The Bridge Over the Neighgara
“Lieutenant Rarity?”
I jerked my head up at the voice, and saw one of my sergeants poking his head in through the tent-flap. Fluorspar, a gaunt unicorn stallion. He’d found me sitting on my camp bed, bringing my helmet to a brilliant sheen with a well-used cloth. I tossed the latter aside and rested the former on the bed next to me. “Ahem. What is it, sergeant?”
“We sighted an intruder, lieutenant. Sighted and apprehended. A unicorn mare. Nothing identifying her as one of ours.” Fluorspar grimaced. “Or one of the King’s. Looked as though she was trying to head north and sneak past us across the bridge.”
Unmarked ponies didn’t just wander around the warfront these days. And they especially didn’t try to head north. I frowned. “Do you have her outside, sergeant?”
“Yes, lieutenant.”
Lieutenant. The rank was still odd to hear. So soon after I’d just gotten used to ‘Cornet’ as well.
“Well then,” I said, “I’ll come out to make her acquaintance momentarily. She sounds like a pony with a pressing need to answer some straight-forward questions. Keep her apprehended, sergeant.”
“Yes, lieutenant.” Fluorspar withdrew, and I could hear his barked orders from outside, just over the howl of the evening wind.
Giving orders had at least become easier since I was a cornet. Practise makes perfect, or at least adequate. I picked my helmet back up and regarded my reflection in its silver sheen. Rarity stared back up at me.
She looked dreadfully tired — but that was to be expected, it had been a terribly long trot over rough country to the banks of the Neighgara, and I’d helped with my share of the trench-digging at day’s end.
She looked frightfully unkempt and dirty — but, well, a thoroughly-polished suit of barding and snug cloak and authoritative bearing could obscure all sorts of faults. And if I was lucky, the rugged look would be in this season.
She looked mortally drained — but, really, what new officer amongst a troop on the frontline wouldn’t be at the end of a day? And besides, I’d had a good few minutes to myself just now to polish my barding. Why, the unobscured evidence reflected back up at me. That had to have taken some of the edge off.
And she looked sad. But … but that had to be expected as well. It had been barely a month since the Starfields, since the battle there, and it was still intruding. I could give it time. Time for the memories of pounding, hazy terror to abate, to fade. Time for the rasp of steel to hush, for the crushing mass of scared bodies to lift, for the stench of dark magic to diminish, for the screams — oh stars, all the screams — to, to …
I shook my head, breathed deeply once, twice, and thought of well-polished barding. Of bright banners, and well-prepared camps and trench lines, and intruders on whom one must make a good impression.
I composed myself, and for a moment, Lieutenant Rarity looked sternly up at me. I gave the short purple plume one last brush, and donned the helmet, pressing it down upon my mane. It would be a delight when I no longer had to tie my mane back, and could style my curls again.
And with that, I picked up my snug and fetching purple woolen cloak — my last piece of work at the old uniform factory — swept it over my withers, buckled on my blade in its scabbard, coaxed a little light from my horn, and headed out into the evening. Frigid wind greeted me and clutched at my cloak, edged with a hint of sleet.
‘Evening’ was such a relative term at this latitude. It was practically night, with a high, empty expanse of night sky broken only by a few stars, and a few high, drifting wisps of cloud. Princess Celestia had little time for arranging the constellations these days, and smattered the heavens with only a few pole stars to navigate by. Amidst them, the moon shone, and the Mare within snarled at the world. The Long Night a couple of years ago had rather changed her demeanour.
Below it all, on the northern horizon which I emerged from my tent to face, there glimmered a low band of aurora. Flickering sheets of green, shot through with the occasional flicker of red, violet, and black.
As I hugged my cloak closer about me, I took a moment to test the wind’s direction and sniff. Eastery. Clean. Thank providence.
Below, the frigid landscape glistened under the starlight, bisected by the breadth of the Neighgara River. I’d ordered the troop’s tents raised just behind the rocky lip atop a hill. Below me, the hill’s rugged slope ran down towards the river and towards the old stone bridge that spanned all three-hundred-odd metres of the Neighgara. The river grumbled, heavy with floating chunks and slabs of ice. It hadn’t frozen over yet, but High Command’s Weather Division believed the day it would wasn’t far off.
Past the river, black frozen moorland ran all the way to the horizon, pockmarked with the ruins of abandoned steadings. It vanished there amidst the white sawline of the Crystal Mountains, crowned by the poisoned aurora.
To my right, a couple of miles eastwards, the Neighgara Falls roared. Not so close as to be deafening, just close enough to still leave one with the impression that a mountain was being fed through a grinder. Further yet, umpteen miles distant, there came the steady rumble of Cloudsdale’s great, low-lying warclouds being towed north. They were always on the move these past weeks, racing the army’s railways.
Just before me on the slope, there lay several trenches that we’d dug out not two hours earlier, well-concealed upon the rough hillside, dug deep, parapets high. One central trench, and two smaller ones angled on either side, ready for those inside to rake the bridge with shot from either direction.
Several earth ponies and unicorns kept watch in them, all huddled up in their barding and cloaks, breath steaming in the air. Some kept an eye northwards, but some were understandably distracted by the kerfuffle to my left.
“Eyes north, all! Let’s not be ambushed this eve!” I announced, and those who’d been distracted grumbled apologies and turned back to their duty. They might call me Lieutenant Peacock when they thought my ears were elsewhere, but even Lieutenant Peacock needed to be obeyed on the matter of vigilance.
For my part, I turned to the kerfuffle.
A unicorn mare stood nearby, largely covered up by a patched cloak and cowl, ringed by Sergeant Fluorspar and several other soldiers. Two earth ponies with crossbows, Sergeant Terracotta herself and Private Snowdrop; Corporal Glory, a unicorn, had an arrow notched to her bow; and the entirety of the pegasus squad watched from the clouds they’d arranged over the hill.
If the strange mare was at all trepid about being in the sights of at least three bows and being in the midst of a camp of thirty armed ponies, she certainly didn’t show it. Instead, she seemed to be having a spirited argument with Sergeant Fluorspar, even in the face of Fluorspar’s floating blade.
One can only admit a sneaky admiration for that kind of bravado. I trotted closer to investigate.
“—as I keep telling you, it’s important that I get north! If we want to win the war, there’s books I need to retrieve from the Bleakhold.”
“Are there now,” Fluorspar replied, his tone flat.
“Yes! This all started with the surprise attack on Canterlot and the raid on the Royal Library! Some of those books are being kept there. All I need to do is get to them and I’ll be able to—”
“Either you’re one of ours and you’re far from your post,” Fluorspar said. “Or you’re a confused civilian who’s got no business being right on the sharp edge of all this. Or you’re one of the King’s own. Whatever it is, you’re going nowhere at the moment.”
The unicorn let out a frustrated sigh. She nodded to one of the bulging saddlebags she wore under her cloak. “Look, let me just show you.”
Her horn flared with raspberry-coloured magic under her cowl, the light dancing in a pair of violet eyes, but before she could unclasp her saddlebags, Fluorspar’s hiltless blade moved like lightning. The unicorn choked as the tip pressed against her throat, aglow with Fluorspar’s own teal magic. Glory drew the notched arrow back in her bow and aimed, and Terracotta and Snowdrop levelled their crossbows. Above, the pegasi tensed and prepared to pounce. I hurried closer.
The strange mare looked uncertain all of a sudden. Her eyes widened with fear, briefly, before narrowing with thought. She squinted at the blade at her throat as if it were a problem to be solved with enough contemplation.
“Unexpected magic use, stranger,” Fluorspar said, his tone on the eerie side of mild, “is not friendly. You’re going to—”
“Sergeant!”
I came cantering up, and my troops and the strange mare turned to me at my call. “Sergeants Fluorspar and Terracotta, well-apprehended,” I said as I stopped before them. “This is the intruder, I take it?”
“Aye, lieutenant,” Terracotta replied. Fluorspar echoed her, his eyes and blade never leaving the mare.
I turned to the strange mare, and favoured her with my most austere look. “Good eve to you, stranger, notwithstanding the fact you shouldn’t be here. Lieutenant Rarity, 42nd Heartland Volunteers. Who might you be?”
She regarded me right back for a moment, making cursory eye contact before her gaze travelled over the rest of me and the scenery behind me. What coat I could see was only slightly less rough and weatherbeaten than her cloak. A strand of dark purple mane that I could glimpse within her cowl didn’t seem as though it had seen a comb in months. Had the rugged and well-travelled look actually been in this season, she’d have been the most fashionable pony on the warfront.
