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

FFMS046 

The police lieutenant came to us.  She walked slowly, absent-mindedly into the cell block, stinking of death and dead things.  

Morning was breaking, and my bruises were starting to turn colour, and twinged my regret back at me.  The MPs had been less than gentle, but I've had worse from friends and victims, so I was bearing up.  Getting under their coats was worth the occasional beating.  And better me, than somepony else in the Order. Some of those ponies had suffered more than they ought to have, and we've asked so much of them over the last few months.

Speaking of ponies we would be asking much of, the Nightmare was hovering over the shoulder of the police lieutenant, snickering, far far too proud of herself.

The Nightmare had clearly found some success overnight.  She hadn't really read us into the process except to prompt us with phrases to be seeded into our interrogation dialog, to be properly dropped in the right ears at the right times.  I'd whispered cryptic nonsense into this jailer's ear, that torturer's, - this lieutenant's.  Salted Soil was her name, and her message had been something about a pony named Sweet Soil – a twin perhaps? Whatever I'd dropped for the Mistress, I was guessing that it had seeded in the grim-looking necromancer.

She smelled like all necromancers do – curdled earth, rotted blood, evil walking this world.  Her coat was as streaked and stained as any blood-mage's coat, and to add to the effect she had several well-polished fetishes bobbing like flag-heads over her withers.  She was a rather toxic-looking green, with a mane the colour of old blood.

She looked over my compatriots and I.  I hadn't been able to swing my sole captivity, so two Order ponies had been swept up in the engineered 'capture'.   Ground Truth and Kale Seeds were tough ponies in their own way, but I had tried to take their blows by subtly pushing myself forward.  You'd think that these high-powered military police warlocks would have been able to burn right through the magic that had laid 'Marsh Wisp' over my donkey hide, but Marsh Wisp was no simple glamour.  She was the child of my blood and my magic and my inner pony-self.  And she was resilient in the face of interrogation and blood-magics.

They had beat me, and tormented me, but none of the blows had broken through Marsh Wisp to touch Feufollet.  This is the power of the blood-semblance; it protects, and it obscures, and it transforms.  It was in a strangely real way, as much me, as Feufollet was when I was being her.  For all that the world knew, while I was being Marsh Wisp, it was she who took the slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune, and nopony could see through to whatever truth there actually was in sly little Feufollet.

"What do you want, lieutenant?  We've still done nothing wrong here.  We have our duties back in the camp, duties your questions have diverted us from, kept us from.  Can we be let go now?"

"Duties?  Interesting." She looked… strange.  Like she was hearing the words, but not really understanding them in any conventional sense.  Salted Soil looked… pole-axed.  Like somepony had clouted her across the poll, and she was existentially concussed.  "I honestly do not know which duties you're referring to, Corporal Wisp.  But I am indeed, here to free you and your two friends.  There has been a – hrm.  Mistake?"

She suddenly leaned into my cell, staring with mad eyes into mine. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT MISTAKE I HAVE MADE?  HAS SHE TOLD YOU ANYTHING FURTHER?"

I looked frantically back and forth, trying to evaluate our audience.  The lieutenant hadn't brought any subordinates into the cell block with her.  The jailor wasn't in view.  Was he in earshot?

"What?  What mistake?  Is anypony in earshot that I can't see?"

"No, nopony is nearby, Corporal.  It's only us and the garden.  No weeds nearby.  I've sent away all extraneous ears.  Only you, and your two hooves, here.  Should I send them away as well?  She said to tell you… your Mistress has given unto you, a hoofmaiden in your further tasks, to aid – well, she didn't say anything about weeding, but that is the way I think of it.  I didn't think I had retained so much of the scriptures…" The lieutenant was rambling.

"Lieutenant!  Focus!" I clapped my hooves in front of her staring, empty muzzle.  "What has happened? Where are we this morning?  What have you done?  Do we need to flee?  Are you exposed?"

"Exposed? Me? Why, I – no, I don't think anypony knows anything.  I was not seen, not coming, or going, or putting them to rest."

"Putting to rest?  What have you done?  Who have you put to rest?"

"Nopony, nopony. Oh, I suppose that once they were somepony, but not by the time I was done with them.  My thralls, my most favourite tools. No, no, the abomination is right, wicked to call them that, to have reduced what were ponies to things.  So I cut them loose."

She looked at her hooves, and the dagger sheathed on her left fore-leg.

"Ground Frog was right; there is power in the knife's-edge when you let the abomination into your heart.  They went down like – like puppets with the strings cut."

"OK, OK.  We can work with this. First rule of joining the cult? Don't call the Mistress an 'abomination'.  She only puts up with that from – well, she expects a little bit of respect from her foals.  And it doesn't help us further recruitment to call the Spirit nasty names where anypony can hear you.  Doesn't really help to call Her anything at all if we're in company, really."

Something occurred to me, and concerned, I looked at the stunned new recruit.  "Why are you still calling her that, anyways? You should be seeing her as –"

"She isn't the White Rose. I can't be fooled like that. Savage, vicious – she's an abomination, a horror.  But she made her points well enough.  She's a monster.  But I've seen too many monsters in their own service.  I recognize one in the service of the Rose.  Where is the true Rose?"

