Flashing lights. Explosions in the dark. Shadows without a source that sliced, hacked, shot, and stabbed one another. Screams and neighs, the rending of armor, and charge after charge over land dotted with craters.
"Ugnh..."
Shaking his head, he tried to get these things out of his sight, but they remained just as clear as they had been before.
He grabbed at his head and rolled, trying to keep it out...
Everything suddenly ceased. The noise and vision of battle were simply wiped out by a white light that raced from left to right across his vision, completely blotting out everything else.
The fighting was replaced...
...with a sense of peace. Quiet.
Looking down, he saw flower bursting out of the white floor, a little grass around it. The grass expanded; within half a minute, it had covered what had been a battlefield, and a blue sky with a few clouds and a bright sun overhead had replaced what was left of the white that had come in so quickly.
All around, many ponies suddenly appeared. They gathered around.
He recognized them. One had fallen in the first battle against the changelings, which felt so long ago. Another had been killed taking the ruins of Ragna Fortress. Yet another had died during the desperate fighting in the Siege of Trottingham.
There were hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. All different colors and shades of colors. Various sizes and shapes.
They lined up in so many ranks and files. Their hooves made a soft pounding as they aligned.
Then, all at once, they saluted him.
His heart seemed to stop, but not in a way to cause alarm. As he looked up, he saw a cross made of fire in the sky.
All at once, he felt cleansed. Washed.
Forgiven.
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"Unnnnh..."
"He's coming around!" a female voice seemed to shout from far away.
James rolled his head; his body wouldn't follow suit. He opened his eyes, and thought for a second that the white that had erased the battle had come back.
Then his mind began to catch up with his body.
He was strapped to a bed in a camp hospital, and the white he'd seen when he had awoken was merely the roof of the tent, brightly illuminated by a lamp.
"Don't start moving," a nearby medic said. "You might open up the wound, and we just managed to keep you from bleeding out four hours ago."
James dimly remembered the shot that the emperor had fired into his side, followed by pain and then... he must have passed out, for, except for the - dream, was that what it was? - he'd just been in, he'd been completely unaware of what was going on.
He found a question; "Did we do it?"
"If you mean that the war's over," the female voice from earlier, this one from a nurse, replied, "then yes. We've won."
"About time," a wounded soldier grumbled. "They had no business fighting as long as they did."
"Just be glad we're still alive," another said. "We might not be, and we still have a chance to live our lives with our families and friends." He sighed. "Too many..." He didn't need to continue. The sentiment was all too obvious.
There was a moment of silence following these words. James felt the old feeling of guilt coming up, as an officer who was responsible for the lives of the soldiers under him. However, this time, it felt... curtailed. It wasn't soul-crushing, and it felt like a much lighter burden to bear. It was still there, of course, but the great dark mass on his heart suddenly seemed to have been reduced to something manageable.
It's over. Finally, it's over. After all that... it's over.
No more children of any of the races fighting in the war would suffer being torn away from their fathers, nor fathers and mothers from sons and daughters. No more killing. The guns had fallen silent at last, after nearly a year at war.
James sighed, something between relief and a measure of grief.
"Does anyone know my aide, a pegasus by the name of Crystal Clear? Can any of you tell me how he is?"
One of the nurses looked around. "I don't remember them bringing in a fellow by that name."
"Royal Guard. Pure white, except for mane and tail. Wearing Guard armor."
"There are a lot of pegasi in the Guard that meet those or similar descriptions."
"Shot in the right shoulder, came out the left buttocks."
"Ugh." The nurse, and several soldiers nearby, shuddered, perhaps in sympathy, perhaps out of the ghost pain that one might feel upon hearing such a thing, maybe both. "No, I haven't seen anyone like that, glory be."
"He might have been in a couple o' houses where we set up makeshift hospitals," a wounded orange pegasus suggested. "I reckon they took him there. In that case, not much any of us can do."
James sighed again, this time in worry. "I suppose you're right. I'll just have to wait."
"What else are we supposed to do?" the pegasus answered, to a general laugh around the tent. The soldier sighed. "I'm glad I'll be able to go home to my foals and wife. My home in Cloudsdale is calling me."
