In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Princess-Radio

FFMS004

After the third turn 'round the circuit, the training regimen had become more of a ritual than anything novel, or challenging, or something to be clever about. I helped Bad Apple with her glamours, and Gibblets showed me his tanglevine trick, and Obscured Blade showed everypony his special technique for maintaining multiple unseen levitated cudgels within his own glamours. Our respective ghost-bands became less particular, less identifiable, more standardized with practice.

My cuts grew increasing ridges of scar tissue down the lengths of my cannons, but I still found the hide when it was time. It's something I'm told every bloodmage struggles with, even the necromancers with their long bladed needles plunged direct into the meat of their deadened shoulders and withers. I talked with Rye Daughter about how to safely use those damn fetish-needles without subjecting myself to endless rolling blood-poisonings and infections, but she was only so useful on the topic, and told me to discuss it with her master, whenever Sawbones finally returned from his long tour of the distant training-camps.

We cycled through that first Hydromelian regiment, then a Verdebaie, then one each from Hydromel and Verdebaie, and then V Rennet and Chutes des Cristal's sole regiment. As each regiment completed its circuit of the field training circuit, they returned to the port and the heavy ore haulers and merchantmares that the Imperial logistics command had hired on the Inland Sea to transship the elements of the General's slowly forming field army into its forward camps in and around great Rime.

My fellow apprentices were scattered throughout the training command which had absorbed the bulk of the Company. Charleyhorse with the rest of the cooks and carters, keeping the food cooking and the supplies moving along under the power of the militia's own carts, wagons, and carters. Asparagus's ponies had it, if anything, worse than anypony else, in that they had to keep the entire sprawling beast fed and watered as they hammered their own trainees into field condition. Somehow, none of us went seriously hungry, although I can't say that I didn't spend a night or two nursing an empty and growling stomach. The machine had many moving parts, and it was inevitable that some parts didn't get their daily recommended grease and attention.

The Dodger, Tam Lane, and the rest of the Rennet-apprentices had melded into the command-structure of their respective cohorts, and although most of them were still dedicated runners and couriers rather than line-ponies, they were kept on their hooves as much as any veteran or recruit. Not that there were any raw recruits left in the Company after the last year's campaign season - not except for another dozen or so colony-ponies who had presented themselves to the hidden colony in S- and had been brought down by one of the mares who had gone up there to foal and deposit said foal in the care of the aunties and uncles. Cherie and the two pegasi colts who had joined up last spring had been joined by another three pegasi, including two winged fillies and another colt. There were four unicorns scattered among the ground cohorts, and a scattering of earth-ponies as well. Obscured Blade had been quite cross about not having the time to evaluate or train the new unicorn legacy-recruits, but 'needs must when Discord drives', as Miss Cake says.

The ponies of the aerial cohort had been kept quite busy in the early weeks, moving around entire sections of the ground cohorts, up and down the coast, depositing them here and there in the port-camps. While we could only process one or two regiments through the field exercises at a time, it hadn't been intended that we would leave all those other regiments inactive in their spring camps, unattended, unmotivated, immobile. Each militia regiment got a pair of Company sections and a pair of pegasi or griffins to extend training and the Company's idea of discipline and organization throughout the field army in its muddy northern chrysalises. (Chrysalii? Sawbones, I'm not sure of the pluralization of this one, help?) Uhh... maybe chrysalides?

The aerial assignees were intended to explain and cover for another series of expedients and experiments which certain ponies were indulging in during this long damp spring before the southern campaign. To outside eyes, the Company in that spring was just another mercenary outfit, a bit larger, a bit more hard-bitten than the usual run of jangle-biters and sou-scrabblers. Certain ponies among the sisterhood – and it was in a very real sense, a sisterhood, whatever Sawbones likes to call it – had prevailed upon the Princess to keep a low profile, to do her best to not manifest in the waking world among the heathen and the unbelievers and the mundanes.

We needed the militia to be respectful and obedient, not terrified and cringing in a corner with piss-soaked caparisons. Which meant no great phantasmic alicornic nightmares marching with the witches, or Rakuen forfend, the rank and file.

Which is not to say that the Princess was not with the rank and file, now more than ever. The truce struck between the Captain and the Princess had paid dividends. More and more of the troops were able to see her if they looked in the right place, in the right mind-set. A spirit who had been with us, well, in spirit, was in this season refining her capacity for being with us in a more visible fashion. Visible, that is, to Company ponies. She found ways to lurk like an after-image, shadows within shadows, translucence in the half-light of rainy days and dawns and twilights, seen only by ponies who belonged to her.

