//------------------------------//
// Hiding In Plain Sight, or, The Witnesses 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS161

I was wrong.

The wreckage within the siege camps had only appeared to be empty of the wounded detritus of battle.  And indeed, upon first examination, the only thing to be found was destruction and corpses.  Both sides had disappeared as thoroughly as if the night had swallowed them whole.

But the appearance and the truth were in opposition to each other, and the regiments which followed in the train of the skirmish-line provided the eyes and ears that perceived that contradiction, and resolved it.  Throughout the castra, and in the stubble and ruin that surrounded the outer walls, ponies from the loyal North found the hidden survivors, many dying, almost all wounded, and every single one traumatized, hiding, and terrified.

Upon encountering the first few cases, I sent back word to bring forward the mobile medical station, and then when the first few became a flood, I sent off a flight of pegasi to round up aerial transport and to collect my surgical staff.  Because it began to appear as if every hidey-hole inside the siege camps and every furrow deep enough to hide a wounded trooper had been filled with spooked and mangled remnants from the brief, horrifying assault against the walls of the White Rose.

Both the groups defending the walls, and those assaulting the walls, had shattered like so many burst whiskey-bottles upon impact.  Discipline in the night-assault has always been hilariously fragile, but in the conditions of this particular night-attack, every pony that escaped the distracted attention of their overseers made sure to escape in fact as well.  This fractal dissolution of military units into a mob had, in the confusion of night, spiraled into dull, stupid brawls throughout the darkness.  As the regimentals pulled the scared survivors out of their holes, and as my cattle and ponies began patching together their mangled hurts, I began putting together a more true view of the night's opponents, and the idiot, savage violence which had detonated overnight.

A sampling of spooked III Verdebaie wounded was enough to settle my mind on how exactly Obscured Blade had seduced away an entire regiment worth of hooves and lances to his own personal crusade.  It had been no sort of seduction at all, but rape.

The old unicorn had always been known for his subtle and strong geases, but in some dark and terrible corner of the 'new Company', he had found the raw power to simply – take the loyalty of over a thousand Verdebaie troopers.  Nothing overt, nothing overwhelming – it was, said the survivors, as if they had just… remembered orders.  Assignment to the Company warlock, suggestions that his every word was the word of the General – the turning of regimental discipline in the favour of an impossibly ancient and ugly old witch.

But the longer they marched in unnatural darkness, the stronger Obscured Blade's control over his new troops had grown.  From the testimony of the agonized victims upon my surgical-tables – extracted while I cleaned out filthy, infected wounds, and before I had to remove limbs already beginning to rot away in the humid summer air – it appeared as if the old bokor's trick for escaping notice had been some sort of tunnel of darkness, perhaps a doubled illusion-phantasm, of darkness within, and light bended without.  But what I was sure of, was that the III Verdebaie had slow-marched through miles of ambuscade and chaos as if they were in a trance.  Nopony and nothing saw them, and they saw nothing but the grim old bastard leading them into the distance.

Obscured Blade's life had been long, and evil, and full of lessons for the witchy and warlock-like in nature.  And he spent all of that knowledge, and no little amount of stolen power – filched from what pockets we still did not know – to steal away a regiment, and then he secreted it behind enemy lines.  Finally, he did something unforgivable.  He wasted lives in a stupid attack.

The now-hypnotized regimentals had been sent forward, as in a dream, against the moon-lit walls of the White Rose's last redoubt, and they poured over them as mindlessly as ghouls.  They bled and died by the dozen, a colossal, sudden wreck that swept over the startled and unprepared defenders of the re-occupied siege camp.  Strangely enough, those wounded in the collision generally found themselves suddenly, unexpectedly emancipated in their pain and agony.  The victorious and untouched followed the bokor and his band of 'old Company' co-conspirators – still geased, still under his spell.  But the mangled and wounded awoke from their dreams and – terrified by the darkness and the pain and the blood – crawled to where we found them, sometimes fighting each other for that little bit of cover that could hide them from the terrors of the night.

