//------------------------------//
// The Hayseed Watch 
// Story: Blackacre 
// by Princess Woona 
//------------------------------//

6 December, Y.C. 969
Hayseed Swamps

“Checkin’ in!” called the pale blue pegasus down to the snow-frosted treetops below. “Nothin’ on the ground, far up as Dodge!”
One of the powdered canopies shimmered for a moment before revealing a smallish wooden platform, perched high above the swampy marshland below. Or at least what would be marsh in the summer: come winter, everything froze down to the water table, and with plenty of trees and ice-hard ground, the swamp started looking an awful lot like a forest. To one side of the platform a lean-to offered some amount of protection to a small pile of supplies; to the other, a unicorn was looking over a topographic chart.
“Got it,” nodded the unicorn. “Dragons?”
The pegasus shook his head, descending down to the tree tops, his shadow tracking over the forest in the evening light. “Nothin’ on the roads. See some off in the distance in the Badlands, but no closer’n usual.”
The unicorn made a few notes on a piece of paper. “Lair smoke?”
“Fifteen columns,” reported the pegasus. “Shuffled around a bit, though.”
“Still fifteen?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Counted twice.”
The unicorn shook his head. “They’re moving around on us. Can’t tell what’s a deployment and what’s just a regular camp….”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, horn starting to glow a greenish color. “Thanks for the check-in. I’ll pass it on.”
“Mind if I take a seat?” asked the pegasus, alighting gracefully on the rim of the platform and shifting to a seated position. “Wings’re killin’ me.”
The unicorn’s eyes were half-lidded with the effort of transmitting the report back to the command post back in Baltimare, but he was present enough of mind to crack a smile.
“Tired?” he said quietly. “The great Donner Quick? Now that’s something worth reporting.”
“Hey!” objected the pegasus. “I’ve been up there twelve hours and you know it. Can’t blame a pony for taking a load off.”
“Long patrol,” agreed the other, only half paying attention.
Donner snorted slightly but didn’t press the issue; the unicorn was deep in concentration by this point. Not that there was much to say; the patrols were long and grueling, no matter how you sliced it. Twelve hours a day of flying wasn’t, strictly speaking, hard. That’s what pegasi did, after all, and while some were not as strong as others, anypony who enlisted for duty in the Air Patrol could fly indefinitely, or at least for as long as they could stay awake.
The nature of the flying, though… low patrols were tricky, because you had to stay close enough to the tree tops to not break the horizon. This entailed a good amount of dodging outlier trees, flocks of birds, the occasional overgrown insect… you couldn’t hop on autopilot and just go for an hour, or two, or five. Constant maneuvering.
The worst part of it, though, was that you didn’t even know if you had to do it. Sure, you had to stay low and out of sight, but you never knew if you were being watched, so you had to keep your guard up. Five minutes’ break every hour, but you could only land in trees, the higher the better. Couldn’t risk leaving any scent on the ground; rumor had it Blackacre was sending out timberwolf patrols, and they’d pick up pony prints in the fresh snow quick as a rainboom. 
Donner shivered slightly. Rumors, that was all. Just rumors. For now, they were just doing training flights. Lots of training flights, daily ones, that looked suspiciously like reconnaissance flights. He wasn’t stupid. There was only one reason to patrol the border like this: dragons.
Out of the corner of his eye, Donner caught the watch unicorn muttering something under his breath.
“What’s that?” he asked — to no avail, of course; the unicorn was still in a trance. After a few moments, though, he seemed to snap out of it, though he was still a bit woozy on his legs.
“New orders?” prodded Donner, taking a bite out of an apple, crisp with both freshness and frost. “What’s up? They movin’ you over to an oak tree?”
The unicorn glared at the apple for a moment, though Donner couldn’t understand why; it had just been sitting there, at the lip of one of the supply crates! Twelve hours of flying and nothing but hard biscuits; how could he resist one a fruit as juicy as that one looked? Wasn’t quite up to Appleloosa standards — but, then again, what was?
“New orders,” nodded the unicorn, “for you. You’re to report up to Baltimare. Some of the brass want a word, apparently.”
“With me?” blinked Donner. “Hoo boy. Guess they’ve finally heard of the legend, and want to see him for themselves!”
“Right,” shrugged the unicorn, making a few notes on the map. “You can show them for themselves, too.”
“Sure will,” agreed Donner, hopping to his feet. He glanced off into the distance, where he could just barely make out the last sliver of sun setting over the Macintosh Hills. “Better turn in quick, get a good night’s before flying out tomorrow.” He shivered slightly. “You got a blanket in there, or am I gonna have to strip off some leaves and make myself a nest?”