Not an unqualified feast for the senses, to summarise. But she was certainly intriguing. And her eyes were large and bright and violet, and they practically shone as she scrutinised things. They were eyes that had sought out and seen a lot, and had no intention of stopping.
“I’m Twilight Sparkle,” she replied, frowned, and waggled one hoof vaguely. “Freelance researcher, I suppose. Ah, could your soldier here stop jabbing my throat?”
I arched a brow. “Why should he stop doing that?”
“Because I just want to go north. I’m not an enemy!”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” I turned back to my troops. “Sergeants, I’ll trouble you to escort Ms Sparkle back to my tent. Private Snowdrop, Corporal Glory, kindly remain outside on guard while I have a word with her.”
“Beg pardon, lieutenant,” drawled a voice atop one of the overhanging clouds. I looked up. Sergeant Windward of the pegasi squadron slouched over its lip, his cold, haunted gaze a mismatch for his languid tone. “Would you like a hoof for the questioning? I’ve handled suspected spies before.”
“That shouldn’t be necessary, Sergeant.” Of the three grizzled sergeants I had the honour to command/get commanded by, he was the least grizzled, relatively speaking, and the one with the murkiest reputation. Many a veteran of the assault on Fort Harrow had taken a turn for the worse, after the King’s experiments had been unearthed in its dungeons. ‘Mercy’ was something of a dirty word to them, after what they’d seen. “But should it prove so, I shall call.”
That satisfied Windward, as much as I could tell past his customary cold look, and my troops lost no time in bundling Twilight Sparkle over to my tent. She obliged with only a few token shoves from Terracotta, and soon enough, they pushed her through the tent flap. I followed after, and was glad to be relieved from the chill wind outside.
The tent was much as I’d left it. My camp bed at one side, by a little trunk full of my personal effects. An arcane heating-block in the centre — High Command was leery of open flames when its forces were staking discreet lookouts, but they grudgingly acknowledged the need for warmth. Every tent had a heavy block. When coaxed to life, they made things nicely toasty. On the other side, a table with my personal papers and dragonfire pellets neatly stored away and out of sight.
Few luxuries, but I’d done what I could to give it my personal touch. The firefly lantern that sat on the desk was one from home, and lit the interior with a comforting orange light. A lacquer box beside it held a little sewing kit, and some of the personal papers had vague designs pencilled on their back. A mare could still dream.
And in the canvas just above my bed, I’d sewn a few other pieces of paper. Drawings from home.
Twilight Sparkle hesitantly trudged over to the block, and seemed to just savour the warmth for a moment. I turned back to my troops and nodded. Fluorspar and Terracotta, old campaigners that they were, returned the nod and left. Glory and Snowdrop hesitantly saluted and followed them out to take up positions outside.
Twilight Sparkle leaned closer over the heating-block, and something like a satisfied smile crept across her features. It vanished when there came the sound of my own hiltless blade swwhing free of its scabbard. A metre of bare steel, gleaming and razor-sharp on all sides, always adds that je-ne-sais-quoi to a room’s atmosphere.
“Beg pardon, Ms Sparkle,” I said, and smiled in what could have been an apologetic way. “But when up here and dealing with the unknown, the policy is to ask questions over a drawn blade. I hope you shan’t take offence. Or, for that matter, try to make a run for it.”
“Oh, no,” she replied, absently, first staring at my blade and then at a point two inches over the left side of my withers, as if back in deep thought. “Perfectly pragmatic. Understandable. And I don’t think I should run. Saw the pegasi squadron up above. I could run, but not far. I could teleport, but not for too long before I got tired.”
I frowned at her, yet more intrigued. “You can teleport, you say? Quite a potent trick.” The sort of trick that came with advanced schooling, or specialist training. Was she one of ours? It wouldn’t be the first time High Command had tried some bluff too subtle for their own good … “Any connection to the School for Gifted Unicorns, perchance?”
“Hmm. Oh. Oh, no.” A succession of emotions coloured her features at this point. Confusion, brief sadness, wistfulness, and finally, wry humour. “No. Had the chance once, but no. I’m on my own.”
Curiouser and curiouser. If I’d been an enemy spy, it’d have been an easy cover story to latch onto. So many of the School’s graduates were now in High Command’s own specialist corps and filling the officer ranks, and the latest years, I’d heard, were being trained exclusively for the war in all manner of ways. At the least, it would have taken me a while to message High Command and retrieve a list of the school’s students and alumni, and given her a chance to wreak havoc.
But then, maybe not leaning into an easy cover story was what the enemy might do to try and deliberately downplay suspicions.
But then-then, the point where you started double- and triple-guessing was the point where one went pointlessly mad. Pointless madness was rather more of an asset to the enemy than oneself, old Captain Seafoam had made that quite clear.
Twilight had this going for her as well; there wasn’t so much as a whiff of dark magic about her. I have a sensitive nose, or whatever the precise sense is, for these things. She couldn’t be one of the King’s own.
“How interesting,” I said. “No connection to the School, or any connection to Equestria’s forces. Kindly clarify your allegiance then, Ms Sparkle, and what you’re doing here.”
“I want to end this war and see Sombra defeated.” She didn’t quite spit when she said the King’s name, as was the dismaying custom in Manehattan at least, but there was a respectable amount of venom in her tone. “And I need to cross the Neighgara, so I can slip into Empire territory and reach the Bleakhold. Then I can infiltrate it, and find the books I’m looking for.”
I frowned. “And what, pray tell, do you expect these books to tell you?”
“Magic,” she breathed. “Some magic that could … that could undo this. All of this. That could lay low the King, and restore what we had.” She looked genuinely excited then, and for a moment, it seemed the new day had dawned exclusively in her eyes. “I’ve been researching this for a while. Chasing stories and accounts up and down Equestria, over the sea once, even up into the Empire’s holdings a couple of times.”
Her voice lowered, thick and earnest. “The first attack took Canterlot by surprise, didn’t it? A raid, where the Royal Library itself was caught up and many of its books in the restricted section taken. Taken, not burned. There had to be something in there Sombra wanted, something he didn’t want Equestria to keep having, where’d he’d keep in as secure a place as possible. I’ve a few guesses as to what it might be, but I want to be sure. I want the books. And then maybe … maybe I could fix everything. Just a little more travel, infiltration, and book-theft. Nothing I’ve not done before.”
She paused then as she remembered to take a breath.
I could only smile sadly. It was a nice dream. Uncover one secret to topple the tyrant and win the war. Who hadn’t dreamed of that? Who hadn’t heard it all before?
“A worthy endeavour,” I said. Of course I knew about the raid on Canterlot that had shocked us all and started all this, one couldn’t know. Some of the particulars, like the library being targeted, would have to be confirmed when I sent my messages.
But why even bother to confirm it? Twilight Sparkle, keen and well-travelled though she may have been, was still a civilian. She couldn’t cross this bridge and go north. She couldn’t pass outwith Equestrian protection and die, or worse, be fed to the mask-factories of the King. My orders were quite clear.
Ere I could dwell on the matter much, though, she spoke. “That’s why I’m here.” The look Twilight fixed me with was curious, and surprisingly … concerned, it seemed. “Why are you here?”
Because the victory at Starfields was costly, but it was a victory, and the King has nothing left in the East for now. Because our newly-minted Commander Rainbow Dash wants to sweep north through the vacuum, and wants a watch here in case any nasty surprises come via the Neighgara to harass our advance.
Because I had the sheer luck to survive Starfields, and many positions above me were open for upcoming cornets, and the hardiest old squads that could be spared needed a token officer.
Because everything in the uniform factory was being more and more automated so they could eke out a few more ponies for the front, and the staff sergeant at the conscription office said that anypony who could sound as though they knew what they were talking about — and if we were all very lucky, actually know as well — could sail through the accelerated officer training.
Because there’d been too many worrying newspaper headlines, and all the posters of the Princess looking sad and grim and determined and saying She Wanted Me wore me down, and besides, there’s hardly an able-bodied pony left who hasn’t been drafted. My turn had to come.
Because I have a little sister in Manehattan, and a mother still, and it’s not so far from the front these days, and I have to do my part, I can’t have them getting into, into the clutches of the King, no matter the amputees and haunted-looking veterans I’d seen on the streets, I can’t, no matter the screaming at Starfields, I can’t, no matter all of it, I can’t, I can’t —
“Why, I’m keeping a watch over the bridge,” I replied. “Otherwise, it may be crossed by anypony silly enough to risk their life on the wrong side.”
