Gladstone's Guards proceeded, with Snips and Glittershell their captives, down the trail toward Sunney Towne. Gladstone marched at the head of his force, often passing out of Glittershell's sight in the swirling mists. Starlet and Roneo continued in company in sight of Glittershell, keeping close to one nother, their heads bent together in conversation; keeping their tones low, so that Gittershell could not quite make out what they were saying.
This worried Glittershell, for she felt quite sure that she and Snips were a major topic of their conversation. She noticed that they more than once looked at her, and their expressions seemed sad, even worried, rather than hostile.
Roneo's sympathy was not so strange -- when not being terrifying, he'd actually seemed like rather a nice stallion -- but Starlet's surprised her. Though, come to think of it, Starlet had thought she was polite, when they'd met before. Maybe she wasn't so bad. Maybe they both weren't so bad.
Aside from wanting to kill her, of course.
As they continued down the trail, they were joined by other Ponies -- well, thralls, and the occasional Wraith. The living were very much outnumbered by the undead, here on the outskirts of Sunney Towne.
One of the first to arrive was Rooftop, swooping down out of the mists to land next to her mistress. Starlet spoke with her, then sent her to fly overhead cover for the column. As she took off, Rooftop glowered down at Glittershell, with a mocking laugh making plain what the Pegasus thrall thought of her condition, then ascended once more into the mists overhead.
They were joined by another Roneo. Glittershell blinked in surprise as the old and new Roneos stepped together and somehow became one. Glittershell remembered that Roneo could duplicate himself, and how she had heard his voice coming from more than one direction when he had pursued her. She supposed that this was what he did with his dupilcates when he was done with them.
Glittershell didn't understand the magical theory involved, but she accepted the reality as simply one more aspect of her already strange situation. When the second new Roneo joined them, to be absorbed by the original, Glittershell barely batted an eye.
Thralls straggled in to join the column. Glttershell recognized some of them. An erratic jingling preceded the arrival of Merry Bells, who was accompanied by the once disturbingly-beautiful Unicorn thrall. The Unicorn wasn't as beautiful as she had been before, thanks to the blows Glittershell had rained on her face. Glittershell hoped she wouldn't bear her a grudge over it.
It seemed likely that the Unicorn did, for she flashed Glittershell a brief but menacing glare. Glittershell wilted before the hostility of that expression. She had only meant to escape; she had not had anything personally against the thrall. If she could have gotten past her without hurting her, she would have done so.
As for Merry Bells, the remnants of her ears drooped with sadness at the sight of Glittershell made captive. It was plain where her sympathies lay. Glittershell wondered if, after she became a thrall, she might become friends with Merry Bells. She supposed she would get plenty of chances to see her; Sunney Towne was after all not a very big place.
Members of Roneo's Work Crew also joined the impromptu procession of the damned. Most she had never seen before, but two she instantly recognized: the giant Backbreaker, with his small friend Sandwren riding him as if she were his foal, her lower jaw hanging from a rope around her neck, as if it were some bizarre locket. They, too, glared at Glittershell.
"Heh," she said nervously. "sorry."
The two thralls looked him up and down, shrugged, and stepped on to report to report to Roneo.
Glittershell was not sure whether she had been forgiven, or merely judged inconsequential, but in either case, she hoped she had two less mortal -- or un-mortal -- enemies.
Their way then wound into the woods.
Glittershell remembered Ruby telling her how the Ponies of Sunney Towne had raised a living wall -- a forest woven by Three Leaf into a barrier to defend their village from brigands. The woods were still there, and they had grown fantastically, into a twisted black forest of tall trees and gnarled, interlaced branches, which one could only penetrate if one knew the paths.
All the Wraiths, and their thralls, of course knew the paths quite well. After a very brief delay to shake themselves into single file, they plunged right into the nightmare woods.
