Ch1: Last Flag Standing
November 25th, 1654 BRE (Before Royal Equestria)
The southern pass into the Dyrrdalr, right flank of the King's Defensive Expedition, Krystal mountain range
I stand among my kins people in arms. The sun sits high in the sky, its light filtering weakly through the small viewing slit left between the dull grey metal faceplate and helm. My armor doesn't stand out much, but the soldiers don't need much to recognize me in a crowd, seeing as how I'm a foot shorter than the average shield maidens. My other identifying feature is my shield. It is the only kite shield in the entire Skjoldborg. The rest are the traditional steel studded round shields of our people.
I glance around the battlefield, turning my entire head to move the small seeing slit around. An arrow had dented the joint, and the faceplate was stuck. I didn't remove it because the helmet helps deafen the storm of metal and death that surrounds me. The screams of the dieing made it hard to think at times, and I couldn't afford that.
Those screams turn to cheers as the rangers drive off a fresh wave of skyequestrians. I relax with the subsidence of the skyborne assault, as do most of the men and women around me.
Just as my muscles are about to melt in relief, a miniscule whistling sound sends fridgid shivers up my spine. It is a familiar sound, just a bit higher in pitch than an arrow. Instinctually I lift my sword a bit higher and grip my shield a bit tighter. My feet slide into the nearly instinctive high impact position. Bracing for the impact proves useless, and I grimace in pain as the would be prince killer skewers him/herself on my blade. Their body has just enough force left in it to split my shield and knock us both to the ground. I land on my back with her on top. I grin darkly at our otherwise embarrassing position.
I spit out her, the face was definetly female, blood and hair. I raise a foot and my other hand to grip the sky horse for leverage, and proceed to rip my sword out of the pegasus above me as her muscles spasm uselessly. Contrary to the old myths, equines don't bleed out rainbows. Pony blood is red. The very same dark crimson as human blood. It has the same metallic taste as human blood. They also shit and piss themselves as they die in battle. Their shit smells just as bad.
We were so similar, but yet here we humans were fighting for their survival.
I can feel a dent in my chest plate grinding into the side of my lower right ribs as I shove the dead pegasus off of me. her flimsy lance crunches underneath her body. The lance would have driven me through if it had been any faster. Laughing off my own mortality; I wait a moment or two before I relax my muscles again. I look around myself as I wipe off the partially digested foods of the dead pegasus, and her piss, it is hard to forget the piss. My fellow shield brothers and sisters are resting on their shields or looting Pegasus corpses. My own personal Húskarl is marching up from my right. A raised visor reveals his painted face. He looks pissed. That's probably why my soldiers weren't helping me up.
"You befuddled buffoon! If your were my son I would beat you for being so stupid" Yep, he's pissed.
"Nice to see you alive too John"I answer a tad glumly as I try to stop the ringing.
"What have I told you time and time again?" He says in his stuffy lecture voice.
"Leverage, Direction, and Viscosity." I drone back.
"And what did I just see?" He asks in his normal condescending tone.
"Me ripping my sword out of a Pegasus like a drafted serf." I answer in a practiced manner.
"We've talked about this ísfæddur" Bastard! I force him back a step with a growl, but he quickly regains.
"And we've talked about that. I have a name you know." Now if he would just use it instead of that Moon fucked title.
"I am but a lowly armsmaðr. It would be presumptuous for me to address you by name." Bullshit, I retort mentally.
"And what does Befuddled Buffoon count as?" I ask verbally.
"It's your other title." I give his comment its well earned groan before I stop to examine the remaining scraps of shield. The metal struts are bent dangerously back and the wood appears to have mostly splintered into my arm. the hulking mess of scrap wood is a total loss. I latch my now free left hand onto the pommel of my sword and use it to push myself up.
"And what have I told you about that!?" He demands indignantly.
I look up the hill in time to see a fresh wave of dirt ponies cresting it. They are far enough away that I have enough time to review the basics.