“Two blankets, actually,” said the unicorn, making a final pair of annotations and glancing up. “You don’t get to use them.”
“I — what!”
“Not today, at least,” he said with a slightly malicious grin. “They want you in Baltimare now.”
Donner blinked.
“As in…”
“As in, now now,” confirmed the unicorn.
“Oh, right,” said Donner, rolling his eyes. “What, you gonna teleport me over?”
“Can’t do anything bigger than an apple from over there to over here,” said the unicorn, gesturing at a tree a few dozen meters away. Or at least it looked like a tree; it was rapidly growing darker. “Good thing, too, since I can’t climb out of this tree.”
“Which brings me back to my first point,” said Donner. “Gotta sleep if I’m flyin’ out first thing tomorrow.”
“You’re not,” said the unicorn. “You’re flying out now.”
Donner gaped at him.
“They want you over there now,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “They were pretty clear about it. Sorry.”
“You’re —” started Donner, then laughed. “You’re kidding. Night flight? This close to the Badlands?”
“Dragons aren’t usually nocturnal,” said the unicorn, reflexively glancing off to the south, where they could make out the slightest of unnatural glows just beyond the horizon; fires of a thousand dragons.
“Usually.”
“Anyway, you’re going north. North-east, if anything. You’ll be fine.”
“Fine,” grumbled Donner. “Yeah, you say that, but I’m the poor foal stuck up there for the next… jeez, by the time I get there it’ll be morning!”
“So you won’t even get lost!” said the unicorn, feigning cheerfulness. “Look, I know this is pretty terrible —”
“Pretty terrible?” shouted Donner. “Are you kiddin’ me? I’ve been up there for twelve hours, and now you want me to do another one of those, except at night?”
“Look,” said the unicorn defensively. “They just want you up there, a.s.a.p. Sorry I can’t do anything about if. If I could, I would.”
“I know,” he said sadly. “This just sucks.”
“Have another apple,” the unicorn offered.
“That won’t help,” he sulked, but grabbed it nevertheless, stuffing it in the pocket of his flight jacket. “All right, they want me there now, do they? I’ll show ‘em. Here, hold this.”
With a few tugs at awkwardly-placed straps, the outer layer of Donner’s flight jacket peeled off, the blueish-white camouflage that almost perfectly matched his coat color falling to the floor with a sigh, revealing the darker leather underneath.
“Can you magic me down a few shades?” he asked. “If I’m doing night flight, I need to be grey.”
“You got it,” said the unicorn. His horn glowed green for a moment — the light uncomfortably bright in what was now distinctly night — and with a thwump, Donner’s vision cut out entirely.
“What the hay!” he hacked, coughing vigorously for a few moments. “I said color me dark, not make me see it!”
“Hold — hold still!” commanded the unicorn; after a moment, a pair of hooves wiped off his eyes and mouth. “There. That better?”
“Yeah, but what was that?”
“Dirt!” said the unicorn proudly. “You’re covered in it!”
Donner blinked, glanced down, and realized that he was coated almost entirely with a thin shell of, well, dirt. A small halo of the black powder ringed his hooves on the platform, the brownish dust intermingled with stray snowflakes.
“Most of it won’t stick over long distances, but enough’ll get into your coat to keep you dark until you wash it off.” He smiled proudly. “One of my latest tricks. Worked out pretty well; I can’t even see you!”
“As long as they can’t see me,” said Donner. “All right, they want me there now? I’m already late!”
“Fly safe,” nodded the unicorn, stepping back.
With a small cloud of dirt, Donner lifted off. After a few flaps to get his bearings, he started climbing for altitude at an angle; no sense keeping low to the trees when he was flying back over friendly territory.
That was strange. Since when was he thinking of it as friendly and hostile territory? No one was fighting anyone, and since the Dodge Accords, they were at peace with the dragons. Still… it felt right. Friendly territory.
The unicorn watched as the pegasus shot away, disappearing almost immediately into the cold night sky. He waited for a few more moments, then with a slight glow of his horn reconstituted the silvery masking field, covering the observation platform in what looked very much like the frozen canopy of a nondescript tree.
After a few minutes more he risked another horn-glow to pass another message. This connection didn’t have a paired receiving unicorn at the other end, so he would have to do it by sound, with a bit more power to the transmission.
“He’s on his way back,” he whispered.
He paused for a moment, waiting for a question.
“No,” he said, his voice barely audible. “They don’t suspect a thing.”