—
(This excerpt was taken from an article on the Equestrian Independent “What’s Left: A Look Into the Cost of Resistance, by Purple Haze, dated 24 July 2072)
It was a good few hours going up the mountains, but it felt much shorter than that. Perhaps it was from all the adrenaline pumping in me, or perhaps the anxiety of what the future that laid before us all preoccupied me from the march of time that wore out just about everyone coming up to the HQ.
And yet there was this… pride in the air. I can only suspect this is the famed Gryphish disposition - that staunch, militaristic pride that in peacetime bordered on harsh and insufferable.
But in war, it just makes sense. At this stage of the conflict, with the Greifisch Bataillon on the back hoof after the Equestrian expeditionary deployment into Capra changed the balance of the war, that pride and mettle was practically all that held them together, despite the mounting losses.
I get off the truck, the stiff Buckan Mountain air digging into my fur despite the layers I had on. The schoolhouse that had been converted into a base of operations stood tired, yet stalwart - refusing to collapse, perhaps out of some distant echo of the same willpower that let the battalion stand against the EEF.
A gryphon sentry sneered as they checked my credentials. From my understanding, the media had not been the most welcome in these parts - not that I can entirely blame them. Coverage of the war itself had been mired in a cesspool of misinformation and counter-information and online vitriol from millions of voices all vying for the common creature’s attention. The information landscape has become as much a battleground as places like Kozarno currently are; understandably, it marks us all as proponents of sensationalism.
But I was meant to be here; the call came from Resistance Command, and I was allowed to proceed - albeit begrudgingly. Outside the headquarters meeting room, I passively watch the personnel, mostly gryphons and Gryphish-speaking ponies with the occasional deer, go about their daily tasks - weapon maintenance, physical exercise, drills, base operations. Most pay no mind; some view me with the same disdain as the guard from earlier. Some are visibly wounded, covered in bandages or limping.
—
A particular gryphon caught Haze’s eye as they passed by; most notably the antlers adorning their head. While deer-gryphon hybrids weren’t unknown to the reporter bat in her travels, they have been exceedingly rare to chance upon. Sure, we can start with them, she thought, getting up to her hooves and politely checking for their availability. It took a few moments for her to reach the deergryph, waiting for them to notice before she introduces herself.
As she reached the deergriff’s side the antlered head turned to face her, surprisingly warm eyes met her own and a heavily accented voice spoke in Gryphish, “Kann ich dir helfen?”
“Ah, sorry. Uhh… Sprechen sie Pferdisch?" she replied, her tone stilted and uncertain.
“I do speak Equestrian, yes. Can I help you?” The deergriff looked the mare up and down. “You will forgive me but you do not look like one of ours.”
“Yeah, I am not,” Haze answered, nodding in affirmation. “I’m Purple Haze, of the Equestrian Independent. I’m running a story on the foreign volunteers of the Capran War. Would you be willing to answer a few questions?”
The formerly warm eyes narrow at Haze, turning cold as the mountain wind. “Ah… you are the journalist. I had advised Star against letting you in but I was overruled. At least the Independent is more than a simple propaganda piece I suppose.”
Haze took a breath, sharper than usual - she had been non-verbally made unwelcome by most of the fighters in this base, and she had done a good enough job of holding her displeasure from that treatment. She isn’t like the scum pushing the Equestrian narrative on mainstream news 24/7, she reasoned.
“All I’m here to do is speak the truth, nothing more.” She flashed a smile, earnest but with the corners of her lips straining a little.
The deergriff’s face softened. “I apologize, do not mistake my… concerns for hostility. With Equestria now in the war it is, uncertain, what our status will be should we return home to Equestria or Grifrech. You may ask your questions but I must insist that my name, and image, remain unused.” A low rumble came from their stomach. “And that we conduct this over a meal, I have just come off of watch.”
“Of course, do lead the way…” She gestured with a wing. “May I at least know what I should call you while I’m here? I promise it won’t end up in the story.