"Stuff it John."
Dirtponies were the easiest to fight, defensively. The fact that they had to hold their weapons in their mouth made them laughably easy to predict if you watched their neck and ears, and they couldn't use any pike or spear offensively. They were also the least motivated of the three tribes. Basically slaves to the other two. The ones with the big weapons are to be watched out for. They are easy to predict, but one hit and your bones are powdered. Dirtpony stallions are more common than in other pony tribes. Their males grow much bigger than other tribes, and as a whole they are tougher to crack once they are experienced. These ones aren't, I can tell with just a glance.
Review time ends as the ponies are now within twenty feet of us and keep charging. Possibly a third of them have been downed by archers and what javelins my soldiers had recovered. These were too poor to afford armor, and dirtponies couldn't carry shields offensively. This made them easy prey to any projectile, even slings.
As I face the charging dirt ponies I raise my bastard sword just a big higher. ponies could only raise their heads so far to block. Keeping it high meant you could simply skull check any pony whose weapon was shorter than yours.
the first dirt pony was dispatched easily, my mailed hand grabbing her pitchfork and my sword splitting her forehead as planned. She was probably some unicorn's serf. Unicorns as a rule didn't bother equipping their levy. The next had leather armor that had been scrapped together with whatever her remaining crop could buy. I kick the knife out of her mouth. Her armor wasn't much at all. It just splits as I strike down at her neck.
The one after her had a actual weapon, a battle axe. Her swing catches the shield of the Huskarl to my right, splitting it with her enormous dirtpony neck muscles. This leaves her wide open, and her blood paints my blade like the two before her. My sword is red up to the handguard now, and I flick it clean before the blood drips into the grip and fouls my hands.
Another one of the peon ponies is charging at me from a distance. Her hair is red, her coat is a dull grey, and her eyes were a odd yellow, but what really stood out is her height. She is almost a foot shorter than the rest of the dirtponies so far. She has a dagger, but lacks any armor, or even a cloak. My stomach seems to start digesting itself almost immediately. She was probably just the same age as my little sister. My sister didn't deserve this. This filly didn't deserve this end.
I sidestep her dagger and grab her by her mane, finishing the fight with a pommel strike to her head. Her lungs let out a soft gasp, my stomach stops its self destructive torture and almost gurgles appreciatively at me, but my brain chastises my charity as I barely catch a hatchet with my sword. The handle of the hatchet cracks and I let the pony who swung it just run away. She isn't the first or last runner, and the rest of her formation breaks shortly after her flight.
As the now broken dirtponies retreat as fast as their hooves can take them I look around my forces and count the flags. My own standard has two crossed axes under a crown and over mountains. all of them black on red field like my shield. And on top of that banner was another banner bearing the RVJ of the royal forces. My force's standards were the same minus the crown.
I count two of my retinue's red square banners, and three red triangle banners, so my huscarls and rangers are holding up fine. I glance over to the left flank. It is far on the other side of the battle, but the banners we use to denote status are large enough to be identified easily across battlefields. I can see two of the house of Redcliff's triangular blue flags. one of them is being held at a low angle, so one and a half units of the Redcliff's rangers. There is five of the golden square banners raised high, so we still have all of my brother's Húskarls over there.
That is strange, I can account for all of my brother's men, but I don't see his own standard. None of the banners I could see held the royal crown. I wait for it to rise back up, I quietly beg for it to fly again and that its absence was an accident or slip, but it refuses to show itself. A sinking feeling grips my heart as I consider the possible meanings.
The lowering of his standard can only mean one thing.
My brother is dead. Another member of my family is a corpse on the battlefield. This leaves the list of living royalty at one fifth of the length it had been before the ponies began their assault on my home, and me as the crown prince. Now it is just me, my younger sister, and my...
I look back to the hard pressed center. I can do nothing but stand there uselessly as my father's royal purple falls.
The king is dead.
long live me.
