In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Kicking At The Pricks

FFMS045?

"Salt, Salt, what do you think you're doing?" asked the abomination.

I was struggling under the yoke of a heavy plow, harrowing the back forty of my damnable father's damnable farm. I'd hated that miserable, barren plot of land. He'd gotten the worst soil of the worst portion of his family's ancestral land, and we'd all laboured like mules to wring the slightest grain of corn from that bitter soil. I had been overjoyed when the ball came up at the lottery, and I had been picked by the draft-board. It had been the most wonderful and glorious day of my short life.

The white-furred horror floated over my bowed head, a nasty sneer marring that beautiful face. Her long, beautiful grey wings flapped lazily, keeping her centered over my misery. Her cats-eyed visage watched over my sweat, my struggle.

"This, abomination, is what I escaped, to become what I am. To be the noble mage in the service of the righteous. To command the dead, for the benefit of the living. This was my station, before I was raised above it by those who sought me out in the ranks."

"Oh, really. Don't be so snobbish. Farming is a noble and life-loving pursuit that – no, you're right. It's a miserable existence. No armspony who can possibly escape the grasp of the farming life ever truly misses it. But mark you – the life in this soil, however sour, is still better than all the thralls in all the mages' grasp from here to the gates of Pepin City! Look at them, filly."

Suddenly , the dry and barren acres of my idiot father's worthless farm was replaced by a thrall holding-pen, and the traces hung from my suddenly severed yoke. The dead things crouched, mindless, a half-dozen to each stall. Their fetishes bobbed above their empty eyes.

"Not life, but rather, that ugly emptiness that takes up residence after all life has fled. The negation of living. The hungry, miserable, empty void. Don't look too deep into their eyes, the abyss will suck you right down, drain you like a lake whose dam has been breached. But, I tell you-"

And that was the moment that I escaped the insufferable attention of my nightly haunt. Night after night, dream after dream, the Nightmare had chased me through my slumbers. The only escape was those moments when somepony woke me from my troubled sleep, and I rose against the hour towards whatever emergency desired my attention, my presence.

The howling in the distance gave me some indication of why the guard had woken me. Not inside the barracks, but nearby – near enough that the noise and commotion was audible here, behind closed doors. The rest of the barracks-room was rising up, everypony's rest interrupted by the tumult.

Ground Frog was missing. I followed the guard out of the barracks, pulling a coat over my fur against the winter chill. The rain and sleet had left a slippery sheen over all the surfaces of the camp, leaving the hoofing uncertain and unsteady. The noise was coming from the nearby thrall-pens, the ones we used to store the military police's designated undead.

Inside the pens was the missing Brother Ground Frog, Ground Frog, a long knife, and a quite surprising amount of gore and filth. He was spinning like a bison in full fury, dancing wildly, cackling, the gore and filth streaming off of his blade in sprays all over the straw and the surfaces of the stalls. Surrounding the maddened necromancer were the heaped remains of what once had been intact ghouls, collapsed like marionettes with their strings cut. Further away from the lunatic military-police stallion, were the rest of the thralls, standing, mindless, aimless, unafraid, unmoved, dead-eyed. Even the dissolution, the demolition of their fellows failed to draw from those dead things any sort of response. The ghouls really, truly did not experience the world like a living pony; death meant nothing to the dead, gore nothing to the appetites which wore dead flesh like I wore my cotton-coat.

Ground Frog was surrounded by guards, who were trying with all of their might, all of their slippery hooves, to restrain him from his further rampage across the splattered pens. It was only the guards' intervention which had stopped his assault against our thralls. If they had not interposed themselves, he may very well have cut his way all the way across the whole of the pen.

I plunged into the fray, and directed the ghouls away from the scuffle, sending them out of the other side of the pens, into the control of the other military police-necromancers who were now emerging, sleepy-eyed, into the moonless dark of that bitter winter evening. Ground Frog was laughing, giggling, barking in joy.

"Glorious! Wonderful! Look at them, look at them lay there! See? See? My blade! My blade is the proof! Just a little snip! Ha! Ha! Ha! A little snip, and down they fall, like puppets with their strings cut!"

He stopped, suddenly, and two guards, straining against his unpredictable swirling, fell about him from the cessation of movement, overbalanced. He turned to me, staring into my astonished eyes.

