Gilda was pulled out of the diplomats' dinner by a commotion. She had never been so glad to escape a 'function'. She'd never really had the opportunity to use her mother's preposterous, theoretical 'etiquette' lessons, and most of them weren't operative among herbivores, anyways. So she'd mostly sat there at Gleaming's left hoof, and pretended she wasn't envious of Bob, Fish Eye, and the other valets as they played footmares and servers and didn't have to answer stupid, ill-conceived questions about the current, murderous state of affairs in Griffonstone, or about what the new Duchess of Trottingham was really like, or what Gilda's opinion was on this or that point of imperial policy.
Four winds, Gilda hadn't really been aware that the ponies even had an empire until the planning for this trip had brought it to her attention.
What did they want? A hen's education would naturally suffer gaps when it was entirely self-directed, and built upon whatever books she could beg, borrow, or steal, the table-talk of griffish Territorials, and the assorted results of interrogations of villains, street-trash, and raw recruits. What Gilda knew about the world had holes in it you could fly the Princess's Bit through.
And the more she tried to talk to these chatty diplomats, the more obvious those gaps became. To Gilda, and probably to her partners at the table. The dinner crept on, hour after hour, every course lingered over until the food was as cold as it was inedible to Gilda's griffon palate.
So when the commotion interrupted hour four of that endless 'dinner', Gilda was overjoyed by the interruption. Great! There was an emergency that the master sergeant must go take care of, immediately. So sorry to leave, enjoy your sixth variant on some stinking peat mash filth or other such- au revoir, my new friends, must go!
The actual crisis turned out to just be Lyra Heartstrings and the new bitch rubbing up against each other.
"That little thief was paw-deep in my Hat when I found her!"
"Queenie just looking for spare towels! Wasn't taking nothing!"
"Like human Hades! Who keeps a towel in one's hat?"
"Queenie doesn't know. Ponies are strange people. There weren't any other in shelves Queenie found."
"And that's another thing, all my stuff was tumbled about and scattered, it looked like a herd of bison had stampeded through my room!"
"Gilda, what's going on back here?" asked Gleaming as she came trotting down the corridor, where the two griffish troopers held the spitting, squint-eyed Lyra Heartstrings and a very guilty-looking Reina de Some Damn Place by the scruff of their respective necks. "Lyra? What are you doing out of the infirmary?"
"My job! Or I was going to, before I found this little sneak-thief breaking into my room and messing with my equipment! When I caught her, she dropped my apparatus. I-I need to get back to my room! What if it's broken?"
Was it her Hat, or her apparatus? Not important.
"Calm down and forget the bucking equipment, Lyra," said the major. "You're supposed to be on convalescent leave, and not doing any work at all. You look like the south end of a northbound yak."
"Well, I don't feel great, either. But I wanted to get my scanning rig to go take a look at Trixie and the other casualties that Hawk Eye has in her infirmary. Something's rotten in the Duchy of Great Danes."
"Kingdom of Rottweiler, these days," Gleaming corrected absently. There had been a pegasus mare who'd been going on and on about the political history of the northern littoral of the Inland Sea which, because it contained remarkably few griffons and a great lot of dogs, ponies, and parrot raiders, Gilda hadn't really paid too much attention to, to be honest.
"What's this about Lieutenant Lulamoon and your 'scanning rig'?" Gilda asked. "Is that those magical whatsits you used on Bob back during that Concordat business?"
"Yeah! I was talking to the doc, and we realized that my experimental equipment had a lot of diagnostic and maybe even therapeutic value for whatever's up with Trixie! But then I come back to my room and find this little bitch muzzle-deep in my inharmonic hat!"
"Ananr a beure volar cendra purins, cavall!"
"Gwaine?" Gilda prompted the corporal holding the struggling little perro.
He obligingly shook Reina until she stopped spouting Perroish insults.
"Yeah, I'm very disappointed in you, little girl," Gilda said. "You're going in time-out. Gwaine, introduce her to the - what do the sailors call the stockade again?"
"Th' brig, master sergeant," he grunted.
"Yeah, that. Let her cool her head overnight. At least. Lyra, I want to see what these toys of yours can do." It was an excellent opportunity to avoid the diplomats for the rest of the night!
The other griffon dropped Lyra, who dusted herself off. The two troopers left with the little perro to introduce her to 'the dog house', and Gilda went to follow Lyra back to her state room to collect the equipment necessary to avoid dealing with pony diplo- er, find out what was wrong with Trixie Lulamoon.
