//------------------------------//
// The Night-Fog 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

FFMS027

I didn't sit on my hooves.  Obscured Blade and his band of turncoats and mind-warped servants might be able to hide from the other ponies of the Company, from the common run of equinity – but I was Feufollet, Witch of The Black Company, The Blood-Hound.  I could smell them, even when my best and most well-wrought mystic eyes couldn't fight past the old goat's cloaking illusions.

And they stank of blood and death.

They hadn't left via the road, that much was sure.  I cast off cross-country as they had, following my blood-daubed muzzle into the darkness.  I kept an instance of the Filly constantly updated as to my position, but it was increasingly difficult to figure out where - exactly - I was in that soaking mist.  I could see as easily in the natural dark as any pony of the Company, but as the minutes turned to hours, the heavy mist turned into a fog, deadening sound, obscuring every possible sort of sight, and even, eventually, scent as well.

After those couple hours, I just started following my sense of where the butchers and their necromancer had gone.  It wasn't even anything my nose was telling me. It was what roiled my gut, rose against my gorge.  Even when their scent of death washed away in the mist, their taint still followed in their wake.

Just after midnight – or so I guessed, and the Filly corroborated, assuming that the Spirit in that aspect could actually tell time – my cross-country hunt led me out onto another farm-lane, I can't tell you how far distant from the atrocities at that farm.  The road drew about itself a sort of hollow in the fog, a distinct tunnel of clarity in the darkness, as if there was something about that nondescript lane that had absorbed the droplets of the evening mist, left the surface and the air above that glorified path as dry as the western high plains.

The Filly passed along a chirp from Cherie, letting me know that the thestral was in the air, trying to find me.  I looked up into the endless fog beyond the road and its tunnel of clarity, and wondered how high up the fog extended.  "Is she going to be safe in the air tonight?  The weather seems against us."

"Oh, well, what's she going to run into, a mountain?  I don't care how quick-hooved old Blade is, the Company isn't issuing Seven-League Horseshoes.  Keep talking, it'll help her zero in on your position."

"There's still groves of trees and barns down here to run into, Ma'am.  And those will harm as surely as a rockface or a mountainside encountered blind."

"Funny thing about thestrals, which nobody's much noticed because Cherie doesn't have anypony of her own tribe to gossip with, or play around with in the dark.  Thestrals can echo-locate."

And then I heard that high-pitched screech, like a scream just pitched over the range of my hearing.  And then a series of screeching, a literal cacophony. 

"NO WONDER SHE DOESN'T LIKE TO USE IT, IT SUCKS!" I shouted over the noise.

Just sub-vocalize, acolyte, said the Filly in my mind.  You almost never have to talk out loud to me, anyways.

"YOU DON'T-" I started, then coughed, and then started over again, You don't sound like yourself, Ma'am.  In fact, you sound more like the Mistress in a calmer mood.  Is this your way of apologizing?

Call it a sort of role-play, young jenny.  This form helps centre me.

And then the fog burst asunder, as something tore through the ceiling of that farm-lane's tunnel of clear air, something made of leather and rattan and winged mare.  She wheeled about, and left the fog swirling around in a gyre above my head.  And then she settled herself and her – whatever it was, upon the road before me.  I walked up and stared at it.  It wasn't my gig.  It wasn't any sort of proper chariot.  I stared more closely, and realized I'd seen that rattan chair knocked aside on the porch of that ravaged farm-house.  I had no idea where the traces and the harness had come from, but apparently Cherie had been improvising.

"Are we done screaming now?" I asked.  

"Eeeh, let's see where we need to go tonight, eh?  This pea-soup is everywhere, far as you can see.  Well, far as I can see, the Mistress here says you're being unseelie tonight.  Have their trail, do ya?" Cherie asked in return.

"In that, that's your plan?  It looks like it's held together with spit, grease and hope.  I'm not going into the air on a deck-chair and good intentions!"

"Aw, come on, Feufollet, look at this!"  She yanked on the traces tied back to the rattan from her harness.  One that I certainly didn't recognize now that I had a closer look.  "We took this rig off of that smashed-up reaper-thing in that barn with all the blood."  

