• 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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Negotiating With Nostalgia

FFMS009

The Princess retrieved me from a guilt-nightmare, full of blood and ghouls and my own stubbornness come back to haunt me with the consequences of my bad temper. She dispelled the zombified, plump earth ponies groaning my name, and reached down with her flower-blue hooves to pry me up off of the paving-stones I had latched onto in that dark-shadowed parody of New Coltington's high street.

"Apprentice-Acolyte Feufollet, thy wakefulness is required in the living world. Arise, and walk once more among the sun-touched." The Princess in true Princess-Mode could be greatly amusing, or as Bad Apple puts it, 'ain't she a hoot an' a half?'

"Immediately, Your Highness. What should I know?"

"Blood and fire, as is our wont these days, but of course. Thy master the Acolyte is called away to oversee surgeries remotely. The great savages who rampage in the Rebel's employ found themselves successful in bringing down one of our own, a brave tom who is, according to Sawbones, 'likely'. Other flights of pegasi and griffins converged upon the site of the attack, and a battle did break out. Much slaughter among the 'dirt-worshiping heathens' was made, but sadly, so too were many pegasi injured in the melee."

"And of course, battle broke out as soon as Sawbones left the main camp. I take it Rye Daughter is rising to the occasion?"

"Indeed! As well as are the ponies upon the front lines, who our Acolyte is even now guiding in the procedures to keep the afflicted from, what did he say, 'bleeding out'. But this employ of our acolyte's time signifies this: thou wilt be required, to complete what tasks he hath remaining this afternoon here in the Division camp. Arise, Lady Feufollet!"

And with that, I was wide awake, and it was mid-afternoon. I looked over across the ambulance, and there was Sawbones, snoring already in the embrace of his Mistress. I checked my scabs and ran a quick comb through my matted mane. No time for a shower, although I heard that they had a row of punch-bucket showers running over in one of the washtent clusters in the Hydromel regimental quarter.

So, Sawbone's priority list? Had he written anything down? I reached back for my Princess, and found a Cherie bouncing just behind my perception. No, he had not. I gave the pseudo-thestral shadow a distracted greeting, and paged through the virtual agenda. He had gotten to the Castellan, but not the Major-General.

I marched resolutely towards the stockade, and thought over the approach he had laid out. Most of it wouldn't work for diminutive little me, but at least I hadn't been the one to arrest the Major-General. That had all been the Brigadier's fault, from what I had heard. Brigadier Eugin wasn't willing to take chances once we had arrested the civilian authority. He grabbed up the military authority before Cup Cake could talk him out of it, and now we had the ancient Major-General in our custody, and damn if we knew what to do with him.

I got the corporal of the stockade to let me in. The stockade was already filling up with troublemakers. The Division having been in one place for three days now, in close proximity to civilian facilities, had already inspired a number of the rankers to cut loose in ways detrimental to proper discipline and authority. Most of them were sleeping off benders, but at least two were in there for vandalism. The sunburst wasn't a popular symbol at the moment, and it inspired abuse among our rankers. Amazingly, only one of the two vandals had actually been a brother of the Company – and that one not even an overt brother. The Left Division now had a full baker's dozen of 'silent recruits' that Dancing Shadows and Cup Cake had asked me to induct into the Company. I was still not exactly clear on the purpose of all these secret brothers and sisters, but I was the apprentice and understudy here, it was my purpose to try to understand, not to understand from the beginning.

The ancient Major-General was not looking well. A pony of that age will not react well to sudden incarceration after decades of comfort and the respect of his peers and subordinates. I greeted him, in my Prench-inflected northern accent, and his ears perked up. I got him talking about himself, and he was off and running. As Sawbones says, most ponies just want to talk about themselves; you just need to give them an excuse and then sit back and offer a listening ear.

And my ears are quite large, they take in quite a lot.

The Major-General admitted to being a commander of a merely notational force, a militia which had not been mobilized in whole or even in greater part for centuries. The Imperials had harvested their draft-companies from time to time as they did throughout the loyal provinces, but that simply had required the old militia-pony to make choices, and to order the summoned companies to the standard, to stand and watch as his fellow militia-ponies marched away, and to mourn them when they never returned from the butcher-lands.

Unlike most militia-officers, the Major-General had not been a lawyer or a high-ranking towns-pony, but rather, had once been an Imperial officer in his distant youth. But there were no wars in the years of his career, as the Bride had then been indulging in long, indolent, and peaceful years, thinking that because she wanted peace, then that she would always be so gifted. It was almost as if the great wars awaited the Major-General's retirement to his country manse, his sinecure as a justice of the peace, and his appointment to the militia command of this sleepy little province.