Gilda heard another hoof-step behind her, and turned around to find her major quietly following in their train.
"Major, ma'am, don't you have a diplomatic dinner you should be hosting?"
"Do I have to, Gilda? It doesn't seem to be ending, and this sounds much more promising than another hour of listening to High Flyer go on about the houses of Bullhunden and Bichon in Rottweiler und Grosdannermark. I think I might go cannibal and eat my own left forehoof if I have to-"
"Major. Ma'am."
"But Giiilda…"
"The obligations of command, ma'am."
"Fine!" Gleaming Shield flounced off to her diplomatic doom, and Gilda went off to play hooky. Or possibly doctor.
Nah, Lyra was looking too rough and salty for that sort of banter.
Lyra's state room wasn't nearly as big of a mess as the unicorn's rather overblown complaints had led Gilda to believe.
But the wizard's apparatus was well and truly buggered. Gilda left Lyra Heartstrings muttering over her bunk, poking and fiddling with the bent rods and impact-starred bead that supposedly made the device unusable. Well, tonight, anyways.
Gilda reluctantly returned to the dinner party, or rather, the clean-up as they had finally chased the diplomats out of the mess, and the bat-hens (and -mares, and -stallions, and ninja) were clearing the tables.
Gilda claimed the right of rank, and left the lance corporals to that thankless task, and went to find her hammock in the Major's quarters.
As the ship cruised eastward over the northern-most reaches of the Bight of Bullmastifia, the ponies and griffons of the crew and the squadron slowly dropped off one by one into sleep. The relative quiet opened up an opportunity for the recovery of the lost.
Ping had called it a rectification ceremony, but it had many names in tradition, and many variants. Tonight, they had three victims who needed to be made whole: one who had merely been wounded, and two who had been fed upon, and chewed up, and spit out.
Rhetorically speaking, of course.
The real challenge was bridging the dreamscapes of the three to be restored, rectified, made whole. Dried Durian was the least weakened, the most strong of the three, having been simply mangled, rather than parasitized. And she was also, in a sense, conscious, or at least aware at some level. Unlike the utterly inert Lieutenant Lulamoon, or the in-stasis Nightfang.
Nightfang wasn't actually in the sort of stasis that they could maintain for any length of time, which was another reason to get the job done tonight. They didn't have the Plain of Jars to preserve and sustain her or the lieutenant for much longer.
Ping felt the relative absence of his echoes as the shieldmaidens slowly worked through the first faltering measures of the restoration dance, and the stallion musicians kept the time and the beat. It had been becoming more and more plain, the longer this trip went on. At first, he hadn't needed his special sense, his talent, because they were on a ship, moving in a rigorous line, without deviation or choices of any real import.
It had only revealed itself when they'd come to Barkalona, and suddenly there were choices to be made, other than 'try harder' and 'rely on your ponies'. Neither of which were any sort of choices, if he was being honest with himself.
Where was the choice? You prayed to the Mother, you did your duty, you killed the night-haunts, you protected the Day from the things that crawled in the Night.
Choices meant looking. Looking meant seeing. And seeing meant…
So no, he hadn't noticed the fading of his echoes. He hadn't had to.
Until the fights got worse, and the breaches multiplied, and they needed him to see where they were coming from, what was slipping nightmares through his regiment's wards.
They had a greater concentration of dream-warriors in one place than this world had seen since the Fall of Night, outside of Canterlot and the home caverns. They should have been invulnerable, impenetrable, a perfect armed camp on the move.
The mares moved faster in their paces, circling and entwining, their leathery wings stretching and closing and furling in time to the beat of the colts' music.
The three dreamscapes approached, merged Lulamoon to Durian, Durian to Nightfang. They became not three bubbles of identity, but rather, a long-hall in the night, warm-lit with the emotional weaving of the shieldmaidens in their protected safety, as Ping held his weapon upwards, holding the strongest wards he knew to make, tentlike, over the dance.
He stared vengefully at the black bubbling sub-bubble, held within the space which had been Durian's dream, held now in the heart of the long-hall, where in another world, the long trench, the long pit-fire would have burned to keep out the night.
With a trill of the pipe being played by Fruit Salad, a sparrow suddenly flitted into the dream of the night-hall, come from Mother knew where, crossing under the shadow-beams with one, two, three, four beats of its little wings, before it returned once more to whatever unimaginable world from which it came.