Twilight opened her mouth, and I leaned forward to rest a hoof on her wither. “Do please head back south,” I said gently. “It’s not going to be pretty here for some time, with the new push north. Maybe even less pretty than it was before. As a new acquaintance who’s not unpleasant to converse with, and who I’d sooner see stay alive, please do your research behind the safe side of the front line. Leave the breaking-and-entering of fortresses to Her Majesty’s Army.”
Twilight paused then. She’d smiled, with mixed-parts surprise and bashfulness, at the ‘not unpleasant’ part, though she composed herself quickly. Her gaze roamed around the interior of the tent for a moment, as if trying to find something that could help her, or a way out, or anything.
I watched her carefully, and my magic ever-so-slightly flared around my blade. If she seemed like she was about to make a break for it, or try to summon the magic to teleport away, I’d be ready to swing out with the blade’s flat and clout her horn, and whistle for assistance, and I’d see her bound and a magical inhibitor jammed on her horn. Hardly hospitable behaviour to somepony who hadn’t been a bad guest, but beastly times make beasts of us all.
But I realised that she didn’t seem to be entertaining thoughts of escape.
Instead, she was scrutinising the drawings I’d sewn into the canvas over my bed.
“What are these?” Twilight asked.
“Ah!” I said, regarding the drawings with pride. “These are treasures from home. Perhaps you’re familiar with Manehattan’s foremost up-and-coming artiste, one Sweetie Belle?”
Twilight looked from the drawings to me, and then back to the drawings, and then back to me with a genuine smile. “Little sister, am I right?”
“Precisely so.”
They were all drawings Sweetie had given me before I stepped aboard the train that would take me north, and some had been enclosed in a letter she’d sent me shortly before Starfields. It was work from a keen foal, and, to be dreadfully blunt, it showed. But of all the things I could wake up to first thing in the morning and see before I drifted off to sleep each night, I wouldn’t have swapped them for a whole floor of the Hoovre.
“I like this one of you in your barding.” Twilight, clearly a mare of taste, tapped the culprit.
“I’m partial to that one too,” I replied, “especially since she’s given me a general’s uniform. Great things are clearly expected of me, and as Celestia is my witness, I shall deliver.”
“I especially like this one of you stabbing Sombra.”
“Isn’t it a gem? I know for a fact she’d have had to have used all that was left of her red crayon to render the important details. What did I do to deserve such a loving sister?”
Twilight’s smile was gentle, and she looked at the drawings for a moment longer. Eventually, she said, in a tone almost too quiet to hear, “I’ve a brother out there. In the army.”
And wasn’t that something I could understand. “What’s his name and rank?” I asked? “Maybe I know him.” I almost certainly wouldn’t, but there was a chance. And I could set her at ease.
“Shining Armour,” she replied, appallingly casually, and she continued, quite oblivious to my gawk and strangled ‘Sh-gwuh?’ “He’s with the Princess’s own guard. But she’s been getting more and more directly involved lately, and every time she does, so does her guard. And I don’t want him to ...”
“Lieutenant Rarity!”
I jerked upright, and looked up to the pale face of Snowdrop poking in through the tent flap. “Private Snowdrop? What is it?”
“Lieutenant,” she said, her voice trembling, just a touch. “The wind’s changed.”
I stood still for a moment, just a moment. “From the north?” I asked, my voice low.
Snowdrop nodded.
I turned back to Twilight. “Stay here,” I said, and swept out the tent without even glancing back.
Either she’d obey or she wouldn’t, and if she wouldn’t, well ... there were about to be so many other pressing problems. She said something at my back. I didn’t hear her, I was already outside, clutching my cloak close against the razor-cold wind.
Oh stars, it had changed.
The north wind blew, and on it, there blew a faint, rank stench. A stomach-churning smell of rot, that coupled with a biting chill that pricked goose-pimples across my hide. A low drone seemed to be carried on the wind on the very cusp of hearing, insinuating and rasping. A foul taste had even settled on my tongue. Wrong, wrong, wrong, whispered every sense at once.
Dark magic.
I glanced briefly skywards as I hurried, seeing the high wisps of cloud scudding south, before I looked to my troop. They were already moving, with short, sharp whispers from the sergeants chivvying them into the trenches looking down towards the bridge, or ushering them up into the low clouds. Earth ponies and unicorns crouched behind the parapets and readied bows and crossbows, softly cursing, muttering under their breath. Up above, I heard the faint clink of spurs, the rustle of barding amongst the pegasi.
No lights. Little noise. Whatever was out there, whatever was coming, we had to take it by surprise. I’d headed out earlier to the bridge with the sergeants and looked up at our position and wargamed this, hoping all the while that we wouldn’t have to put our games into action.
Sergeant Terracotta was waiting for me when I slipped down next to her into the central trench. She wordlessly passed me a short nightscope. I accepted it in silence, looked out through one of the gaps in the parapet, and raised it to my eye.
There, on the bridge — movement. And the distant tread of hooves … many hooves, moving in measured lockstep upon the old stone. I squinted down through the scope, trying to make out the figures past the darkness, trying to swallow down a rising bubble in my throat.
A column, coming over the bridge. Six abreast, for nine or ten rows. I could already see the glow of the front row’s eyes. Poisonous green gleamed past the eye-slits of their steel helms, the wretched helms of dominion. They had earth ponies and unicorns in their number, and one in the front even had the shining coat of one of the few remaining crystal ponies.
When the King’s original stock of thralls had begun to run low, he’d drawn more and more upon the territories he’d occupied and any prisoners his forces might take. You couldn’t let yourself be taken alive these days.
I drew out a piece of paper from a small saddlebag, a pencil, and a dragonfire pellet. With indecent haste, I scrawled a message, hoping it’d come out legible in the dark. Engaged at bridge. Force of sixty. Holding. Lt Rarity, followed by a scribbled code-symbol. The instant I was done, I crushed the pellet into the paper, and the little message vanished for High Command amidst a whirl of flame.
On came the steady trot, sixty hooves crashing on the stone perfectly in lockstep.
My stomach churned, and my vision briefly wobbled. They’d advanced in lockstep across the Starfields, too. Over the dark expanse of the fields, indigo grass dotted with tiny, glowing flowers, soon to be churned to mud. A vast, implacable mass advancing on our lines, on our pitifully thin lines, with things that had once been ponies lumbering in their midst, the tread of all their hooves filling the world like thunder, unhurried and unstoppable, till it was all I could do not to weep and turn and flee, till the cries of “Loose!” rang out at our backs and the sky turned to fire…
I breathed in sharply, the air sharp and chill and foul. I wasn’t at Starfields. I was here. I was here. My magic clutched for a whistle on a string hanging around my neck, and I raised it to my dry mouth.
Terracotta was giving me a look. I returned it, forcing myself to appear cool, composed, or as much as one could with a whistle between their teeth. Any number of miracles can follow when one simply forces a brave face and leads by example.
They kept advancing, all the King’s thralls, and I eyed the distance between us. All around, ponies fumbled with their weapons. Bowstrings creaked. Hooves shuffled. Somepony, probably Private Lucky Penny, tried to suppress her cough and choked into her hoof.
Eye the distance. Sixty metres, maybe, between us and them. Maybe twenty till they’d be clear of the bridge and onto our open ground. Fifty-five. Terracotta looked insistently at me. I gripped the whistle between my teeth, and tried to force my breathing steady.
Fifty. Green stars shone amidst a river of advancing steel.
And I blew the whistle. One short blast.
The instant after, my troop rose to the parapet, and a wave of bolts and arrows shivered forth towards the bridge. They swept down amongst the column, scything into the front row and punching into its flanks. Thralls toppled, were knocked back, slumped as lengths of feather-sprouting wood fell amongst them.
They didn’t scream. They couldn’t scream. The helmets saw to that. But they could gasp, and rattle out their dying breaths, and bleed where they fell upon the bridge. The ranks behind halted their advance and pulled back instinctively, some reaching out on reflex to pull up the dead and dying and hold them in front as shields. Some unicorn at their back let loose a flash of red light from their horn, flaring up at the sky.
How many had fallen? Many had taken more than one arrow or bolt, a few had cheated the shots with their barding, some shots had just flown into the river. Seven, maybe? Eight?
