• Published 28th Aug 2016
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In the Company of Night - Mitch H



The Black Company claims to not remember Nightmare Moon, but they fly her banner under alien skies far from Equestria. And the stars are moving slowly towards their prophesied alignment...

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The Filly Fixes What She Broke

SBMS112

"Gibblets, sir, he's in there! I'm sorry, I don't know what happened, but he's in there and he won't wake up!" Eidetic memory is how I got where I am today.

"Cherie here knows a little of what happened. You have the key?" Being a doctor is largely about memorizing things, and remembering them at the right time.

"Well, heck, he's staring. That's unsettling." You don't have to be a genius to be a doctor, you just have to remember a million things, and retrieve them at the right time, in the right time.

"No response, that's not good. Cherie, tell me again what you did, and what he did." Oh, there's a little theory, and a bit of math, and if you want to be a surgeon, you need impeccable mouth dexterity, or a really steady magical field. But at the lowest most functional level of medicine? Memory.

"I was practicing like Uncle Blade told me to, except the shadows weren't listening to me, so I decided to do it in dreams instead. Monsieur's dream is most realistic, very stable. I figured, it was sort of like reality?" So that's how I ended up a doctor's apprentice, and how I extracted a useful education from that old nipcheese despite his best efforts.

"So you were image-casting with Sawbones' dreamstuff?" I am a greedy sponge, it is my magic.

"Well, that, and maybe, I was trying to do what Bad Apple does? With the fireballs?" I literally cannot forget anything.

"You were sculpting his stable dream-self, and then BLOWING HOLES IN IT WITH FIREBALLS?" Hey, Gibblets, stop yelling at the filly.

"Master, his lips just started moving. And now it's stopped." Wasn't her fault.

"So he's not totally unresponsive. That's good. Well, better. For future reference to all three of you, dreamstuff is not a glamour or a phantasm. It's literally part of a pony's psyche. Handle it with care. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. Rye, BA, go find something to do in the front office, or help in the wards. The next bit is very private, and even I shouldn't have to know this shit, but needs must. Go on, scoot. Zebra needs his privacy as much as any other person, and bad enough Cherie's been playing target practice in his mindscape." It's amazing how much I can remember of conversations in which I was effectively comatose.

"OK, now, spill. What does it look like in there? Before you started blowing holes in him, and after you made your mess."

"Monsieur's dreams have looked the same ever since he came back from the Bloody Foaling."

"The what?"

"It's what I hear they're calling it up in the northlands, what Monsieur did in Rennet City. The recruits get letters, the armsponies talk."

"I know what it is, they shouldn't be telling those damn stories to foals!" Too late for all that, she'd seen everything. Why wasn't she screaming anymore?

"Pfft. Anyway, he's been hiding in this grey cloudy bank ever since then, full of cloudstuff and annoying noises. You get used to it after a while. I thought he was doing it to keep the Princess from pestering him, you know? She didn't like it, not a bit." She didn't like it because she helped make it.

"OK, that covers 'before'. What about 'after'?"

"Not nice. I think some of it was the Bloody Foaling. Stuff about cutting the heart out of an infant foal, and throat-slicing, and bloody axes. Mixed in with the Princess being the Nightmare, really nasty stuff, eating monsters, eating foals." Oh, fewmets.

"Watching all of it was a filly, or kind of a filly, nailed to a chair. Cut to shreds, but still living. Weird-looking, her face kept flickering, and she looked like different ponies. Looked a little like me, once. Then, while I was staring at the filly in the chair, I hear this screaming. Sounded like me – except I wasn't doing the screaming. I turn around and there's another me, standing in front of Monsieur, screamin' like somepony's eating her leg. I try to make her stop, but it's just another dream-figment. Monsieur wasn't reacting to me, then. Just staring and crying quiet-like at the dam' weeper." This was new information to me. A defensive mechanism, I suppose? Nothing I could do about it as I was.

"Ugh, that certainly sounds like high-octane nightmare fuel. Speaking of our Dark Mistress, why didn't you go to her first? She may be mad as a hatter, but she's certainly the house expert on screwing around with dreamstuff." Good question.

"Haven't seen her all night. Was part of why I was blowing holes in dream-statues of Uncle. Couldn't find the Princess to play hide and go seek again. Strange, right?"

"I go for months on end without laying sensoria upon Her Darkness. Been damn awkward since she had to rebuild my eyes. Hrm. Well, she'll show up at some point, she always does. I was just as glad as not that you pulled me out of that meeting, the Captain's insomnia is rapidly becoming all of our problem. Thinks we're playing tricks on the Company, spinning grand illusions of the Mistress to 'shore up our mystique and to seize control of the Company out from under her hooves'."

"There you are, damn you! We weren't finished."

"I am sorry, your eminence, but an emergency came to my attention."

"What could possibly constitute an emergency in a back room of the hospital? Sawbones, stop lying about like that and come to attention!"

"He can't, m'lady, that's the emergency. A bit of a training accident with the apprentices, we think. I'm working on it, before we have an actual emergency and no doctor on hoof. You look tired, ma'am, why don't you pick up a sleeping draught from Rye Daughter and go get some sleep. The Company can't operate properly with a sleep-deprived commander."

"Faugh!" The Captain was starting to show signs of erratic behavior. Said the brain-blasted Annalist laying comatose in his cot, waiting for the witches' coven to staple his psyche back together.

"OK, look, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go back into dreamland, and find the mess you made of our Annalist. You're going to re-spin the mist-scape you tore up to make your little sculptures and fireball range, and see if that doesn't bring Sawbones back from his time-out corner. Then you, me, and that old fraud with the horn are going to have a nice long talk about boundaries, training regimens, and expectations. He's been the training unicorn for the Company for half a century, but I've been with the Company before there was a Company, and I bloody well outrank his fanatical ass."

"Yessir."

She appeared in front of me, and my dreams restarted. Full of screaming and blood and viscera. I saw Cherie wince, and there was another flicker, like the screaming thestral filly was reappearing. The real vision of Cherie frowned in concentration, and the false Cherie blew away in the wind. A reverse spiral of cloudy dream-stuff poured down from above, and began coating the horrors like a sticky, wet snow. It deadened the sounds, and hid the ugliness away from my inner sight.

Finally Cherie was done, and my dreamscape was peaceful again. Trees and bushes had grown up out of the ground, coated in heavy snow, their bare but sturdy branches weighed down like they were just shy of snapping from the burden. Deep, fluffy snow covered the lane curving down to the big house, and the garçonnière above the kitchen-house. The rose-bushes were simple mounds of snow with the occasional leaf poking up out into the cold air.

I sighed. There was silence. The snow deadened everything, put everything into hibernation. This would work. It wasn't mine, but we had just established that I needed to get out of my own mind more often. Lest I find myself locked inside with no way out.

"That'll do, filly. Thank you for coming back," I said.

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