Now that she mentioned it, I could smell the blood-stains hidden by the strange fog-light.  "Fine, whatever!  I'll come back to haunt you if this hackwork inverts in the middle of the air and drops me on my head from a thousand yards up!  Is there at least some way for me to strap in?"

We worked out how to get me tied into the preposterous jury-rig, and I debated with the Filly in my head how to get the other assets of the Company vectored onto our line of pursuit.  "Do you have any idea what exact heading I've been following these blood-ticks along?" I asked Cherie.  "It's too damn easy to get turned around in the fog."

"Yeah, you're pretty much moving due west.  The first of the prisoner-cages are an easy quarter-day's march that way.  Lucky for us, this isn't exactly an easy day, is it?"

"They have a hell of a head-start on us, Cherie.  Or should I call you 'boss'? Who's in charge of this operation?"

"You seem to be the only pony that knows what the hay's going on tonight, Feufollet.  I think that means you've got tactical control.  Tell us where to go."

"Who's us?  Is there somebody up there?"

"Come on, come and see!" Cherie laughed as she launched us through the wall of fog hiding the upper air from our isolated tunnel along the lane.

There was very little distance between that road and the open air above the fog-bank, but for me it was still a long moment of blindness that I did not like, not in the least.  I thought of Sawbones' missing eye, and the fog's damp upon my already-saturated fur damn near froze me to the core.  But then we did find that open air, and the moon's bright light broke across an endless damp carpet of cloud, or fog, or ground-mist.  And crouched upon the surface of that endless plain of cloud, were dozens of pegasi and griffins.  No, hundreds of them.  The Aerial Cohort had concentrated, and – there was the Lieutenant herself.

"LT!  Hey, you're here to take command!  Cherie, why'd you –" and then the Lieutenant interrupted me.

"Apprentice Feufollet, you're the first lead we've gotten on the fugitives since they disappeared.  Take over direction of the search." She looked across the featureless plain of cloud. "Tell us where to look."

I closed my eyes, and searched with my nose, and then with my gut.  Then I guided Cherie in the right direction with one hoof, holding tight to my rickety conveyance with the other three.  

I opened my eyes as we surged forward, and saw as four hundred wings stirred that once-featureless plain up into a moonlight fantasia of spirals, splashes, and waves flung in every other direction.

Except the one I had shown them.  On that line, only ponies flew.





As we flew in pursuit of my gut-knowledge, I discussed the next necessary steps with the Filly, and by extension, the Lieutenant flying behind us in that grand-formation.  Bad Apple and the Third Cohort were moving north from their positions behind the river-fortifications, to secure the POW complex, but they were still an hour, maybe three away from reaching the site.  That was a lot of time for atrocities to occur.  We could send Bad Apple in her gig ahead to scout the situation, but the fog-bank was reported intact far into the west, and her potential drivers couldn't echo-locate their way through the pea-souper.  I was pondering sending the bulk of our pursuit-force ahead to interpose between the fugitives and their supposed target, when I noticed that my gut had shifted.  

"Wait, bear left.  The signal's shifting.  Or the smell.  The sensation?  That way, now.  By Grogar, where are we?"  The skies were empty of all landmarks, even the geyser of swirling mists had fallen out of sight a few minutes before.  

Cherie shrieked, deafening me even though I hadn't caught half of the tones of that terrible noise, nor was it aimed in my direction.   Then the Filly relayed the results of the echo.  

A picture in greys and blacks, shapes and sensations.  Some obviously the outlines of farmlots, farm-houses, a road I recognized as the one we'd marched along our way to the ambush-site the morning before.

And what looked like a column-caterpillar, dark and featureless in that strange sense-image.  The spear-heads were bright as the morning-star, but the rest was just – blank, black.  But a different black than the road around it, and that was enough to pick them out, moving against the background of the loop, that little time-picture of the world beneath its blanket of fog.

The nearest occupied prisoners' cage was about half a mile away from the swiftly moving battle-caterpillar.  They would reach it in minutes, if that was their target.  How was Obscured Blade guiding his myrmidons? Did he have some way to see in the fog and night?  Or had they put down some sort of guidance, beacons or something?  I stared out across the featureless foggy plain, and tried to sense what they were following.