I glanced around at the central trench. Ten, a mix of earth ponies and unicorns, the sturdiest, the teams from the squads most adept at close-quarters work. And I flourished my blade, blew two short blasts on the whistle, and leapt clear of the parapet. “At them!” I screamed, the words babbling out, hardly seeming to come from my own throat at all. “At them! Hold them on the bridge! Celestia!”
And the troops of the central trench leapt up with me. Some roared “Celestia!” also, others “Equestria!” or their home town or simply “Get them!”, all of it drowned out by the thunder of our hooves pelting down the slope. I was amongst them, legs barrelling me onwards as if they knew what they were doing. Thank heavens some part of me did. I screamed down the slope, unthinking, riding a wave of pure and sudden exhilaration and panic. Arrows and bolts and whipped through the sky over us from the side-trenches and the teams there, and several more thralls fell. Onwards, onwards, and they were getting closer, closer, stars, they were right there...
One thrall leaned past two upraised bodies with a crossbow in hoof, aiming right for me. My mind froze for an instant, even as my hooves refused to stop, and my blade rose in a desperate, useless ward. But a bolt thwwped past my ear and punched into one of his eye-slits. He toppled back, and Terracotta practically barged past me, dropping her crossbow as she galloped. “Here!” she bellowed, as her hooves made first contact with the stone of the bridge. “Form ranks! Spurs front! Blades and lances behind!”
When in doubt, let Terracotta shout instructions. Jostled along, I suddenly found myself coming to a stop amidst a row of my troops with couched lances readied, hiltless blades angled in their magic and ready to come thrusting out. Before us, crouched and ready, the front row waited with their spurs and steel-shod hooves ready to come slashing up from below. Fluorspar was to my left, I realised, with Terracotta before me in the front.
Let them pour the entire column at us. They’d fail. The bridge was only so wide, and we held it. And no matter their numbers, they would find us hard to break.
The front row of the enemy stood just a few metres shy from us. Several fallen thralls they hadn’t bothered to heave up as shields writhed on the stone between us, making it run red. This close, the foulness of their masks was all but choking, their dark magic thick in the air.
At their rear, their silent ranks seemed to be parting, as if affording someone in their midst a path to the front. I caught a glimpse of horns, seething and smoking, and their front ranks tensed. No first moves from them, not this moment.
An instant of calm before the storm. I plucked up my whistle again and blew one short note, followed by one a split-second longer, and spat it out. “Forward!” I shouted. “Forward!”
The front rank, still crouched, began to shuffle forwards in an advance across the bridge, and us in the back row followed. The nearest thralls shuffled back in turn, and a couple of unicorns in their midst were readying lances. The lockstep was briefly gone, as a great many helms now juggled their strategy with individual thought. So their magic went, we’d been told.
And they remained silent. There came no barked commands, no whistle-blasts, no curses or insults or screams or sobs. They just advanced, as quiet as death.
But before they could greet us, something swept over my head, and I looked up to see Windward’s pegasi come tearing in, the sergeant himself roaring, “Remember Harrow!” My whistle-summons had done its work. They peeled around to the sides of the column on the bridge and slashed in, couched lances thrusting forth and spurs jabbing out. I glimpsed Windward sweep around one thrall, hook them by the edge of their helm and just pull them right over the bridge’s edge and into the raging Neighgara.
And those thralls at the front who turned to ward off the pegasi were suddenly left open to our own advancing ranks. To my right, Corporal Indigo Spark slammed her own lance out over the head of Terracotta, and a distracted thrall took it right through their throat, slumping back with a hideous rasp. The mass of them still on the bridge seemed to be forming nothing so much as an elongated schiltron, facing outwards on all sides, a few lances and blades jabbing out from their midst and try and fend off the circling pegasi and our own advance. Another volley of arrows lashed out from our side-trenches to hurt them yet further.
I watched the display and fought the dreadful urge to laugh, briefly giddy. Textbook. It was working. Thank the princess, it was working. Our victory might even be bloodless. Surely the helmets would turn around and extricate themselves, and we’d have ...
Screams rang out at my back. From up the slope. I turned, beheld, and my gut twisted in horror.
Thralls flew down at our trenches, pegasi strapped into the same awful helms, and a dozen or so came spinning down from the high skies to take our archers from above. Their wings shone, glistening with the rimefrost of the highest altitudes. From one point on the slope, a stream of raspberry-coloured fire stabbed up through the darkness, and sent one down in flames to the ground.
My gaze rose to the high, high clouds that pockmarked the night sky, and I could have retched upon realising how they’d hidden themselves, how the red flare the unicorn had conjured had called them down from the high skies and thin clouds to ambush us. No, no, no.
I jammed the whistle into my mouth, blasted short-long-long, and even as he swept over me, Sergeant Windward whirled briefly mid-air and turned in the direction of our trenches.
His cold gaze widened. It was the last thing he ever did.
A thrown lance came whirring up from the thrall ranks and smashed through his torso, punching him out of the sky. He screeched as he spun down, the sound of it thin and wretched, till he cracked down neck-first against the bridge’s side, and then slipped silently over into the Neighgara.
I watched him vanish. My blade trembled in my grasp.
It was going wrong.
Everything was going hideously wrong, all at once, and even a few of the pegasi troops briefly stopped short. It took every shred of will I had to remember why I was there, and who I was, and what I had to do. “At them, pegasi!” My shout emerged raw and I gestured with my blade towards the slope. “At them! Clear the skies!”
Those who’d been shocked by Windward’s fall rallied and flew forth, to be met by their counterparts in the air. The screams and screeching steel and utter, utter chaos of any aerial melee rang out, and I frantically spun away from it all. There was still a bridge to fight for.
The thrall ranks were still shy of our own, but without the pressure of the pegasi, they’d edged that little bit closer, and the rears ranks were still opening and closing to permit something though. Eventually, that something revealed itself. A unicorn, their horn cracked and smoking and blazing white-hot under an orange corona of magic. They shambled forward unsteadily, as if their sense of how to so much as walk was getting weaker by the minute. The steel of their helmet nearest their horn glowed cherry-red.
And as the front ranks of the thralls parted to let them through, they dipped their head, levelling their horn at us. Whatever monstrous spell the helm was forcing from them was aimed for the heart of our ranks.
Time stood still. As it had once or twice before on the Starfields, when the dark tide had seemed to sweep in and bring me this close to the edge of death.
Everything seemed cold, and faraway, and the edges of the world misted red. The mad exhilaration and focus that dwelt on the far side of terror. The zone, as it were.
My legs moved without prompting, my blade swept down into a low ward, and I all but vaulted over my own front rank towards the unicorn thrall. My hooves hit the stone, and my blade slashed wildly up, a silver ghost in the air. It caught the thrall on the bottom of their helmet and knocked their head upright, the instant before the magics screaming around their horn detonated.
The world erupted, an orange cone of flame blasting forth from their horn and billowing flames into the sky, reducing the thrall underneath to a dark silhouette. I was blinded briefly, the light dazzling, the heat of it crisping the hide on my face. I staggered backwards, blinking and coughing, and at my front, I was dimly aware of dark shapes surging forward. Half-blind, choking on smoke, I thrashed my blade before me, clawing out like a desperate animal to keep them at bay
But hooves caught my withers and voices rang out at my back. “To the lieutenant!” “Advance!” “Good work, Peacock! Get back now!”
Warm, barding-clad bodies engulfed me and pulled me back behind the troop’s ranks, my hooves stumbling. I desperately tried to blink my vision back into order, and past flashing patches of light, I could make out my ranks closing with the thralls. Spellfire briefly crackled and slashed forth between the lines, magical knife-fights before the true close-up work began. One of my own screamed and toppled backwards, the side of their face a red, bubbling ruin. Indigo Spark.
I lurched myself into steadiness, even as the screams of metal meeting metal and shrieks as metal met flesh rang forth past the troop’s ranks, as hooves crashed onto and dug into the stone. Indigo Spark’s scream subsided into a piteous moan, and I nearly stumbled over a fallen thrall in my haste to get to her, to get her clear of the bridge.
I had to get her off. But even as I made for her, I heard cries ring out from the hillside and the trenches. One of the highest and most piercing might have been Snowdrop, crying for her mother.
Stars, I had to save her too. I had to see the fight between our archers and pegasi and their own pegasi-thralls. They couldn’t be allowed to attack the back of our ranks on the bridge. They couldn’t win.