And now, here he was, imprisoned, before an adolescent blood-mage, ruing the days of his sleepy and fruitless career.

"General, we need you to not be in this cell. Can you convince the Castellan to re-set our relations? There is a real war to the south, along the river. There are real ponies dying in siege, in the fields, in hospices and hospital beds, and hidden, wounded, in barns and hayricks right now."

"We need to be forward of this town, beyond the bounds of your peaceful province. We need supplies, we need to be certain that your districts won't rise up in revolt in our rear. Because the enemy is pressing towards the shipyards in Coriolanus, and we need to be down there to keep them away from the gates of the east."

The old earth-pony, his faded coat half-grey and half-pink, looked up at me with his rheumy eyes. "Little jenny, I would love to do nothing more. But I cannot command that young fool Long Scroll to do anything he doesn't want to do. That family was always full of its honour and its probity. Celestia herself couldn't move them if they decided they were in the right."

I thought about that.

"What about somepony who has actually met the Eternal Princess, and can in a certain sense, speak for her?"

"Well, then. He's still not likely to listen, but at least then, we'd have some justification for ignoring the stubborn son of a mule, wouldn't we?" The old Major-General smiled sadly at me.


Marking down that as a successful meeting as these things went, I left the stockade and the castral grounds, looking to find the Cakes and the new Major who had arrived with Sawbones. The Sergeant of the Guard insisted on sending a pair of guards with me as I ventured into the pony town. New Coltington was hardly enemy territory, but the militia were still exploring their newfound status. They were out of their element down here in the south, and weren't really militia anymore – they were Imperials! And somehow that made the difference in the ranks. They weren't ponies and donkeys out on a vacation jaunt, the old militia way. They had been run through the Company wringer, and if what came out the other side wasn't something different, wasn't something greater? Then what was the purpose of it all?

So they cleaved to their procedures, and they marched as if their caribou General was always watching. It was almost cute. If it didn't mean that I was burdened with a pair of CdC rankers to over-inflate my importance while trotting through the cobbled streets of the 'castle town'. I left the two of them to exchange glares with the New Equestrian militia door-guards at that glorified town hall these ponies called a 'castle', and ventured inside to find the Cakes and their actual, living, breathing Imperial.

I found Cup Cake fuming in a hallway, the sound of conversation drifting out of a half-closed door behind her. Corporal Cake was rubbing her shoulder with his forehoof, whispering something in her trembling ear.

"Miss Cake! I was looking for you, and the Princess said you were here. Do you have a couple spare hours?"

She looked up, and collected herself. "Sure! Why not? These silly ponies won't listen to me. Hundreds of years since they've seen the Equestrian sky, or stood on Equestrian soil, and yet I'm the delusional one full of foalish stories about impossible wonderlands. Where do you need me?"

"Are you certain that Major, uh, de Bonne doesn't need you?"

"The locals seem more inclined to work with a vanilla Imperial. All I do is confuse them. They talk as if Equestria is dead and buried. Can you believe, six hundred years since the last time anypony even tried to contact home? There's provincial, and then there's whatever the tartarus you call that."

"Inquisitiveness and contact with foreign equines are not well-rewarded in Tambelon, Miss Cake. You should know that by now. And speaking of which, have you heard the latest news? Vallee du Pierre has made contact with the refugee centres. We're getting all sorts of news on our front now. Dancing Shadows is riding a chariot inbound, should be here by morning."

"Ah, you know I don't like to use this new system of yours. But that's good to know."

"Really, if you'd just make your peace with the Princess, everything would be so much more easier."

"I bring not peace, but a hoof-blade, little donkey. Somepony needs to speak for the homeland here. Even if all the locals think it's a dark-forest-haunted wasteland."

"It isn't as if your own stories about Equestria aren't full of dark forests and ghosts and haunts and terrible things."

"By Celestia's tail, girl, they're stories! Stories are about bad things happening to other ponies, or else nopony would care about them! I could tell you youngins dull and pointless happy tales about the centuries of prosperous and cheerful ponies living quiet lives of innocence and harmony, except you'd fall asleep before I was done with the fifth sentence. Adventures are terrible things happening to ponies somewhere you aren't."

We re-collected my guard, and headed back to the camp to try the Castellan again, with reinforcements and the Major-General.

Maybe we'd exhaust him into compliance.

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