FFMS021
Over the next two shifts, we found two more barrowgasts, hiding like ant-lions waiting for the advent of our advance, waiting to waken, emerge, and ravage our skirmish-lines. It might even have happened if it weren't for our aerial scouts and their witch-ridealongs. The ensuing extermination process was more of an exercise than a battle, at least, once we figured out what triggered the damn things. After that, it was just a matter of bringing up an available witch to provide support and the standard-bearer himself to pull the cork on the jug of evil.
As I said, more of an exercise than a proper fight. Although the presence of fifty or so ghouls around the third barrowgast nest complicated the approach just a bit. We ended up making a showpiece of that one, and waited on five full sections of the Third Cohort to cross overland to reach the intended ambush-site. Meanwhile, all around us, the regiments were boiling through the fields and brush and woods east and north and south of the Clearances, herding the scattered, starvling remnants of the expeditionary army of the White Rose into manageable coffers, to be chivvied west into captivity.
After a while, a new rank of pegasi and griffins joined us, casting about overhead, and the land echoed to a strange, wailing song. As darkness followed in the train of dusk, the song gained voice and lyrics, and although I couldn't make out most of the words, it seemed to be something about surrender and the will of the night. After our successful suppression of that last barrowgast's ghoul-guard - after Corporal Cake put his lance-head through the rotted heart of that cold horror - I had enough spare attention to tend to the reports coming in about what the rest of the coven was up to, and what was the deal with the banshee wail.
Otonashi and Cherie had banded together, and were herding fleeing White Rose. The song was Cherie's, or at least, what the deaf Otonashi made of Cherie's promptings, the broadcast of that call to surrender, of food, of warmth and cleanliness and safety. Personally, if I had heard that, hungry terrified and alone – I would have run as far and as fast away from that night-haunt as I could. But they say it played to some sort of myth or archtype that the religious fanatics of the West all bought into, so good job, I guess?
Eventually, the scatterlings faded away, and the only rebels we had to worry about were the ones too organized and swift to be caught in our nets. Four distinct groups, gangs – showing alarming signs of forming into proper bandit bands, if you asked me. Two were headed north or north-east towards Dover. Those we left to the battle-groups of the Left Division, who had never truly abandoned the approaches towards High Earth and the line of the Bride's Road. They returned to their old stomping-grounds, and were moving forward to snatch up the refugee bands as they fled northward into their net.
Farthest east, one grouping was struggling overland towards the road west of the Hayfriend, and the re-grouping Army of the Housa claimed it could get enough of itself across that meandering mess of a stream to molest the wayward band of fugitive rebels.
That left a band of roughly a hundred and fifty ragged White Rose working its way through the hedges and woodlots of the ridgelines east of Dover. They were far enough east that they'd be slipping past the flanks of the Left Division's easternmost patrols, and far enough west that the loyalists of the old Army of the Housa would never catch them in time. And that left the aerial cohort and its magical supports to cover the gap. A hundred and fifty bandits would be more than enough to cause chaos and misery and dissent in the rear areas of our deployment, and what is worse, weaken our support and reputation in the eyes of the civilians.
Which was why a battle-group of twenty pegasi and twenty griffins were dragging two witches behind them, bouncing about in our increasingly ragged and campaign-worn gigs. Theoretically, all they really needed was Bad Apple. If they could herd together the fugitives into a small enough area, she might even be able to immolate the entire lot in a single pass. But, command insisted on capturing fugitives whenever possible. And so, a flight of the pegasi were also dragging behind them me, as well as some of the heavy lifters, filled to the brim with a section and a half of ground-pounder rankers to provide security and control for any White Rose that survived the encounter.
Bad Apple and I had traded off our drivers at the request of Cherie, who said she had work she needed to do which was not really going to work with all of Bad Apple's showy pyromancy. I asked her if that had something to do with all of these horrible warblings I'd been hearing recently, and she cried pitifully and wingslapped the mean out of me. I guess she's sensitive about her voice?
All kidding aside, she had been practicing her Lorelei cantrips, with a bit of special sauce to power the suggestions. She muttered something else I didn't quite catch, but might have been something cryptic about dream-walking. Sawbones and the others paid more attention to Cherie's supposed prowess in crafting the dreams of other ponies – I'd never seen it, but then, she saves that business for other ponies. My dreams mostly held Nightmares.
Whirlwind brought Bad Apple's gig around in a great semi-circle over some poor farmer's hilly, rolling farmstead as the night threatened in the east. As darkness began to rise up out of the fields, the little earth pony's flame-alicorns appeared behind her and her driver, flight-formation style. The pegasi and the griffins kept overhead, out of slingshot range. Some of these fugitives had proven to have been proficient in slinging heavy bullets skyward, and more than one griffin or pegasus had lost tailfeathers to their counter-fire in the last few weeks.
