In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Amphibian In His Element

SBMS025

I found Gibblets and his mini-me out by the drainage pond, looking over our overstrained sanitation system, such as it was. This was a bad place for drainage, there's a reason the local ponies hadn't put a town here. Best we could do was this bollocks, set up leech fields and drainage ponds and hope nopony notices the stench. Even then, a warlock had to work overtime to screen the works from view, and more importantly, the sensitive noses of our neighbors. I thought some of them might have been twigging to the fact that their temporary gypsy neighbors are something different from the regular run of bums and petty thieves. We would have probably had to start recruiting and terrorizing, because obscurity was quickly reaching its full capacity. I was sort of surprised the half-dozen foals that followed Gibblets home had been the full extent of our curious foals problem. Maybe we could use the apprentices to lull the neighbors' kids, spread rumors counteracting the natural conclusions they're sure to have been drawing at that point?

"You done with the mystery quotes and versifying?"

He looked up and smirked, clearly in a happier mood than the last time we talked.

Donkeys and horsefolk, be not bold
For Griffon thy master by haunts was sold!

"Damnit, Gibblets…"

He giggled, vilely. "No, no, one more…"

What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?
Remember whom we are to hope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of irregulars, and base lackey peasants!

"You finished?"

He composed himself, and sniggered, "Yeah, that's it. Had to get it out of my system. Elsewise I could go for hours."

"The Lieutenant wanted us to kiss and make up. She wants answers. She was swearing in that peasant creole of hers, right in front of my apprentice." I waved a hoof at Roggentochter, who had scurried off with Bad Apple to go do foal things in the woody verge around the stinking pond. I yelled at her, "Don't fall in! You won't enjoy the cold bath afterwards!"

"She won't like answers. You won't like answers. Tartarus, I don't want to think about answers. I've been with the Company too long this time, let down my guard. That thing got inside my head this time. I spent so much effort keeping my distance, kept my independence, stayed neutral… have you ever heard the story of the alicorn Azrael, and the war in Rakuen?"

"Vaguely. Rakuen is some sort of alicorn homeland, isn't it? There was some sort of big fight in pony heaven, treason and war and the usual religious nonsense."

"When the Peacock Angel rebelled against her father and master, great Mazda, the alicorns fell into camps, for the proud Peacock and the All-Father. Some few like Azrael refused to choose sides, and fled the fighting. Lots of fighting, lots of dying, and in the end, the Peacock Angel was defeated, her ponies scattered, and she was cast into a terrible prison. But the All-Father changed his fickle mind, and let his chastened daughter out of her prison, and restored her to her estate, as his face to the outer worlds, his vizier and right-hoof mare. And her surviving loyalists were brought into the fold, and all was once more at peace within paradise, if much depopulated and war-ravaged. But Azrael and her fellow conscientious objectors? They are even to this day outcast, and the stories say they wander the Chain of Creation, bemoaning their moral cowardice, and leaving stories of secret alicorns meddling in the affairs of ponies wherever they go."

"You claiming to be an alicorn? I don't see any wings on you, Tartarus, I don't even see hooves, unless you're hiding something really odd in those brogans you wear everywhere."

"No, you damn fool zebra. I'm saying that we live in an existence of harmonic resonance, and that fate and destiny are nothing more than the patterns into which thinking beasts are inevitably drawn by their natures and the worlds as they are. And nopony likes someone who won't pick a side when it comes to drawn steel and blood drawn."

"A mercenary company is a peculiar place to find a conscientious objector."

"It was a long, long time ago. I think I told you once that the Company is easily as old again as its surviving Annals," he paused, seeing by my frown that was incorrect. "Well, maybe that was a previous Annalist. But it is, and before it was the Company, it was something else. The Nightmare told you true, that part at least. One of her rebel thestral regiments, although I wasn't there for that, and before that, one of my mistress's loyal Lunar Guard battalions. They must have fell when she did, and I am not sure how or why they left Equestria after the Longest Night."

"The spirit mentioned Equestria. I thought it was a fairy-tale, more fantastic than Rakuen. A fantasy about a fairy-land ruled over by an immortal alicorn queen who ruled the heavens above as the earth below, a second paradise of impossibly happy ponies. Emphasis on 'impossible'." I stomped about in irritation and disgust to be talking of foals' tales.

"I've not been there in recent centuries, and I can't be sure how much of the propaganda is true - I've been with you and the Company for the last hundred years, and heard the same stories you've no doubt grown up on - but it was real once upon a time, and was briefly a paradise in my youth. The confused young mare you met, after meeting her… other self. That was my Princess, my mistress. I…" He choked up, and I was concerned he was about to run off again, and we'd have to have this same damn conversation, again and again, like a tedious limbo or purgatory, tearing the truth out of him, even if I had to chain him to a rock and rip it out of his liver like a hungry griffin.

My fierce frown pinned him to that muddy bank, and he started again.