I could always be wrong, they could be just fleeing, blind, through the night.  And the fog.  Or planning to hit the now-occupied town beyond.

Make your choice, embrace your regrets later.  I contacted the Lieutenant and relayed my findings, and strongly suggested we descend upon the most likely target, a now half-empty cage full of Cherie-loving White Rose parolees.  They were supposed to be rotated out tomorrow to their own labour-assignments, but we only had so many guards, so much attention to go around.  The Lieutenant signed off on my proposal, and dozens of flights of Company armsponies surged past the labouring Cherie and our awkward conveyance.  Cherie had just fought her own battle earlier today, and... It must have taken more pegasus magic than she had bargained for, to keep that improbable hash together and in the air.

The fog over the cage tore apart under the pressure of hundreds of magical wings, torn into tendrils of mist and sprays of droplets.   Suddenly, the whole site was in view, as if a giant had reached down and ripped off the top of an ant's-nest, leaving the interior exposed to the merciless judgment of the world.  Almost nopony was out and about, in this heavy fog.  Only a few guards were visible outside the fences.

They were quickly ushered inside the gates by urgent armsponies.  As they were rushing inside, I smelled the van of the enemy column approaching, and screamed the alarm at the top of my lungs.

The clearing pegasi-magic of some three or four flights of armsponies ripped into the obscuring fog-bank, shredding their cover. Dark figures raced forward and were exposed to the night.  They paused, suddenly uncertain, and thus were easy meat for the wave of javelins which we launched against them.  A few even hit.  

Then the rest of them fell back into the bank, further than the pegasi could reach with their magic, and then it was quiet again, but for the sobs of the wounded before the open gate.  Nopony was stupid enough to go try and pull the wounded enemy back into the cage.

It was a cage, not a fortress.  Designed to keep ponies in, not to keep ponies out.   While we were focused on the charge against the main gate, some commandos tried the fences on either flank, and got inside.   The screams of the prisoners were the first sign we had that we were being flanked – my nose was so overwhelmed with the presence of the fugitives – the turncoats – that I couldn't pinpoint anything.

But screams and commotion will carry its own information, when all else is fog and night.  Cherie and I stooped over the nearest commotion, and I saw figures with weapons, and figures upon the ground and fleeing empty-hoofed, and made the obvious deduction.  

"There!  Give it to them, and let me out here!"  I undid the leather straps holding me into my chair, and then, thinking again, started untying the leather straps holding that chair into its configuration with the traces.  By the time Cherie was low enough to the ground, the whole was more a cloud of disconnected parts moving in rough formation with each other than any sort of coherent thing.  I kicked off from the traces, and used the free-falling chair to cushion my collision with the ground, happily crushing a pair of armed figures as I tumbled into the packed earth in front of one of the improvised barracks the White Rose had built for themselves.  They didn't get back up again.

I collected myself, and slashed myself left and right with my spurs, drawing forth a certain trick I had learned from a horrible jenny, one whom I wasn't supposed to have ever met, and I suppose, writing about this will bring consequences.  I have no idea if she's even still alive, but she told me how it was possible to –

Fight with one's own blood.  The enemy armspony's own life-blood arced over me like the sprays of mist and fragments of fog that half-obscured the whole of this battle-field.  Whatever small globs of my own blood remained after I had torn out their throat with my blood-magic, was absorbed into the general gore that remained.

Which was fine, the blood didn't have to be mine.

And then I continued my dance, every true-stroke multiplying my arsenal of weaponry.  Three more bodies were splayed out on the hard-packed, blood-soaked earth before they retreated, and left me to the barracks-door I had found them trying to force.  

I moved deeper into the cage, and hunted for my prey.  Four more I caught, weapons in hoof, stalking my herd, my friend's ponies.  These were our ponies, we had paid good blood for them, they belonged to us.  Not for anypony else to slaughter.  

Especially turncoat scum.

In the morning, we found thirty dead prisoners, and over a dozen dead assailants, familiar and otherwise.  I'm told that some other sectors saw a few dozen ghouls, but none appeared before me in the confusion and the remnants of the fog.

The names of the Company turn-coats?  Let Sawbones record their names, if he cares.  As far as I'm concerned, they've been read out of my version of the Annals.