Ping knew he should have been astonished to see his wards of invulnerability affronted so effortlessly, mocked by a little brown thing. But somehow, in the throbbing beat of the music and the dance, he couldn't find in himself the fury or the terror or even the curiosity.
Somehow he knew it wasn't relevant. That it had just been a voyager, a passer-by.
A reminder that there were worlds beyond the dream of the long-hall, a dream which could all too easily become one's whole world, as the beating drums throbbed to the rhythm of their united hearts, and the skirling pipes shrieked against the beat.
In the long trench, the bubbling blackness turned, shifting, becoming first a sort of brown, then a sort of grey, and then brown again, thread by thread, bubble by bubble boiling out of the dream-magic-infused solution.
The bubbles turned colors, turned light, turned rich, turned glittery and golden and mauve and purple and, increasingly, a pale pastel blue, and an even paler hue which was only white beside its fellow-blues.
As the dream-stuff boiled, and lost its nightmare character, it released those bubbles, which flowed in the heavy hot steam of the long-hall, the mares thrashing through their measures more and more feverishly, sweat flinging in moist arcs as their wings snapped, their legs lifting and falling in the quickening patterns, the wildness of the skirling pipes, the rhythm of the beating heart-drum.
Now holding each other by the grasping hoof, the cupping wing, the mares paired, sweat-slick and slightly foamed, as they bent and danced, and jumped and leaped, and poured that dark harmony which was the dances of the night into the center of the hall.
The bubbles of purified night floated in the air-currents, sluggishly, wafted this way and that, finding their way in ones and in pairs, and, over the now-lengthening measures of the song the musicians played, drifting eventually into three groups of bobbing, congealing not-matter along the spine of the hall.
The players allowed the dance-music to weave wearily, sluggishly to their scripted conclusions, and the dancers came to the end of their dance, stopping, finally, in stillness.
The pipes fell silent, and only the drums continued, softly thumping.
"I said to my heart, be still," Ping said, shifting his spear-head to a point over the central mass of bubbles, grey and yellowish-grey and brief flashes of the occasional bright emerald green. "Those who wait, lie in wait. They wait to guard, they wait in stillness. Stillness is a virtue. Learn ye to be still, and stalwart!"
"We wait in stillness," said the dancers, reformed into a chorus, and the bubbled dream-stuff shot to the walls of the center of the hall, lining them with Dried Durian's essence, her colors.
Ping walked down the now-empty trench which had once held the corrupted dream-stuff, and now was dry, walked to the second floating mass, in the arm of the hall which once, and would once again be Trixie Lulamoon.
"I said to my heart, be patient," he said again, in the ancient words of the ritual. "For patience is a virtue beyond all else. Evils may come, but evils will go, and those also serve, who endure what cannot be fought with blade or spear."
"We endure what cannot be fought," the stallion-musicians agreed, and the colors of the stricken artillery-mare, purified, streamed from the mass to the walls of that end of the hall.
Ping swung his spear about with a flourish, and stalked back down the trench to the final mass, the purples and greys and navy blues of the fallen Nightfang, whom they desired so ardently to return to their ranks.
"I say to my heart, be valiant! For though the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting, we would at last be done with waiting, and stillness, and patience, and we would have back our sisters! Cast off the darkness!"
"Cast off the darkness, so that it becomes once again, the light!" sang the chorus and the musicians as one, and the last mass of dream-shadows rushed outwards, and the hall was a tunnel of lights in the darkness.
"So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing,
So the skies, full of her stars, shall be the night everlasting!"
"The night everlasting, under the light of her stars!"
"So mote it be," Ping concluded, and the hall broke into three, as one collective heart became three.
"So shall it be," the chorus and the musicians agreed, as they were carried off, each to their respective dreamscapes, and the ceremony concluded.
And that was that. A debt repaid, a failure… not justified. Not even redeemed. But, Ping hoped, devoutly, a little bit of restitution, a little bit of grace, in a night that he increasingly found baffling and dark and worrying.
Because now that he stood with the few others carried along with Durian's dream-scape, he'd realized that with the ceremony at an end, he couldn't see the other dreamscapes.
His sight was almost entirely gone. What would he do, when he was just another stallion? No longer the special colt?
Could he hold this herd, this string together, when everything else that made him special leeched away?