And what we and the rankers often saw and heard, was the Princess as we had come to know her, the smaller blue-feathered unicorn-pegasus with the archaic dialect, and the greater, terrible-fanged Nightmare with her black pelt, thestral stare, and great bat-wings. It was almost reassuring to have our Princess with us, whenever we needed reassurance, or guidance, or a way to pass word up the chain of command.

The Princess being, in a very real sense, the Company's chain of command.

But sometimes, I would call out for an update, or for a test-message through the 'Princess Radio', and instead of the Princess, I got a little intangible thestral mare, white-pelted and green-eyed, all chirpy confirmations and happy babble. Obscured Blade and Sawbones insist that the phantasmic Cheries are not, in fact, the apprentice herself, but rather the Princess putting on one tartarus of a performance, but I swear to Grogar, she never, ever broke character. It was comforting in its simplicity and cheerfulness, until you took a second to think about it, and realized it was not the foalish Cherie, but rather our beloved foal-eating monster-Princess playacting the foal.

I had never been invited to the dreaming playdates that Sawbones describes in his entries, and I can't truly imagine the supposed innocence the master-Annalist claims to find in the filly Princess and her playmates. We love the Princess, but still, the foals know who and what she is. We live in the shadow of her whims, and upon the sufferance she bears for us, for love of her favoured ponies.

I'm told that the actual, living, breathing Cherie is running messages between the ports along the northern shores of the Inland Sea, up towards Tonnerre and Chutes des Cristal. And I've exchanged messages with her via the Princess-radio, as part of our experiments in testing the range and fidelity of the connexions across the length and breadth of multiple provinces.

As far as I could tell, no whispering-game errors crept into the round-robin tests. But I tried to keep in mind that there were clusters of Company ponies with the training-sections scattered all up and down the long coast in the dozen regimental camps between here and Tonnerre. There was no guarantee that this fidelity would be maintained without a hoof-full of booster-pony minds scattered every fifty to seventy miles along the route the mystical messages were taking.

All these tests were taking place without the knowledge or authorization of the General or her staff. They were giddy enough as it was with the flexibility of the pegasi express; no point in explaining to them that we were in the process of replacing that tried and true method of happier and richer offworld militaries with something stranger, more unseelie, and possibly much more dangerous.

Nopony really had forgotten the bizarre events that had followed the standard-bearer's extermination of the third lich, the uncontrolled, unsummoned phantoms which had burst forth across the whole of haunted Dance Hall. Having been at the centre of that unnerving display, and having been in a very real way at fault for the specific disruption of the substance of the Princess which caused the loss of control, meant that I was… less than enthused by the apparent tactical and operational value of this newly aggressive commitment of our tutelary deity. It was a specific sort of holy fire we were toying with, and if I was learning anything from my readings within the vast accumulated mass of the Annals, it was to be very wary of letting holy fire spill out of the sanctuaries of the priestly, lest it burn the whole temple down.

Sawbones was right about one thing. The Book of Desecrated Temple was a perfect cure for a night's good rest. When I think that this madpony had written as he did without the presence of a lunatic phantom goddess haunting his dreams, I wonder what we will leave in these pages for future generations to shake their heads over.

Comments

[Dorath]

It was comforting in its simplicity and cheerfulness, until you took a second to think about it, and realized it was not the foalish Cherie, but rather our beloved foal-eating monster-Princess playacting the foal.

When I think that this madpony had written as he did *without* the presence of a lunatic phantom goddess haunting his dreams, I wonder what we will leave in these pages for future generations to shake their heads over.

That ... is a good question. I still have hopes that it might include the line: "Our beloved Princess has returned to Equestria, and we have gone with her. Here ends this final Book of the Black Company."

[totallynotabrony]

So if "radio" is a thing, a word they know…why not use actual radio?

[Mitch H]

7903089 Honestly? It's one of these things where the character decided to run with it, and I really should clean up the mess they left behind. You'll note that it was Feufollet that came up with the term, not Sawbones. I'm gonna go with - yeah, radio is something in modern Equestria, and Feufollet has heard of the *idea* of radio - probably from Cup Cake - but has no idea of the actual execution, the actual thing itself. It's more of a princess-telegraph, but I think I was remembering a short novel about a pentacostal church in the 1632/Ring of Fire shared universe - Turn Your Radio On. There's something ecstatic-religious about radio which doesn't fit the idea of the princess-telegraph.

And between 'radio' and modern Prussian-style staffing terminology, I'd say the latter is a bit harder on the fourth wall, don't you think?