I could see now that the ponies had funneled all of their forces into the middle, probably in a attempt to get at my father. They purposefully murdered the man who sired and raised me. I want to hate the murdering bastards so badly. I want to hate every single last one of them, but images of long ships filled to the tipping point with liberated serfs and slaves keep flashing before my eyes. Images of their beaten and cut legs or wings fill my head every time I think the word hate. I just can't, this war had beaten it out of me.
I look down at the foal soldier I had knocked out earlier. I didn't notice it earlier, but she had two underdeveloped wings, and her coat was mangy and torn as well. Then I look at the pegasus that had almost run me through. at second glance the lance she had used was obviously steel tipped, and it was made of ash wood. If I hadn't thrown the pegasus' aim off at the last second with my movement and my sword, there would be a snowflake's chance in Tartarus of me being alive now.
Ash wood? I look again at my shield's paltry remains. It wasn't pierced it was scraped. It hadn't broken on my armor either, and I didn't hear the crack till after I had taken at least half of the momentum away by caching her with my sword. That meant that the reason the lance had snapped had to be her weight.
Which was odd because she didn't look fat.
I try to lift her up slowly, immediately I'm straining my arms against her weight. As heavy as she feels, it should be impossible for her to fly much less get above my head. I reach my sense of touch out into the armor. The entire piece is humming with magical spark. As far as I could sense the enchantment was designed to make the heavier armor much lighter for the wearer. With buffed stamina and strength a lancer could lift much more armor and put all of the weight into their lance. It was the perfect armor for a lance carrying pegasus assassin.
Assassin.
Feeling dumber than the average tuskfish for not checking the unusual attacker earlier, I motioned to my standard bearer. "Fair Breeze, lower the royal standard and raise up one of the regular standards!" she frows at me, but she lowers the top of the flag to her assistant and lets him stow it as ordered. A standard huskarl unit's banner was in her hooves moments later. It may have been my imagination, but after my banner disappeared the flood of ponies seemed to come to a stop almost entirely. I can see flags moving away in the distance as well.
The battle is far from over and there are still a few enemy flags on the battle that I end up facing personally, but there are pauses in the battle again. Pauses that let me think. It takes just one of those thoughts to bring forth a desperate hope within me.
If I lowered my banner to trick the assassins, then maybe my brother and father did too.
It would take just one symbol to confirm this. A symbol of royalty only known by the royalty and their trusted few.
"Breeze, Raise the Rose" Breeze gave me a blank look for a moment. The rose was the one flag she had never had reason to fly before. She didn't even know what it meant.
"Y-yes your highness." Her hooves carefully pass the unit standard over to her assistant. Then she shakily draws a small white and red flag out of her personal sack.
She glances over to me again for confirmation. She looked worried and concerned, and it was understandable. I had just given two orders she couldn't make any sense of. She had probably saw my father's and brother's banners fall.
"Do it."
Horns blare out commands as she raises the standard up with the smallish flag tied to its spear. I look over to the left flank and die a little as a black Rose is raised. A little more of me crumbles as a similar standard is raised in the middle of the army. They're dead. I'm king now.
This is-
This all just a bit much.
*thud*
<--->
August 13th, 1343 ARE (After Royal Equestria)/ 4ALR (After Luna's Return)
Golden Oaks Library, Ponyville, Duchy of Twilight, Equestria
Twilight flipped through the pages of her atlas for the third time. Each page just seemed to add to her confusion. She hated being confused, and by the end of the 456 page pony sized tome she was a very perplexed princess indeed. She angrily tossed the Royal Atlas aside.
"How could the largest most accurate collection of maps on the entire world, Not have a map of this. It had a map of the windstreams of the Apploosan desert and a map predicting the dune locations for the next fifty years." There Was in fact almost no wind at all in the Apploosan desert. Consequently, seeing the difference between each of the predicted dune locations took a magnifying glass. "It's not like it's too boring to be here!" Twilight ran her calculations again... and again... aaand again. According to her math there was a chunk of land right above the Crystal Mountain range and to the East of the Crystal Empire that had never been mapped.