As BA's fire-ponies descended and began scorching hedges and trees behind the enemy, most of them ran for it. I don't know where they thought they were going, what they thought they could do, outrun sky-monsters? The more clever ponies dropped like sacks of lead, and rolled for the nearest damp corner throughout the little copse and complex of fields within which we had caught them. No doubt they were putting their faith in darkness and obscurity to save them from our hunt. Poor fools, they had no idea how good our night-vision was.
We left the smart ones to Bad Apple and the free-winged flights now stooping to the hunt. Our remit was that crowd of panicky animals who had forgotten for the moment that they were ponies. Cherie began her eerie song, and I formed my phantasms in flight around our gig. I could feel the pressure of Cherie's personality as my blood boiled into illusion, and my usual black-winged monsters formed white and grey, and strangely beautiful in the gathering dusk. Like Cherie, if she had ever let her mane and tail grow long, like the Princess, if her stars and sky had hidden themselves in mist and smoke, like the Nightmare, if she had calmed that monster which gnawed at her heart.
My monsters were of a sudden, beautiful, and white, and grey, and they opened their mouths, and the song of surrender echoed across the darkening fields full of fleeing foals. Thugs and killers and deserters, who would have sacked and burned and pillaged all the lands from here to the Inland Seas if we had left them unmolested, reduced for the moment to yelping, wailing children in the dark, running from their enraged guardians or siblings or parents or – I don't know what was going through those ponies' minds. But Cherie and I, we tried our best to put fatalism and surrender into their emptied minds.
No, that's not right. I've often heard from Sawbones that 'nature abhors a vacuum', and I've seen what happens when a retort is allowed to suck itself empty, but somehow, that simple dictum doesn't work for the panicked mind. I think that panic isn't a vacuum, but rather a tumult of emotion. A mind full of panic is too full to contain a thought.
So we had to force our ideas into their over-full mindless minds. Perhaps terrorizing them with the burning flames of Bad Apple had, indeed, been a bad idea. Nevertheless, after about a mile or so of running, most of them were wrung out, and more malleable.
None of them had really gotten enough to eat over the last few days, even though I knew that this particular band had come across and despoiled one of their army's own abandoned supply-wagons. Some of our ponies had been keeping an eye on this group for a while. I sometimes wonder at how many different places some ponies could be at one time, and yet, the scouts, they get everywhere, they see everything. It is a wonder and a puzzlement.
The pegasi with the carts full of ground-cohort rankers touched down on either flank of the wide arc of exhausted runners, and let out the rankers to start rolling up the now-placid ponies. The Company armsponies barely had to prod them at all to get them to drop any weapons they had in hoof. The vast majority had dropped their pikes or axes at some point during their flight; it must be hard to keep hold of a weapon when all you can think of is running.
I dropped my monsters down among the prisoners. They walked among them, long-limbed, as if the illusions were real ponies, striding high-necked and proud among the tired and empty-eyed former rebels. Some of the prisoners reached out with trembling hooves to try and touch the trailing tails and manes of the white and grey illusions, but I did my best to stutter-step the phantasms so that nopony broke the illusion by failing to make contact with a 'ghost'. Almost none of the prisoners looked up at our gig, to see me leaning bemused overhead, staring down at our captures, or to see the actual white-and-grey model for the false alicorns that strode among them. I let the 'alicorns' strut about as if they were shepard-dogs guarding a flock of geese.
By the time we reached the fields where the smart ones had gone to ground, the prisoners were weaving, dazed. When the guards stopped them in place, many just dropped in their tracks, asleep. At the edges of the fields defined by Bad Apple's black-scorched trail of destruction, were piles of tied-up ponies. In the flickering light of the burning brush, you could see that some were unconscious, while others stared furiously at our prisoners, none of whom were trying to escape.
I scanned the copse and the fields, and noted that the flights of griffins and pegasi were finished quartering the search-grid, and now were re-quartering, and beating down the last few hold-outs. Not too many left now. In absolute terms, we were badly out-numbered by the bandits, but in the actual event, they had fallen quite easily to our methods. I moved a few of the illusory alicorns along the line of hog-tied and conscious captives, and let Cherie sing to our cognizant victims her lullaby.
More than a few were ready to be untied by the time the pegasi and griffins returned with their remaining unconscious captives. I could see the rest of them laying in the woods and the fields, their green fading to green-tinted grey. No pony ever killed by a Company pony would ever turn red; there was that, if nothing else. And the sweeps had killed far fewer than I had expected. Terror, fear, and the thestral's song had reduced our prey into our prisoners with very little drama in the end.
It was nice to play my part in a melodrama from time to time; it certainly beat playing the villain in a tragedy.