In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Dream Of The White Rat

SBMS168

Into the depths of the night, I prayed for guidance and forgiveness. I laid in the dream-garden of burning roses, their half-cindered petal-wicks flaring at the faded stars above. The paths and bushes flickered first red, then blue and pink, and eye-straining white, and purple, and then a rainbow smear - a kaleidoscopic riot of colours broken free of the tyranny of the laws of light and shadow. However did the rainbow ever become the symbol of Harmony? That night, in that garden, the rainbow ran rampant, chaos incarnate.

Finally, my mind settled, and the agitated rose-beds ceased to paint my striped coat their mad and shifting colours. And the great and looming moon in her path across the heavens overhead flared, and She was in the garden.

Her blue wings spread overhead as she flew above the burning roses, and came to earth before my muzzle, once more pressed into the loam in supplication.

"Acolyte, we heard your cries in the night. We are quite busy, and hath little time. Please, do be brief."

"Your Highness, I have done such which I cannot justify in the pursuit of our enemies. I have done many terrible things as a member of the Company and in my own personal wrath, but this –"

"CEASE!" Her shout interrupted my confession, causing me to cringe back down on my face in the dirt. "Acolyte, thou art not alone in thine actions, nor in thy company. Consider those that take thee for a model of behaviour, and a pattern of morality, and restrain thine over-wrought self-flagellations."

Her wing swung away from her side, and gestured deeper into the burning garden. In the strange and shifting light of the flaming roses, a disturbance could be seen among the bushes and the pathways, a rushing and a flurry of shadows and shapes underneath. The Spirit took my hoof, and dragged me out of my crouch, and led me into the deeper garden.

A timber-weasel flashed past, its thorned fangs agape, glaring with its unsettling green eyes at something ahead of it. Then a second, then a third, all of them rushing by myself and the Princess.

Then I spotted their target, which came running back along the next path, over the other side of the nearest row of burning bushes. A white-grey rat, so fast as to be a blur, its whiskers leaving a sort of after-image behind it. It tore underneath the nearest bush, and burst out into our own pathway, running across my forehooves as it flashed by.

An impression of draconic, emerald eyes, wide in fear and anguish.

The three timber-weasels piled up against the far side of the rose-bush, stymied by the narrowness of the passage, and then the third bounded off the backs of the other two, and came tumbling over the top of the blossoms, caught alight by the flames. It rolled about in the dirt at my hooves until it put itself out, and then resumed the chase.

The white rat came fleeing back towards us, the other two timberweasels having come around to block her flight at the far end of the hedgerow. She squeaked in terror to find her escape-passage blocked by the third, at bay at last.

My hoof crushed the third beast into the earth, smashing it into disarray for the nonce. But I could feel the timberlings struggling to re-assemble itself underhoof, and I held the twigs and branches down more firmly into the ground.

"Cherie," I said. "What do you think you are doing?"

Squeak! said the rat, eyeing the twitching wreck of her pursuer. The other two held back, waiting to see what I did.

"Wake up, dream-walker! Shame not thy Mistress by this display of uncontrol! To be in a dream and not be lucid! Shame! Shame!" bellowed the Princess at her student.

The little thestral rose out of her ratty dreaming into the more appropriate lucid state. Her wings and her ears both drooped with misery. The shadows of the timberlings left with the rat, and then only ponies stood in that corner of the burning garden.

"What was that, Cherie?" I asked. "A dreamwalker having a nightmare? You're lucky the Nightmare isn't here herself, to laugh herself silly at you."

"Can't help it. Saw you in the camp, after they took that body away. My fault, my fault. If I hadn't let her catch me, we wouldn't have caught her, and then you wouldn't have had to do – that."

"Are you trying to steal my sins from me, pouliche? It's enough weight for one pony, the acts of that pony. Don't start taking on the guilt of your followers, or else you'll be crushed flat by the burden. You defended yourself from an assassin. All else is on those of us that did the hurting and the killing."

"You did it for me, I saw your eyes, before and after."

"I did worse for my foals and the Duchesse, far worse. Should they take that on themselves? Quite a Tartarus you'd condemn those infants to, pouliche."

"I'm too old for you to be calling me pouliche, Monsieur," She sniffed.

"Would you rather be called the White Rose?"

"Augh! Even worse! They're not doing that now, are they? Behind my back?"

"Oh, we suspect they might," interrupted the Princess, half-forgotten by us in our shared misery. "Thou ought visit thy followers more often, little rose. They feel rather neglected by thy absence."

"You are one to talk, Your Highness," I accused. "We here see little of you these days and nights, and less of your other selves."

"The new foals, they require much time, much attention," the Spirit defended herself. "Little time, much need for training. Our dream-magic is stretched to its limits to provide the lucid spaces for training, the necessary hardness, the sharpness is unnatural to the dream-world."

She drew her hooves through the soft dirt, brushed the burning petals of a rose-wick. "The natural state of a dream is to accommodate the dreamer – to be what it is needed to be."

She picked a burning rose from the bush with her horn-magic, and held it aloft, and turned it into an apple, still aflame. "In dreams, the intent is the father to the effect, the meaning to the result. You feel it, and it is; you think it, and it has happened. To turn that special providence and make it stubborn, consistent – to make it real – this is no simple thing."

"But you can't forget us, Princess," pled Cherie. "The Company needs you too. Things are getting bad out here!"

"Filly, there is no us and them, not in our eyes. You're all our ponies now. And the new foals need close supervision. And we must admit, none of us want to spend much time watching our ponies kill each other. Easier for even the Nightmare to play with happy foals, than to deal with what Obscured Blade has become."

The great Spirit paused, and bowed her head. "We must admit that this is why we created the Nightmare in the first place. To bear burdens we could not carry, to do things we could not abide having done. But she develops her own needs, her own wishes – and even she shrinks from the weight. Must we then create yet another Nightmare, even more heartless and savage than the first? Thus horrors multiply in our weakness."

She sighed. "No, no, thou art correct. We will walk in the company of the Company tonight. The foals can survive alone with the others for one night."

She looked around at the burning garden, now surrounded by an orchard of burning apple-trees. "We rather like what thou hast done with the place, by the way."

Comments

[Arexander]

Aaand I caught up. Oh bother.

[howard035]

Oh jeez, they're going to make a super-nightmare aren't they? A Tantabus.

[Dorath]

She looked around at the burning garden, now surrounded by an orchard of burning apple-trees. "We rather like what thou hast done with the place, by the way."

8211933 Oh, bloody hell, I hope not! That could go all kinds of bad