In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


The Miracle

FFMS051

My first three attempts have been consigned to the fire along with Sawbones' remains. Tradition holds that the volumes of his Book be bound in what the tanners take from his hide, but the condition of his body when we found it hadn't left anything for them to work with; to be honest, it was mostly ashes anyways. The ceremonial pyre was more for form, tradition, really. The fires and the destruction made them difficult to reconstruct, and if we did not have Sawbones' last testimony to the Mistress, what happened in that chateau would have been an enduring mystery.

My first and second attempts were nothing more than extended profane rants, primal screams transcribed and blotted across ruined pages, torn and incoherent. The third turned maudlin and sobby and even worse, self-indulgent, so to the flames it went as well. I turned to transcribing the Mistress's last memories of my late Master, and so found my centre.

And so I return to my own story. My Book. Damn it all.

In those days the Black Company was in the nominal service of a black-hearted villain known as The Bride, soi-disant Empress of All Tambelon, queen of the damned, plague-mistress, slaughterer of her own people, mother of rebellions and enemy of life. To say that our relations with our employer at the time were fraught was to understate matters entirely. The Company was in the process of investing our employer in preparation for a late-winter siege at the moment that I officially took over the post of Annalist.

We were mid-air when the news came. It was delivered on wings of fire and shadow, a mystical wave of vast and terrible effect. Cherie was drawing a hacked-together double-gig, carrying Bad Apple and I in cobbled-together tandem seats, clutching each other and the rattle-trap half-collapsing remnants of our 'gig' lest it fall apart mid-air. Cherie had grown by leaps and bounds that winter season, leaving the rest of us behind in her very late adolescence. What had once been a tiny, spritely thestral foal was now a hearty mare whose wing-span was wide enough to carry two not-particularly-overlarge witches and their half-assed chariot through brutal winter skies at a pretty rapid clip without tiring or losing control of the equipage.

But it wasn't exactly an easy ride.

And it got considerably worse when the death-surges passed through the medium of the Company. Which is to say, us. Previous lich-deaths had affected the ponies of the Company profoundly, as minor as those devils had been in the general scheme of things. This was the lich-queen, and two of her minions, and more besides.

And for a moment, all the world were stars. And I learned for the first time, in my burning bones and blood, that the stars are fire.

We must have left one hell of a contrail. The improvised gig certainly didn't survive the flight. In fact, the only things that bound the three of us together were the boiling contents of my reserve-bottles of blood, burst out of their broken containers, and Bad Apple's pyromantic talent for the fires which burned in us.

I leashed us to the burning thestral with reins of boiling blood, and the little earth-pony pyromancer shaped our black-fire selves into a coherent whole, and kept us from bursting apart like a mis-fired gran pétard.

We had been in flight between the camps outside of the ruins of the Second Mouth and the rural chateau of the late Baron Rincewind where the minions of the Bride had taken our Annalist captive. We were most of the way eastwards when the wave of death's-power hit us, having set off not long after the reports of the ambush and Sawbones' captivity had come across the princess radio.

By the time Cherie arrived over the chateau, the three of us had come to a balance, spinning the flames and the blood and the shadows into a flyable arrangement, and we were able to descend with some modicum of dignity.

The chateau was a pillar of mottled flame, the stone itself on fire. It was encircled in turn by expanding circlets of wildfire surrounding collapsed, flaming ponies dotted here and there across the landscape. The aerial cohort had been shuttling bits and pieces of reaction-force commandos from further east and north, and at the time of the explosion there had to have been a company and a half on the ground, along with two of the Company's warlocks. Gibblets had not… reacted well to the surge, and was out of commission throughout the next several hours, brought down by heatstroke and his own, peculiar biology. Otonashi had come through the flames in a more effective fashion, and was working the ground elements, trying to rally them from their panicked, destructive chaos into something more disciplined and ship-shape.

It's hard to keep your military cool when every hair on your coat is a wick, your caparison is aflame, and your chamfron is melting on your head. This all was more than a little distracting. And yet, none of the Company armsponies were being consumed by the fires bursting out of their pores. It was as if the flames were something passing through us, rather than feeding off of our bodies. Like we were sweating fire.

