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// Nothing As Melancholy 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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FFMS012

My dreams in laager just east of the last defile before High Earth were strange.  The battalion had joined me in sleep, mostly.  A few guards oversaw my trip-line vinery, which had been tied to tin-cups with little pebbles in them.   They sat, ordered to stay awake, to watch the laager and listen for the rattle of the tin-cups if any would try and sneak into our sleeping formation.  The excitement of the fight and the exhaustion of the forced march back had wiped us out, and I hadn't even paused to wonder why I hadn't heard from the princess-radio all night long.

My dreams were strange, because they were empty, and echoing, and dark.  I floated through them like a fire-fly, and hummed to myself at the familiar coppery smell.  The hypnotic nature of this dream was such that I was not at all startled when the Princess in her more Nightmarish aspect appeared enraged in front of me.

Not that she's ever less than peeved in that mood, but you get the idea.

"Feufollet! My apologies for having left you out of contact for so long!  Reports, please, your Captain and her Lieutenant need information, immediately!"

My firefly-self pulsed, sleepily, and I organized my thoughts and memories, still half-disordered as they are before a good long session of sleep.  They were enough, I suppose, for the Nightmare to seize and forward in a fluttering dark-winged state of distress.

"Mistress, what troubles you, that you look so?"

"What troubles me?  Oh, naught but my foolish other self, who cannot abide the simple clash of forces, the death of one little filly, without screaming her blue fool head off for hours and hours!  One simple death, and madness!  Nothing but madness!  We lost control over the whole of your Third Cohort, in the midst of bloody, howling combat.  Of all the times to weep over spilt blood, in the crush of two lines testing their shafts 'gainst each other!  The battle joined and then – feedback!  Nothing but feedback, and misery, and sobbing, and I am totally out of patience with myself at the moment."

My own self rolled over in dozy alarm, and I realized she was talking about a battle.  One which hadn't been our one-sided fight in the lane outside of Beech Grove.  After some poking, she explained just how much of a mess the main body had gotten into, and the situation as it was.  She really should have been screaming in my ear to get my detachment moving in support of their battered parent regiment, but I think the distress of the more Princessly of the Spirit's personalities had communicated itself to her other selves.  I gathered that her Cherie-self was currently talking down the traumatized Princess-self, leaving the Nightmare, with her less than pony-oriented personality, to pull together the fragments of Company scattered across our eastern front.

I absorbed what I could gather, and then, fully lucid, I forced myself awake.

It was still pre-dawn when I woke the officers and sergeants of the battalion, and explained the 'message' I had just received.  They were sleep-deprived enough that they didn't register the lack of an actual pony present to have delivered my 'message'.  We got our rankers up and on their hooves as the black eastern skyline took its usual pre-dawn tints.  By the time one could tell a white thread from a grey one, the detachment was on the road, and rushing through the defile into view of High Earth and her environs.

Little was visible of the defeat or rout.  We swept southwest on a farmlane we had used the day before to bypass the town, and still found nothing until we reached the main market-road south of town.  The roads got muddier and muddier as we moved south, showing the demarcation of the storm-front which had meandered out of the west the evening before, soaking some fields, leaving others bone-dry.  

The main market-road was full of debris, and the occasional pool of red-tinted rainwater.  We went into formation, and everypony armed themselves properly, barding set and spears couched at the ready. The major consulted with me, and she sent a squad of rankers north to make a connection with whomever had passed this way, leaving all this debris in the road.  It was impossible to determine if that had been the main body, or an evacuation detachment, or what had happened here.  I examined the disturbed roadway, and decided that it hadn't been fought over.

I didn't think.

The rest of the battalion moved south, to throw out a screen in case we had accidentally come out in front of the current lines we were supposed to be defending.  We moved slowly, and the morning sun began to draw forth a heavy haze, approximating a mist, from the rain-soaked fields and groves all around us.

The detachment sent north returned soon enough, escorting a small train of carters with wagons full of breakfast for the rest of the regiment.  We had come in behind the main body, and between the regiment and its supports.  We cleared the road to allow the wagons to pass, and formed up, in march-column, to follow in the slowly drying roadway.

We found the regiment three miles south of High Earth, where they had slept on their arms in the muddy fields around the market-road.  We had had a mostly dry night in the valley to the north and east of here, but they had set themselves down in a muddy, soaked wasteland of disturbed earth and affrighted farmlots.  