Twilight decided to try and run through everything that had happened up to this point. Just in case she missed something
A few days earlier Rainbow Dash came to the library with her adopted daughter Scootaloo. Twilight still didn't quite know how Rainbow Dash managed to be both immature and brash and extremely motherly at the same time, but Twilight just felt a smile appear on her face just thinking about those two.
Twilight shook herself out of that line of thinking. She picked back up her last relevant thought and tried again. So the two of them came into the library with a question. Scootaloo had been learning about the geography of the Crystal Empire. Which was a funny name for a nation the size of Manehatten... Focus! Scootaloo had been learning and... She had wondered why they didn't try to open up a port on the east coast! The class had just gotten to the Crystal Mountain tunnel project, and Scootaloo thought that it would have been easier to just open a sailing port rather than dig through a mountain. Rainbow Dash hadn't known and so they came to her.
Twilight of coursed opened her mouth ready to explain... and just stopped. Twilight couldn't explain it, and that worried her. So she started trying to find out why.
Now here she was three days later. From maps of the ocean currents, to lists of guard posting in the northern areas, she had exhausted all possible literary sources of information on the subject. Her research led to three conclusions. One: there is a group of large islands in line with the Crystal Mountains and Northeast of Manehatten, and it is somehow not been discovered; two: there is a smallish passage through the Crystal Mountains to the Northwest of Manehatten, and it is has also managed to avoid detection; and her third conclusion: all cartographers are idiots.
She had been avoiding this up till now to avoiding looking foalish by missing something obvious. Now, she was certain something stranger than Dash's mothering skills was going on and only the other princesses would be able to help her.
A quick teleport brought her back to her writing desk in the smaller air castle Rainbow Dash and Derpy built. She took a moment to feel sorry for the poor archive interns that were going to clean up after her, but the importance of her mission cut that short. She raised three pens simultaneously and began writing a letter to each of the three other princesses.
Dear Sister
... how to word this?
...ah!
Three days ago, a friend of mine noticed something unusual about the Crystal Railway initiative. Namely, why it was undertaken in the first place. She suggested that a port on the East coast of the continent would have been cheaper both now and then. I undertook a investigation into the coast land north of the Crystal Mountains. I found disturbing evidence of not only a seemingly invisible passage through the mountains, but of a entire invisible island group as well. I'm both confused and scared by these revelations, and hope that one of you might know something of the matter.
Your Faithful Stu Dear Sister and Friend,
Twilight Arcana Sparkle
Twilight Sparkle flew down to her actual castle. The smell of the bog on the other side of the chasm as her workponies continued working together to transform it to arable land, brought a smile on her face. She found spike in the courtyard taking fire breathing lessons from a Dragon Sage.
"Sorry to bother you spike, but would you mind sending these letters to the pro- other princesses for me?"
"Sure thing Twi."
She thanked him, then flew off to check the work on the bog while she had to wait. Waiting was one of the many Princess skills she had learned since her ascendancy.
<->
1 hour past midnight, November 25th, 1654 BRE
Æztrborg (Foremost Fortress Town), Jarldóm et Dyrrdalr (the Jarldom of the Doorway Valley), Ríki Jarnfjöllum (Iron Mountain Kingdom)
The crackling fire is the only sound in the room besides the small sobs of my sister. We have been in this room for hours and the blanket was heated up perfectly to keep out the freezing night air.
I hold sister close as she just lets it all out. I clutched the blood red hair that marked royalty among my people, fighting against my own storm of feelings as I acted as a rock for hers. I was trying desperately to fill just some of the emptiness I felt, but There was no softening the cruel blow that fate had dealt us. Father and brother were dead. Dead dead. Not mortally injured, not clinging to life. Dead. The war didn't even care. It wouldn't stop, not now, not ever. I didn't and wouldn't have time to cry like she did. She was luckier than me in that way.
