//------------------------------// // Night Reconnaissance // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// FFMS015 The night exhaled, hot and humid above the disturbed fields and waterways of the day's skirmishing and entrenching. Whirlwind was back in my gig's traces, and we coasted higher and higher on the copper- and manure-scented wind. If this is what a day of desultory skirmishing smelled like, what would the big fight smell like? What would the great battle everypony was expecting be like? The night sky to the north was full of pegasi, spiraling furiously upwind from the expected directions of march for the enemy, who was now almost certainly reacting to our onslaught, our stolen march. From here to the outskirts of New Equestria, as many pegasi as we could spare were going through the ancient motions, the forgotten rituals that their distant ancestors had once used to summon the precious rain to parched lands. Here, now, southward, the sky was full of glittering stars, and the southern skies were clear as far as the thestral eye could see. But the clouds were banking quickly to the north-west, and the hundred or so pegasi dancing their rain-magic were drawing up the moisture from the summer-damp soils, and down from the glittering and frozen upper airs. The conjured cloud-scapes were slowly forming. But I could feel that spark in my tail. Nothing we could concern ourselves with, while we had a mission for the night. Those few fliers and those witches they could spare from the demolition of the White Rose's rear base, had been sent out to scout, to count heads and tails, to see how quickly the rebel reacted to our existential threat to their survival. As it turned out, the few witches they could spare, was me, and the few fliers, the griffin-corps, whose lack of touch for weather-magic left them free of the Lieutenant's mystical flock of memory. Upwards, Whirlwind drew us through the mansions of the sky, and I clipped myself a little bit and started the seeing cantrips, those little tricks which let me see as far as a pegasus, as sharply as a griffin, and as darkly as a thestral. The fertile plain between the dampness of the Wirts and the low ridges of the highlands was dark but full of movement. The many open fields, and the few orchards and groves hid little of the halting caterpillar-movement of our enemy. The thin scattering of battalions and companies who had contested our claim over the old battlefield below were visible, and tangible in other ways. Their… stink on the wind was palpable. Especially those surviving necromancers, whose psychic stench befouled the magic beyond any taint smelled through the nose or seen through altered eyes. A necromancer warped the world around him, took and gave nothing back to the bleeding existence they passed through like a many-edged razor. They were visible, here and there, like little rivulets of magic cut out of the veins of the living world. Few ghouls, though, from what I could taste. Their excavations had either been fruitless, or interrupted early in the dig, because aside from the occasional blood-mage's guard, there were not all that many shambling about. Certainly nothing horde-like to worry at the morale of our mundane militia-companies. The Company had little to fear from the lesser undead, but our allies certainly did. Beyond that rabble of skirmish-chewed battalions directly opposite the Middle Division, was an empty void of nopony, of nothing but the green world getting on with its nighttime affairs, respiring, absorbing the day's sunlight-supplies, and exhaling its waste-products towards the day to come. And there they were, there was the advancing columns of the enemy – the actual army-elements of the White Rose, their main battalions. Streaming westwards, concentrate. I tapped on the traces, indicating silently to Whirlwind which direction to take. I waved at our griffin escorts, and gestured in broad pantomime with my forearms in a sort of mime-dance, the new line of flight. We tipped over, and headed south-westwards, over the empty void, and towards the crawling caterpillars. The closer we got, the more distinct the details one could pick out from the darkness and the distance, the little worms growing furry with pike-heads, their tails full of labouring wagons and carters catching their bound wheels in what had to be poor roadways. These were the main brigades, their full regiments on the march, in the darkness. The White Rose wasn't a night-haunted army like the Company-sponsored Northerners. To stumble about in the heavily-chewed-up roads in this deep darkness – they must have been full aware of the danger they were in, they must have been shocked awake, to that threat that had moved into their rear. And they were awake to our surveillance. The nearest regimental caterpillar bloomed a full set of fire-works, crude rockets launched blindly into the darkness, perhaps having heard wings overhead, perhaps some magician smelling my magic. I spun up a black-edged cloud of phantasm to hide myself, my driver, and those griffin escorts I could reach – but some of the cat-birds had spread out too far for my sudden illusions to reach them. I sawed desperately at my hide, and tried to magick up something to deal with the flares floating overhead. Were those parachutes? While I got oriented and powered up, the regiment below had produced more rockets, and these were somewhat guided. Flung into the air, one by one they detonated, and little glowing terrors floated out upon the humid night air, lit horribly bright by blue-white guttering flares. I could smell the magic on those glow-balls, and tried to get up a bit of levitation, a bit of wind to drive away those little killers. I could feel the fear in the gravel in my throat, and realized I was shouting warnings without even having thinking them through. One by one, les petits bâtards brillants floated away from my exposed escorts, as we all spiraled up and away from the rebel regiment with far too many tricks up their tails. Then one of the petits bâtards caught Gaetan, and he lit up like a hayrick on fire. That drew another volley of rockets from the next regiment we were passing over, upon a converging road. We had to leave the flaming tom, his feathers wicking tartarus-fire like an enormous flare as his expiring body spun mid-air. That terrible flare dispelled all of my illusions like the air and blood they were. Regiment after regiment fired up their flares, and they marked themselves with their panic-fire. If each rocketry unit was with a regimental-sized group… I counted the rockets as they leaped skyward, banishing the night in terrible blue-white shocks which ruined the night-vision of everypony awake on that plain east of the Wirts. At least fifteen groups of rocketeers, at least fifteen regiment-sized groupings, stretching from what I think was the southern roads down from Dover, to the farm-lanes and roads leading up out of what I've been told is Braystown and her Shambles, and westward over the hills from opposite the loyalists behind the Hayfriend. The enemy was concentrating, and swiftly. Not tomorrow morning, but perhaps the afternoon after that. And they outnumbered us by my reckoning. We floated to safety, scorched and short one more precious flier, burned out of the skies. The White Rose had found a way to contest, or at least, to protect their air-space against our knights of the upper airs. I could see little fires alight on the plain, scattering wild-fires where les petits bâtards brillants were touching down and burning anything they touched. Somepony hadn't quite thought through their tartarus-traps, hadn't they? I hoped vindictively that at least a couple landed in among their own ranks, crowded into the roadways. Then I thought somberly of what those rocket-delivered terrors would be like, if they were fired against fortifications, or even armsponies massed in the field. Who knew what other surprises they might have in store for us? As we flew home, the storm-front summoned by the Lieutenant's flock roared overhead, tumbling some of my somewhat shocky escort. The clouds were dark and full of lightning, and sheets of rain gouted out from underneath them as if someone had disemboweled a great watery monster, and left it to pour out its viscera upon the darkened landscape below. The storm-winds scattered the surviving parachute-flares in the distance, and the storm closed in on the rebel on the march. They might be a bit later than expected, if that monster made trackless muck of the roads of the plain. Good.