I was in her grasp, and she was mad-eyed, and armed, and I was unprepared.  If she snapped, I might be dead before I could summon my own defenses.

"Nearby.  We don't expose her when we don't have to.  I'm who they send to make the connection, to bring in the recruits.  If we can find a safe space to dream, I'll introduce you to our Rose."

She explained, haltingly and lamely, making occasionally little sense. The Nightmare had come to our new recruit as herself – well, mostly.  I couldn't understand the logic of the Spirit at times.  Was it just that a military police-mare expected to be lied to, and needed an obvious lie to interact with?  That the Filly would have set up all of her most desperate defenses, caused her to lock down in an impenetrable huddle? I honestly don't know.

She was quite the constant gardener, our Salted Soil.  And she was a fervent believer in keeping her garden well-weeded. The Nightmare had shown her what was, and was not a weed.  All it took was a little – twist. And suddenly Salted could see that a dead thing without vitality was by definition out of place in something like a garden.  

Fanatics never stopped being fanatics; they could only be shifted on doctrine, goals - targets.  So the Nightmare gave Salted Soil a new set of targets.  It helped that the new goals suited the faith she had been brought up into in the first place.  Whomever had perverted the White Rose, had bent its adherents against their own principles.  The entire edifice was a series of springs bent against their own tensions. All we'd have to do is release the springs, and the whole tangled mass would tear itself apart.

I walked Salted Soil through her day, as brief as it had been so far, and we worked out who had seen her, when, and where she was expected.  Then I disabused her of the idea that she was going to free her 'prisoners'.  We weren't going anywhere.





A position within the military police battalion was too precious a perch to give up so easily.  We needed this leverage – it was why I had encouraged our concentration upon the MPs.  They were natural fussbudgets, nebby noses, inquisitors.  Nopony thought twice about the MPs going where they weren't wanted, asking uncomfortable questions, disappearing random soldiers and contractors as the spirit and the Rose inspired them.

Or the Spirit, for that matter.

I had her put the three of us into the thralls' pen, and I laid another glamour over the three of us, reinforced by yet more blood, yet more magic.  We put down several more thralled ghouls, enough to explain our presence. Their rapidly-decomposing bodies were hidden in the back stall, covered with a bit of very old hay.  The other ghouls paid no attention to the extermination of their existential kin; when their times came, they would resist no strongly than the others had.  

Assuming that we didn't disturb their thrall-fetishes.

Which I reminded Ground Truth and Kale Seeds of, with great emphasis. Our safety, our protection against being eaten by our bunk-mates relied entirely upon our proper care and maintenance of their fetishes.  Those little devices were literally our life.  I took every pain when I looked over the thralling pins of that slowly rotting herd, examining each possible failure-point, crack, or blemish.  I didn't particularly want to be chewed upon in my sleep.

The Mistress and our new brethren worked on the rest of the investigation squads that operated out of their company-station.  Over the next three nights, we absorbed each new recruit as they succumbed to the torments of the Nightmare and our careful daylight traps.  I found myself playing police-ghoul to more than one unconverted MP in that interim, guarding them against their enemies, their victims – or just the negative attentions of their compatriots.  As little as I had expected the common White Rose soldier to think of their MPs, I found that the reality was even worse. 

Nopony likes an inquisitor.

So I moaned theatrically, loomed threateningly, and practiced my zombified shuffle. Nopony seemed to suspect my moans or my shuffles; I suppose it was not especially likely that anypony would care to pretend to be the undead.  I was able to hide in plain sight.  And I learned quite a lot.

The winter quarters of the White Rose's armies were no more active than your average Imperial encampment.  The grain-ships and supply freighters came and went, the fleet was pulled up on the islands and the shore-banks, and stripped down for winter storage.  Most of the regiments should have remained on the northern shore, and within whatever shelter the ruins of the  Second Mouth provided.

Strangely enough, a good number of battalions had been shipped onto the islands in the middle of the stream, and even across to the southern shore.  Given the terrible weather, you'd have thought that the hassle and danger of crossing the wide Housa in numbers would have been ruled out, but nevertheless, the companies marched down to the boats, and they crossed in their vast numbers, day after day.

Something was happening.

The boats in motion and the constant churn of soldiers back and forth gave us the opportunity to move more ponies over to join me and my advance-team in our foothold inside the oversight elements of the army.  I passed along the necessary suggestions, and that first night a few boats' crew were kidnapped off their decks by the Order as soon as they could do so without anypony observing.  The sailors I had seduced to the Mistress's faith took over these boats, and the actual boaters were swiftly taken into custody, hidden deep within the Order's encampment, to be recruited at their leisure.  As far as they were concerned, we were in no particular hurry.  Our sail-donkeys could do their job as well as them, in between carrying packages and ponies for the Order in their free time.

Salted Soil and I greeted the newly-claimed ferry-boats when they returned to the islands in the stream, and I weaved fresh glamours over our new boat service, and those ponies they'd brought to us to play ghoul for the military police.