I had woken up in my tent shortly after the battle. My shock driven stupor had kept me unbalanced, but I was stable enough to accept the situation and begin swearing in the lords that had been at the battle.
Had I been just a year younger they probably would have appointed a steward to the throne. I'm just old enough to rule, and it wasn't like many of the remaining lords were much older than me. Their fathers are dead just as mine is now.
Heh, we are a kingdom ruled by orphans. By young men and women whose parents were cut down like weeds before a tedious farmer.
I had hoped to be a poet or a skald before the Equestrian Tribes declared a crusade against humanity. The Equestrians called it a war for global purity. It wasn't just coincidence that they were fighting against Tritribal wide peasant revolts. This war was just a distraction. My... my father's death was a distraction...
I hadn't gotten to cry once during the whole process, not during the march back to the City, and not as I ran to my sister to inform her of the tragic news and be there for her. I had always been the brother that was there for her, and we had a little ceremony for each family member that died. It happened so often we had a fucking ceremony for-
"Your Highness?" I stir from my dark thoughts and saw that a messenger had popped his head in through the door. He is wearing the colors of the high martial, so this would probably be a message from him. The war had taken away his chance to grieve the last ten beloved family members that died, and these two would be just the same. More unwept tears for spent blood. More loss. I motion the man to enter softly with two motions of my hand. He bows curtly. His bow was a commoner to prince sort of bow rather than a commoner to a soon to be coronated King bow. I didn't actually mind, but father said i should always put my eyes to good use. He had been a good attentive father before all this... shit.
And now I'm acting like a rambling moron. The messenger had been talking this whole time.
"Sorry could you please repeat that again." Manners are important no matter your station.
"High Martial Jarnfel requests your presence in the ivory tower, and I quote, as soon as your sister can spare you." That last bit gave me a smile, and looking down, I can see it made my sister smile too. I bring her head closer to my heart to try and affirm that smile on her face. The request is certainly from Kristofer, but there is still something off about it. Last time I checked, the Ivory Tower was where some scholars had attempted to research ways to counter pony magic with funding from my father. The project had only marginal innovations, making this a rather odd place to hold a meeting. Though it would make sense for a secret meeting.
"You can tell Sir Kristofer I will be there soon."
While I'm curious as to why he chose the Ivory Tower. I have a sister to tend to who is far more important.
I was torn at first, between letting her fall asleep or talking to her. I decided to let her do as she liked for now. She apparently decided sleep, because just a few minutes after the messenger came and went, she was gone to the realm of dreams. Her cute red eyes were hidden from the world for now. I stand up slowly with her in my arms as I slowly wrap her in a blanket. The trip to the bed was a short one, and I had her tucked into bed warm and safe before she could even stir. I called in her guards-maids, donned two more coats, and left for the tower.
Just walking down the keep's hallway, It is almost as if I am descending into the frozen domain of Hel herself*, and when I step outside it's like walking onto a glacier. I can feel the night's chill underneath all three of my coats. I have to shuffle awkwardly to conserve heat. The trip through the courtyard ends up taking almost half an hour, and I groan in relief when I finally get to the tower. Even then, the inside of the tower is only a little better than the cold courtyard air. Hoping to shorten my time in the cold, I take the stairs up right away.
Near the middle of the tower a hand emerges to blocks my path.
"This door your highness." The guard the hand is attached to informs me. The door in question is the only one on this level. The room is probably a suite of some sort, or a library since it took up an entire floor. Stepping up to to the door, I am immediately confronted with a sort of warming sensation. It's as if the ice in my coats is being inexplicably thawed. The Inexplicable part is that I'm not standing in the middle of a bonfire, yet I feel warm under my near frozen coats. I feel immediate revulsion for this strange heat. Every last bone in my body tells me that keeping me this warm, in this sort of chill, is impossible. That something unnatural is occurring.
Curious.