“You can call me Gráinne,” came the reply, “and I know your first instinct will probably be to call me a hen but please refer to me as a doe.” With that she set off down the hallway. “Come along, the mess hall is this way.”
Haze had to briefly trot to keep up with the deergriff. “Gráinne, pleased to make your acquaintance.” A beat, as she briefly looked at the doe beside her. “Uh, shall I refer to you as she and her?”
“She and they if you wish to get technical about it but she and her will do.”
Gráinne led haze to what had once been the school cafeteria, there she directed the mare to a table while she went to fetch a tray. To her surprise the deergriff returned with not one but two vegetarian meals.
“You don’t have to refrain from meat on my account, I knew full well I would encounter it here”
The doe flashed a nervous smile at Haze. “Ah… this is not so much for your benefit as it is for mine.”
“You’re a vegetarian?”
“Not by choice, my diet is out of medical necessity.”
"If I may ask, which condition?" Haze braced herself internally, hoping not to have crossed a line.
“As far as I am aware there is no actual… condition as it were, it’s not common enough to have a name. Just a quirk of being caught between deer and gryphon. Some of us have no antlers, others cannot fly, some have hooves instead of paws. I cannot eat meat, and attempting to do so will leave me quite ill.”
“Interesting…”, she mused, the clicking of her mechanical eyes accompanying the dull, ambient noise of the mess hall. “I will admit, I have not encountered your particular combination. Where do you hail from, and are deergryphs common there?”
“They are perhaps ‘more common’ there than elsewhere but I do not think we could ever be called common anywhere.” She spoke between beakfuls of food. “I grew up in a Griffonstone deertown. There I knew exactly two others like myself, though both significantly older.”
The reporter nodded along, helping herself to the food provided. She asked a few more questions about Gráinne’s hometown, what growing up was like. Then she sat up straight, the mechanical gaze meeting the deergryph’s.
“Before I, uh, get to the journalistic half of my questions here, I’d like to ask if I can record this part of the conversation. Rest assured your likeness and identity will be hidden, as I’ll be doing most of the editing for the accompanying video to my written piece.” Again, she braced for the inevitable standoffish response these questions get - military volunteers were, after all, in a precarious legal position with the nations they hail from.
“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” she added.
The doe’s wings fluttered nervously and she glanced about the room. “I… I suppose that you may. Though if my dear parents should find my photo in the papers, or worse a knock at the door from CBCI, I shall know exactly where to go.”
Haze gave a nervous chuckle, steeling her nerves with what levity she can muster. “Well, my folks don’t exactly know I’m here either, so…”
The rims of her eyes briefly flashed a faint red - a courtesy light, to signify recording in progress, The batpony cleared her throat, flapped her wings once, and straightened her posture.
“So… I take it that volunteering for this conflict wasn’t the easiest of decisions to make, and everycreature has their own reasons for joining,” she started, trying to maintain the same level of casualness from earlier to little avail. “How did you come about making the jump to serving here in Capra?”
“Going right for the hard questions I see.” she chuckled and set down her fork. “It was… an easier decision than I thought it would be. The creatures who helped me get back onto my talons in Griffonstone after I lost my wing were all going, my marefriend with them. We saw the possibility of a better world here, one free from the economic dominance of Equestria and Draconian tyranny. The creatures of Capra had decided they would live free, and it was the least we could do to help.”
“Was the Capran cause unique in any way, or would you have joined if it were a different nation hanging in the balance of powers as Capra does now?”
“I should hope that all nations have the chance to break free of domination the way Capra is now, though I should also hope they have the chance to do so without such loss of life. But should it require force of arms to achieve it I like to think I will be there, no matter what nation.”
Haze nodded, her expression implacable as she nodded in agreement. “I, well… I was there when the war started. Been in Capra for a good six months at the time, covering the unrest. Truly, I’m glad that we–” She briefly paused, backtracking her fumbled sentence. “--that you are here along with the rest of the volunteers coming in from all over the world, to help where the Caprans need it most.”