"Until your wings are healed, you're staying here," a doctor replied firmly. "As is every patient present, until their wounds are sufficiently healed."
James realized that that meant him, too. Given that his side would probably half kill him if he tried to get up, he wasn't all that enthusiastic about getting up in any case.
"What's been going on since the emperor went down?" he asked.
"I think I can answer that," another soldier, a blue earth pony, answered. "Most of the conscripts just gave up when they saw the flag waving from the palace, sometimes killing their insane officers, who kept trying to urge them to fight. That knocked out most of their remaining strength right then and there. There were still so-called patriots as well as royal troops who kept fighting, but without help from their unwilling comrades, they got pocketed." He looked a little sheepish. "That's how I got here. I was in front of a block of houses where some diehards walled themselves up. I told them to surrender, and one of them shot me. Just glad it wasn't something worse than it turned out to be, but it feels embarrassing to have been shot just as the war was ending."
"Nothing to be ashamed about; it's not like you could mind control them," James reasoned.
"And mind control magic is illegal in any sense," the doctor added.
"Yeah, well, it's a hard feeling to shake. At least this hit just gives me a souvenir, instead of forcing an amputation of my front leg."
James looked around for a moment, his eyes scanning the tent. "What happens now?"
"Well, lots, actually," the nurse said, preparing a batch of medicine. "The griffons need a new government, or sets of governments, the former king needs to be judged, as does Chrysalis, we're going to have to establish formal relations with the changelings, and somehow we have to deal with the diehards and nationalists that are still fighting."
"Those last two groups aren't going to last long," the pegasus said. "We just kill them or capture them, and keep them in prison for not giving up after the king was dethroned. We can put it up to treason or a breach of ceasefire or something if we want to."
"The Royal Sisters will probably hoof them over to the Council of Nobles, which, until further notice, basically is the griffon government," the nurse answered.
"They probably won't punish the nationalists all that much," James said. "They're concerned with not being under pony rule, something that the Princesses have never intended anyway. It's the former king's soldiers and officials and officers who are going to be in big trouble. After all, without them, the king couldn't carry out his tyrannical policies. Most of the people are probably just going to be glad it's over."
"Okay, so what about whether or not the griffons are going to fracture into half a dozen countries or more?"
"Hmmm," James hummed, thinking about it. "I can't be sure. They have the liberty of choosing their own fate, though they'd be much weaker as balkanized states."
"Good," the blue earth pony said. "Let 'em break up. Keeps them from bothering us again."
"I doubt they'd be foolish enough to try," the nurse replied, sticking a bag of morphine onto one of the beds. "We have better tech than they do, not to mention that with the fall of Gryphos, their magitech program is gone, so we'll have magic and they won't. Add to that, they've been hurt much more than we have. I doubt the many widows and orphans in the griffon kingdom want a second round, not after so any sons and husbands died to no purpose."
"There's probably going to be bad blood between Equestria and the griffons for a while," the doctor put in, checking the pegasus' bandages. "We've lost too many on both sides, no matter who won. I'd say there will still be a faction of royalists no matter what we do, though I think they'll remain a minor faction, isolated. They probably won't last very long as a political force. Most of the commoners... well, we can't be sure what they'd support regarding the unity or break up of the kingdom. We'll have to see. As was said before, they're probably focusing more on the fact that they lived through the war than thinking about the future, at least, not yet."
"The world has changed," the nurse went on. "I'm not sure... but I think the world's a slightly better place now."
"How do you figure, with so many guys dead?" a soldier demanded.
"Well, the changelings aren't hostile to us anymore, and most of their queens are actually not all that bad. Not to mention we dethroned a major tyrant and destroyed his war machine. Perhaps better wasn't the right word; safer might be more accurate. But that was still worth doing. Now future generations don't have to worry about Chrysalis and Raneiro and their plans to rule the world."
"Maybe, but I still say we took too long and lost too many."
"Regardless, it's over now," the doctor said, not bothering to look away from his current patient. "Time to think about healing and rebuilding."
No one bothered to argue with that.
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