In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Nightmare On The Wing

FFMS018

We missed out on the big fight that afternoon, living on the evening shift. Even the nominal day-witches were largely left out of the magic and the heavy lifting; the simple unicorns, with their shield choruses and arrow-storms swept the day. The bowmares fired their horns dry, and the sword-stallions fought a battle the likes of which the Company rarely saw.

The warlocks mostly sat on their haunches and watched their tangle-vines get trampled into pulp by overwhelming columns of ponies, and their phantasms overwhelmed by saturation fire and chaos. The subtle methods of the Company witch were swallowed up in the grand killing without a burp.

Which is probably why the older witches joined Bad Apple, Cherie and I on the evening shift, looking no doubt to trade a little exhaustion for a second bite at relevance within the Company. Gibblets and the others needed to prove to themselves, I believe, that they weren't merely the barking dogs of the Company caravan.

There had been a lot of rocket batteries in the day's fighting – were there any still alive in the night? We flew dangerously through the darkness, trying to find the threats still lurking in the black. My magic was best-suited to this sort of casting blind through the haystack, finding the poisoned needles before they pricked our hooves.

I would have thought that Whirlwind would have traded off with one of her sisters, or perhaps that her sergeant would have ordered her to stand down and let the rotation continue. But something mysterious had occurred on the feathered side of the fence, and there she was again when I went to my gig, squatting patiently in her traces. Later that night, we coursed through the black, my trickling tendrils of thought combing the distant, sodding surface below.

We rather expected the still-equipped, still-supplied batteries to be towards the rear of the enemy deployment, but the enemy was in terrible chaos that night, and it was honestly difficult to find a rear and a front, supports and infantry all merged together and nopony seeming to be working to untangle their glorious messes.

The occasional rocket rose into the night, to burst over their misery, but the resulting fires were from flares. No additional killing-rockets rose to challenge whatever griffins or pegasi might be spotted by the rebel rocketeers by the floating spots of glare. The low, raining clouds no doubt contributed heavily to this failure to detect our overflights, as we could simply rest on the heavy banks of cloud, and ignore the small holes burned into the cloud-deck like lit cigarillos scorching a paper map.

The few hours spent provoking rocket launches at least gave us some targets for the beginning of the night's harrying, and we stooped upon the offending landscape en masse, two or three witches in their gigs following as closely behind the diving pegasi as our charioteers and the construction of our wicker baskets allowed.

We crouched behind our flights of feathered brethren, desperately ready to cover their flanks when the inevitable replies flew up to meet them with gunpowder and death-magic. I had shared my discovered tricks, the knack in capturing control of ces petits bâtards, with my elders. We had no idea if the knack was transferable, but Gibblets had been optimistic.

Few opportunities to test the elder warlock's happy theories arose, as our strikes against the apparent rocket-battery locations came up dry, or at least, more slippery-sodden than not. A few rebel ponies were killed in the rain of javelins and the squalls of flashing wing-blades, and more were scattered into the soaked darkness, but no great batteries of racked gunpowder missiles were found. We combed the night with blade and javelin, and their resistance was like that of a flock of pea-hens harried by raptors.

After a while, we re-grouped, and conferred through the medium of the Nightmare relay. Obscured Blade and the Lieutenant decided to shift our tactics, and concentrate on harrying the increasingly disordered enemy. We shifted from protecting the assault-flights, to multiplying them. The flights of two dozen, became phantom-battalions of two hundred, and each of our witchlings put their own wicked touches upon their night-haunt legions. My winged furies wore the face of the Nightmare-horrors I remembered most from the Night of Echoes, but Otonashi's flights were terrible glowing wisps of tartarus on the wing. And the less said about the nightmares of the Crow, Uncle Blade and Gibblets, the better.

Bad Apple's 'phantasms' were simply alicorns of flame, burning through the night. And there was nothing intangible about them at all; they set fire to everything they touched, and every single one wore Cherie's laughing face.