“It seems we have both been here from the beginning. My friends and I crossed over the Greifreich border a week after the failed elections, just as that unrest was turning to conflict.” She looked down at the table. “Truly, we have been very lucky. Of our close group we have not suffered many losses. The same cannot be said for the rest of us. We all feel the loss of Blackthorn and his Platoon.”
It was then that a tall unicorn mare trotted up to the table, Gráinne’s expression melting into joy as she spotted her. “Miss Haze,” the unicorn spoke. “We’ve been looking for you, the Command Council is ready to speak with you.”
“Oh,” Haze exclaimed, caught off guard from both her name being called as well as the doe’s joyous reaction. The red ring around her eyes flicked shut, as she found herself scrambling to get her belongings back in her gear bag.
“Well, terribly sorry to cut this short, but it was nice getting to speak with you, Gráinne. She extended a purple wing to the deergryph, a wide, fanged smile adorning her muzzle. “I hope to,uh, meet you again - perhaps in better circumstances than this.”
The doe extended her own wing and gave Haze’s a firm shake. “The pleasure is mine, you will be in good hooves with my marefriend here.” She picked up her fork, returning to the meal before her. “Please do send me a copy of your article once it is published.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” she answered, giving Gráinne a polite nod before turning to the unicorn. “Thank you, er…”, she paused, waiting for the mare’s name.
“Guide Star, Subcommander, 1st Platoon, Greifisch Bataillon. And as Gráinne is so fond of pointing out, her marefriend.”
Haze looked back at the deergryph, her polite smile now a full grin as she raised her eyebrows teasingly. “Well then, Subcommander, do lead the way - and I’m terribly sorry for having you search for me around here.”
—
(This excerpt was taken from an article on the Equestrian Independent “What’s Left: A Look Into the Cost of Resistance, by Purple Haze, dated 24 July 2072)
I ended up speaking with the remaining members of the Battalion Command Council that day, led by a Commander Gordon. The situation remained dire, following the fall of Kozarno - the council were more than aware of the fact. Still they held up their pride and their resolve, answering my questions with the same confident ardor that I've come to expect.
Two chairs remained empty, a silent vigil to their fallen comrades. From what I was told, they were for the commander and second-in-command of the Sylvanian Platoon, a small but dedicated band of some thirty or so deer that held the rear guard, and paid the ultimate price - all hooves killed or missing in action.
It was, nonetheless, a promise all the members of the Greifsch Bataillon made when they made the decision to fight for the Free Capran cause. "Bis zum Tod," they echoed.
To the death.
In my heart of hearts, I hoped, prayed to anyone still listening out there, that it wouldn't have to come to this. Enough blood had been spilled over the folly of creatures holding power at our expense. Yet everyone knew that as long as freedom for the Capran people isn't secured, then there shall be those continuing the fight elsewhere.
"Ti uvek odviše ponosna
Ja tvrdoglav kao noć
I ko će koga prvi zvati?
Ko kome dati ruke za dodire?"
—
Purple Haze stood in the corner where the medics had shuffled her off to the moment the first casualties came in. “Out of the way,” they had told her. “Work to be done.” So she stood with a notepad in hoof , writing her thoughts and gathering footage with her eye. She let out a wince, as an orderly sidestepped and knocked her onto a wall, the batpony trying to make herself smaller than she already is as she took record of the makeshift field hospital, tending to a battle that erupted at that very schoolhouse she had been to not long ago.
Haze’s stomach had fallen into a bottomless pit from the uncanny feeling of having met so many of the Battalion that now lay wasted, maimed or otherwise indisposed. As another stretcher passed by, she scanned the rows of litters carrying survivors, taking in the devastation.
While the initial chaos had died down as fresh wounded stopped trickling in and the medics treated the worst cases, a second, worse phase had settled over the tent, the quiet despair of the wounded, the silence of the dead, and the sobbing of the survivors. All of it interrupted by a flash of action at one end of the tent. Her attention drawn by shouting, she turned in time to see an orderly punched across the jaw by a heavily bandaged gryphon he was wrestling with. No, not a gryphon, a deergryph.