As I made for Indigo Spark, sudden motion in the corner of my eye distracted me. I turned to see two of the pegasi hurtling down towards the river, twisting and grappling, too fast for me to make out who was who. One was smashing a spur repeatedly into the other’s head, even as the other held them tight and pinned their wings. They splashed down beneath the roaring river waters, narrowly missing a great chuck of ice.
I didn’t see whether either of them rose again. Something blindsided me and smashed across the front of my helmet. Stars and pain exploded in my skull as I went flying back.
My helmet’s right side knocked down against the edge of the bridge’s stone wall, and amidst a ghastly ringing noise, the stars mixed with black. Everything went away for a moment, everything was forgotten. I came down into a crumpled heap at the wall’s base. Muffled roaring pounded in through my ears, and choked breath escaped me.
Slowly, fitfully, I twisted my aching head to try and make sense of things. Above, the raging world had collapsed into blurs of black and orange. Gleaming figures grappled back and forth across it, their voices muffled. Silhouettes flew by in the night. Raspberry-coloured fire rippled out across the sky at one side, sickly green-red flames stabbed forth at the other.
Everything ached. Everything seemed so very remote. I was so very tired.
Something — someone was approaching me, their wings outspread and shining with frost, green slits simmering down. I blinked blearily up at them as they loomed over me and raised a hoof.
A spur gleamed on that hoof. And urgency slashed through my mind’s fog just as it came stabbing down.
I tried to twist up and aside, but not fast enough. It punched past my barding and jabbed into the top right of my torso, skewering me with cold, sudden pain. With an agonised choke, I whirled my left forehoof around and to smash their foreleg away, and the tear of it leaving almost made me black out.
The enthralled pegasus was already weaving away, and a crossbow bolt that was embedded up to the fletching high up in their right rear leg hardly seemed to be impeding them. They sprang forward, and their red spur blurred at me.
But I was already rising up and after them, staggering upright on unsteady hooves, pain and exhilaration lifting me off the ground. I held one armoured foreleg up as a makeshift shield, and desperately fended off the jabs and slashes from the spur. And my magic groped around the ground, hunting for my fallen blade. The thrall-pegasus tore at me, and white-hot lines of agony ran across my leg wherever the spur snuck past my greave, but they didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. My magic had found my blade on the ground.
The thrall drew their spurred hoof back, as if to just smash my foreleg away. My attention went briefly to the bolt stuck in their rear leg, and so did my magic. I grasped the bolt and twisted, screwing it in that last half-inch, and their leg buckled underneath them. They sprawled. Helpless, for a moment.
I swept up the blade. I spun on them. I thrust.
They stopped short where they writhed, my blade sunk between their helm and chestplate. A soft wheeze escaped them. Their spur trembled up into the air, and then their whole frame slowly slumped. The green magic filling the slits of their helm faded, and then vanished.
Breath caught in my throat. The exhilaration and fury ebbed, and I was left strangely numb. I stood properly upright and rested some weight on my right foreleg, and nearly sobbed at the pain that blossomed in the wound under my wither at the motion. My magic closed around the blade and tried to pull it free from the gap in their barding. It resisted, stuck fast, and I wrenched at it.
They weren’t my first.
Starfields. Always Starfields. Now here.
Don’t dwell on it, don’t dwell on them, no choice at all, don’t, my thoughts spun as I finally managed to pull the red blade free with a ghastly scraping noise. There was still a battle, I, I had to—
Raspberry-coloured magic flashed to my left, and I spun with my blade raised, a snarl rattling out of me.
“No! L-Lieutenant! Rarity! It’s me!” The unicorn mare I’d turned on flinched back. “It’s Twilight Sparkle!”
I paused and took her in, and true enough, it was the mare that I’d questioned in my tent a brief lifetime ago. Twilight’s cowl was torn, a long cut ran red across her brow, and her horn smoked faintly with use. Magic flickered around it, the same hue that I’d seen flaming on the hillside. Her lively eyes flitted this way and that, in something between a tactician’s rapid appraisal and a scared beast’s skittishness.
Her face was pale as she regarded me. “You… Lieutenant, you’re hurt—”
“Have to,” I muttered, twirling the blade once, twice, and shivered. The red was trickling back in around the edges of my vision, and the chill had set back in. Words were effortful to find and produce. “Have to, to, withdraw. Get the injured off the bridge. Pegasi can, can put them on a cloud, push them east.”
I fumbled for my whistle while Twilight stared at me. Where had my whistle gone? I needed to sound a withdrawal.
“But,” she started. “But the trenches, the hillside, they’ve —”
“Run,” I mumbled, ignoring her. “Go. Gallop south, Twilight. Indigo. Others. Whistle. Have to...”
I trailed off as I turned back towards the body of the bridge, scorched by blasts of arcane fire and littered with bodies, so many bodies. Some of them from my troop. The smoke-filled darkness made it hard to see who was still fighting. But fighting was happening, chaotic and haphazardly, some indistinct figures clashing on the bridge and a scant few yet in the skies. But there were more down than standing, and I saw nearly all my troops moaning or cursing or still on the ground, with thralls looming over them.
Our ranks had been broken. How?
There — two unicorns locked in a swift and savage blade-fight, silver ghosts filling the air between them. But a brief moment after I saw them, one of them won. A silver blur whipped through one’s throat and came out crimson on the other side, and the struck unicorn fell with a small, wet death-rattle. Their teal magic winked out, and their blade clattered on the stone.
I saw the fallen unicorn’s face, and I recognised Sergeant Fluorspar.
His killer stepped idly on over him, their blade floating back into a ward. The eye-slits of their helm shone green, and their horn and the aura around their blade burned black, with curls of red and green and violet flame lapping around its edge. The colours of the poisoned aurora, the colours of dark magic.
It hurt to so much as look at. It hurt to even be this close to. Foul wrongness clotted every sense I had, nearly overwhelming my fatigue and horror and dull grief with the simple animal urge to run, get out, get away, flee. My legs trembled.
“Lieutenant Rarity,” Twilight, her voice no longer shaky, but terribly, fearfully calm and controlled, “you have to run.”
The thrall casually wiped their hiltless blade clean on Fluorspar’s cloak as they made eye contact with me ...
… and they spoke.
“Pardon my mess.” His voice was deep and melodious, smug as an emperor’s, and radiated cold amusement. “A hazard of my exercise.”
“Lieutenant,” whined Twilight. “Please.”
Something that any sensible pony would flee from at my front. A sensible voice urging me to do exactly that at my rear. Good reasons engulfed me.
But my dead troops filled the space between us. And Fluorspar lay at his hooves.
I raised my blade.
“Much as I’d enjoy another spar, gallant lieutenant, there is no need,” the strange thrall said. His smug voice deepened, till it could have come from the empty night itself. “It’s not too late to put down your blade. It’s not too late to bow. Come, pay homage. Bow before your king.”
I looked at the strange thrall, at the dark magic that all but corroded the very air around him, at the unblinking green of his eye-slits.
Realisation dawned, and fear overpowering clutched at my gut, turned my blood to ice. And as it did, the world grew a little redder. Coldness filled my veins, and the world.
“Sombra,” I whispered.
The King, oh stars, the King himself stood before me, dark magic palpable about him. He swung his blade casually to and fro, playful and restless, and the blood of my soldiers dripped from it.
What Equestrian hadn’t had nightmares of something like this?
What Equestrian who’d ever held a weapon hadn’t briefly dreamed?
My aches didn’t matter. Not my cut foreleg, not the stab-wound in my torso, nor the lingering dull pain in my head, not even the foulness of the dark magic. My blade angled forward into a drill-perfect ward, as if some other pony held it in her magic. “Come on, then,” I murmured, and began to trot towards him.
Twilight screamed something at my back; I didn’t hear what. “Come on! Here’s my homage!” I snarled. And then I tore right at the Dread King, the Usurper of the Empire, the arch-foe of Equestria, Sombra himself. “CELESTIA!”
He stood, still idly swinging his blade, though the green light of his eyes seemed to flash.
For a moment, the blue fire of the magic around my blade outshone the darkness all around, and I lunged to bring it crashing down on Sombra like a shooting star. Then he moved, his blade blurring up and around in his vile magic to knock my own aside.