"She promised me, filly. Promised with all the sincerity of a holy thing, a holy object, a sacred, winged thing – the Rose told me all I had to do was *believe*. Believe with all of my rotten, corrupted heart, believe, believe believer, sacred heart, sacred blade, sacred soul, sacred knife."

He suddenly brought up the gore-encrusted knife between us, covered in rotted, clotted horror. "The blade, the blade! The blade proves our salvation! Death dies upon the blessed blade! Blessings upon the horrible, the depraved, the vile – not even a week ago, I used this very blade to flay an innocent for the crime of being a drunk. Damnable, damnable, horrible, horrible – but look! Look! She forgives me! By this blade, she forgives!"

And that was the moment when one of the guards clouted the maddened Brother across the back of his poll with a clubbed sword-pommel, and he went down like the ghouls he had carved up with his ‘sacred blade'. They tied him up with rope, and restraints, and hauled him away into the holding cells.

The Captain approached once they'd gotten Ground Frog hauled away. I'd noticed that she was nowhere to be seen while the blades were out. As soon as the maddened Brother was down, though, here she was. Taking charge!

Officers! And I don't want to hear about my commission from you, you snickering donkey. It's not at all the same thing.

I checked the collapsed ghouls, Ground Frog's victims. Dead meat, the lot of them – and not the sort of dead meat which our necromantic magic can rise up to answer our expectations, our demands, our will. Soil in the form of decayed ponies, dirt to be returned to dirt, soil not quite rotted enough to return to the soil.

Was it his magic, that had drained the deaths'-magic from our thralls? Whatever it was, had drained them drier than my father's barren farm. Nothing left to them but to be buried, to be burned, to be reduced to that ash which could once again be plowed into the living soil.

By the time we were done cleaning up after Ground Frog's inexplicable rampage, the belated winter sun had finally crested the limb of the chilly world, and we had returned the remaining thralls into their now much-more-capacious stalls. He had destroyed over a dozen valuable thralled ghouls. I was loudly furious about the waste and the foolishness of it all, as were all of my peers.

And I did my best to ignore the snide sniggering of that dream-abomination in the back of my head, who crowed about the wonder and the honourable righteousness of the mad Brother, who had done exactly as he ought to have done. The madness was one thing; I could deal with madness. But for my own delusions to join in harmony with the lunacy of my fellow?

Dreadful.

I reported myself, of course. Again. Perhaps for the third time.

"Lieutenant Salted Soil, not only have I not yet processed your first confession of unreliability, I don't intend to write down that second one," said the Captain. "Nor do I intend to accept this third repetition. Kindly shut up, and do your job. Do you have anything useful you plan to do this day of glory and righteousness?"

I granted that I had intended to boat over to the mutineers' camp on the south bank of the river, and to interrogate individuals, before the Brother's mental collapse had interrupted all of our plans.

"Fine, fine. A waste of time, but you go do that."

I chose to take a double-brace of guards rather than my usual pair of thralled ghouls. For one thing, the undead do poorly over running water; for the other, I knew from prior observation that the mutineers reacted poorly to our thralls, and thought that it wouldn't be wise to bring such irritants into a camp full of unsettled, battle-shocked former-prisoners.

We boated across the bitter, ice-rimed waters of the Housa, sliding unsteadily into the rough slips they'd thrown up on the far shore of the river. Command had chosen to house the mutineers in camps along the southern shore, away from the field forces' trenchworks and camps on the northern shore and around the ruins of the Second Mouth. Despite the retreat of the enemy, and their cession of the field of battle to our battered forces, nopony in command really were settled in their minds about the alleged end of the campaign.

It hadn't felt like victory. There had been no climatic battle, no overwhelming victory. The patrols had gone out a day or two after the great mutiny and the enemy…. Just wasn't there. They'd retreated.

It felt like a cheat.

The additional ships brought to us by the Great Mutiny had been of little use, as well. Not long after the grand celebrations, a terrible storm had blown down out of the northwest, and shut down everything, everywhere. They'd grounded their galleys and half-galleys upon the shore where we'd directed them, and everypony had tented up, hiding from the suddenly furious winter weather.

Almost as if the winds themselves had been outraged by their overthrow of the proper order of things, and had set loose the winter storms to lash the offenders against all that was right and proper.