“...Gráinne?”, she couldn’t help but say out loud, shuffling towards the unfolding commotion.
Attempting to restrain Gráinne with the help of the orderly was Gordon, the Commander of the battalion, and the meergriff she had seen with him at the school. The four of them yelled in Gryphish as they struggled, though all she could make out of it were Gráinne’s repeated cries of “Ich muss sie finden!”
Haze could only watch in shocked stupor as they wrestled the deergryph back onto the cot, sedating her into a fitful respite from her distress. She couldn’t understand Gryphish, but the pit in her stomach grew as assumptions started to form as to why Gráinne was inconsolable. At some point her gaze met the commander’s. His eyes which had been so bright and full of fire now cold and empty as he gestured for her to come over.
“Uh… Commander…”, she greeted as she approached the small crowd, head bowed.
“Just… Just call me Gordon now. Can’t really be a commander with nothing left to command.” Beside him, the meergriff placed a wing across his back as they sat beside Gráinne’s cot. “Please, take a seat Miss Haze.”
The batpony found a spot, carefully taking a seat and looking at the unconscious deergryph. She opened her mouth, wanting to ask about her or the status of the battalion, but the words refused to come out, tacitly switching her gaze back to Gordon.
“She’ll recover if that’s what you’re wondering.” He fidgeted with a talon. “At least, physically I… I don’t know if any of us are going to be ‘okay’ again.”
At that the meergriff spoke up. “It will take time, but she’s come back before. She’s strong. And so are you, love.” He turned to Haze, offering a talon. “Coldstream Ma’am, not sure if we were introduced properly.”
Haze reached out a hoof in turn, accepting the talon-shake politely. He could feel the jitters coming from the mare as she composed herself, briefly clutching at the notepad she had out… No, not right now…
“I, uh… I’m sorry… for all this… loss.” Words were becoming difficult to grasp - she could feel the sorrow in everyone present, the pain of a wounded esprit de corps, who promised to fight to the death, but were left behind. She took a deep breath, composing herself.
“H-how many were lost?”, she finally dared to ask.
Gordon drew in a breath. “When you last saw us, there were some hundred of us left. Now…” Tears glistened in the corners of his eyes. “Maybe twenty, if none of the wounded die.”
The mare winced, hearing the news, a hoof pressing against her face as her mind tried to make sense of the gravity of the news. Her eyes darted towards Gráinne, then back to Gordon, then back to the deergryph, pleading. No, it can’t be…
“I’m sorry, Guide Star is… no longer with us.” Gordon hung his head, tears flowed freely down his face. “Another good creature I lead to her death.”
Coldstream pulled the gryphon tight against himself. “Don’t say such things. We all came here freely, followed you freely, swore our lives freely. This was not your doing.”
Silence hung between Haze and the gryphons, as she chewed on her lip, eyes locked forward and focused at nothing. Her ears flattened, only to twitch back up again, once more looking at the notepad sitting by the cot.
“Gordon… will you be okay if I write about what happened here?”, she asked, her voice small. “I wish for the memory of your Battalion to live on with the people. To, uh… let them know what’s really happening here.”
“Please do, they have all given so much. Lost so much. To sacrifice their memory is not a thing I could ask of them. ‘No warrior died in vain that is remembered’.”
“Thank you, Gordon,” she answered, resting a hoof on the gryph’s shoulder, before looking back at Gráinne.
“You know, she actually took a liking to you after your interview. Kept asking if your article had been published yet.”
“I… yeah… publishers had to review it.” A deep sigh, as she rustled her wings together. “I’ll be revising my draft to include this.”
—
(This excerpt was taken from an article on the Equestrian Independent “What’s Left: A Look Into the Cost of Resistance, by Purple Haze, dated 24 July 2072)
The indomitable spirit of sapience allows many a creature to do the impossible, deal with the unbearable, face overwhelming odds, even at risk of death, and come through the other side. It can be argued even, that the civilizations that are the foundations of the modern societies we live in are the cumulative results of these moments of boldness from our forebears.