But I was already pulling the blade back to come jabbing up at him, the seemingly-wild swing turning smoothly into a controlled thrust. The point glanced off the steel of his helm, and Sombra hastily stepped back. For a brief moment, he seemed almost … he surely couldn’t have been surprised.
But the moment passed, and after a second’s hesitation, his blade rose in a mock-salute. And then he came at me, his steel moving almost too fast to see. And I rose to meet him.
Our blades slashed and blocked and jabbed out in the space between us, grey ghosts for a few moments that seemed to last a lifetime, filling the air with the scream of tortured metal. Not enough room to circle one another, no quarter given. Every blow of his that came raining down faster than any bladework I’d ever known was knocked aside by my own, met thin air as I side-stepped or backtracked, and every opening he left me found a blade slamming right through it.
Red had overtaken me, and the whole world was cold, colder than the darkness past the stars. Some other pony had possessed me, somepony to whom their body’s aches were meaningless, somepony to whom the blade was all that mattered, to whom their opponent falling dead at her hooves was all that mattered.
Every scrap of muscle memory I’d retained from the weekly drills in the uniform factory, and every lesson that had been shouted and bruised into me in the cadets’ crash-course for bladework, and everything that had kept me alive at Starfields, everything was keeping me alive and keeping him at bay and looking for the moment, just the right moment …
And that moment seemed to come. He rained blows down upon the tight circle of steel my blade wove in the air, hammering down like a storm till he broke away, just for a moment.
A laugh escaped him, and his blade twirled in a playful flourish. “And now,” he purred, “in earnest—”
I jabbed out with a viper-quick feint, passing perilously close to the eye-slit of his helmet. He flinched back, raising one forehoof and his own blade to ward me off. That moment of motion was all I needed, the red whispered. As smoothly and quickly as if I’d been wielding a needle, I slipped my blade back from his helm and jabbed down, right at the same gap twixt helm and chestplate.
But as my blade swept in, his forehoof descended and stamped down upon it, pinning it against the stone of the bridge. I frantically tugged at it, trying to wrench it free. But I may as well have been trying to lift a boulder. He just stood there, never mind the blood trickling from his hoof as my blade bit in, and smiled.
Slowly, casually, with all the ease and bonhomie of a cat playing with a mouse, he lifted his blade high over me. The sheen of its edge filled the world. I could hear Twilight Sparkle screaming something at my back. It might have been, “Lieutenant, step back!”
Sombra heard her. He briefly glanced in her direction, and seemed struck by her for a moment. A low hiss escaped him.
And there was the moment.
My magic seized the edge of my cloak, and swept the thick folds of wool right up and over the King’s blade. He blinked, nonplussed, but before he could even try to grapple with it or slide it free, I struck again. Light from my horn flared right into his face, enough to dazzle, enough to briefly blind. The world collapsed into blue-streaked white, and I heard Sombra curse, step back.
And as he staggered, his blade still trapped, I grabbed for my freed blade, rotated it upwards, and punched right up.
There came a soft grunt from Sombra.
I turned my head away, shook it, blinked, tried to restore my senses, and when I turned back to Sombra the moment after, I could just about make out shapes, silhouettes, gradually taking on more details. The blade emerged from Sombra’s torso, red trickling down past it. He stood, and rocked slightly on his hooves. His own blade slumped free of my cloak, low in his magical grip, momentarily forgotten.
The red mist receded, and the cold was replaced with a disbelieving warmth that left me almost giddy. Had I just won the war? I couldn’t have, it couldn’t have been that easy, surely I hadn’t, stars above, had I?
For a moment, Sombra looked down at the blade impaling his torso, like a banner planted in the mud. His face was hidden past his helm, but one forehoof rose to pat at the blade. As if confirming it was real.
“Well done. A fine blow, unfairly struck,” he eventually murmured. His voice was wet with blood, though there was a clear tone of gratified surprise in it. “I have other vessels than this. The spar is yours.”
His head rose again, and fading green met my own gaze. “But I must insist that this crossing is mine. Farewell, lieutenant.”
Up past his dimming eyes, black simmered to life around his horn. Black, threaded through with red and violet and poisonous, seething green. Simmering, and blazing, and building to a mad intensity in seconds, and aimed directly at me. I frantically wrenched my blade free and stabbed him again, and again, and he didn’t so much as flinch. As if he’d put the vessel’s senses to one side.
No time to stop him, my fatigued mind belatedly realised. There’d never been a chance, if he thought his current body was perfectly expendable.
I closed my eyes, and tried to think of home.
“No.”
Twilight’s voice rang out at my back, cold and clear and sharp. Not a shout. Just as if she was stating fact. I opened my eyes, just in time to see the bolt of raspberry-coloured magic arcing from behind me to strike at Sombra. Like thunder chasing lightning.
Her magic sparked across his head as he ducked, briefly disrupting his dark magic. A growl escaped him, and Twilight Sparkle all but barged past me, horn alight. Her face was set, her teeth gritted, her eyes violet ice, and even as I hesitantly stepped back and drew my blade back to my side, she volleyed spellfire at Sombra, chasing it up with a wave of magic that turned to a glittering shield between us and the King.
Sombra snarled as the spellfire buffeted him and raked his barding and hide, and his own dark magic raced to clot around it, smother it even as it burned. A hammer-blow of the magic smashed against the front of Twilight’s shield, turning its solid form almost immediately to a jigsaw of crystalline cracks.
Wings flapped in the darkness behind and around us. Twilight looked quickly from Sombra to the skies, breathed out, and turned to me. Her icy eyes turned briefly gentle. “Trust me for a moment,” she whispered.
I was hardly about to say no.
She swept one foreleg over my withers and wheeled back towards Sombra. Her horn blazed with magic, the light of her aura building, tight and focused and seething till it was almost white. A ragged pant escaped her, but she kept at it. On the side of her shield, Sombra’s form rose, his dark magic burning like a hole in the world and a snarl of rage escaping him. The remaining ranks of thralls trudged in lockstep behind him, ready to march in his wake. Several pegasi buzzed through the skies, flying right for us.
Furious dark magic surged at the damaged shield once more. But Twilight was faster. A white-hot lance of magic leapt out from her horn and into her own shield. And the instant she released it, she pressed closer into me, and another aura of magic quickly enveloped us. Warm, and gentle, and —
— and the instant after, the world erupted. Light and noise and blistering heat rippled at me.
And the instant after that, something seemed to hook me and spirit me away into darkness.
And the instant after that, and what a crowded series of instants that had been, I found myself flopping back into the light. My hooves skittered on something cold and slippery, and I wobbled. A shocked gasp escaped me.
“Hush,” Twilight hissed next to me. Her foreleg was still over my withers, and she pressed me down. Wisps of the magic that had teleported us smoked around her horn. “Lie down. Shush.”
Behind me, in the distance, something seemed to be exploding.
Trembling, and shivering all of a sudden, I lay down, and forced myself to keep quiet, even whatever I was lying on pitched and rocked. I blinked down at what exactly I was lying on, and saw it was ice. A couple of metres ahead of me, the ice shelf ended, and dark river water went rushing past.
Slowly, achingly, I turned my head to see what lay behind.
Behind us, the bridge lay sundered nearest the side we’d defended, with a fading aura of mixed raspberry-coloured and dark magic crackling over the new metres-wide gap. Amidst the magic, some black coil of smoke was writhing up through the air. A long, low hiss of fury rattled forth from it.
And then it twisted in the air, and flew north, and was lost from my sight.
Tiny dark shapes milled around the broken bridge, all but hidden in the darkness, and then were lost altogether as the bridge gradually receded into the distance.
“Detonated the shield,” Twilight whispered, noticing where I was looking. She sounded tired, almost as tired as I felt myself, but quietly proud as well. A delirious half-babbled, half-whispered stream escaped her. “Just a matter of altering and riling the magic that’s already in it. Took out another of his vessels with the same technique a while ago. Wasn’t expecting it to work again. Though he probably wasn’t expecting to see me again.”
I nodded vaguely as I turned around, away from the bridge, my eyes drifting over the horizon. Far off, the Neighgara seemed to end amidst clouds of mist, and there came a constant roll of thunder. All my fatigue was catching up with me at once, and whatever adrenaline had kept me going on the bridge was gone. The horizon flickered as my eyes struggled to stay open, and bobbed with the motion of the floating ice.
So many aches and pains were making themselves known. Sleep offered an escape.
“Don’t drift off yet, lieutenant,” Twilight’s faraway voice said. “The Falls are near. We’ll need to bring this to the side and make our way down to … are you listening?”