This was not the first time I had stalked the tent-squares and organized encampments of the mutineers. Each time I'd returned to the southern shore, it seemed like their encampment was more well-organized, more built up, more like a proper and well-squared away fortress-city. I'd seen recruit-camps and veteran encampments which were less well-organized than what they'd accomplished by this, my third visit to their camps.

I shouldn't have been that surprised, these were the survivors of a veteran army. But I had always thought that a twice-defeated force would have suffered worse discipline for their losses – not improved on the standard.

We were searching the camp for signs of loyalism, of betrayal of the revolutionary ideal. If you have a better idea than I of what that looks like in a well-organized winter-camp, then more power to you. For me, this examination mainly consisted of looking for drunks, keeping an eye peeled for strange revival-meetings, and listening for street-preachers.

I couldn't possibly have known at the time that they had better ways to communicate with each other, than to shout their business in the open, under the Rose's heavy, leaden skies. But I did notice that some ponies were stalking my own command as we quartered the tent-city.

They thought they were being clever, but I had ears to hear, and eyes to see, and they couldn't crawl along upon our heels like that without giving some sign of their presence. And so, I directed my guard to peel off and surround our stalkers before they could slip away.

It was a matter of moments to subdue the ponies who were haunting us. Three scraggly, underweight ponies, rather wide-eyed and mean-looking. I chose to hurry them into the boat, and to get them away from their fellows before any sort of rescue could be mounted for their escape.

They were bound, tied, and gagged. They gave little resistance, and we were able to chuck them into the holding cells upon our return to the station with very little effort. Ground Frog was still there in the holding-cells, though, and I regretted it immediately when he started bawling about his visions and his objections to our activities.

I sent in a pair of guards, and gagged the wayward Brother before he got our new prisoners too worked up.

It was military police practice to let new prisoners stew in their cells overnight, bound, tied, and gagged. A long night pondering just how exposed and vulnerable they were, was just the ticket for shaking the certainties and the confidence of traitors, smugglers, and sneak-thieves. It was no skin off of our muzzles, and it paid dividends far beyond the investment of time.

They say patience is a virtue, don't they? They don't encourage us to read scripture in the military police. Supposedly it only shakes our confidence. Anyways, sleep came quickly after such a long and eventful night.

"Salt, Salt! Why are you persecuting my ponies? What do you think you're accomplishing, my darling?"

"Be quiet, horror. I'm trying to sleep here."

"Oh, foolish filly, you are already asleep. And still offending against my righteous commands."

"What do you know of righteousness, you terror? You haunt the dreams of foals!"

"Oh, you've already learned how to make me giggle. Wise filly! Make me laugh again – tell me your plans!"

"Take off that skin, you mockery! Stop pretending to be the sacred foal! I know demons when they haunt my dreams."

"What, are you now a foal, to follow your own metaphors? Oh, my degraded filly, you're too old for this sort of raging against your elders. If you must be a foal, be a good foal! You've read more of your scriptures than you pretend. You know you're violating your own holy writ, every day and night you offend against my wishes, my hopes, my expectations. Come around to the righteous standard, filly! Look at my garden, so full of weeds."

The bat-winged alicorn dug away at the offending growth beneath the rows of rose-bushes, as the flickering flames lit the night-garden.

"Tell me, filly, how do I deal with the weeds that would choke my rose-bushes?"

"Salt of poisons, abomination. We boiled away the mixture, my sisters and I. It was the only way to deal with the stubborn growths that choked out our father's crops. Boil away the excess, scoop up the salt remains, and then trickle that over the weeds. It burned the leaves you wanted burnt, spared the useful plants. It was how I got my cutie mark. My mother called me Sweet Soil when I was born, but the salts – that was what they called me after I figured out how the world worked. Burn away that which only saps and devours that which is needed by that which is healthful."

"Salted Soil. Bitter and sere, bringing death and destruction that that which should not have grown. A hard row you've chosen to hoe, filly."

"The row chose me, not vice versa."

"Is that so? Well, indeed. Sweet Soil, I will call you, if you would be called by your mother's foal's name. Only, I charge you – kill that which chokes the garden, and not the rose-bush."

