Blueblood's War

by OTCPony

To Play the King

The Unicorn who sat behind the desk was of middling height and size. His brilliant white coat and shining blonde mane were immaculately groomed, and the cravat at his neck was exquisitely knotted.

His name was Blueblood, and he was Chairpony of the Committee of Public Safety, formed in the aftermath of the devastating assassination attempt that had left half of Canterlot Castle in ruins, driven Celestia into exile, and delivered to the Parliamentarian movement near-absolute power. Everypony knew that story, that Celestia had attempted to murder Blueblood and Radical Road to destroy a great democratic threat to her authoritarian rule and that they had been saved by Major General Neigh and his heroic soldiers. Then, with Celestia fled and with no other choice, they had been forced to proclaim a new Republic of Equestria and adopt emergency powers to deal with the Royalist menace.

Everypony knew that, except for barely a dozen ponies who knew that it was Blueblood who had tried to assassinate Celestia. Still fewer ponies knew that he had schemed and plotted for well over a year to generate every scandal, every crisis, every embarrassment, that had destroyed confidence in Celestia’s rule and given him the conditions he’d needed for his coup.

He had supplied the army with deficient guns that had burst and killed their crews. He had leaked Shining Armor’s genocide of the Changelings to the press. He had engineered the destruction of a mine to ruin Equestria’s largest company and cause a recession. He had covered his tracks by strangling a stallion with his magic and throwing his body over a cliff. He estimated that over five hundred ponies had died directly owing to his efforts, and he had done it all for power.

The ideologues and naïfs Blueblood had associated himself with to bring down Celestia spoke grandly of greater democracy, greater transparency, and a freer nation. Blueblood cared for none of those things. He did not need to justify his actions to himself. He had known from the beginning that he would have to commit atrocity after atrocity to gain the power that was rightfully his. Nor had he faltered at any stage: he had never lost confidence that he would succeed, his fate determined by a prophecy that Celestia and Luna had kept secret for centuries to deny him and his house the power that was foretold to be his.

The same prophecy had foretold the blood that he would have to shed. Having killed hundreds of ponies, he now stood ready to kill many thousands more.

Blueblood swore quietly and turned to the window, staring out from his mansion over the darkening city. The buildings were already ablaze with light, but for a great patch that was conspicuous for its darkness: Canterlot Castle was still uninhabitable. Bodies were still being pulled from its shell, yet more by-products of his coup. That he couldn’t take over that castle seemed to epitomise everything that had gone wrong: Celestia had lived, Twilight Sparkle had evaded capture, and now the Princesses were rallying the realm against him. He had expected that he would have to fight, but he had hoped that Celestia’s death would have taken the heart out of any resistance. Yet for all his efforts, he possessed little more than this city. Even, he thought with a rush of fury, the simplest of his ambitions was incomplete, for when Twilight Sparkle had fled Ponyville, her haughty little friend Rarity had escaped with her, slipping away from the long-overdue retribution Blueblood intended to exact on her.

He swore again and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window. All his efforts had left him little better off than before, and he was denied even the pleasure of venting his frustration on that arriviste bitch Rarity. Worst of all, responsibility for any defeat would now be laid at his hooves.

He hadn’t meant to be Chairpony. He had thought to rule from the shadows, be the power behind the throne, until the hard choices and compromises Radical Road would have had to make to win the war discredited him and given Blueblood his opportunity to replace him. But Radical Road had outmanoeuvred him, forced him to be Chairpony, forced those hard decisions on him, forced him to be responsible for everything – the dead, the injured, the food shortages, the prices hikes – needed to be done to win the war. Already the mood was turning: the propaganda put out by Newsprint could not mask the truth coming in from Celestia’s broadcasts, and while the mob could be told that it was the Royalists who were blockading the ports and strangling the flow of food and fuel, winter was upon them and a few months of cold and hunger might leave them just wanting the war over, and not necessarily as the victors.

Perhaps it was his own fault, Blueblood reflected, for embracing the rhetoric of populists like Newsprint and Radical Road, embracing it because it was the language the mob understood. And much as he hated and belittled the mob, in his heart he knew that he also feared it. He had seen what Radical Road might do with mass popular anger, but he had always thought him too timid to wield that power. He was not so certain of that now. There would be, he thought with savage pleasure, a time when Radical Road and the thousands he claimed to represent were driven back down to their proper place and reminded that they were responsible to their rulers, not the other way round. But until they would fear him, he would have to fear them, and to stay in power Blueblood had to placate them. For that he needed victories, and once he won the war, he might have the moral authority to retain the emergency powers he had accrued in the Committee of Public Safety.

He had to admit that Radical Road’s rhetoric had an effect: he promised a restored, freer, better-governed Equestria, and for that the cosmopolitan coffee-sippers, the university students, the opinionated teenagers, all those who’d had their hearts touched by Radical Road’s optimism, were willing to sacrifice. Blueblood had an army, and now he needed to use it.

Plans flew across his desk daily, for with Canterlot Castle still a ruin, the Blueblood Mansion was effectively the headquarters of the Committee of Public Safety, much to his disgust. Many of those plans were hopelessly unrealistic, produced by the Equestrian Republican Army’s newly-minted Generals who knew they needed to earn their gold braid. Yet if they feared for their new positions many of those Generals were also ambitious. They knew that there were opportunities for advancement and power in a new army and a new war that did not exist in an ancient, tradition-bound force at peace. He had already approve the plan to seize Baltimare when spring came, but without more victories he might not last that long.

When General Neigh had presented this particular plan to him, he had thought it impractical, a recipe for losing an entire army amid the mountains, but when Ponyatowski had heard of it, he had insisted that it should be done, and that the Ponish could do it. It could work, Blueblood now realised, and even if it failed, it would cost him little that truly mattered. He would still have a strong position behind mountain and river frontiers, and if it succeeded, Newsprint could certainly spin it into a decisive triumph.

He picked up a pen in his magic, flipped open the folder, and calmly wrote a brief message.

“Commence hostilities against Maresaw Corps immediately and capture Imperial Ponland, by order of Blueblood, Chairpony, Committee of Public Safety,” it said.

Comments

[BlueColton]

Scumbag! Someone kill him already!