Less than two hundred pegasi and fewer than fifty griffins, supported by a witches-coven of about a half-dozen, lit into the night, and hunted an army of more than ten thousand. Our night was darkness and fire, and they ran in terror, no-where standing to fight. An army proud with banners, who had smashed the Northern first line of defense, who had marched into arrow-storms without flinching, and thrown away thousands of lives in a stubborn noon-day assault under the proud sun, ran and hid in muddy holes from the terrors stalking in the night.

After a while, we gave up trying to find the enemy in his ranks, and just started seeking out camp-fires. The pegasi worked out their jealousy of their ground-brethren's great battle in those late-night hours. Relatively few White Rose fell in these clashes in the black, I do not think, but I could not be everywhere, and even with dark-sight, that night was particularly secret and obscured. I do know that we didn't lose a single Company mare or stallion to enemy action, nor did we even suffer anything more serious than a scattering of scratches and sprains. It was everything I could have ever wished for, the sort of one-sided, bloody romp which young jennies dream of.

There were surprisingly few supplies or carts to burn and destroy. The rear of the enemy assault, which should have been full of tents and wagons and teamsters and support-elements, that expected echo of our army's own vast and growing 'tail', was almost not to be found. There were scatterings of tents and a number of carts here and there, but somehow most of the White Rose's material self was missing from the field. Had they truly lost that much to their enforced mud-marches? Such a catastrophic loss of equipment, to nothing but a little bit of rain and some mud. Even I, who had once nearly drowned in a mud-hole, was surprised at how utterly the enemy's logistics must have collapsed, to leave them this naked in the dark.

They tell me that Obscured Blade was in his element, and drove his charioteer to the edge of exhaustion as they followed upon the very tail-tips of the coursing pegasi. You'd think a pony as ancient and aged as that old 'bokor' would have been feeling that night in his bones, but you'd be wrong. His charioteer told me later that the damp and the dark just made that old twist of leather supple as youth. The night took twenty years away from the ancient, and he hunted like a youth of barely seventy summers.

And he was feeling the night so lightly, because Obscured Blade had a target, had a goal. The rest of us were up there in the darkness, to hunt the rebel, the many-hoofed enemy in all her numbers. We were chasing the herded many, and our targets were legion. His target was Legion Herself, the dead mages he insisted were commanding and controlling the White Rose horde. I had only heard a little of Uncle Blade's convoluted theories, but I was already tired of his new-found obsession.

He had some sort of ulterior purpose in chasing 'enemy liches', but I wasn't sure I wanted to dig until I found out what that purpose might be. If it were truly pernicious, wouldn't the Nightmare winkle it out of him? We were none of us alone in our villainy; we always had somepony to look over our shoulders. It was both the blessing and the curse of the New Company. And even Uncle Blade, that icon of the Old Company, had to bow his stiff neck before the authority of the Princess and the Nightmare.

The passage of Cherie and Bad Apple could be seen in the distance from quite a long ways away, as they burned trails of smoldering destruction behind their battle-group, fires that the soaking rain struggled to extinguish. Their path criss-crossed the enemy's territory, and must have scattered the rebel more than any other thing we did that night.

By the time that the pre-dawn gloaming began to supplement Bad Apple's furnace-light, we were having more and more difficulty finding any enemy to harry. We certainly had not killed many of them, but they had just – disappeared. The combined efforts of the pegasi and the Humus clan and that week's heavy fighting had left the landscape pocked with mudholes, trenches, and wreckage, and the rebel had scattered and gone to ground, often quite literally.

Two hundred and fifty stalked the night, and ten thousand fled and hid in mud-holes. This is what it means when the Nightmare is on the wing.

Comments

[SomeDudeYouMightLike]

8020503 nice picture, reminds me of my sister when she's on her period and hasn't eaten anything and looks at my food I cooked

[FanOfMostEverything]

Bad Apple's 'phantasms' were simply alicorns of flame, burning through the night.

I have to appreciate the irony of accidentally invoking Daybreaker in the name of the Nightmare.