In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Thundersnow

SBMS126

The thundersnow split the sky, electric arcs licking the edges of the high, dark clouds on either side of the draw northwards between the Deep Mines and the Pepin Front. Tiny feathered shadows flit here and there among the great lightning-strikes, the vast bolts curving between tiny little globes of eye-straining light in the darkness boiling furiously on the far side of the airy void over the roadway north to Pepin City.

The pegasi danced in the heights of late afternoon, the inexorable storm raging against the unseen chains which they drew across the roiling, willful clouds. Each pegasus’s course across the face of the storm drew sparks and flashes that, drawing together, arced point to point until the flashes became bolts, and the bolts became flashing furies. You could see the fury of the storm, to be so restrained against its natural course. Nothing so vast and primal could possibly be held back by mere equine hooves, not for long.

I stood in the turret of the northern watch-tower overlooking the Bride’s Gate with the two Cakes on either side, all of us watching the ponies of the aerial cohort answering the challenge of the Spirit, who had cast aspersions against their very natures. She had mocked their unnatural disinterest in weather-control to the Lieutenant’s face, and sneered at their mere militancy and weakness before the natural weather of a world with such weak wild-magic. In her day, the solar pegasi had fought long and hard to prove the superiority of ponies in the face of chaos and the wilderness. To cede the convenience of equinity to the whims of mindless nature? A blasphemy against the underlying philosophy of the Company, a granting of authority to Fate in its natural guise!

The occasion of this challenge was the plans of the ducal party to return to Pepin City along the northern road the day after Hearth’s Warming, and the heavy storm that every pegasus’s primaries tingled warning. The weather had refused to break prior to the holiday. Afterwards, it was as if all of Tambelon had paused for the celebration. In the aftermath of that happy day, the weather was rushing as if to make up for lost time. Those foregone storm-fronts were now piling one upon the other until the storms which nature had spared us in the late fall and early winter, came to lash us in a single ravening tumult, a grand blizzard.

The feathered ponies of the Company were not weather-ponies, nor did most of them even come from cultures where weather-control was a traditional activity. Some few clans in Crossroads laid claim to the taming of hurricane-weather, but none of those strange ponies ever ventured abroad, nor did they volunteer to become mercenaries under the mares-head. Perhaps their life in endless conflict with the great tropical disturbances provided their youth such excitement and grand adventure that none felt the need to search for such things at the wing-blade’s edge.

So when the sections of the aerial cohort set forth to carve a passage through the storm for the traffic north along the road to Pepin City, they did so with far more enthusiasm and ignorance than skill or efficacy. They had no idea how to make the weather work against itself, to bend clouds against themselves, to show the winds the simpler paths, to direct the moisture towards places to fall, and places to pass over, to make energy do the work that intention would assign it. Instead, they fought the storm as an enemy, meeting it lance-head to lance-head, pike-staff to pike-staff, stave against stave. They fought the storm as a blundering general fights an enemy well-entrenched and posted – bloodily, blunderingly, furiously.

And, apparently, their amateurish methods leaked electrical discharges. The corridor was held against the winds, but that corridor was fenced-in with a terrible, rolling fury of lightning-bolts stretching out from the high cloud-tops to the scorching wooded slopes below.

"There’s only a hundred pegasi out there?" asked Cup Cake.

"More like a hundred and twenty, I think," I replied.

"That’s a lot of lightning. Way they’re going, I’m expecting the snowflakes to catch fire," she said.

"Is it not supposed to do that? I grew up in subtropical climes, Miss Cake. Snow and all of its quirks are novel phenomena for me, if you would."

"Nope, snow storms ain’t supposed to light up like that, Doctor," said Carrot Cake. "Not 'round here, leastways. Pegasi are relatively new to the province, you know. First time I’ve seen 'em try to fight the weather before, really."

"Never really been in our wheelhouse. The Company exists to kill ponies and break stuff, not to mess with the weather."

"Nonsense!" said the pudgy little baker. "Pegasi exist to mess with clouds. Oh, not all of 'em, and maybe not even most of 'em, but it’s their tribal role, you know? Earth ponies muck around with dirt, and unicorns fiddle around with magic, and pegasi play with clouds. It’s a tribal… hobby I guess you’d call it? It’s not natural that you Company ponies have been keeping the poor dears from their tribal selves."

"I don’t think I’ve ever seen you dig in the dirt, Miss Cake," I said.

"Well, really. Cooking’s a sort of digging in virtual dirt, isn’t it? Plants growing in the dirt, being an extension of the dirt itself, and the grain and sugars and fruit of that dirt. All dirt in the end."

We were quiet once again, and watched the lightning lash the skies like a vast fireworks display. There is impressive, there is awesome, and then there is the sublime. I’ve seen the sublime described as that beautiful display of things greater and stronger than we, that could wipe us away in a heartbeat if it turned upon us.

The storm and its lightnings was sublime in the truest sense of the word.

"That’s still a lot of lightning for so few pegasi. They’re throwing a lot of magic around for complete novices at cloud-punching," said the Equestrian spy.

Then a bolt of lightning arced across the great valley-void, from the clouds above, to the easternmost peak of the Deep Mines, to the westward slopes of the Pepin Front. It lit up like a gateway thrown across the northern gap. I fancied I could see the convoy of the ducal party upon the roadway underneath. And perhaps a vast great black spectre, walking slowly above the coaches and wagons, Her wings spread in protection above the distant carters and coach-donkeys.

We couldn’t help but cheer like a pack of foals at the fire-works display. It continued long into the night, as the clouds piled up westwards of the caravan in the gathering darkness.

Comments

[Dorath]

The Company exists to kill ponies and break stuff

"It's in the charter."

I think the Company and Tagon's Toughs would actually get along well ...

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

7836938
I'm more of a Hammer's Slammers fan