I stared at the burning blossoms on the bushes all around me. Somehow, the abomination herself wasn't what drew my attention in this dream-garden.

"I'll leave you to your weeding, Sweet Soil."

And so I did. I weeded that long, choked row, and more besides. It was full morning before I woke to a new, watery-skied day.

---

The interrogations were less than fruitful. I discouraged stronger measures, although I could feel my peers leaning against the traces. For some reason, I didn't want to bring it to screaming and blood. But the prisoners kept their muzzles locked tight, and my interrogators got more and more intense in their pressures.

It was at that point, after hours of restraint and strong – but not torturous – methods, that one of the prisoners cried out in her duress, "Oh, Mistress, are the burning blossoms worth this?"

I stopped the method in its middle, and came up close against the weeping prisoner.

"What's this about burning blossoms?"

The prisoner – who was not as agonized as she had pretended – turned a sly eye at my muzzle, and laughed, quietly. So softly you might not have thought she even had said a word, she still, said, "Oh, Salt, Salt. Why do you persecute me? Be the Sweet Soil, and burn only the evil growth."

I recoiled as if she had thrust a viper into my ear-canal.

"Lieutenant! Are you alright?"

"Yes, yes. Fine, fine. Resume, please." The prisoners returned to their agonies. But each of them watched me with eyes that, when nopony else was looking, glared cats-eye green. And I heard in my inner heart's remove, that abomination's voice, laughing, and crying out "Salt, Salt, what do you think you're doing?"

I went to bed early that night, as another winter-storm roared over the camp's tents, and the burlap belled and quivered with the water and the wind and the sleet.

And as I fell into the dream-garden, the abomination chased me, her and her hunt of ambulatory rose-bushes, like wolves, like bears, like bison roaring in their stampeding tumult. I ran and I ran, and it was all that I could do to keep ahead of those terrible, rushing thorn-bush things as they chased me through the burning garden.

And at the end, when the rose-monsters trapped me in a cul-de-sac of flaming flowers and dark heavy-thorned bushes beneath the endless starlight glow. The abomination curled around me, and kissed me on my quivering ear-tufts, and whispered in my ears her love, her forgiveness, and her wishes.

I woke slowly, sadly, unwillingly. I dressed myself in my uniform, and I strapped my knife-sheathe around my left foreleg.

I went out into the street, and I slipped into the pens where the guards couldn't see me. I found my way into the back stall where my two favourite thralls squatted on their haunches, awaiting the next mission, the next task. I brushed their manes and their tails, I checked their hooves and their fetishes for chips and for faults.

Then I pulled my knife from its sheath, and I drew it across first one, than the other's throat. And as if they were living equines, they trembled, their forelegs faltered, and they fell over. Just as if I had cut the throats of living ponies. The two thralls twitched in the old hay, their ichor pumping out onto the floor as if they still had working hearts to drive their blood through their long-dead carcasses.

Then they were still, and I knew that Ground Frog had been right. There was something miraculous in the believing blade.

And I left by the same way I came, leaving nothing but two corpses returned to the state from which I had, wickedly stolen them in my own arrogance.

I pondered my discoveries, the world I had not fully understood until that morning.

And then I went out to plan my new course of action. There were weeds to burn out of the Rose's garden, and I had spent far too many months and years straining at gnats while the pigweed strangled our revolutionary fields.

I had been told there were pests in the garden. Time to free the innocents in the holding-cells, and turn my attention to finding the tap-roots of the true evils strangling her rose-bushes.

This manuscript was clearly and obviously in the hoof of the author we believe to be Feufollet, but the context and the content explicitly state that it is the testimony of one Lieutenant Salted Soil. My best guess is that is the recorded testimony of said Lieutenant, written down by our own Feufollet. But it's a strange departure from the usual pattern of these manuscripts, and I reserve the right to be wrong. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

Comments

[Lesolan - Rest In Peace]

Fucking yeeeeessss... this story remains so goooood...!

[howard035]

8297213
Not the Bride herself, but one of her sinister, semi-rebellious legates.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

And that was the moment when one of the guards clotted (clouted) the maddened Brother across the back of his poll with a clubbed sword-pommel, and he went down like the ghouls he had carved up with his ‘sacred blade'. They tied him up with rope, and restraints, and hauled him away into the holding cells.