In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Dream-Forge

FFMS030

We didn't have time to train up the new formations to our standards; the summer was dying, and the fall campaign season would be short, so very short. We could only put them through their paces, and rely on whatever training the White Rose had beaten into their field troops. Some of the new Order ponies had survived from the front-line units, but more had been in support and logistics. In a catastrophe, the ponies in the rear echelon are almost always the ones with the best chance for survival, this is simply the way the world works.

And so, each cage got its own pair of Company sections to exercise and drill the inhabitants. It was almost impossible to keep the few townsponies who had returned to Clear Creek from seeing all this activity – assuming they'd not noticed the spectacular recruitment ceremonies. The regimental guards who were displaced by Company training cadres were re-assigned to foalsit the witnesses in town – to help them rebuild, aid in their work, and make friends with the locals.

Just so long as nopony left town, especially to gossip with friends in neighboring towns or hamlets.

Stomper and the rest of the Third Cohort was distributed among the fifteen Order cohorts, as cadre, as training ponies, as foalsitters. Some brief thought was given to breaking up all of the Company cohorts, and only assigning earth ponies and other ponies who could pass for earth ponies to the new formations, but Sawbones threw a fit and that idea died quick. Instead they roped me into the game.

It was an interesting challenge, and not one that could be accomplished with a simple song and dance, or a clever hack, or a brilliant bit of one-off spellwork. Long glamours, long illusions, took time, time and attention and deep engagement in the fabric of the illusion.

I would be part of the plan, even if nopony cared to tell me all the particulars. I was told enough – told how it demanded semblance, and subtlety, and consistency. So I started in on the Company armsponies who couldn't pass for earth ponies, and I spent all of those intense days and weeks of drill and long work, wrestling with the discarded caparisons of the naked training-ponies. Bleeding into the fabric, painting myself into the threads and the weave. I took their imagined selves from the Filly, who dove through the dreams and fantasies and self-images of those unicorns, those zebras, or donkeys, or in three odd cases, caribou. What part of themselves could be massaged, and crafted, until they looked like a Western pony?

The Westerners had a certain look to them, a cast in their eyes, the way they wore their manes, how they braided their tails, how they carried their weapons. A looseness in their limbs, a disregard for how well-filed their hooves were. Each of our Company minders had to not only be painted over with the semblance of a Westerner; in a very real sense, they had to see themselves - in their sense of self, and their physicality - as those Westerners. They had to walk, trot, and speak with a Western cadence.

The Filly filled in the gaps by dream-pairing each trainer with their platoons, pushing them into dream-chambers each night, with trainer and platoon rubbing up against each other in endless, time-altered night-training reveries until they absorbed a bit of every trainee in their shadow-coats, their shadow-manes.

When they put on the blood-daubed caparisons I had prepared for them, even their cutie marks changed – strange amalgams of certain elements of this trainee's mark or that, blended together into something that at a glance looked unique. You would have expected this fundamental alteration of the outward symbol of these altered Company pony's inner selves would have caused alarm, outrage, even mutiny. But the Filly's night-sessions with her new herds seemed almost to produce a sort of hypnosis, a lucid trance.

Ponies changed faster than I could have imagined. Even I felt this strange rapture of the dream-depths, for I was weaving my own dream-coat along with the rest of the Third Cohort. During the day I remembered the donkey that I was, but night after night, dreaming of the work I was doing in my sleep, I forgot Feufollet more and more often, and only remembered Marsh Wisp, who had walked away from her parents' farm on Upper Halter Creek in the province of Traverses to fight for kirk and kin, and await the second coming.

And those nights lasted forever, as the Filly extended those lucid dreams five-fold, ten-fold, twenty-fold, until eight hours asleep felt, subjectively, like a week. And not merely a week spent lazing about the barracks, but training-weeks as hard as anything we put the northerners through in Vallee du Pierre. Weeks spent training in combat, training in ship-handling, defending galley-decks, assaulting ships from below, combat-landings in ports and on open river-banks.

