//------------------------------// // Dream-Sculpting // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS111 I had returned to my dreamscape to meditate, and think over the news from the northeast. As fall grew colder and the last harvests approached, the skirmishing around the fords between Pepin City and the White Rose in that unpronounceable heap of stonework grew more frequent, which is not to say constant. A continual stream of casualties rolled south from the duc's physician in our ambulances, until I was thinking of posting either myself or Rye Daughter permanently in the duc's castle. Rye wasn't nearly seasoned enough to be operating as a frontline surgeon by her lonesome, and I was uncertain what might happen if I left myself in the vicinity of the Duchesse's fiancée for that long. It had been awkward enough earlier that year when I spent a tense week re-training the duc's physician. I couldn't get out of that place quickly enough. Two more Company ponies died in the skirmishing. Pauldron Spur, an earth pony recruit from Hydromel, caught a bad blow in a fight for the main ford, and died of massive head trauma. A week later, one of the young unicorns that had come down with Occluded Blade died under the walls of Hohonahkemenie proper, on the wrong side of the fords. She had been trying to levitate a heavy boulder which had almost crushed one of her section-mates as they chased the remnants of a broken White Rose patrol back to their own gates. Hidden Jewel caught the boulder, but didn't see the spray of bolts flung by a war-engine on the walls above her. She had traveled eighteen hundred miles, crossed two portals, and passed through two different hidden colonies to join the Company of her ancestors, only to die months afterwards in an inconsequential little border affair. Now Duc le Murs himself was absent from his capital, his bridegroom's procession having passed through Dance Hall the day before, headed north on the Road. We had resolutely ignored each others' presence, and thus the Bride's peace was maintained. I just wondered what the foals had been named. Clearly meditation was not my strong suit, but even a saint of focus and equanimity would not have been able to concentrate on not concentrating when their own dreamscape began spontaneously growing mist-sculptures. A spectral grey-shading-into-white model of an angry, wizened unicorn grew up out of the ground-mist, scowling angrily down at something hidden in the distance. A second twin to the original statuary grew on my other side, staring across my head at the back of the other statue's patchy mane. As they formed more distinctly, I recognized clever caricatures of the bitter old stallion Obscured Blade. Then flaming balls of fury began blowing holes through each one in turn. The gouting mist flowing out of the craters blown in each cloud-sculpture failed in any serious way to resemble viscera or blood. I got up and went looking for the sculptor before one of her short rounds blasted me right out of my dreams. She was in her very own little crater, ripples of dream-energy sweeping the mists away from her hooves where she stood, braced, her wings stretched out. As she stared at one of the statues, another globe of red-yellow fire formed in front of her, and accelerated rapidly towards her target. Half of the cloud-statue's forehead blasted away in the explosion, and I could see her tongue hanging out as she tried to craft the liberated tendrils of mist into brain-matter on the fly. She was… less than successful. "Maybe I ought to show you some of my anatomical texts. You seem to have some rather odd ideas of what things should look like." "Bah! Realism is for glamours. This is VENTING!" And she fired another globe at her target, blasting away its' tail at the dock. "Is it just me, or is this a new trick? You said before that you didn't have this sort of control." "Old goat has been drilling us. Making me visualize, claimed that if I could walk through it, I could man-ip-pul-late the stuff. Never could do what he wanted, no matter how much he yelled. Called me names, 'bat-pony', 'toothy damned ting', dat sort of thing. Said worse to Bad Apple. Haven't heard 'mud pony' since my gran-mere got eaten by putain ghouls. Called Feufollet a 'white goat', whatever the tartarus that is. Evil old GOAT." She yelled, blowing the head off of one of her statue-targets. A white goat was an equine sacrifice in certain esoteric ritual traditions. She didn't need to know. "Look, Obscured Blade just lost one of his students up in the northern districts. Trained her for however long, sent her into the sections, and the first thing she did? Died ugly while showing off for her peers. That's the sort of thing that leaves a teacher feeling stroppy. You have to give him some leeway. I'd feel the same if you managed to get yourself hurt, Cherie." "Bad Apple's sensitive, more than you'd think. He's nasty, he is." "He's a unicorn, who has trained three generations of Company unicorns. And somehow? He's found himself training a donkey, an earth pony, and a thestral. The world's been turned upside down as far as he's concerned. And he isn't young anymore, he's not flexible enough to deal with that sort of topsy-turvy geography." "Hmph!" said the little thestral, and fired off a spray of fiery razors that cut her cloud-sculptures into decaying slices. The mist formed itself into double-helixes, and spun widdershins in a display of wondrous complexity. "So," she said, "Apparently dream-stuff is a lot more malleable than shadows. Does whatever I tell it to do. Maybe I could even re-arrange your loud, ugly dreamscape, Monsieur!" "No! Don't – " But I was too late, and a great wind drove away my concealing mists. Blood everywhere. Dismembered bodies. And on a throne, once hidden by the mists, the foal's body, flayed, still breathing erratically, that horrible sound once hidden by the clicking and buzzing. The vile little thing, whose plotting had nearly killed my Duchesse and her foals, who had bribed the physician, who had paid for it all. Who I had butchered like a pig in the slaughterhouse. And whose screams tormented my dreams until I had built this protective construct to suppress the nightmares, with my Spirit's collusion. Cherie screamed and screamed and screamed. And I couldn't do anything to make her not have seen.