Mist. That horrible clicking sound. A little grey tail bobbing up out of the mist, like a -
Thestral filly trying to sneak up on me.
"If you're going to stalk a pony, you have to hide your tail as well as your wings, Cherie. All prey animals are born with a suspicion of erect tails sticking up out of high grass like that. It's quite literally like flying a 'beast of prey hiding here' flag."
Her tail jerked down out of dream-sight, and her head replaced it, blinking at me. "'Mn not stalking a pony, I'm hiding from the Princess."
OK. "Why would you be hiding from the Mistress? Have you been a bad filly tonight?"
"Nn-nn! Je suis tonjours bon! The Princess made me bet with her! If she can find me, all of me, I'll do what Uncle Blade says I have to do." She made a scrunchy face.
"What's that old bokor telling you to do?"
"Ah, I have to sit with the others and listen to him lecture, and nag, and mind him."
"What others?" What was Obscured Blade up to?
"Tu sais, the witchlings. Feufollet and Bad Apple. Didn't you know he's taken over their 'educaysun'?"
"Education, and no I did not. Why are you being thrown in with the little witches?"
"Uncle says my walking is his 'peervuu', whatever the hay dat is."
"Purview. It means that you are his concern, his business. His job. Walking - which one, the dreaming or however it is you're getting through locked doors?"
"The both, really. It don' feel like sorcerie, what I do. I just do it." I didn't say anything, or let it register in my expression, but the little thestral was growing a shadow in that grey-white emptiness, where there was no light, nothing to cast shadows with.
"Well, Uncle Blade is the Company expert on training young mages. If he feels that dreamwalking and… whatever walking is something that can be trained, then that is, indeed, his business." The shadow was lengthening, and there were stars in its mane.
"But I don't LIKE him! He smells funny, and his eyes are mean."
"We're all bad ponies, Cherie. Why don't you dislike me?"
She turned her head, confused. "You may be bad, but you're not mean. Why would I hide in the dreams of a mean pony?" Then she shrieked in surprise as her shadow pounced.
They went tumbling through the scattering grey mist, slapping at each other with their bat-wings, grey and black, and play-biting like a pair of puppies fighting over dominance in the litter. Finally, the black shadow-pony pinned the grey dream-filly, and put her teeth to the base of her mane.
"Give?" demanded the dragon-eyed shadow in the stentorian tones of the Spirit in her Nightmare aspect.
"Heck, no, Princess! You only found dream-me! You still have to find real me, and I'm damn well hid tonight!"
"Language, filly! She still is our Mistress." I paused, and blinked, breaking free of the dream-logic. The Spirit was surprisingly… small. And proportioned like a filly. "If somewhat smaller in stature than usual."
Then the Spirit did something I had never seen her do before - she blushed. Red as a tomato. And got up off of Cherie and started playing with something in the mist, refusing to meet my eyes. "We might have… agreed to a handicap. For the sake of the wager. I did not think that the juvenile form would have, well, never mind. We art still thy Mistress, Acolyte!"
"You know we can tell when you're putting on the accent, Princess."
"Bah! Toy not with the dignity of thy Queen, worm! We own thy soul, and might choose to devour it if thou must make mock of royalty and its ways!" Her head suddenly jerked sideways, eyes gone narrow, staring into nothingness.
"You did not just find me, Princess," said the little filly, getting up off of the dream-ground, rolling her eyes at the display. "I'd certainly notice."
"No, not you, you disobedient child. My other self will find you when the time is right. No, something else, something that shouldn't be there, something that smells like…" The Spirit suddenly exploded, forming her proper 'body', as I thought of it. Her wings were erect, alarmed, and her head threw back, her starry mane disappearing beneath her silvery helm. "INTRUDER!"
And she was gone.
Cherie and I looked at each other, and we nodded once before leaving for the waking world.
I jerked awake on my cot in the back of the infirmary, and looked around in the darkness. Nothing but me and the spiders. I stretched and then headed to the door, convinced that something was happening somewhere. There was a commotion in the outer office, and I broke into a trot.
One of my oxen was standing with his head poked out of the door into the main hall, light pouring in from outside. A dropped blanket on the floor showed where he had been napping on his shift. We'd talk about that later.
I joined him at the door, and saw a guard go running past towards the northern sally port. "What's going on out there, Skinflint?"
"There was this… shout in the hall, and when I looked over, there was a shadow or something opening the door into the hospital. It slammed the door shut and maybe I heard hooves running away? I don't know. When I looked out there, the Spirit, she was twice as big as life, and a-galloping thataway, yellin' bloody murder."
"So the shadow wasn't the Spirit?"
"Not unless she gained two dozen hooves worth of height between when I saw it the first time, and when she went running past the door. Two ponies. I think." He held his own dinner-plate hoof about the height of a short donkey on the door-frame, indicating his estimate of the intruder's size.
"Damn. Well, won't learn anything here, I give you my parole, I'll be back when the trouble's done being troublesome. Hold this door, don't let anypony else in until I get back." The niceties have to be observed, don't you know.
Heads were poking out of various doors along the halls as I galloped in the Spirit's wake. None of the guards were at their posts - I guessed that she had collected a posse as she rocketed past each station. Words would be had with those ponies later - I don't care what it looks like, in the dead of night, any given disturbance could be a distraction, not the main threat. I stuck my head inside a fourth cohort barracks full of half-asleep recruits, and ordered them out to replace the abandoned posts until the original guard returned.
This delay meant that I missed all but the last of the dramatics. She had galloped the whole length of the northern ramparts, and leapt the gate beside the north tower in a single bound. The trailing guards piled up at the gate, obliged to actually open it before following the semi-tangible Spirit into the darkness.
As I arrived at the north tower, the echoing boom of some distant explosion disturbed the stillness of the night. Cherie walked out of a shadowed corner on the stairs as I passed by, and she looked up at me, questioning.
"I don't know, kid. Let's see what we can see."
There were flashes in the brush to the right about three hundred yards up the Road, and you could see some trailing guards struggling up out of the drainage ditches into the brush. Another burst of light flung scrub into the night air, digging out a crater. You could sort of see the half-transparent Spirit snarling, and tossing around a half-grown sapling like a switch.
But you couldn't see whatever it was she had been chasing. She fried a few additional bushes as the guards spread out in a search pattern.
Nothing was found, but the destruction wrought by the Spirit upon the scrubland. She eventually disappeared into the night, letting go of whatever substance she had stolen from the world to gallop among us.
The Captain finally put in an appearance a half-hour after the Spirit had departed. You could tell she didn't want to believe our latest collection of ghost-stories, but I don't know how else she'd explain the smouldering brush-fires left by the Spirit's rage.
Her skepticism was growing tiresome.