SBMS164
Almost nothing went right for our Obscured Blade that night. The unseasonable weather negated all of his best illusions, diversionary cantrips and deep spells. Great phantasms, little haunts, visions of ghost-columns on other roads – all were swallowed by the heavy, crushing fog, made small and silent and then nothing in the great enveloping whiteness of the night. You can pretend to be anything you want, it means nothing if nopony can see you making faces at yourself in a darkened mirror.
Not even yourself.
He may even have had lost some control over the remnants of his geased troops, and the newly risen undead he had butchered away the afternoon before. The old bokor was new to the practice of necromancy, however deep and ancient in that evil's theory he might have been. And, unless he and his little sub-cult had been holding out on the Annals and the witches' coven's training regimen, his deep theory on necromantic conversion and control can't have been all that old.
To be honest, I am still trying to tease out of the few scraps of evidence, the full extent and breadth of this little inner-chamber of Blade and his sycophants. Was it older than him? He had insinuated to others, once upon a time, that there was a sort of oral tradition in parallel to the Annals, almost in opposition to them, that predated them, that had survived the Dar al Hisan's doubled disasters. This asked me to believe that both Fatimah's Company and Desecrated Temple's 'Company' had both carried this mystical shamanistic thread, kinked and knotted however it might have been, safe and unbroken through doubled defeat, despair, rout, and retreat.
Well, let it pass.
However and whatever he knew, the old witch was losing control that night. Whatever the source of his unsuspected new strength, it didn't vastly increase his capacity for command, for direction. As soon as he took those new ghouls, he started shedding Verdebaie troopers from the rear of his formation. We didn't find out about this initially, as our pursuit in his immediate rear was almost exclusively aerial, and the armsponies and the witches overflew the disintegrating, straggling enemy without really perceiving the wrack and ruin he was dragging behind him.
He really should have beat us into that exposed prisoner's-cage outside of Clear Creek. Even if his target had been the town itself, he still had the road and the night and half a march on us. Even with that advantage, the fog and the loss of control meant that his force wallowed, stumbled, and slowed.
Well, also, that this may have been the first time he'd tried to rush a target with his command. His stalk of earlier targets had been slow sidles up to a blinded, unseeing victim. Perhaps he simply didn't have the hoof for rapid movement. He was a witch, not a tactician.
Feufollet and the aerials beat them by a griffin's whisker, and held the line against his ponies as they came over the fence. In an open-field fight between skilled unicorns and pegasi, we should have taken massive casualties, the defense is simply not a pegasus specialty. They're raiding ponies, the winged sections, they have to keep moving to stay aloft, to stay alive. Siege and assault are the specialties of the sort of pony who had followed Blade, and they should have crushed the improvised skirmish-line.
As it was there were over a dozen casualties, some serious. It was more chaos than an organized attack. Blade's ponies recoiled when faced with Company armsponies. Most of them refused to advance or to attack. Only some of the geassed troopers went forward, those and some unicorns who I am still convinced were confused by the dark and the fog, and never really saw their targets.
Nonetheless, the attackers got inside the fence, and made a mess. Which is when our Feufollet made her own mess. More on that anon. They were driven out with some loss to the prisoners, and in the meantime, a stampede of ghouls distracted absolutely everypony outside the fence.
I mean a literal one, a stampede of the undead, rushing back and forth just outside of the reinforced fences which were the main guard against the prisoners' escape. Back and forth in the dark, uncontrolled ghouls went rampaging, aimlessly. Did Blade lose his grip, or had he let slip the reins for a distraction? It was enough to extract his attacking-force, the most of it from the mess they had made of their stroke. By the time the ghouls stopped galloping and rushing back and forth, the living element of the assaulting force was nowhere to be seen.
They'd slipped away.
We could have followed them, we should have followed them. Cherie insisted that the enemy was sidling around to the aerial cohort's northeast and north, clearly looking to circle around into the unguarded interior. But we couldn't make chase with one point of reference, and Feufollet was out of commission.
I'd arrived with the third convoy of chariots some hours later, long after the Third Cohort had relieved the aerials on the ground, and moved out into the fog and darkness to try and sniff out the trail of the retreating raiders. My first priority had to be the wounded, of which there were a shocking amount for such a brief fight. I got a good start, and was breathing more easily when a heavy guard brought in my Rye Daughter and her coterie of underemployed surgeons an hour into the longest, darkest, most mist-haunted dawn I'd ever suffered through. I briefed them about the triage, and my initial work keeping the worst of them from bleeding out. As many as the wounds had been for one pony, for the whole team, it was nothing but a busy morning. Let them work.
