FFMS029
The officers refused my quite reasonable request to join the clearing operation down in Braystown. The clock was ticking on an opportunity to trap the traitors, and pin them in place, and the Captain just waved me off and told me to sit tight and wait for orders. I mean, I was looking kind of ragged after that old goat sucker-bucked me, but I was still pronti a partire, as I've heard her say more than once.
Admittedly, the scorched coat wasn't exactly a selling point. And I was sort of afraid what might happen when the numbness wore off. But there wasn't any deep tissue damage! And what good were body-glamours if not to hide cosmetic damage like that?
So I sat in the warlock-camp and played catch with some of the smaller timberlings. It was sort of frustrating, as they had a tendency to eat the sticks instead of bringing them back to me. Even when I tried snapping off the head of a javelin and using that. Who knew a timberling that size could bite right through the fire-hardened wood of a battle-javelin?
Nopony thought to clue me in on the planning, and it was obvious that they had some sort of incredibly complex plan going on. I guess they thought I'd be a distraction, given my known opinions on the urgency of dropping everything else and hunting down that evil old screw-head. It has to be hard to work out the angles and the details with an angry jenny braying bloody vengeance in your ears.
I eventually talked the Nightmare and the Filly into letting me tap into the communications stream of the Braystown operation I had been kept away from. But it wasn't nearly as interesting to listen to message traffic, as to be there in person, taking down the ghouls, hunting out the forming packs. Because Obscured Blade had really made a mess of that fortress, he just left the defenders in place, out of hoof, out of control, gone feral. The late Beau had held his undead with an iron hoof, rigidly controlled. With his expiration, what had been a centrally-controlled, mane-raising machine of impressive coordination and impossible discipline instantly collapsed into a ravening chaos of starveling ghouls scrabbling for any available morsel of meat, drop of blood – anything that they could get their jaws around. The few living ponies that had stuck with that stubborn, paranoid legate must have died quickly, if not easily.
The former defenders came bursting out of their walls in small groups, many self-impaling themselves on their own defensive works. The task of the troops called out for the clean-up was filthy, dangerous, and painstaking, but not especially difficult. Once Fuller Falchion and Brigadier Guillaume realized the scope and extent of the problem, the troops were assigned appropriately. The regimentals were posted with surplus pikes in blocking positions around the walls of the fortress, and intercepted the escaping undead, pinning them in place until they could be destroyed by those Company auxiliaries which had been assigned to the active regiments.
The Second Cohort moved forward, and breached the main gates of the Shambles in a mass. Their assault would have been a bloody disaster not two days previously, when an actual intelligence defended the fortress. Now that this intelligence had been murdered, the clearance was a simple matter of slow, yard-by-yard butchery and patience.
As I wrote, it would have been riveting to experience first-hoof. Listening in to the comms drained all of the blood from the matter, and left it as inert and juiceless as a plate of dried-out sausages. Mmm, sausages.
MS is spotted and unreadable for the next three lines, substance seems to be some sort of vile…grease. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives
and I was invited to join the next meeting between Cherie, Sawbones, and three of the White Rose parolees. Two of them I'd met before, somewhat obsequious ponies who insisted on praying at my friend rather than talking to her. Unpleasant people, really. The third was unfamiliar to me, an older, greying stallion with smiling eyes and a serious look on his muzzle.
"Monsieur, I do not know if you have met Whispering Wheat, when you were here in the camps last month," said Cherie. "He has been very helpful in organizing a number of the camps, and aiding us in paroling the work-details. Entre autres."
"I remember Whisper," said my mentor. "He had some… interesting things to say about the battle, the aftermath, and pointed us in the direction of ponies with even more interesting things to say about that entire period. Religious visions, I think you said?" he asked the White Rose prisoner, turning towards the older stallion.
"Visions makes the entire experience sound rather… fantastical," equivocated the deep-voiced elder. "Say rather, the revelation of one's inner voice. Well, that, and the spectacular illusions which haunted our entire division in those days leading up to the battle. That latter business, I take to be your mages' tactical expedients?"
"Surprisingly enough, not really," said Cherie. "At least, nothing we did intentionnellement. Some elements of le monde spiritual may have gotten ahead of themselves, in enthusiastic anticipation of future events. I do not know how familiar you are with the things beyond ce plan physique, Sergeant Wheat, but some of les esprits that exist beyond our waking eyes can become somewhat confused as to what is today, and what is tomorrow - when is now, when is this afternoon, or evening."
"So that when I see a youthful, unmarked filly who looks and sounds a great deal like you, you are saying that it was not, in fact, you?" asked the White Rose non-com, skeptically.