Most of the new 'ghouls' were former-Company veterans. We were all past masters of pretending to be what we weren't at this point.  It was almost relaxing to shuffle about and moan threateningly, after months playing the enslaved prisoner of war.

With the expanded Order presence in the main logistics base, and the conversion of more and more of the military police themselves, we began making headway into the project of mapping out the command structure and control-points within the army of occupation.  They had been three separate field armies upon their first deployment, but our Third Army had been destroyed in the campaign on the middle Housa, and these remaining formations, the Seventh and Eleventh Armies – they had been bled so thoroughly that they were closer to the establishment strength of corps or over-large divisions than proper armies.  The Housa Army Group was severely over-officered, the fighting having been much harder on the ranks among the Seventh and Eleventh Armies.  

This left us with very long lists of potential targets in the table of organization.  We soon put up blotter-sheets on the walls of the ghoul holding-pens, heavily marked up with notes describing said table of organization.  A hair-trigger glamour was in place to conceal the blotter-sheets if somepony not read into the cult wandered inside our stinking quarters.

By that point, all of the former inhabitants had been put out of their undead misery, and hauled out mid-river under cover of darkness by our boat service – to be dumped overboard as soon as the opportunity offered.

Cherie took up where the Nightmare had left the process of recruitment.  The Mistress terrified and unsettled them, and then once they'd been stampeded inside the gates, Cherie came to them to talk them down from the shock of their crash-recruitment.  The Nightmare's hard sell was surprisingly effective among these judgmental, savage inquisitors; but we didn't want to preserve them in their hard, angry state.  Fanatics converted to our cause were still, in the end, dangerous and brutal and all too prone towards overkill, overreaction, over, well everything.  So, we left the state of their souls to bubbly little Cherie.  

If anypony could lead savage, fanatical inquisitors into a more sanguine way of life, it would be our thestral hope, our golden child.

Better her than I.  I still tended to hold against these blood-soaked necromancers just how thoroughly they'd dived into the life of unlife, still intermittently angry at how they'd surrounded themselves with these disgusting, vile things.  

Especially when I had to walk around in the daylight covered in a semblance of cyanotic rotting death on the hoof.  I swear I'll never have enough showers in the rest of my life that will wash away the psychic filth of those weeks of performance in the pens, among other ponies likewise wearing the appearance of the undead.

It often took an entire night's dreaming in the paradises of sun, sand and pleasure-beaches to wash away the self-disgust a day among the military police burdened us all.  And we spent as much time asleep as we could, I assure you.  Life was brutish, filthy, and savage in the White Rose's military police.

Because, among other things, the state of the army group behind the gates of the Second Mouth was not well. The north shore was dotted with quarantine-camps, and only the need to maintain a properly armed and regimented presence on that side of the river kept any non-quarantined battalions down there among the quarantined.

And these quarantine-camps were both necessary, and beginning to break down.  Sickness had risen up out of the trenches, and spread through battalion after battalion.  A nasty, vile flu, one with a ferocious death-rate, and which turned over into rampaging ghouls so rapidly that the White Rose had suffered double-digit losses among their medical corps in the course of the brief week we took to recruit our way into dominance over the military police's central companies.

The combat necromancers were overwhelmed by the problem of keeping the quarantine-camps under control, and a few days after we'd secured control of the second of four companies among the military police battalion, we were called up to reinforce the combat-necromancer corps.  You could imagine how we all took this unexpected turn in our affairs.

"What do you mean, we're being mobilized?  You're the MPs!  The MPs don't get mobilized, and certainly not in the middle of winter!"

"I don't know how they did things wherever you all came from, but our military police are auxiliaries to the necromantic corps!  We are their back-ups."

"She's right, ma'am," said Kale Seeds. "It's why we had no military police among the prisoners in the POW camps.  They all fought and died with the necromancer battalion, every single one."

"Pfft, probably not all of them.  The traitor had to have found his pet necromancers somewhere." I eyed the rather hang-dog former necromancers we'd forcibly recruited into the cult. "Well, water under the bridge.  You all are alive, and serving the Mistress as is your duty.  Which means we need to serve your apparent needs until the time comes to throw off all cloaks, all semblances.  Until then, 'be as wise as serpents'.  What's the tactical requirements of a deployment?  Do you lead with your ghouls, or with support-platoons to do your suppressing and bleeding for you?"

"Oh my Rose, of course we lead with our thralled ghouls!  That would be slaughter, sending naked troops in to put down the uncontrolled dead!"

"Huh. Good thing you've got a fresh corps of troopers who can't be turned by the undead, or overrun easily. We might leave a swathe of dead ghouls in the process, though.  I think… maybe we should bring extras hidden in our ranks, and then pretend to 'suppress' our fresh troops as 'ghouls'?"

"That – that's a lot of glamouring. Do you have enough mages to pull that off?"

"Ha!  I can handle twice as many illusions. Don't underestimate my capacity, you blood-soaked ghoul-diddling poisoner!  Let's just work out how this is going to work. First, we need to cover our fresh troops with a no-see-um, then…"