//------------------------------//
// Arguing With The Abyss 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

FFMS026

"Mistress.  We have questions."

The great black dream-alicorn emerged, drawn by my challenge, her vast star-spangled mane billowing as she broke the surface of the shadows of my mind.

"Don't say 'we', jenny, when you mean 'I'.  Take responsibility for your own outrage."

My eyes narrowed as I considered debating grammar with a Spirit prone to archaic outbursts of preposterous pronouns.  But let it pass, let it pass.  "Sawbones is questioning Cherie, so we'll be getting her side of this.  What did you know?  Did you lead these ponies into an ambush?"

"I?  I lead nopony, direct nopony.  I am a ghost in the machine which is you.  I am simply the… ghost in others as well.  Others who promise me such things as you and yours never even mention, let alone think about."

She was in one of her mad moods, I could see.  The light-green sclera of her draconic eyes were enormous, her pupils tiny and constricted.

"What promises are these?"

"Home!  An end to exile.  My throne, my dignity and my purpose.  He wants for me everything I've ever wanted.  Everything I've ever wanted!"

"You said just the other week that he was walking a destructive and damning path.  Would you let him take you and us down into this tartarus?"

"I do not recall any such conversation.  What on earth are you talking about?  What are we talking about?"

"Nothing important, apparently." She was not rational, there was no point in arguing logic with her, or really, trying to treat her as a sane pony.  "Did you know there was a pack of ghouls on this road you sent us down?"

"Oh, he knew something was coming down this lane, and I knew what he knew. But he didn't know everything I did, didn't he?  He didn't expect you and the Filly here, rampant, to shame him and his bloodthirst?  Greedy colt!"

"Are we talking about the same greedy colt that we have been talking about all these last two weeks?"

"Oh, you know who, don't play games with me, little bloodmage.  You're closer to him than you pretend.  Wolves pretending to be guard-dogs.  But he called off the closing of the trap when he saw members of his pack in the killing zone.  Still more pony than thing, our greedy colt.  He took out his frustrations elsewhere.  Do you know what was behind you all this time?  So focused upon what was in front of you, all the while the Blade was being drawn behind your neck."  She stepped out of my inner vision, ghosting into the real world before my eyes.

"What are you-"

"Come.  Come and see, come and see."   

She walked down the lane, back through the trampled barley, onto the farm-lane.  I questioned her again and again, but she only smirked, and beckoned onwards.  By the time we got back to the big home-farm complex, I knew something was wrong.   The slight misting rain was unpleasant, but still, somepony should have been out and about.  No farm ever really stops moving, there's always somepony doing something, even when the clouds descend in a blanket of damp like it had that evening.   And there were no lights lit.

Then I could smell it, and we turned towards the cluster of tents around the barn which was the work-camp we had delivered our first tranche of work-release prisoners.    And the tents were torn down, tumbled about, and scattered.

And blood was everywhere.  

I ran here and there, pulling canvas back from this tangle and that, searching through the splattered gore.  No bodies.  Then into the barn, which if anything was even worse, the doors and the interior positively painted in damp, dripping blood.  It had had time to dry, but this miserable misting humidity had caused the bloodstains to run once again, and if I hadn't known somehow when this had happened, I don't think I could have guessed from the evidence.

No bodies in the barn, either, although it had clearly been where the survivors of the initial attack had fled for sanctuary.  The great doors were shattered, one of the mechanical reapers laid in gory ruin, smashed by what I don't know.

Drag marks were everywhere, mostly towards a ritual-circle in the farmyard, melting away in the rain.  I looked over to the farmhouse, and saw blood on the open front door.  I knew what I would find there as well.  And I knew what that ritual-circle had been.

Obscured Blade had replaced his lost ghouls from the nearest available supply, a supply we had provided and then left barely protected. There had been a squad of Rennet regimentals guarding these ponies, and the farmer's family, a family who had returned to a district under our protection, who had been told it was safe.

I threw up in the farmyard beside that fading ritual-circle.

"You say I'm like him?  Damn you, Mistress!  Where is he?  Where is that traitor!"

"You thought you could play at evil, and not get any of it on you?  Yes, jenny, you're closer than you think.  A moment in time, a break just wrong enough, and you'd fracture like he has.  And I will not tell you where he is, any more than I'd tell him your whereabouts.  But what exposed vulnerabilities have you?  What does he want, what does he need?"

I snorted, the taste of foulness caught in my throat and my snout.  Obscured Blade had gone necromancer, at the least, maybe something worse.  He needed… power, blood, materials.  Necromancers collect the undead, until they can control no more, until they just can't command another ghoul.  They will expand their control until they hit their limits.

Did he have limits?

Wait, he had hidden the sound of this massacre and the sight of this slaughter from our column on the road.  That was the mean, nasty old pony we had suffered under, that sly, obscuring old unicorn, who never did anything in the open if he could hide it in darkness, in obscurity. He was still Obscured Blade, whatever else he was.  What did he hate?

"The prisoners.  He wants the White Rose."

"Very good, jenny.  You see?  You can get into his head so easily.  It's almost as if  you were… in sympathy with that greedy guts."

"Buck you, Mistress."

"The Acolyte has been a bad influence on you, Feufollet.  You should show more respect to your goddess."

"Mistress, you are not a goddess, talk to me again when you've remembered that.   And remembered that I've seen you disassembled, scattered.  You've been talking to that traitor too much.  Obscured Blade is a madpony, he can't be good for you.  Cut him off!"

"Madpony or not, he's my madpony.  As are you, my madjenny.  Don't tell me otherwise, I can see you licking your lips."

"Don't be preposterous, I just dry-vomited.  I'm parched and starving." I glanced over to the kicked-in front door of the farmhouse.

"Go ahead, they won't be needing whatever you find.  They won't be needing anything at all, ever again, until some Company pony puts down the shambling wrecks that used to be them."  And with that, the Nightmare disappeared in a cackling cloud of derision.

I went into the shambles that Blade's ponies had made of the farmhouse, looking for their water-pump.  And I called up the Filly, and began screaming my head off to the rest of the Company, howling for the big guns, demanding that they bring everypony in.  Bad Apple and the cohort in the south, the rest of the pegasi and the griffins – everypony.  

He had at least two hours head start on us, and he was heading straight for the prisoners' cages.  The half-empty, mostly unguarded cages.

We hadn't seen this coming, this little massacre.  But I could see the greater massacre, I could see it in my mind's-eye, in all of its screaming horror.

I screamed for my witch's gig, and for a driver.  I could get there ahead of them, if I had my gig and Whirlwind.