In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


Having Overstayed Their Welcome

FFMS017

The morning after our flight was a desperate sort of sleep, in which we grasped as hard as we could for rest, no matter what else was astir in the evil world around us. The Company and our superiors largely left us to our own devices, and left us to recover from the long night of keeping the enemy from the northern gates.

Having awoken not long after noon, I discovered the price paid by those that insist on sleeping through world-wrecking warfare. The Nightmare buried my sudden waking self with a pile of updates detailing our defeat in detail and the driving of our forward elements from their defensive posts. And the blood that had washed our troops backwards from the first line, was labeled in the notes, ‘expected'. Really? Alicorns damn it.

I crawled out of the nest which I had clawed from my exhaustion of the night before, and looked to see if there was anything I could do about the new situation. Whirlwind was still asleep, and so was Bad Apple. Cherie, on the other hand, was up, and jittery, and looking for something to do with all of that energy. I found her, stomping back and forth nearby, and we exchanged glances.

"Looking to get aloft?"

"Looking to get into it?"

And with that, we found my stained witch's gig, and got up into the air and overhead. The Nightmare grouched at the both of us, and pointed out that we weren't part of Command's plan for the day's operations, one way or the other. I just asked for a description of the northern flank, and verbally directed Cherie towards that flank.

Gaining our height, we spiraled upwards in the humid and sunny skies, the rainclouds having evaporated in the hot summer sun. Underneath Cherie's bat-winged expanse and my gig's heavy wicker, I stared down and watched as our loyalist forces scrambled backwards from the battle-zone, and the smoke and the flames rose from the battered ramparts of the overrun forward line of resistance. All such resistance was at an end, and if wasn't for the confusion on the ground, I think that the retreating regiment and cohorts would have been overrun by the victorious enemy.

The batteries of the second line and the bowmares of the Second Cohort began to play against the enemy units as they swept into the abandoned trenches and fortifications of the forward line as we swept forward, and you could see the rebel roll back in response. Our newly-assigned targets and goals were not the main battle-line, but rather to the north and even further northwards, but I directed Cherie to come in closer as we passed over the very hot battle-line.

I could see the ponies struggling in mud-hole after mud-hole, quicksand and traps and all the rest of it, scrambled and deranged like a mass of mud-daubed fools struggling in total chaos. Nopony was pushing forward whole units, and I couldn't even make out any batteries or organized units leading forwards. I made this observation via the Nightmare to Cherie, and I could feel her grinning, and asking me, soundlessly, for that shadowing lense. I looked up, and noted the position of the hard-edged sun still hours above the western horizon, and had to deny her request. It was just the wrong time for our contribution to the battle and the expectations of the Company. But still we spun downwards over the deranged advance of the enemy.

Surprisingly enough, their anti-air batteries failed to fire their expected rocketry at our clearly exposed selves, not even as blatant as I left us, holding all of my illusions in check for the expected spray of heavy fire. I had no idea what had kept their brutal counter-fire from raking us stem to stern, and tapped Cherie's traces on the proper line of descent. The closer we got to the flaming wreckage of the forward line of resistance, the stronger I felt the remnants of the illusions and the tangle-vines our seniors had left upon the battle-field. I seized those tangle-vines, having paid for their control as I usually do, and directed them for the throats and hooves of any White Rose within strangling distance of those doughy, redoubtable vines.

You could see from the air those vines as we arced overhead, gaining our distance as we broke our arc and began recovering our height. I don't know how much actual damage it did to those battered regiments trying to recover their organization, and direction in the face of advancing towards the second line of our resistance, but it certainly left them confused and baffled. We passed over the edge of the Clearances, and into our actual assigned aerial region not long after.

And there, indeed, was the enemy we had been assigned to deter, and to deal with. Ghouls, swimming and stumbling through the muddy fields north of the Clearances, were clearly visible here and there in the filth and the muck. Not too many, for the enemy just didn't have that many ghouls available to them, but just enough that it might have caused problems if they had ever managed to find our rear lines of operation, or our exposed flanks.

Cherie and I noted the clusters of ghoul-squads in their flailing about. There wasn't an awful lot either Cherie or I could do directly about them, the either of us. But it was enough to mark their positions, for later return flights. Collecting fire-bombs and other projectiles would be sufficient for later eradication passes. That was sufficient evil unto the day, as far as we were concerned.

The return to the depots was itself a sort of waste of time, but night was still hours away. And at least, the supply-ponies, prompted themselves by Company ponies themselves, and tied via the Nightmare, were able to load us up with those fire-bombs and other projectiles which were necessary for the extirpation of the rebel's undead on the flanks.

We got back into the air, and found those struggling ghouls, and I flung out our payload as carefully as I could, directing the individual sticks and javelins as I could with my own blood-magic. They went down… more easily than I had expected. Ghouls really didn't have much in the way of self-preservation, when it came down to aerial bombardment. It would have been better if we had Bad Apple with us, but I gathered from the princess radio that she and Whirlwind had paired up on the southern flank, after the two of them had discovered Cherie and I had left them to sleep in. The enemy had tried to test both flanks, and the permanent marshes of the Wirts had been teeming with as many ghouls as our northern flank had been, in our temporary mud-flats.

In between our two minor campaigns against the undead, the living fraction of the White Rose reorganized, and moved forward in the dying hours of that first day of battle, to address the second line of resistance. They discovered that the first line had been nothing but a notional gesture towards the true fortifications which were on offer in the second line. And their damned rocket-batteries were of no worth against the runecasting of the General of the North. They just splattered over her wards as if they were water dripping down the face of a wooden screen. They burned the soil and the sod in front of the second main line of resistance, as if it was nothing more than a rainstorm over a well-thatched roof.

And as the sod burned, the sky behind our defenses glowed from the runaway sun, already fled over the edge of the world. The enemy's regiments inched beyond their captured fortifications, but the onrushing darkness left them without any guide but the darksight-destroying flames of their own support fire.

We could see the White Rose as they maneuvered into the drylands, and made proper observations of where and how they had concentrated in the narrow swathes of land between the muddy flanks and the hidden marshes and swamps and quicksand pits our allies had seeded throughout the fields upon which the enemy was trying to concentrate.

We and Bad Apple and Whirlwind requested permission to bombard the enemy positions as the darkness gathered, and the heavy swamping storms formed yet again on the northern flank. The pegasi were gathered once again, and without the need to protect the Army's positions in front of the second line of resistance, they were building up a real stem-winder of a storm, a monster, unrestricted, intended to wash as many of the White Rose into the Housa as they possibly could.

Winging in ahead of the heavy gusts, we flung bombs and javelins and chaos in front of us, and behind flew Bad Apple and Whirlwind, leaving a fury of fire and tartarus. None of the rocketry batteries tried to fling defenses in our faces that night; they just couldn't get themselves in proper order. Perhaps they had the ordnance somewhere to the rear of the enemies' positions, but it must have been impossible to get those tubes far enough forward to defend their exposed assault units against our attack.

They scattered like prey animals. Into the muck, into the filth, into the quick-sand. We did little actual damage, but the chaos in the darkness was enough to scatter their assault units into every drowning mudhole in their captured acreage.