They went in single file, because the trail was very narrow here. The trees were very close on either side, and here and there the branches of strange plants reached out and brushed them as they went by. Luckily, none of the branches seemed all that tough, or wickedly-thorned. Glittershell, bound over the back of the helmeted thrall, had no way of avoiding injury from any such cause. She hoped the thrall was being careful.
What wa surprising was that she could sometimes feel the plants brushing by her. This was surprising, because she was bound face over the left of the helmeted thrall, which he was keeping well clear of the side of the trail, and thus it was her hindquarters which were brushing the plants. The sensations varied, from gentle touches to the occasional burning agonies tht made her fear tht parts of her hide were being torn off.
The first time she felt this extreme pain, she of course howled, and her bearer stoppd, craned his neck around to the right, and examined her rump to figure out where she'd been hurt. He evidently found nothing, for her brought his skull-face around to the left to look at her face, one witch-fire widening slightly by way of a questioning expression.
"Where?" he creaked.
"I don't know!" said Glittershell. "It burns, all over my bottom and around my legs and tail!"
Then she realized what she'd just said.
"I -- I can feel my hind legs!" she gasped in joy.
The helmeted thrall nodded at her. "Stun ... wear ... off."
"Stun?" she asked, almost disbelieving.
"Wraith-touch ... stunnss," the thrall explained. He looked around, then resumed walking. Nopony head seemed to have noticed the brief halt. "Sssh," he said. "Master ... no know."
From that point on, Glittershell stayed silent about those pains, no matter how much her bottom hurt her. At most, she made an occasional whimper.
A thought struck her, though, and she whispered to her bearer. "You don't want Gladstone to know?"
"Don't," he agreed, nodding in emphasis.
"Why?" she asked.
"Was ... Rangerrr," he said. "Must ... obey ... Master." His face contorted partway into snarl. "Not ... like ... Masterrr." The emphasis in the voice of the decayed thrall would have terrified Gladstone, had she been the object of that hate. "Was ... honorrr ... was good. Want girl ... esss ... get away."
"Can you just let me go?" she whispered in excitement.
"No," the thrall said, sadly. "Must ... obey." That last was tinged with despair.
Glittershell was overcome with a sudden sympathy for the thrall. On impulse, she leaned toward his head and quickly kissed him on the cheek, trying to not flinch at what she saw, smelled and tasted in the process. "Thank you," she told him. "You are a good Ranger."
The thrall seemed to straighten up slightly at that.
"Rangerrr ..." he said. "Skwhd-Leaderr Sergeant Bravesword, Thirrhhty-Fifthhh Rangerr Regimenhh, Niiight Grrd, killed acshnn forrhhteen-hunnert-ahhty-uhhn." He looked at her with a peculiar intensity. "If ... out ... tell!"
"35th," she repeated. "Killed ... 1481?" she asked.
He nodded.
She shivered. That was more than twenty years he'd spent as Gladstone's thrall.
"I will, Sergeant Bravesword," she said. "If I get out of here. I promise."
He nodded once more, and turned his face once more resolutely forward.
Their trail joined a wider one, and they turned to the left.
And were suddenly standing before the gates of Sunney Towne.
The mists were suddenly gone, and Glittershell stood beneath a blue sky, which seemed to be sunlit, though the actual Sun was nowhere in view. There was something wrong with it all, but Glittershell didn't care -- she was simply glad to have emerged from the oppressive clammy fog.
The party stood beore a gap in a wooden palisade. The palisade seemed somehow set into and against the thick trees of the forest to either side. This was unusual: most walls of this sort of which Glittershell were familiar were cleared on the outside. The wall was about three lengths high -- almost three times as tall as Glittershell could have reared, had she been able to stand.
The gates themselves were wooden and fitted into slides, into which they were opened almost all the way, to admit the combined party. They looked fairly thick and strong.
Within was Sunney Towne itself.