At first I couldn't figure out where the Filly was getting the material – Cherie's experience with ship-handling and riverine combat consisted of sneaking on board and burning hulls to the water-line. But I was given a loud and boisterous revelation one night by a Nightmare. She was disguised as a sort of spirit-parody of Cherie, a somewhat monstrous, enormous thestral. She was engaged in directing a dream-simulation I was observing. At the time, I was working on getting down and recording the self-image of a particularly set-in-her-ways unicorn corporal, who was leading her training-platoon in a losing fight against the Nightmare's own dream-platoon. The Nightmare and her Black Rose were defending a galley deck against the hapless assaults of my subject and her increasingly-battered dreamers.

"Where did we get the setting, and the ideas?" asked a cackling white-grey Nightmare as she let her defenders in driving back the corporal's outmatched assault team. "Look around you, my pony-acolyte!" She slashed at a westerner's dream-shadow with a marine's cutlass, and the pony howled in pain and fell into the water. "We captured survivors from half-a-dozen marine battalions in and around Leveetown!" She kicked another pony into the water, and looked around for more victims. "Hundreds of ponies' worth of experience and methods, all well-trained in riverine warfare." She leaned on her bent cutlass, watching her platoon drive the remnants of the assaulting team into the dark waters. "To be honest, even the ones who weren't marines are more experienced in this sort of thing than the Company, who have spent the last few years stuck on dry land, forgetting all of their naval tactics."

She snapped a grey wing, and the dream ended. "These scenarios are as much to get the new Order working as a whole, as units and formations, to build up their confidence in themselves and each other, as it is for the simple training itself. These are veterans, my dear Marsh Wisp! They just need to be reminded of that, and lo! The rest shall fall into place." She started a new dream, and her platoon exchanged places with their opponents, assaulting the same dream-galley they had just finished defending. The Nightmare, still pretending to be a spirit pretending to be Cherie, threw herself into the frey, yelling wildly to her training-platoon.

I think it was all a game to her. Every time I laid eyes on the Nightmare in those weeks, she was smiling that sharp-toothed smile of hers, and she never spoke long without a laugh escaping her lips. She was having a vacation from herself, and it suited her.

But as intense as those weeks were, I still believed that they couldn't be preparation enough for what was to come, though I had no idea what that might be. Dreams and the bone-crushing reality can never truly compare; the former can only gesture in the direction of the latter. But then, what training truly prepares for the real thing?

Cherie and the officers stayed closeted up, and we saw little of any of them. I was somewhat surprised that this did not affect morale in the absent thestral's newly-formed Order, but then I realized that the Filly and the Nightmare was keeping the new ponies so drop-dead exhausted and over-busy that they had no time to think, let alone feel neglected. I don't think any of the Order ponies were truly fooled by the Nightmare's Cherie-act, but most were taken in by the insinuation that the Company's elder Spirit was one of Cherie's 'spirits', a dream-daemon serving their new mistress.

Cherie was away, and the Nightmare was having fun in the dreamscapes – but in the real world, the Filly was everywhere. She took those cages by storm during the day-training, the pure physical exercise which was necessary if the Order was ever to be able to implement their night-training. If the flesh is weak, it doesn't matter how willing the spirit might be.

And an interesting thing happened during those days. If the physical appearance of their Company trainers blurred into a semblance of their training platoons, then the emotional and mental tendencies of those Order ponies were likewise made over, overlaid somewhat with the personalities of their trainers. The Third Cohort had over the years developed a unit personality, a certain cheerful irreverence and easy-going looseness, which blended strangely with the traumatized, fanatical, and intense affect of the survivors of the White Rose. At times, it almost came across as schizophrenia. Which wasn't exactly a disaster, for the purposes I'd been led to expect. These were to be desperate and unbalanced ponies, defeated and thrust into slavery. They would naturally be scattered and uncertain in their affect.