The princess radio was nothing but static and the roaring of a bonfire.

We communicated via sign-language on the ground, Otonashi trotting everypony through the steps; we'd grown up more or less understanding her when she 'talked', but none of us were exactly practiced in actually speaking the way she did.

And while we stumbled around in the steaming tartarus-landscape around the burning chateau, a twisting tornado of fire spun in the flaming hole blown in that fortified building's roof. We knew something massive had died in there, but we were cut off from the Spirit in that fiery moment, or rather, we were too full of Her to hear her words.

And the tornado kept growing, sucking the flame and fire that was melting away the winter all around us, drawing the upper air down into a growing wind. Our flames were drawing upwards towards the fire-tornado. Things were spiraling out of control.

Well, moreso than they were already out of control.

Now safely on the ground, Bad Apple and I joined hooves, and she passed through the contact the knowledge of how to warp and guide the flames, and the three of us ceased our ceaseless flaring. Cherie took to the air again, merely glowing like an ember, no longer burning like a phoenix. She circled above the Company positions, her ash-grey wings cutting through the tendrils of rising flames like a blade. Bad Apple and I galloped in opposite directions, finding our individual brothers and sisters, torching against the gathering night. As we passed, the fires died and faded, the guttering power ceasing to waste itself in heat and light.

We met together the opposite side of the gathered troop-clusters from where we had landed. Our fire-dazzled eyes still were mostly worthless in the restored darkness, after-images ruining our night-vision.

But at least the bonfire-roar in our heads was dying away. One could almost hear – "-dead, dead oh my baby colt, wait, wait, don't go, don't go, don't go-" Meaningless babble. That stentorian voice should never have been heard whining like that, never been heard saying words like that. I have gone back and forth over revealing the Mistress's weakness in that moment, but in the end I came down on the side of proper disclosure. To say she was distraught is to understate her reaction to the death of Sawbones.

In retrospect, I think this emotional reaction was the only thing that saved this world. If she had been in this moment receptive to the blandishments of the victorious traitor, I think Tambelon would have burned.

All of it. Ponies, foliage, soil, crust and mantle, right down to the burning core. An ember-world, scorching every other world it touched above and below it on the Chain. We only survived that seed-fire beside which we trembled because of the fire in our souls, which preserved us body and mind against a spinning maelstrom that burned stone and melted steel.

And, mindless as it was in Obscured Blade's stunned victorious madness, it still was building. Drawing air from above, wicking the earth itself below his flame-hooves. He had found his spark, his fire, and the world kindled. And we were too much of the flame to fight the fire.

From the Mistress's babblings and from the evidence on the ground, we realized who the pillar of fire was, and where the power had come from. And yet, in the face of the fire which would burn the world, we had nothing to offer, no plan that would snuff it out.

The traitor was consuming himself in his conceit, there was very little sense in his fire. He would burn away, the wick blackening and flecking away in ash in the birthing of his flame. Nopony ever heard another word from that mad unicorn, no final words, no grand speech, no megalomaniacal gloating. As a villain, he was something of a disappointment. Not a romantic figure, no – rather, in the end, he was just another mindless tropism, another phenomenon. All of his intentions, all of his purpose, burnt away in a meaningless fire.

A meaningless fire that would destroy everything.

Enough of the traitor. He destroyed, and in destroying, was destroyed. He was a fool, in the end, and all of his plans and plots consumed in his idiot success.

And there we stood, destroyed right along with him. All of our plots, all of the Company's low cunning and educated cleverness, blown down by the winds of the maelstrom circling the triumphant bon-fire, wild-fire, magic destroying order by its mere touch. The fire is alive, but it is nothing else, and it consumes itself, leaving nothing behind it, not even death.

And so it was that our greatest daughter flew through the howling winds, grey-ash-wings over the raging fire, and we just watched, baffled. Locked in confusion and increasing panic – nothing we did, did anything but kept us from the growing flames.