I found my other apprentice where I was told she was, still screaming intermittently at the bloodied wall of a little corner of the prison-camp, a sort of cul-de-sac formed by the indifferent architectural priorities of the prisoners who had built the various barracks. Blood was splattered all over the battered, naked logs of Feufollet's corner, and the half-unrecognizable heap of meat sprawled up against one barrack-wall. It might have been a unicorn once – I thought I saw keratin exposed and a bit of spiraled bone in the right shape, and I was pretty sure it was some sort of pony, once.
As I approached, Feufollet spun about suddenly, and I flinched back as something red spun through the air in between my face and her whirling forearm. A whip of something tore through the heap of gore and bone which had been a pony, and another spray of blood erupted out across the face of the wall above. She shook her hoof, and the redness curled around her arm, like thread around a bobbin. She glanced in my direction, but didn't meet my eye.
"He keeps moving. Saw him. Saw him firing into their sleeping-quarters. Salaud! Nos poneys! les notres! We paid for them. They can't have them."
I blinked, and asked permission to go and see. She waved, angrily, still staring at the long-dead unicorn's body. I walked slowly around the edge of the barracks she had indicated, and found the open door. The unlit interior was abandoned, blood and a couple arrow-filled bodies not far inside, visible from the weak morning light streaming inside. Arrows everywhere in the interior, fired from the only door into the unprotected interior. Most of those who had been exposed, died quickly. Some few must have been those ponies I had left to Rye Daughter's medical team, extracting unicorn-bolts from riddled victims. I returned, even more slowly than I had left.
"Who was it?" I asked.
"What does it MATTER? Ils sont MORTS! They ought to be dead to THE COMPANY! Oath-breakers! Wolfs-heads! Connards de TRAITRES!" Her voice broke, and she sat down in the bloody mud. "Bank Shot. I saw his face just after I removed his gorget with a bit of his spine. de l'Intérieur."
I looked for and found the crumpled gorget, torn off of what I now recognized as a dismembered petryal under all the blood and bone. She hadn't stopped there. I suppose she couldn't stop once she had started. Kept carving until nothing looked like a pony. Nothing left of that older Company pony who had laughed at her, welcomed that little Prench-speaking jenny all those many months ago, had welcomed the little wayward foals into our brotherhood with an easy grace and a card-playing insouciance.
Feufollet had known this turn-coat better than I had, even though I'd treated him on three different occasions. One of our few stallions in the archers' corps. An Old Company pony, but never the sort of sullen sour stallion you'd have associated with Obscured Blade and his pinched dogma. He'd been a mainstay of the Company as long as I'd been a member, had been a young ranker when I'd been an apprentice to the dying Silver Glow. Far too happy to be a stallion among mares, if you ask me. Smug.
"Don't write about this! Cut ce salaud from the Annals! Laissez les tomber dans l'oubli!"
"You don't make that decision, apprentice. And I'll write what I damn well please. Or will you cast me out next?"
She cringed as if slapped, and tucked her muzzle down by her shoulder as if bracing for a blow.
"How did she know?" she asked, quivering.
"How did who know? Oh, Her. Yeah, you got Hades' own mess from that assignment I gave you, didn't you? Did she admit to having led you all into the ambush?"
"Half-way, half-not. She still holds onto these turncoats. Says they promise her what she wants, we don't give her what she needs."
"She's not nearly what she thinks she is when the fever's on her. Even she acknowledges it when she's lucid."
"Yeah, I know. But she was sniping at me, saying I was just as vicious as Obscured Blade, just as mad. I had no idea what she was talking about. Not at the time." She looked down at the heap of meat which had once been an armspony. "How did she know?"
"The Spirit has claimed to be a little precognizant. She gets… flashes. Especially in that Aspect. She once warned me… well, it was barely in time. Violent death and-" Madness. Violent death and madness. Don't say that, fool. "Well, violent death in particular brings that prophesying bent out in her. It's what makes her so effective in the battle-field. Battle is just usually… simpler. When the enemy isn't our brother." I looked at the little jenny, and realized she was breaking
So I grabbed her up in as strong of a hug as I could muster, and whispered reassurances in her long, trembling ears.
"You are forgiven all of your sins, jenny. Tous tes péchés pardonnés. You tried your best, and that's all we can ask. Good girl… bonne fille."
When she had cried out enough grief and horror, I carried her out of that bloody cul-de-sac to the nearest troop-shower.
It was a long walk, but the rest could wait.