The thunder grew louder, and the water underneath our ice churned and muttered.
It was enough to lull an exhausted mare to sleep, and it duly did.
I woke up.
I cracked open my eyes to regard Sweetie’s pictures, as per usual. But instead of the usual crayon depiction of the Princess giving me a knighthood for gallantry, I instead beheld the rough stone wall of a cave. The wall glistened with dampness, and little veins of quartz glittered throughout its dark stone. From elsewhere, there came a faint and constant murmur, and the ground seemed to rumble.
Dim memories churned in the back of my mind. I had the impression I’d woken up from an awful nightmare, but whatever it might have been was frustratingly out of reach.
I then moved to try and stand up, and all of a sudden, that inspired a cacophony of pain to break out across what felt like my whole body. My head hurt, my eyes somehow ached, my foreleg throbbed, my torso felt like a burning brand had been pressed into it, and everything unlisted felt achy and tired.
And that brought memories of the eve flooding back, smashing through whatever dam my mind had erected. Green stars and blurring blades and bodies. Oh stars, there’d been…
For a long moment, I lay still, trembling and desperately trying not to believe any of it. Any moment, I’d hear Fluorspar, Terracotta, or Windward verbally dismembering whichever private had pranked Lieutenant Peacock by stealing her tent — Timpani or Wild Card, most like. I’d hear my troop grumbling and chatting and changing shifts and breaking their fast in the morning chill, backed by the distant drone of the Falls.
I listened, and there came only the constant murmur.
The only possible outcome rose in my mind, black and suffocating, and I desperately forced it down, kept realisation at bay. I couldn’t let it be real. I’d just have to get up. Go find them all.
With a gasp of pain, I struggled up to my hooves, throwing off my own cloak which had been laid over me as a blanket, and realised I was entirely unclothed. My foreleg had been bandaged, and a dressing had been applied to the shallow wound in my torso.
Damp stone walls rose on either side. By one of them, I saw my barding and blade and saddlebags had been neatly piled. A cave mouth loomed before me, and the wan light of a northern morning spilled in through it. I stumbled towards the mouth, to peer out at where I was.
Past the mouth of the cave, all seemed to be shrouded past a glittering haze. A long, low bank of pale stones ran down towards a wide and rushing river — the Neighgara, surely — flowing from right to left. I hurriedly blinked upwards, up past where high black cliffs seemed to clutch at the clouds. The sun hid amidst the grey sky to my left, its light dim past the glittering haze.
Assuming this was morning, and Princess Celestia hadn’t been distracted, I had to be on the north bank. I glanced round to my right for any sign of the bridge.
I saw the Falls instead.
They were surely at least a kilometre distant, but even from afar, they were colossal. A great horseshoe-shaped drop had been eroded into the high ledge, wide enough to straddle my range of vision, and from that drop an ocean of water came thundering a hundred metres down, all but lost behind enough mist to refill the sky with clouds. Here and there, I glimpsed chunks of ice cascading down, to be lost amidst the bottom. The ground constantly trembled with the sheer, unrelenting force of the Falls.
As I stared at them with awe past the curious glittering haze, I realised that the haze was a magical shield over the cave mouth, and the glitter was water pattering off its surface. That would account for why I hadn’t woken up sodden to the bone. If there was a sound-dampening charm on it as well, that would also account for why the Falls weren’t blowing out my eardrums.
But I hadn’t remembered casting anything of the sort, let alone finding this place. Which surely meant…
“Lieutenant?”
I turned. Twilight Sparkle lay towards the back of the cave, and was rising to her forehooves. In the space between us, there sat a little flame, the same colour as her magic. Judging by the scorch-mark radiating around it on the stone, it had ebbed to that point from a full-blown fire. Groggy and tired though Twilight’s gaze was, the fire’s reflection gave her eyes that little vital spark. “Good morning.”
It was an arresting gaze. Memories from the last night spilled back in from when I met it, memories of conversations before the storm, of meeting it just after slaying an enthralled pegasus, of meeting it when the battle was all but done, when everypony…
I turned sharply away from her gaze and forced the darkness down. I struggled for words for a moment, and when I forced myself to speak at last, my voice emerged as a croak. “G-Good morning.” I looked around at the cave interior and the little flame and the entrance and finally back at Twilight herself, and waved my uninjured foreleg in a vain attempt to encompass all of it. “How did we, ah …?”
“I brought us here last night,” she replied. “Let us drift downstream for a bit, and brought the drifting ice onto the north bank just shy of the Falls. I knew this cave was here, and that there was a path in the cliff leading down.” She smiled ruefully. “Bit of a haul, but I know a few bits of magic that helped. Put up that shield on the outside as well. If anyone looks at it from a distance, they’ll just see an empty cave.”
I slowly processed this, with no small amount of awe. Why on earth hadn’t she been in the School for Gifted Unicorns? It could have been named with her in mind. But there were other questions I had to ask first.
“And that, er ...” I managed, waving the same foreleg in the vague direction of my piled personal effects. “Those. Did you …?”
Twilight’s gaze followed my foreleg, and she nodded. “I did. You were out cold. And I can’t really blame you. Do you remember crossing blades with King Sombra?”
Oh, Celestia’s blood, I had done that, hadn’t I.
The murky recollection presented itself for my attention, all flashes of steel in a dreamlike haze of red, fouled throughout by the murk of dark magic, by the memory of a cruel, cold voice. Punctuated with me hurling light at the shadow and slamming a blade right into its heart, running it up to the middle, again and again and again—
“You’d already taken a few knocks,” Twilight said gently, and with a hint of — it couldn’t be admiration. “And then you did that, and won.”
I nodded mutely. It all seemed far away and vague, as if I’d heard another pony had done it. I rested my uninjured foreleg, and presented the one wrapped around with bandages. “Was, er, this you as well?”
Twilight blinked, broken from her line of thought. She smiled bashfully. “Yes. Most of it looked worse than it actually was. Still, no sense in letting you bleed out or getting infected. I’ll have to change these soon.”
“Thank you,” I managed. I’d been brought up properly, after all. What else is one to say to a mare who spirited you away from certain death, hauled your unconscious form to safety, patched your wounds, and tucked you in?
And with all that asked, I had to ask the most important question. “And … and my troop?”
Her face fell for a moment, before she seemed to remember to compose it. “I— Lieutenant, they…”
“Thank you. Thank you for everything.” I turned away from her voice and her inevitable awful words and made for my pile of barding. My magic picked up and fumbled with the chestplate. “But I, I need to go back to the bridge. Find my troop. Maybe they’re still holding on there, some of them. Not sure how I’ll cross back to the south, but ...”
“Lieutenant,” she said, her tone sad and strained, “you were overrun. The enthralled pegasi got to your trenches, and whoever might have been left on the bridge would have been overwhelmed by Sombra’s remaining forces.”
Overwhelmed, slain, dragged off to the enthralling factories if taken alive—
The same darkness rose and threatened to swallow me up, and I clutched at anything that would keep it at bay, even as I strapped on more and more of my barding. “They’ll … they’ll have made a run for it. Back east. I didn’t see Terracotta fall. She could have, could have rallied them, effected a withdrawal.”
“Lieutenant, they couldn’t have—”
“Private Snowdrop—” I heard her cry for her mother, no, no, I couldn’t “—knows a lot of first-aid. She was safe in the trenches. Get them all to a safe distance, and she could have gotten to work. Saved a life or two. Kept them going till they reached a proper field hospital. She would have. She’s conscientious. Does her best.”
As I pulled on my cloak, fresh new slashes running through it where it had been thrown at Sombra’s blade, Twilight stood silent. I still didn’t dare meet her gaze. But I saw her hesitate, and then open her mouth—
“Be quiet,” I whispered hoarsely. My helmet rose, and trembled in my grasp..
“He’ll have forces moving to the bridge, to try and make some quick repairs. If you head back out there, you’ll just be spotted and—”
“Shut up!” I screamed, the words erupting out of me, and stars, I felt the dreadful urge to draw my blade and brandish it to scare her, to make her stop saying these words. “They’re … they’re not all — they can’t—”
My helmet fell from my magical grasp and clattered on the cold stone. I stopped, and drew in a ragged breath. Twilight had taken a step away from me when I shouted, and as I stared down at the useless, wretched lieutenant mirrored in my fallen helmet, I was dimly aware of her gingerly venturing closer.