Yes, slavery. About two weeks into the project, word came down about some details of the Plan - at least in the vaguest of terms. The 'prisoners' had been re-categorized by the Bride's bureaucrats as criminals, traitors and rebels. Their freedom was not merely constrained in the sense that one interned military prisoners of war – they were criminals, and thus, deprived of all freedoms, permanently.

Tambelon was a bad place to be a slave. They could have been sacrificed to the military's ever-thirsty 'rear support battalions' and reduced to thralled ghouldom. They could have been sent to the phylactery-owned mines in the eastern ranges, to be worked to death.

Instead, our newly enslaved Order ponies were being shipped down to Coriolanus to serve as galley slaves. Classically, the oardonkeys of battle-barges and galleys had been free jacks and jennies, but in the Bride-era, this tradition of proud oar-jennies had been washed away in a tidal wave of convict labour. Many of the ships driven down in the great river-battles of the last several years had gone to the bottom with their rowers still chained to their oars and sweeps.

They say that the great river occasionally belches forth packs of undead upon the lower reaches, drowned ponies dragging behind them oars still chained to their forelegs.

The new fleet being laid down in Coriolanus required full complements of oar-donkeys, galley slaves. And we had thousands of them convenient and near to hoof. It was the obvious solution; the General and her staff had been planning on impressing sailors from the Inland Sea to make up the numbers, which would have made all of us deeply unpopular. They jumped at the chance to avoid the Inland Sea impressment campaign, at least, once they were given to understand that the Company would stop standing in the way of the enslavement of the prisoners of war.

They wrote off our sudden acquiescence as just another of the strange and unpredictable starts of a demon-worshiping cult, and went on with other matters. With the initial campaign concluded, General Knochehart was besieged with hard-luck stories and demands to return this regiment or that regiment back north; everypony was ready to call it a war and go home. It didn't help matters that word had arrived that the White Rose had tried to invade Pepin in our absence, and that there had been a somewhat active summer season on the upper river for those regiments we had left behind. With the Bride absent and tied up at the front, her endless campaign of censorship and suppression of communications was in abeyance, and the news was beginning to flow for the first time in generations. With news of the greater Tambelon, came politics, and contention, and distractions.

Nopony paid us much heed. They were too busy arguing with each other.

And so it was, in the last days of that summer, we began marching the newly-enslaved White Rose prisoners in long, regimented columns north to the Road through High Earth. Each pony was march-hobbled, with rope halters tied to allow a steady marching step, but no faster, and with reduced flexibility. Everypony who watched us shuffle past were treated to the prospect of thousands upon thousands of down-trodden ponies, hangdog, thin, and hollow-eyed. The more we played up the spectacle of misery, the less reason anypony had reason to pay attention to the heavy-laden carts and wagons spaced out here and there within the slave-columns. They were only food supplies and chuckwagons, right? Even the ones that held our timberlings, curled patiently upon their sharp-edged beds of weaponry.

It only takes a little stagecraft and misdirection to make a division-sized military movement look like slaves being taken to market. So off we went, shuffling awkwardly towards the distant river-port, towards our rendezvous with the Imperial fleet coming off the slips in that great city on the Housa.

Coriolanus, mother of ships – we come for your children!

Comments

[TheStratovarian]

High risk, but ouch, a trained company of folks, working in harmony, yeah, thats going to be a thing to have their navy one night.

[Elsaack]

Sounds like the Nightmare liked a certain fillies plan, nice to see it come together since last time it was censored from the Annals.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

Tambelon was a bad place to be a slave. They could have been sacrificed to the military's ever-thirsty 'rear support battalions' and reduced to thrilled (thralled?) ghouldom. They could have been sent to the phylactery-owned mines in the eastern ranges, to be worked to death.

[Mitch H]

8636741
That was an ongoing headache, the autocorrect hated the very idea of 'thrall/thralldom', and kept trying to fix it. That one is now corrected.