Today, however, I bear witness to the flipside to this boldness.
At the time of my visit to the headquarters of the Greifisch Bataillon, there numbered roughly a hundred creatures - gryphons, meergryphs, ponies, deer, among others - within their ranks. They had lost a sizable chunk of their combat capacity with the fall of Kozarno, and yet despite being given the chance to retreat or regain their strength through reinforcements, they chose to hold their ground.
"Bis zum Tod", they echoed. To the death.
What then becomes of one who promises to hold the line to the end, yet is denied even that?
At a field hospital not far from the front lines, several dozen creatures lay infirmed - maimed, broken, left at the doorstep of oblivion. Echoes of agony fill the tents as the remnants of the Greifisch Battalion lay in recovery - able to fight another day, but never truly to become 'okay', in the sense that you and I have taken for granted for so long.
It is sorely tempting to offer comfort in these trying times, to console and to tell them that everything is going to be okay. They, of course, will know that it isn't okay. It wasn't okay that they were left behind from the covenant they had freely pledged to. They will lament, and anguish, and curse upon that which had set them on such a path. And they will carry the legacy of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to the cause.
This account of events here cannot possibly give justice to the lives lost, both Capran and foreign, in this still-raging war. What I ultimately hope for with this, is to keep alive the memories of those whose lights have been snuffed out, mere bargaining chips to the games of power our leaders play behind closed doors. And until we decide that enough blood has been spilled, I will have to remind you of the memories of those we now have to keep alive.
To the Greifisch Bataillon,
Den Gefallenen - Lebet fort
“A kada ova prica prodje, zauvek prodje,
Sta je ostalo od nje?
Ne ostaje trag,
Hladne su ulice i praznno je srce.”
—
The three sat and talked by Gráinne’s cot, Haze typed away at a laptop. An hour passed before the deergriff stirred from her sedated slumber, rolling over to face the three creatures beside her. Gordon shot to his paws, ready to stop her if she tried to do something foolish again.
“Gordon?” Her voice was raw from the argument earlier. “Did you have me drugged?”
“Gráinne, I’m sorry it was… You were trying to… You’re a fucking idiot Gráinne. You tore out two stitches and were going to get yourself killed out there.”
“You should have let me go.” There was no anger in her voice, there wasn’t much of anything in her voice. “I could have found her. I could have joined her.”
As she sat up she finally noticed the third at her bedside. “Miss… Haze?”
The batpony looked up from her screen, surprised. “Gráinne… I, uh, saw… what happened earlier…”, she trailed off, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“What use are sorry’s now?” She tried to rise from the bed but a talon on her shoulder from Gordon held her back. “‘Sorry’ cannot bring her back to me. It cannot let me hold her again.”
“Gráinne, I just–”
“Just what? Came here to find another story?” Ragged as her voice was, the words had Iron in them. “A follow-up perhaps? Well the only story you will find here is what…” the doe fell silent as she spotted something new on the journalists outfit.
A band of fabric on the right foreleg, red cloth, the letters FCF printed on it. Free Capran Forces.
“What are you doing wearing that?”
Haze sighed, deeply. She closed her eyes for a moment, shut tight as if holding something back. Inhaling sharply, she stood up, wordless, unceremoniously packing her equipment up before facing Gordon.
“I, uh… you guys probably need some time… to yourselves,” she spoke, her voice even-keeled like the six o’clock news. Her eyelids twitched, betraying the professional façade she tried to maintain, as she turned away, heading out of the infirmary.
Gráinne could swear she heard a hitch in her breath, somewhere in the distance.
Author's Note
Buck and I wrote this story to serve as a prologue for the characters we are playing in a tabletop game set in the Capran Civil War, we drew heavily on the history of the International Brigades and the International Freedom Battalion as inspiration