The main body had gotten badly mauled in a brief, catastrophic fight – almost as sweet of an ambush as our own little massacre along the Hayfriend.  They had at least been properly armed and barded when the enemy had found their flanks, although that was hardly solace to the many dead and wounded.  The Company supports had retrieved the situation by flanking those who had flanked the militia, and driven the victorious rebel back in confusion.  It had been enough to retrieve the remnants of the Vallee du Pierre from its trap, and to allow a retreat, however bloody.

Still, a defeat is a defeat.  We left the rebel in control of the town of Dover.  That's how they calculate these matters once you join up with the regulars, so all the books tell me.

And my idiot knight managed to get wounded again, so the ponies of the Third Cohort told me.  At this point, it was almost a tradition for the hapless unicorn, to catch a wound whenever the Company got proper stuck into a situation.  One of his sergeants was technically in charge of the cohort, but as far as I could tell, the Crow was actually running things on the line.  It was her illusions and fireworks which had covered our retreat.  She looked almost as tired as she was muddy.  And everypony on the front line was covered in mud that was, by the odor, at least one-third manure by weight.

I could sort of hear the Nightmare over the radio, but it was still kinda blurry here next to the rest of the Company.  She got across the gist of my instructions, which were to wait for a pegasi flight coming this way with my witches-gig.  Time to play the scout.

My chauffeur that day was Whirlwind once again.  I gave her a hard time about being in the traces yet again, and she assured me that we'd be courting more than enough danger for her emotional needs.  The crazy mare had a pair of wingblades strapped to the front of the gig, where she could easily shrug into them if it came down to a ground-fight.

The two of us laboured into the air, as the rest of the flight made a couple quick passes to the east and west of the battle-line, who were laying in the rays of the rising sun, the mud on everypony's backs baking into a shell of filth.  As we made our altitude, the escorting pegasi gave the wing-wobbles that indicated all clear, and we moved south-eastwards, to make an easy curve that would bring us over the fields and homesteads east of Dover, where yesterday's battle and retreat had occurred.

I wove an illusion from my bloody scratches and the bright sunlight, a glare and shine like sundogs on the prowl.  Anypony looking up from the ground would only see flares and evaporating wisps of haze and mist boiling away in the hot early-summer sun.  

Coasting over the battle-field, I could see the windrows of the dead, and the blood and the broken weapons and barding littering the field.  You could smell the stink of battle from three hundred feet in the air, and battle smelt like shit and vomit, with barely a hint of that old-sou stench.  There was no sign of the enemy on the field, just the bodies they had left unburied.  In these conditions, you could expect risers inside of a day.  Either revenants or ghouls; given the violence remembered by that field, my deniers were on 'ghouls'.  The White Rose was being alarmingly sloppy about their battlefield hygiene, if you asked me.

We continued over Dover proper, which was locked up tighter than my méré's silver-cabinet.  No sign of rebels under arms, or wagons that might suggest anything larger than a battalion.  Continuing into the fields west of the town, we still found nothing, and a further spiral southwards over the roads leading out of Dover found only churned muddy road.  

A lot of churned muddy road.  A mile south of town, my detection cantrips finally triggered, and we coasted, silent, over the hidden scouts scattered through various copses and groves within line-of-sight of the various roads winding south and east and west of Dover.  A mile and a half south on the Dover road towards, hrm, I think Braystown?  There was a battalion or two in their own laager, well-posted with a pair of war-engines which could have shot us out of the sky if it weren't for my illusions.

I felt my blood drying, and my magics fading about that point, so I cut myself again to renew the energies, and then I tapped the traces, gesturing for Whirlwind to bank northwards and for home.

The enemy wasn't coming, and had even left the field of battle to – well, to the crows as far as I could tell.  Maybe it had been closer to a draw than anypony on our side had thought a few hours ago.  I reported via the Nightmare, who was still feeling nervy and irate.

By the time I got back to our battle-line, I  was getting reports from a chastened blue-winged Princess, looking rather embarrassed for herself.  And yet, she brought good news.  The rest of the Left Division was on the road between New Coltington and High Earth, with the Reserve not too far from the campgrounds outside of New Coltington.  

The Army of the North was beginning to concentrate, and yesterday's setback would be nothing more than that.  And the Lieutenant was on the field when the pegasi and I touched down in the dried and steaming fields north of Dover.