And then the universe took pity on us. From the east, beyond the eye-dazzling fire, something washed out like a wave. The first roiling flash, crimson-red, blended so strongly with the fires that it looked for a bit like the fire escaping its pillar-constraints to consume the whole sky in a sudden terrible rush. And then it rolled over us, and it was red, pure – light and life, that which was loyal to itself and to all that lived, and it shot past us like lightning.

And then the second flash, and it was the world itself, and it was the world without filters, without expectations, without falsehoods. And that orange wave drew the fire with it, and raced westwards, chasing the red lightning.

And a soothing wave, soft and soothing and cooling our burns, the first flare of the sun on the kindest morning of spring, a sweet smile wafting westwards as it went.

The green of growing life, the giving blue beauty of the infinite heavens, the sacred fading colors of day's last twilight, they followed themselves in serried ranks, wave after wave of miracle chased themselves through the gathering night, an impossible sky, an impossible gift that came from nowhere and raced itself towards nothingness, passing over our damned heads in their journey from the heights of the Chain to the ends of Creation.

A moment of grace in Tartarus.

Moments count.

When the last purple flickers died from the darkening skies, the shattered, melted chateau was itself darkened, the flames extinguished for that one, precious second.

The moment passed, and the embers began to catch fire again. The Blade-bonfire had only been stunned, beaten down by that whatever it was. And it was re-kindling before our eyes.

But Cherie had stayed in the air throughout that moment of grace, and her tail trailed a bit of every sky-tint which had passed over her in her flight.

And from every point of the compass, the Company's pegasi and griffins flew, joining Cherie in her flight, trailing behind her along with the tendrils of colour in her wake. And their wings lit with the colours of the sky-light, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, each flier a lantern in the darkness.

The fire was growing again from the ruins of the chateau, but around it, a torus of flitting ponies, their colours holding back the glare. And against the roaring of the fire, a high, singing voice, Cherie's alto singing something wordless and ineffable.

And the colours started to rain upon the scorched, winter-wasted gardens surrounding the shattered chateau.

All through that night, they floated around the struggling fire, the gardens bursting with impossible, rapid growth, the earth-ponies pushing forward, somehow knowing to knead and push against the outside ramparts surrounding the chateau's gardens. And the lights and the earth-ponies' intrinsic magic melded, and kneaded, and drew from those modest rose-bushes and flower-beds an ephemeral, living growth, great vines and flowering plants, equine-height, twice again, rose-bushes as tall as the chateau itself, blooms impossibly wide and hungry.

Great seed-pods grew and fell from the tall stalks. They burst, and from them full-grown timberlings tumbled like foals a-birthing. The flames of the Blade-bonfire fought against the living rose-wood that surrounded it, and was sucked away, pulled apart bit by bit, minute by minute, hour by hour.

All night long the struggle sputtered, never quite rising to the level of a rage again. Ponies fell out of Cherie's formation, to rest behind our modest lines on the ground, and then, having rested, rose again to join the endless circling flock again. She never wavered, never stopped.

And below her, her rose-garden thrived, died, fell to scorched mulch, and grew again, five or six seasons in rapid succession, hour after hour, months of growth passing in minutes. And from each generation, grew another crop of timberlings, foal-legged and shakey and disoriented. Those of us who weren't earth-ponies led the newborns away from the White Rose's impossible nursery, pushing and nosing the wild-magic children of that mad night away from the guttering magic flames.

In the pre-dawn hours of that long, terrible night, the flames started to die down. Each successive generation of monster roses had drawn more and more magic from the fires, and grew closer and closer to the centre of what had been the terrible fire-pit where the liches and Sawbones had died, where the Blade-bonfire had been born, and now was dying.

And then, as the long winter night ended, and dawn rose in the east, the last vile flame was cupped by one last rose-bloom, and snuffed out like a pony putting out a candle. And that last rose-bush dropped one, last, tiny seed-pod, and from it crawled a tiny little timberling, the size of a mouse.

And Cherie landed beside the timberling, and took it up with her wing, and looked westwards across the rank and overgrown garden, towards the gathered timberlings, and the naked, gathered Company.

And the night was over.