"Say rather, it was an inspiration, an effect running ahead of its cause," said Cherie, confusing pretty much everypony in the room, except, apparently, Sawbones, who nodded as if it made all the sense in the world. "And if I choose, ces petites apparitions can… become me."
The prisoners looked duly impressed and awestruck by this arrant nonsense. I did my best not to roll my eyes.
"The spirits… talk to you, miss?" asked one of Whispering Wheat's cronies. "What do they say? Who do they speak for? Can they help us, help us to get back to our families?" She looked so earnest, so vulnerable… how did ponies like this get here? How had the world not eaten her alive by now, as it had so many of her peers? "Can- can you help us get home?"
"Noon Dream, you cannot confuse the spirits for gods," said Cherie. "They are not creators, not masters of fate or destiny. They simply… see what you do not see, know things you would not know. And not all of them are bénigne, amical, utile. Comme j'ai dit, I choose which shall or shall not become me. Like you would, being presented with a feast of uneven quality, pick and choose between the tasty treats and le pain pourri plated side by side, so I find that I have to be careful what I allow inside."
"Likewise," added Sawbones, "We need to be careful of what we allow inside of our society, whom we permit to join our communion of likeminded selves. We've been watching you and your fellows for some time now. You're survivors, this much is true. We respect that in a pony. The ones who would just lie down and die, have laid down and died. Well enough – some ponies are just not strong enough for this world. It isn't an easy one to live in, Tambelon. Tartarus, I'm not from here myself. You can tell by the stripes."
He paused to let them laugh at the joke. They could laugh, because he was wearing a bit of a glamour himself, and wasn't nearly as horrifying as he sometimes looked. More like the younger, happier zebra I had met that first morning, that first, terrifying morning when I woke from a waking dream, and found myself in the Company of nightmares. Sawbones, today he looked like a normal zebra, with both eyes, both brown, and normal, pony teeth. The doctor, before Tambelon got her evil teeth in him. I looked back at the three White Rose, their eyes shining at the trend in the conversation. Everypony wants to be part of something wonderful, something special. But they were more credulous than a pack of wildling foals. Religion does strange things to a pony's mind.
"This much, is true," continued the glamoured zebra. "What further, is true? That you also mean well. That you have joined together with us, in repairing the damage you've done to these war-torn lands. You've made restitution to the uninvolved. You've made a proper gesture to the surviving donkeys and ponies, to these simple artisans and farmers, far from any court or barracks or battle-field or abattoir. You have given signs that you understand that what is wrong with this world, cannot be fixed through war to the hilt, through extermination and endless slaughter."
"Please, do not get Monsieur wrong," added Cherie. "I am anything but un pacifiste hypocrite. Bloodshed is a necessary prologue to le véritable changement, true solutions. Some ponies, you just can't reach, and some – well, we have to be quite vigoureux dans notre approche, as you have experienced first-hoof. We are a brotherhood, a sacred society, an order. But we are also an order militant." She rose to her hooves, and then spread her bat-wings over her shoulders, hovering above us.
"I come not to bring peace, but an axe." Her green eyes glowed white, shining so brightly I had to turn away. "There are evils in this world, evils which must be cut out, burnt from the body. Not all will survive la chirurgie, la cautérisation. But la chirurgie, it must be done. And so, we sharpen la hache, le scalpel."
She settled back down into her seat, and continued, less dramatically. "We have assessed our needs, and you, and yours – and what we need you to be, is one of our scalpels. La hache, the axe – we have passed beyond where that is needed. Le scalpel, Sergeant Wheat. Can we make of you and yours a scalpel?"
"I – I don't know what you're asking of us, Miss. You have to understand. We look at you – and we see the promised filly, the one who was prophesied. And we know it in our bones, because you, or something that works through you – you saved us from destruction. You hold the markers of the true promise, of this I am certain. And yet - there have been too many false prophets, too many lies. Words are nothing but words, gravel beneath our hooves. The act, the demand – where are you asking us to go?"
"Sergeant Wheat, gravel est la base necessaire for good roads. The Bride, the lich-empress, elle est beaucoup de choses – but she knows how to build a road. From the gravel up. And we aim to take your home back from the latest batch of 'false prophets'. We know false prophets well. All the Chain of Creation – du Rakuen perdu au le grande Equestria – groans under the hooves of false prophets."
"Are we true? We cannot answer that question, except by the demonstration, by the example. And, I have been told, example is the school of ponykind, and we will learn at no other. Venez, étudions ensemble. Let us learn together!"