The first thing Glittershell saw in there was a square, about the size of one of the larger ones in Ponyville. The gate and its square were built by a diagonal of the palisade; the gate entered the near wall, there was a corner, and then the wall continued on up the right side. On the far side and the left side of the palisade, narrow streets wound off between the buildings.
These buildings, at least the ones fronting the square, were large and impressive for such a rustic place as Ruby had described. Both were two to three stories high, and solidly framed; the tips of some of the beams protruding, carven into the heads of animals. The one on the far side looked like a warehouse, and Glittershell remembered the one from Ruby's tale. The one on the left seemed official: some sort of town hall.
Glittershell's home town of Ponyville deliberately tried to look old-fashioned. Half-timbered houses and thatched roofs all contributed to the illusion that Ponyville was several hundred, rather than merely a bit over one hundred, years old. It was all a game of 'let's pretend,' put on to attract the rich day-trippers from Canterlot, who came to experience the town's simple ways, and enriched the town in the process.
Sunney Towne was not pretending to be old-fashioned. Nothing looked old or worn, but everything looked archaic, in dozens of little ways making it obvious that this village belonged to the past, the long-dead past, even though Glittershell's inexpert eyes could not precisely place why that was so.
She could only spare a short glance for the buildings, for her attention was immediately drawn to the contents of the square itself, which was half-filled by great tables and benches, upon which there sat Ponies. And she knew some of these Ponies.
She knew them well enough to know that three of those she saw no longer even had real bodies.
They were Wraiths.
Every single Pony sitting at the tables or milling about them appeared to be alive and whole; there were many more of them than could possibly be Wraiths. Were they thralls? But if so, why weren't they decayed? Was some or all of what she was seeing an illusion, like one of Trixie's spells, but on a much larger scale?
There was no way to tell.
As for the one who sat at the head of the highest table?
She knew who he was.
She had seen him before, at the bridge to Ruby's front door. And, knowing who he was, she trembled.
Black mane tumbling down over gray coat, eyes blacker still which were twinkling merrily at the little procession pouring in through the gates of Sunney Towne. He wore red robes, richly embroidered and of a style similar to those Glittershell had seen on a school field trip to a museum.
Grey Hoof beamed down upon them from the place of honor; as if he bore the two living Ponies naught but the best of intentions. Glittershell felt his charisma tugging at her mind again, and had she not met him before, she might have been deceived by it.
Glittershell trembled at the sight, and the sensation as his power touched her mind, for she had gazed into the abyss of the Curse from the nearby hill, and she knew the horror that that jovial face concealed. She did not understand it, but she knew it, which was enough.
By Grey Hoof's side sat two mares, both of whom Glittershell had met before at close quarters. On his right was a a gray mare with a red mane; her robe was black, as if she were in mourning, but embroidered in white thread to show its quality. She looked at Glittershell, and her dark-red eyes were kind but sad. This was Mitta Gift, Ruby's mother.
The other was a light-green mare with a curly dark-green mane; that mane was woven through with ribbons the same shade of blue as her eyes. Those eyes were intelligent, but grave as they looked down upon the captives. Glittershell had seen her in her nightmarish Death Aspect, and today much as she appeared now. She was Three Leaf, and above all else she was a healer.
A moment later, another Pony -- a young mare, with Mitta's gray coat and a two-tone orange-and-yellow mane -- got to her hooves between Grey Hoof and Mitta Gift, her face a picture of dismay. She could not rise very far, for she was bound with red-glowing metal chains.
"No ...!" gasped Ruby Gift, gazing at Snips and Glittershell. "I had hoped it untrue ... I am sorry. I have failed."
Grey Hoof surged up, rearing and planting his forehooves upon the table.
"Well met!" his mellifluous voice boomed forth, echoing in the village square. "Well met and well come to the half a millionth, thirty-six thousandth and something holding of the Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Equestriad, as celebrated by Sunney Towne! As always --" was there more than a hint of sarcasm in that jolly voice? -- "this will be a wonderful festival, here in merrie olde Sunney Towne!"