"There once was an alicorn princess, two of them. The elder ruled in truth, and the younger was pretended to be an equal, and in fact was made the hauler of garbage and the destroyer of monsters for her queen of an elder sister. This wore on the younger, and her immature mind - for alicorns age at a different rate than lesser ponies, and their adolescence can last centuries - buckled under the strain and loneliness. I'm still not sure if it was simply her madness taken personality, or if she was actually possessed by some dream-monster, and I was not there to see the process. My ambition led me to try to make something of my soggy self, and I was in the process of failing to distinguish myself in the elder sister's magical academy at the time. My Luna, she fell, and rebelled, and became that… thing we saw slavering over foals' blood in the mess hall."

"She was such a sweet girl, proud, strong, far, far too proud - but she did love foals. Every mare kills the thing she loves…" His eyes got that quoting look to him, and I clopped my hooves together to break the trance.

"Right! After her sister defeated her rebellion, and used a terrible magic to banish the Nightmare to an eldritch prison, I left in disgrace. Started wandering down the Chain of Creation, because Equestria is at the head of the Chain, it is easy to travel from Equestria to other worlds, but hard to travel from other worlds to Equestria. There's this mystical head-wind… Anyways! I kicked around, and fell into a world of slow-time, where every hour was a week, and every week a year, and lost a couple centuries. I was wandering through that horsey land of fanatics and god-botherers when I came across the Black Company for the first time. I didn't recognize it, because that grim young hellion Fatinah had replaced the banner with her morbid hanging-ponies flag. I signed on as a warlock, they thought I was some species of djinn."

"Ah! al-Dafdae! That was you? But Fatinah records you leaving in a huff-"

"Yeah, the moment they pulled the old banner out of her memory to celebrate her great victory over the Eighters. I realized at that moment the band of ponies I was in traces with weren't just a random mercenary outfit with a strong ethos and more thestrals than you generally see out here on the world-chain, but was actually a traitor legion. I left for a long time, but in later centuries I crossed the Company's path time and again, and each time I signed on under a different name. It felt… like home. Like she was nearby. Until I got a wild hair, or somepony did something monstrous in the ranks, and then I had to go again."

"Why did she use your current Company name, if you've been using a nom de guerre? And what kind of court jester is called 'Gibblets', anyways - that's what she meant by pierrot, right?"

"Yeah, that's what I was. And Princess Luna could be a strange filly, morbid and amused by ugly things. It's why I was her fool, after all - my face was a comfort to her, in all the over-decorated splendor of her elegant sister's court. No, this last time, I didn't have the heart to think up a new name. Everypony who possibly might have remembered it was dead for over eight centuries, or Celestia on her gaudy throne in far-away Canterlot, worlds away. Nopony would have remembered the old moon-princess's hideous jester; from what I hear, nopony even remembers therewas a moon princess, all the stories out of Equestria talk of the princess of day and night, the alicorn of the moon and the sun. She's extinguished her sister from the memories of the living." The goblin looked saturine and wrathful upon this last declaration, a whiff of rebellion and fury in the air along with the stench of waste-water and associated filth from the drainage pond before us.

I had something I had to say. "I, I haven't been fully forthcoming about the oracle in Pythia's Fell. I thought it was all a charlatan's act, or at least, most of it was. You know how easily they can cold-read you, pick your tells for clues and feed you back your fears and hopes. But she said things that made no sense to me, and match up with what you say," I said, and proceeded to quote the Pythian oracle's prophesy, or at least, long sections of it. I may have perfect recall, but that doesn't mean it is easy to just stand there and vomit forth stanza after stanza of once-heard gibberish.

His eyes closed, he started waving his monkey paws towards the drainage pond and the leaching field beyond it. Bad Apple, off to the left doing something half-hidden among some scraggly alder buckthorn, reared up in surprise as the wave of magic caught her by surprise, and she stumbled back into Roggentochter, who was knocked into view by the collision. The smell suddenly was gone, and Gibblets' work, which he had been using our conversation to avoid doing, was done in an instant.

"That is definitely not good news. Yes, the mechanics of Equestria's corner of the Chain are more or less as described, and some of the characteristics of the way that Celestia runs her little sandlot may be tying into the greater aspects of the Chain of Creation. I certainly never noticed any such reservoir of magical potential in the pikestaff, but it is something unique to the Company, and the warlocks Luna employed in the Guard were subtle, powerful, clever and far too comfortable with a class of dark magic which could be hidden in ways you wouldn't be able to spot just by looking for it. If we're actually a necromantic infernal device over nine hundred years in the winding-"

"The power could break worlds," I finished for him.

Comments

[Minalkra]

Oh snap son, plot aplenty!

I am enthralled but not much to say on the matter - and curse this infernal (in all sense of that word) phone for the ease and ill ease it is.

[ponygrad]

For April fool's can the company go to eqg land?

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?
Remember whom we are to hope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of irregulars, and base lackey peasants

Please don't use 'infer' when you mean 'imply'

[Mitch H]

8453501

Should have mentioned this previously, back when you first commented. This is a ponified bit of Richard III:

What shall I say more than I have inferred?
Remember whom you are to cope withal,
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants

So, insofar as someone molested the mother tongue here, it was, as it were, one of the fathers, Avon Bill himself.