The flashes of light drew closer and closer, as did the booming salvos that corresponded with them. They illuminated every haggard and stubby angle of Josho’s muzzle. And yet, as he trotted forward through the hellscape, accompanied by the injured captain and his company, he couldn’t help but feel like the most immaculate equine soul there.
When they arrived at the Ledomaritan forward camp, Josho hadn’t noticed. He needed the shouts of the hobbling, three-legged captain to inform him. Suddenly, as he glanced all around, he saw that they had reached the crest of a steep plateau jutting towards the east. Along the fringes of this ridge, several camps were positioned. They occupied what looked to be a gently sloping ravine. But then Josho saw slivers of impenetrable darkness, as if the ground was falling out from beneath the surface of the battlefield.
Something had blasted the geography to bits, and the stallion perceived that it was more than just shelling from above. The very foundation had collapsed, as if with demonic subsidence. The spectacle of this cataclysm was completely lost to the soldiers. The dark, smoldering air of the place was filled with notstop shouts and screams between the punctuation of bomb strikes. Soldiers galloped in solid trains, carrying weapons and supplies towards the lower camps… and returning with wounded, writhing ponies and bloody effects.
The smell of death was positively electric, and it leapt into Josho’s nostrils like ravenous leeches. He had experienced all of these senses before, but not this dense… nor this concentrated. It felt like twenty years of memories rolled into one grimy ball. He hadn’t realized just what an effect it was having on him until one of the young soldiers guiding the captain tugged at his forelimb. Josho looked down at himself and noticed that he was positively stumbling.
The soldier shouted something again. Obviously he was concerned. Josho replied, only he couldn’t hear himself over the wave of noise blanketing the landscape. Another shell had gone off, this time disgustingly close. Metal barrels and scraps of a tent flew up into the sky. Josho actually flinched, and doing so made him feel like a lone flea on the back of a bloated corpse. Everyone else was trotting, rushing, slithering in straight lines. They had places to be; tasks to accomplish. They were companions with death here, and Josho felt like a complete stranger.
Nevertheless, he ascended the crest of the plateau along with the company he had stumbled upon. As he climbed, he glanced east past a line of tents and saw a trench full of enforcers firing into the east. Flashes of bright blue energy flickered and was gone again. Josho heard serpent shrieks and monstrous yelps. The summons of the Xonans were being slayed by the minute, but the Ledomaritans did not rejoice. It would seem that slaying the enemy did not exactly kill them.
A loud siren filled the air. Josho’s ears twitched as he gazed up towards a distant splotch of the sky lit up with otherworldly amber. A zeppelin was plummeting into the deathly ravines, too far away to actually obliterate any ponies--at least within eyesight. Josho squinted and squinted, but he couldn’t tell the colors of the falling vessel. As he observed the dull, shellshocked figures huddled within the campsite around him, he realized very few of the veteran survivors cared.
Reaching the highest point, Josho could now look out upon the entire battlefield. It wasn’t a rewarding sight. He knew that the enemy surrounded this bastion at nearly two hundred and eighty degrees. He was essentially standing on a lone peninsula in the middle of death and desolation. All he could see was dusty streams of charcoal black refuse, a landscape too charred to render any visible colors.
Except for one sliver--a glowing sheen of otherworldly gold that shimmered like the edge of a cloud. Josho craned his neck, hoping to get a better glimpse. Something in the middle of the darkest ravine--just barely on the Ledomaritan’s side of the front--was glowing, even though there wasn’t any exposed sunlight above to cause the reflection. It took Josho a few seconds to realize that the entire Ledomaritan camp was built to defend that one point, and all the trenches with huddled enforcers had been dug at harsh angles that ran parallel to it at a few hundred yards’ advancement.
“Don’t stare too long into it or you’ll go mad,” a voice hoarsely said from behind.
Josho turned to look. “Huh?”
He hadn’t realized how close he was trotting alongside the injured, hobbling captain. The stallion--easily half his age yet twice his resolve--was limping on three legs with the assistance of his companions. He and Josho entered the south end of a long tent, and the air suddenly filled with the smell of the rust and the sound of suffering. Josho was almost too distracted by wailing, sobbing, pleading voices to register what the captain was saying.
“It’s not the Xonan monsters that’ll end you,” the captain said. “Not the death rattle of your best buds.” Orderlies in red-faded fatigues rushed in and helped him towards a spot between two cots where shredded soldiers lay, sobbing into their bandages. “But that… place that Seclorum is defending.” The captain winced as his freshly wrapped stub twitched for a few seconds. With a hissing breath, he muttered, “Either it’s not of this world, or we ain’t. Why we’re defending it, I have no clue.” He gulped dryly. “But ponies who have gazed at it for a long time, seeking solace? They’re the ones who are driven mad. Like a void has opened in their hearts. It sucks them in, and it’s cost us several dozen lives alone in this madness.”
Josho took a deep breath, his ears twitching from the sounds of moans and whimpers all around him. “I don’t think you can blame any of this on a place or an idea,” he muttered. A shell struck within a hundred meters and the whole tent shook. Bloodstained medical instruments rattled while foalish squeaks lifted and lowered back into the wailing cadence. “Where is he?”
“Seclorum?” The captain laid back and pointed upside down beyond the cart. “That’s where the bastard’s at.”
Josho followed his remaining good hoof. He saw a circular, reinforced tent lying at the northwest edge of the plateau.
“Right in the line of sight of the Xonans. Why those tattooed freaks haven’t blasted him to shreds and ridden us all of his arrogance is beyond me. Sometimes…” He coughed, wheezed. “...I think they’re keeping him alive to help whittles us down to nothing. So long as we’re holed up here… we’re wasting away all that Ledo’s got to give.”
Josho slowly nodded. “Yeah. I’m pretty much on top of that mountain of crap.”
“Just who are you, anyways?” The captain gazed up at him. “You have teleportation skills. No soldiers have utilized that since the initial days of infiltration. Are you from the Council? Paramilitary?” He gulped. “Fr-Franzington?”
“No.” Josho shook his head. “But I’ll tell you one thing I am.” Miniature bolts of lighting danced down from his horn and flickered between his eyes. “I’m pissed off. And it’s time I had a little chat with an old friend.”
The nurses and wounded soldiers gawked at him. “What are you--”
Flash! Josho vanished. The ponies around him gasped as a faint streak of the unicorn’s leyline went soaring through the MASH unit and towards the circular tent on the crest of the plateau.
“You idiot!” A surgeon snarled as he charged up to the scene. “Do you realize what you’ve done?! You’ve marched some sort of an assassin into this place!”
The captain squinted at him while the soldier in the next bed bled to death. “And you’re mad about this… why?”