The final battle between Obscured Blade and his lich-victim was as hidden from our wounded witnesses as it had been from our own front lines and skirmishers. Later, after the wave of fire and darkness within darkness, the hiding wounded had, some of them, seen a terrible, transformed bokor pass back through his own trail of dead and wreckage.  Their descriptions were vaguely terrified, and I could not determine if he had been simply under a typical glamour, or if something else had been at work.  My witnesses were too disordered in their witness to make sense of that one way or the other.  He had been followed by Company armsponies likewise dread and inequine in their appearance, which again could have been due to simple glamour, or something worse.  Although I cannot imagine what value there would have been in maintaining a glamour in a conquered and neigh-abandoned camp. Those wounded who had not found sufficient cover, had not hidden, were simply too slow in cringing back into their holes – they were swept up by the victorious warlock's followers, and carried away to what fate, nopony could say.

But I was growing increasingly worried about just where Obscured Blade was getting his new-found power sources.  There are cheap and easy ways for witches in the death-haunted world of Tambelon to juice their own native magics, and those ways are the wide and easy roads to Tartarus.  The old witch should have known.  Perhaps he knew, and he did it anyways?  It was incredibly worrying that the only wounded we had found in his back-trail had been wise enough to hide from him and his followers, though.

So the survivors shrank back into their holes and their cover and they hid.  Because they were in agony, and awake, and their mommas hadn't raised no fools.  And nothing that looked like Obscured Blade looked after his bloody victory could be trusted by the little ponies in his way.  And this may be why they survived to give their testimony to me.  If so, then there is no hole deep enough to hide the old bokor from the consequences of his choices.  Not from the Company – his honour-guard was proof enough that there was support for whatever wickedness he was using to conjure with.  But from – I don't know, call it karma.  Actions have consequences, and I don't like what I smell coming on the wind for the old witch.

The stories of the surviving White Rose were appallingly similar to that of the Verdebaie ponies.  Hypnosis, control, evil warlocks commanding mad acts committed in a dreamlike state.  An objective pony, hearing the stories of the two sides, the defenders and the assaulting force, would have had nothing to tell between the two of them, excepting only that the horrors that the awoken Verdebaie troopers feared from the old warlock, the White Rose had seen, again and again, committed by their evil overlords.  

By the time of the great retreat, the surviving commanders of the White Rose had been beyond simple play-acting and catering to the religious expectations of their followers.  Their pretense of righteousness and piety had been increasingly thread-bare even before the crack-up in the Clearances, but in the rout, all illusion had been tossed away.  They hadn't had the power or energy to spare to coddle their remaining followers.  Obedience had been compelled by terror, force, and ruthlessness.  Remaining civilian prisoners had been massacred – those Gibblets had found in the freshest of mass graves in the killing-fields.  The wounded had likewise been sacrificed to the power of the masters of the White Rose, and fed into the control of dead-eyed necromancer-captains – the ghoul ambuscades we had just spent days fighting past.

When the III Verdebaie came screaming over the siege-camp walls, most of the remaining White Rose scattered like leaves – at least, those who found themselves outside of the control of their maddened commanders.  I think all of those still under control could be found in the windrows of the corpses laid out like a carpet of death from the walls to the heart of the camp, and the last stand of the Rose.

If there were any westerners still under arms and under command anywhere in that district, we did not find them.  Obscured Blade, his followers and that portion of the III Verdebaie still under his control, likewise had vanished into the mists, absent without leave.  The ghoul ambuscades had been beaten down, the survivors collected, and then – suddenly! – there was a great silence, from the Wirts to the streets of Dover, from the bloodied fields of the Clearances to the walls of Braystown and its Shambles.  

It wasn't over, but it felt a little like it was over.  And the undead of the alarmed loyalist legate hiding in his ramshackle fortress by the river was the only force under arms we could find in the whole of the land.  The Beau crouched within the Braystown Shambles, and the truly loyal lich hunkered down behind his walls, afraid of the nominally loyalist army come down from the north.

And after the madness of Obscured Blade had burst across the districts of the south, I cannot say for sure if the legate didn't have any reason to worry.