I could not believe that this palaver was the sort of thing that could inspire ponies. And yet it did, I was there, in the room. And these prophesy-struck ponies enlisted in Cherie's 'École d'exemple'. We went out into the camps, and Sergeant Whispering Wheat, and Corporal Noble Dream, and that wild-eyed ranker and lay-preacher Iron Wheels picked and they chose. And those we picked, and those they chose, we led into an open space between three camps, where all the other prisoners could see through the fences, through the gates.
And Cherie and the Annalist guided the volunteers into ranks, squad by squad, ordered into platoons. Some from this regiment, some from that battalion, mixed without prior association. And Sawbones read from one of the earliest volumes of the Annals, perhaps the first book laid down by that first Annalist after the great defeat. He stripped out the obscure references that these White Rose true believers would not have understood, would not have been able to use. He did not call it the Company, but rather, the Order. But the core, the spine of the story – that was the same. He talked of an ancient association, broken in battle, stripped of its traditions, its hope, broken but for the infantry-mare's pike and a tattered standard.
From the edge of the assembly strode the Company's standard-bearer, holding the war-lance, the Company's true pikestaff, and from it hung a torn battle-standard, a crimson banner with the iconic white rose wrapped in thorn-stems. The largest of our timberlings strode out of the opposite side of the assembly. That huge, animate, wolf-like mass of living shrubbery seized the battle-standard out of the hooves of Carrot Cake, and it waved its prize high over our heads.
"PONIES!" shouted Cherie, in her great-lunged way, her voice larger than herself. "Many have died in the last generation in the name of the White Rose! Many have died for tradition, for justice, for the will of the heavens, for their neighbors, against their neighbors, against their landlords, in spite against distant oppressors, and in hate against oppressors close at hoof! More have killed for country, for plunder, for prophesy and the dream of a better world! I will not ask any of these things of you! None of them interests me in the least!"
As Cherie bellowed her politician's words at the wide-eyed parolees, I opened the preservation-jars beneath my barrel, and with a nick against my heavily-scarred forearm, I bled into my preserves, and awoke them into life. From each jar the ribbons rolled, endless droplets so close together that they made a liquid stream, a hundred, no, five hundred liquid tendrils. Each touched the high pike-staff held by the Bocage, spiraling past the shaft to touch the racks of lances, axes and spears which stood behind us.
"What fascinates me, what concerns me, what motivates me is this question, my ponies, is this great question," Cherie continued. "WHAT WILL YOU LOVE FOR? WHAT WILL YOU LIVE FOR?"
The thestral pony rose into the air above the assembly, and her fur was as bright as the morning-star, and her wings like an iron sky promising a hard, cleansing rain. Her green eyes flashed and flared until they turned white, a punishing fiery white like looking into the sun itself.
While the assembly was hypnotized by Cherie's light-show, I used my magic to lift the shafts and the blades by their hundreds from their racks. I never would have been able to do this just last fall. The power that was pouring into the Company, that was flowing through it, had brought unexpected changes to the way my magic worked. I don't know that another blood-mage on this continent could have done what I did before that assembly. Each weapon found its pony, and hung before them, beads of old blood dripping down their blades, baptizing each in the magic of the Company.
"PONIES! TAKE UP THY BLADE, AND DEDICATE THYSELVES TO YOUR PROMISE! PROMISE WITH ME!"
And five hundred hooves raised up, and grasped each weapon by the blade, cutting their frogs and mixing old blood with living blood. And without prompting, without coaching, via the magic of the ritual, five hundred and one leather-lunged voices bellowed as one:
"WE LIVE FOR THE ORDER! THE ORDER OF THE BLACK ROSE! LIFE UNTO DEATH, LIFE WITHIN DEATH, THE LIVING WORLD REBORN!"
And the pikestaff burst into a glorious flame of all colours of the rainbow, and the white of the banner's device turned black, as black as a cinder in the fire, a black rose against bleeding thorns.
The ceremony, the ritual was repeated fifteen times over the next fortnight, every evening as the sun faded away in the west. One would have imagined that somepony would have refused the ritual, refused the initiation. And yet, not even the doubters, the would-be skeptics, held their stance in the face of a thestral burning like a mirror catching the rising sun. The Company birthed forth an Order, seven-fold. An Order that, to look at it, before and after, was nothing but a ragged collection of refugees and defeated captives.
But what of appearances, I ask you?
As for my enemy, that evil old traitor, and his plans, and his destinations, and his plots. Well, if that old goat thinks that the Company was nothing more than a vessel to be discarded – there are always new pitchers by the sink! There are new bottles in the wine-cellar. It's not the flagon that matters, but the vintage of the wine.
We can only hope that the Spirit can still taste the difference between beaujolais and old vinegar.