“...they’re not,” I managed, and nothing else. The dark clouds rose, and broke. I burst into tears.
Twilight came close, and I was dimly aware of one forehoof reaching out to awkwardly pat my withers. But that didn’t last, and she finally drew in and hugged me close. I clutched right back, and wept like a foal.
I’m not sure how long for. Till the sharp, all-encompassing misery had settled to a horrible dull ache, till the wave of grief had broken and rolled back out. Till my heaving, ugly sobs had diminished into silence broken by the odd, empty sniffle.
Till I could croak words again.
“...Wasn’t meant to happen.”
“I know,” murmured Twilight in my ear.
“Were … were meant to just hold the crossing and watch till the engineers came, fortified both ends, left a garrison.” I choked down a sob, and swallowed. “Weren’t meant to get attacked and overwhelmed. Weren’t meant to get attacked by damned King Sombra.”
“He’s been getting more aggressive. Preparing more vessels. Only recently, though.”
“Weren’t meant to be led by me,” I whispered. “Should have had a better officer. A better lieutenant. I should still be on that bridge, alongside everypony I led there. I should have—”
“Lieutenant.” Twilight’s voice was soft, but firm, and I felt her peel back slightly. Her hoof rose to lift my chin, and through blurry eyes, I met her brilliant violet. “Don’t attack yourself. You did your absolute best, as well as any officer in that situation could. And you shouldn’t be on that bridge. Nopony should, save Sombra himself. He’s at fault here, for all of this. Him, and nopony else.”
I turned my gaze away. Black despair and self-loathing still coiled and snarled in me, but Twilight’s words had shone light on them, forced them to shrink and withdraw. “Tartarus take the King,” I croaked, and ground a forehoof into the stone underhoof. “Tartarus take this whole wretched war.”
And I could have elaborated on that theme, had a sudden twinge of pain from my forehoof not made me yelp. It was my injured one, and Twilight broke away to change its bandages and re-dress the wound in my chest. She stooped to her work, and I sat, breathed deeply, and tried to think.
A good cry can be cleansing, and a lot of the dark clouds had receded. My mind was certainly that little bit capable of focusing on the future, what I needed to do.
Twilight anticipated my line of thought correctly, just as she finished applying a new dressing. “What are you planning to do, lieutenant?”
“I … I shall have to head back east. Back to High Command.” Back to an inevitable court-martial. Like an officer who lost their entire troop deserved. “They need to know what happened here. They have to be warned that we didn’t hold the crossing.”
Twilight was silent then, as she seemed to check and double-check her work. And then she said thoughtfully, “Did you send a message off before the battle began?”
“I did.”
“And have you sent anything since?”
“No,” I replied, and then realised. “Ah.”
“They’ll already know. There’ll already be pegasi companies inbound.”
And if Sombra’s forces insisted on trying to hold it, there’d be a second Battle of the Neighgara, I thought. The river would run red, and there’d be a new front for ponies to die on, and either High Command or Sombra would eventually seize it, or one would lose patience and destroy the bridge altogether.
I’d destroy it. Never mind Twilight blasting one gap in it. Topple the whole length into the river. Not a single other soul should die for it.
“Regardless,” I said, “I have to head back. Just to be sure they know. I can’t send a message via dragonfire, they’ll just think Sombra’s forces are trying to mislead them. And I … I well, I need to be held to account.”
What would it be?, some part of me wondered. Loss of an entire command, negligence in the face of the enemy, party to the damage of a military asset in the form of the bridge, and perhaps Twilight spiriting me away from the scene before I could properly order a withdrawal would be construed as desertion as well. Imprisonment? Field punishment? Cashiering? Maybe more. Sometimes, one must hang an officer to encourage the others.
Or maybe there’d be clemency, understanding. Not that I felt I merited any.
Twilight regarded me for a moment. Eventually she said, “There’s an alternative.”
I regarded her in turn. “An alternative to what?”
“To going back east,” she replied. Her hoof stole forwards to rest on mine. “I’m still going north. You’d be very welcome to come with me.”
I stared at her for a moment. A long moment. The words needed some processing to become something that made a lick of sense. “Come north?” I eventually stammered.
“I wasn’t joking about anything I said yesterday. I’m going to infiltrate the Bleakhold and steal any book Sombra’s not got nailed down there. I’m going to figure out the magic in them that could end this whole war and … and restore what we’ve lost. And I could use your blade.”
“My blade?” I said helplessly. “Mine? Why?”
She gave me a quizzical look. “Remember when you fought Sombra and won?”
So I did, though it would never seem real. “That’s … certainly an argument for heading north to ingratiate myself with him yet further. Though, truth be told, I believe he was only toying with me when that happened. He won’t be quite so sporting next time.”
“Then don’t be quite so sporting with him either.” Twilight flashed a quick smile, and despite it, despite everything, I couldn’t help but flash one right back. “What do you say?” she prompted.
It was mad. It was an utterly mad plan, and I suspected that even if Twilight explained it all in exact and excruciating detail with the aid of diagrams, it wouldn’t stop being mad. It was certain doom, and death wasn’t even the worst possible outcome—
—though Twilight had said she’d infiltrated the north before.
If I agreed, I would definitely count as a deserter. I was alive and able and on active duty still, and I was obliged to report back to High Command and face justice—
—but they’d received my first message, and thereafter the silence of the grave. High Command knew. And if I perished in the north regardless, well, justice delayed is still justice done.
I’d be missing, presumed captured or dead. There’d be a letter sent home. There’d been a letter, when father had…
There’d be a letter.
But if I went north, and Twilight was right, and we did it against all odds, and we could end the war, and if we even returned alive—
Home would be safe. Equestria would be safe. Sweetie Belle and mother would be safe.
And nopony else would have to die.
Fate, or providence, or sheer luck, or whatever you might feel was happening, had played me a peculiar hand. Let’s see where it led.
“Alright, Twilight Sparkle,” I said, and her eyes lit up like the dawn sky. “Where do you propose to lead me?”
There were caves behind the Neighgara Falls. Splashback had hacked out great shelters into the rock, wide enough to hold whole towns, and those caves connected to a network of tunnels beneath the frozen earth. Diamond Dog packs had settled these tunnels, as well as other things yet in the darkness beneath the world. And the tunnels ran north, with exits scattered across the Crystal Empire.
So Twilight said. She’d chased a story and discovered the network last time she was here, and allegedly had tried to pass a note to High Command alerting them to their existence. The Dogs owed her a favour or two for unspecified aid given. They could lead us most of the way in secrecy.
When we finally left the cave, we did so under Twilight’s shield, made into a dome to keep off the all-encompassing moisture, and illusioned to conceal us from any unfriendly fliers.
We detoured towards the river, though, where I dipped a cloth into the roaring, ice-cold waters. Using my helmet as a mirror, I wiped the remaining grime of battle off my features — all the mud, sweat, and specks of blood. When I’d finished and inspected myself in the helmet, a cleaner-looking unicorn inspected me right back.
She still looked tired. She still looked moderately dirty, no matter my quick cleanse, and she was undeniably drained and sad. But there was something else in her gaze that had been missing for a while. Rarity looked hopefully up at me. The war had nearly battered her flat, but only nearly, and here she still stood. When I made us both smile, it didn’t take as much forcing as it once had.
Behind my reflection, Twilight leaned closer, and then nodded towards the Falls. I nodded back, and redonned my helmet.
We followed the bank till it drew close to the thundering Falls, where it rose into a rocky ledge that ran along the cliffs leading round to and behind the descending water. Climbing up to that ledge, we stuck to it all the way, hugging close to the cliff face all the while. A bit of magic from Twilight helped our hooves not slip on the slick rock, but the going remained hard.
The hardest part came when we were trying to navigate between the cliff and the plummeting sheet of water, when even the sound-dampening in Twilight’s shield couldn’t stop the noise from all but deafening us, when the sheer force rippling up through the rock threatened to pitch us off. But Twilight was in front, and I followed without fear. And before long, space opened up to our right, and we were through.
The caves behind the Falls rose to greet us, rising above our heads into gloom and running back into absolute darkness. Within that darkness, one of the many tunnels would lead us north without risk of discovery.
I took a step forward, and wet moss squelched underhoof.
“Mind your step, lieutenant,” Twilight said, somewhere next to me.
“Just Rarity, Twilight,” I said, and summoned soft blue light to see by. The darkness fell away. “Just Rarity.”